Ecclesiastes, The Search For Meaning

Greetings All,

     I trust this email finds you well!  Today I thought I would share some thoughts on one of my favorite books in the Bible -- the Book of Ecclesiastes.  These "thoughts" come from a Brit (I'm assuming from the name he's originally from Wales).  His name is Selwyn Hughes, and they come from a Bible Study booklet in the series, "Every Day With Jesus."  The title of this particular volume is: Ecclesiastes, The Search For Meaning."

     Solomon begins this book with a rather shocking statement: "Meaningless, meaningless," says the Teacher... Everything is meaningless!"  Yet we must remember it's a statement qualified by the other frequently-repeated phrase in the book, "under the sun," which essentially means, "focused only on the things of earth."   "Under the sun" essentially means, "life lived without consideration of God," or "life viewed apart from the acknowledgement God," or "life lived apart from a relationship with God."   So, with that clarification, I hope you find these thoughts challenging, relevant and useful. Enjoy.

     "The main message of the book comes through it's opening statement: "Everything is meaningless."  Seeing the utter futility of life is the first step to an encounter with God. Many are not ready to meet with the Lord until they have been silenced by the futility of this world in which they live. I heard someone say that the first book of the Bible everyone should read is the book of Ecclesiastes -- because it silences you.  When we see as clearly as Solomon saw that the world does not provide us with the life for which our souls were created, then we are more likely to turn to the true source of happiness -- the eternal God Himself.  One of the reasons why some of us do not know God well is because we have never been convinced of the utter futility of trying to find life in things. We have not been silenced. We must let Ecclesiastes silence us, and and in that silence we may experience a deeper awareness of God...

     One of the reasons why Solomon uses such forceful language...is to break through our defensive attempts to avoid reality.  It was T. S. Elliot who once said: "Humankind cannot bear too much reality." Psychologists warn that we should be careful about stripping away people's defenses, as coming face to face with reality too quickly can cause those who are fragile to slide into depression. The author of Ecclesiastes seems unconcerned about this, however, and tells us over and over again, and with deep conviction that life, "under the sun" is futile... 

     He tells us how his determination to find purpose for living led him to deep and serious study. But study, and trying to grasp the meaning of the universe by the intellect alone, proved also to be futile. He says that it is like "chasing after the wind" (chap. 1:17).... Yet if education, intellectualism, and philosophy are not the routes to making life work, then what is? Perhaps (say some) life can be found in pleasure. Not so, says Solomon [and who would know better than a man who had 700 wives and 300 live in prostitutes?!]. Pleasure pleases, but it is powerless to quench the ache that exists in the soul.

     Solomon provides us with a list of ways that pleasure can be gained, but he gives all of them the "thumbs down."  The first pleasure is laughter (2:2).  Send in the clowns.  Bring on the jokers. Let's hear the funny one-liners. But as almost everyone knows, those who bring laughter to thousands are themselves often desperately unhappy.  Billy Graham tells the story of a man who went to a doctor for help with his depression. "I'll give you something better than anti-depressants," said the doctor. "Go to see the clown at the local circus. He has just arrived in the town and is sending people into hysterics." The man looked at the doctor and dolefully said, "I am that clown."

     If laughter cannot satisfy, then perhaps drink will help.  "I tried cheering myself with wine," Solomon says (2:3). But clearly that did not satisfy either. He then threw himself in a great round of activity -- great projects and achievements like building a house for himself, planting vineyards, purchasing male and female slaves, buying up herds and flocks, amassing silver and gold, and finally equipping himself with a harem -- what he describes as, "the delights of the heart of a man" (Chap. 2, v 4-8).  He even tried fame and making a name for himself (v.9). But did these things work? Here's his conclusion: "everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind..."  He is not saying these things did not bring pleasure. He is making the point that this kind of pleasure just does not last...

     Facing the realities of life can greatly provoke anxiety. The moment when we face the fact that there is nothing in this world -- no person, place or thing -- that can meet the deepest ache in our soul, is probably one of the most solemn moments of our existence. Many can't face that kind of reality so they escape into such things as fantasies, endless rounds of activity, drink, sensual pleasures, and so on...  Satisfaction in things is found only when they are seen as being behind God and not in front of Him. When God is not first, then everything around which we wrap our affections are unsatisfying idols. There are two paths we can choose: One is to find life in God and enjoy the provision of His hands; the other is to find life in things, and turn our back on God. The latter is "meaningless," says Solomon. It's like "chasing after the wind.'"

     I myself went through a period, in my late teens and early 20's, of trying to make sense of the world if God did not exist.  It was one of the primary things that drove me into a lengthy period of depression.  Thinking God did not exist made it much easier to sin, but it also made life (and all I did) meaningless and inconsequential. If there are no eternal consequences for anything we do, life becomes completely meaningless and somewhat intolerable. It even led me to entertain thoughts of suicide.

     I still say to this day that the only way one can be an atheist and think life has meaning is to lie to oneself.  To make up what a world without God can never supply.  To be "content" in a life lived apart from God ("under the sun") does not come from asking important questions and getting satisfying answers, it comes from refusing to ask enough questions.  It comes from being content not to connect the dots, or follow the path godless thinking to the depressing dead end where it will always lead when life is considered without reference to God.

