Let's take our Bibles and turn to Solomon's book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 9. Talk about simple gifts. It's kind of a fitting topic on this Thanksgiving weekend. We didn't plan it that way, but that's how in God's Providence, this text fell to this date. One of America's best known folk hymns was written by a guy named Joseph Brackett. He lived from 1797 to 1882 in the Shaker community of Gloucester, Maine, and he wrote a little song that most of you are familiar with. It is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free, it is the gift to come down where we ought to be. And when we find ourselves in the place just right, we'll be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend, we shant to be ashamed. To turn, turn will be our delight till by turning and turning we come round right. This song was largely unknown outside of the Shaker community until 1944, when American composer Aaron Copeland included it in his anthology of American folk songs, turned into a symphony called Appalachian Spring. Then it became a popular song. It's been recorded by Judy Collins and young lady named Jewel by the Mormon Tabernacle Wow, by the Santa Clara Vanguard and everybody from the crooner Frank Sinatra to a rock and roll band called The Birds. It's been part of our folklore and our folk songs and our common expression of American values for a long time. John Haynes and I tried to fit this Shaker song into our worship tonight. There's no way it could be done because there's nothing Christ centered in it. There's no gospel truth. In fact, it's not even a spiritual song. Mr. Brackett wrote about dancing, not about religion, turning and turning. Because one of the things the Shaker community did as part of their religious services, services is they danced, they twirled until they reached a state of ecstasy and meditation. And I didn't think that you really as Presbyterians were going to do that tonight here. We're not really equipped for twirling in this sanctuary but we could move a few pews and try it. But it is about a simple life. It's about when true slemplicity is gained, he says. Simple life and simple dancing and simplicity as a gift from God, and that's why perhaps it's such an increasingly popular song in our American society because our lives are increasingly complex. Richard Foster, who is an evangelical clicker, has written about simplicity in a book called The Freedom of Simplicity. He begins this book by saying contemporary culture is plagued by the passion to possess. The unreasoned boast abounds that the good life has found in accumulation that more is better. Indeed, we often accept this notion without question, with the result that the lust for a influence in contemporary society has become psychotic. It is completely lost touch with reality. Furthermore, the pace of the modern world accentuates our sense of being fractured and fragmented. We feel strained and hurried and breathless. The complexity of rushing to achieve and to accumulate more and more frequently threatens to overwhelm us, it seems there is no escape from this rat race. Christian simplicity frees us from this modern mania. It brings sanity to our compulsive extravagance and peace to our frantic spirit. It allows us to see material things for what they are, goods to enhance life, not to oppress life. It tells us once again that people are more important than possessions. Simplicity, by the way, doesn't have to do just with less stuff, and as soon as you bring up the subject of simplicity, Americans get real antsy because we all are fluent compared to the other 95% in the world. But it really has less to do with things than it has to do with a view of one's life, what life is all about, where life is supposed to get us there. A man can be a multi-billionaire and have a very simple life, a person could be a clerk in an office, and have a very complex life. Because simplicity is more than the stuff we manage. It includes the use of our time, and the management of our life, and a quietness and soul that is seldom seen among mankind, let alone Americans. Solomon in his memoirs, his book about work, Ecclesiastes, has an awful lot to say about simplicity. The last time we met, we looked at the opening part of chapter 9, where Solomon talked about simple things, food, and friends, and family, and work. He said in verse 7, go eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart for God has already approved what you do. Then your garments be always white, let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun. Because that is your portion in life, and in your toil, at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave, or show, to