     I do not encourage anyone to stop asking questions. I encourage them to ask one after another after another and not stop!  Because I believe (as Solomon shows and many others have discovered) that at the end of those all those questions -- if they dare ask them all -- one will run headlong into the eternal Absolute that stands behind all that exists. The road of truly seeking does not lead to nothing, it leads through the nothingness of human futility to the ultimate reality we call God. But we must press things to the limit, because it's a lesson many can only learn after trying all those other things and discovering they end in futility and will not satisfy the truly thirsty soul.

Grace and Peace, Pastor Jeff

Praying with The Puritans

Greetings All,

     This past weekend I attended a conference in Pittsburgh, PA, for the CCO (Coalition For Christian Outreach) where there just happened to be a bookseller.  My curiosity got the best of me, and I walked over to see what books were on the shelves.  I practiced great restraint (for me) and ended up walking out with only four new books to add to my library!  One, which was entitled: "Kneeling With Giants - Learning To Pray With History's Best Teachers," by Gary Neal Hansen, caught my attention.

     I've only gotten through two of it's chapters so far, but I found one section both interesting and helpful.  It's called, "Praying with The Puritans" and encourages us to use their common form of praying by meditation and writing.  Enjoy.

Praying With The Puritans

     "Back in student days, after a bad breakup, my journal saved my sanity. I bought a little black book to hold my dark, grieving thoughts, and in it I poured out lamentation, confusion and anger. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, until I didn't need to anymore.  A couple years later, I looked back and found that pretty much every page was the same. You could say writing was a kind of therapy, but for me it was prayer. God was listening. Healing came.

     I often pray best with a pen.... Writing in my journal draws me quickly and surely into God's company. God is there, listening, and I find myself understood and accepted. That changes me. It may seem an odd and indirect form of prayer -- I do not start each journal entry with "Dear God" -- but if prayer is conversation, the act of writing allows me to take my part of the dialogue seriously.  It slows me down, and hidden things come to light.  Burdens are lifted. Insights and possibilities emerge....

     To all who resist writing as a way of prayer, I plead for an imaginative openness. A great many people find that writing sparks spiritual growth.... The first time I tried to write in a journal, I found myself so anxious I destroyed every page. I was not afraid that someone would see it. The struggle was with myself. Here were my feelings, the insides of me, spread out on a page. I felt almost naked. Later, and to my own surprise, I tried again. Soon writing in my journal was the way to come honestly to God and find grace. All I can say is that it is worth it to keep coming back to the experiment of prayerful writing...  If this is a new way to pray, it can be a challenge. The good news is that many Christians have prayed this way throughout history.  And there is no better example than the Puritans.

     Now, before you start rolling your eyes, let me say that these sixteenth and seventeenth-century Calvinists from England and then America have gotten a bad rap. We assume the joke is true that a Puritan is defined as someone terribly afraid that someone, somewhere, is having fun.  In literature class we read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) or The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1915-2005) [neither one of which ever met or had any interaction with a Puritan] and forever after when we hear "Puritan" we picture poor Hester Prynne being judged and shamed, or the horror of the Salem witch trials.  However, if you read what the Puritans wrote about the Christian life, the picture changes. They brought single-minded passion to their pursuit of God. They lived with a focused, prayerful longing to be made new in Christ. They may have been more conscious of sin than most Christians are today, but they were also more aware of God's blessings and grace. These were inner experiences, but I can describe them confidently because when they prayed about them they often did so with pen in hand. Written approaches to prayer were so important to the Puritans that they wrote manuals to teach each other how to do it. 

     The Puritans, as Calvinists, had a very heavy doctrine of providence, believing that God was actively involved in virtually everything in their lives and the world. Today the idea has fallen on hard times. Many assume God is not actively involved, or they look at things that happen in the world and wonder what God could possibly have been thinking. Providence filled John Beadle (an English Puritan who lived from 1595-1667 and wrote "Diary of a Thankful Christian") with a sense of wonder. He claimed that if we only looked, we would see God's name, wisdom, power and faithfulness in every blade of grass and every drop of rain. Nurturing awareness of providence can bring us to awe as well. Believing, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, "earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush alive with God" makes it more likely that we will notice God at work, take off our shoes, and kneel.

     Beadle lists a number of topics to write about in our journals. Some are more clearly powerful than others, but they all help us move forward in seeing God at work, and giving thanks, knowing God better and loving God more. 

            1.) "Let every man keep a strict account of his effectual calling." "Effectual calling" is the Puritan term for the way God got through and made you a Christian... 

       2.) "Take special notice of all divine assistance.. either in the performance of the duties that are required of us, or in bearing those evils that are inflicted upon us." 
       3.) "Remember, and for that end put into your journal all deliverance's from dangers, either to you or yours."
       4.) "All the instruments, all the people and means that God has in providence at any time used for your good, must not be forgotten." 
       5.) "And finally, mark what returns, what answers God gives to your prayers, and write them down... as most remarkable pledges of His love." 

     When I first became a believer (38 yeas ago) I did this very thing more often (having no idea the Puritans had done it before me). I even have those journals in my possession still, and the answers to many prayers recorded there. But in our fast paced society that habit fell by the wayside. Thankfully, this chapter convinced me I need to pick up my pen and journal again.  You may want to give it a try as well. After all, how could one not benefit from prayerfully writing about God's grace and involvement in their lives, or recording for future days a written record to remind them of His power, providence, intervention, rescue, provision, and daily expressions of kindness?  I dare say it could do everyone nothing but good! 

In His Service, Pastor Jeff

Pouring out the Heart

Greetings All,

     This week's 'thought' comes to you from Mike Mason's superb book, "The Gospel According to Job."
     One need not study the book of Job in depth to benefit from Mason's insights into the spiritual life which are gleaned from Job's lengthy time of suffering and the attendant soul-struggle it spawns in him. A struggle which becomes quite heated at times.
     In fact, those who read Job chapters 1-2 and then skip (as too many do) to the happy ending in chapter 42, often miss the meaty lessons on true, gritty, mud-slinging, down-to-earth spirituality!  Mason skips over none of them. He tackles each one with such keen insight there isn't a believer I know who would not benefit from his 200 or so short, devotional style entries.  This one is entitled: Pouring out the Heart. Enjoy.

"Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath." (Job 7:7)

     "This may well be the most significant verse in the entire book. Why? Because this is where we first hear Job break into prayer... And from this point on we frequently hear him slip into and out of this intensely personal form of language, as spontaneously as if a visible, incarnate God were sitting right there beside him, just one more participant in the discussion.
     Granted, Job's prayers are more concerned with God's apparent absence than with His nearness. But the radiant proof of Job's genuineness of faith is that he prays at all -- especially in view of the fact that prayer is so conspicuously missing from all the talk of his friends. Nowhere in the book does one word of prayer pass any of their lips.
     Surely this is the crucial, telling difference between the speeches of Job and those of everyone else. Job regularly talks to God; his friends talk only about God. Like Christ on the cross, even in his agony Job continues to speak -- now to himself, now to others, and now to God...
     It is worth reflecting on how unusual it is for anyone to speak openly to God while other non-praying people are present. [Add to that the sad fact that his friends sit with him for days on end, throughout his intense times of struggle and pain, and never once offer a prayer on his behalf]... The point should be clear: Job is the only person in the book (with the possible exception of Elihu) who has any direct communication with God. Quite obviously Job knew the secret of Psalm 62:8: 'Pour out your hearts to Him, for God is our refuge.'

     Human hearts are full of many things: joy, anger, peace, weariness, anxiety, strength, bitterness, trust. To pour out the heart means to pour out not just some, but all of these contents before the Lord, the bad along with the good. Would we try to conceal our bitterness from God? Or conversely, would we cling greedily to our joy? In either case we could not really pray. In one sense joy is no better a thing than bitterness, because either can pass away in a moment. Yesterday's joy will not do for today. A flower is beautiful, but in drought it withers like a weed.

     Therefore in prayer everything in the heart must be poured out to the Lord like a drink offering, so that the heart is kept empty for Him. God only fills hearts that have been prepared for His residence like a clean, swept house with all the windows thrown open to the sun. This is what Job is doing when he prays. He is sweeping out all that is in his heart, even to the point of groaning, 'I despise my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone; my days have no meaning' (7:16).

     Are these good Christian sentiments? It does not matter. What matters is that Job is not afraid of true prayer. He knows it consists not in flowery language, nor in false humility, nor in pretending to possess any greater faith than we really have, but rather, in simply trusting God enough to spill our guts to Him. Because Job does this, because he speaks his heart to the Lord as frankly, as familiarly, as crudely as any hapless drunk to his bartender on a lonely Saturday night, the Lord in His time speaks back." 

     One of my dad's favorite sayings was, "Honesty is the best policy."  I believe he was right.  And not just me.  From what Job says in consequent chapters he seems to have held firmly to that same truth as well (see Job 10:8-22, 16:6-14, etc.) -- a truth he applied to his prayer life.

     After all, why would anyone pretend they are feeling one way (at the time they are praying) when they really feel another?  Do we really believe God doesn't know the true state of our soul? Do we not insult His limitless knowledge when we try to cover our anger, bitterness, disappointment or frustration with Him by using words that suggest "it is well, it is well, with my soul!" ?  And if it's not well, why not tell Him things are not well? 

     Would we want our children to lie to us (or throw up a smokescreen) about the struggles they are going through, or tell us the truth? Would we not be disappointed if they didn't trust us enough to bear their souls to us that we may help them in their struggles -- even if the "truth" included hearing their frustrations or anger with some of the things we were doing?

     That's one of the things we learn from Job. It's ok for God's children to be real with their heavenly Father.  He encourages us to pour out all the ACTUAL content of our hearts to Him, not just fake and flowery words of reverence. Prayer isn't a game of pretend, its a dialogue between two people who have covenanted to love each other, share with each other, remain committed to each other, and be completely truthful and transparent with each other -- even when the truth is embarrassing or stings.

Forever in the Grip of His Grace, Pastor Jeff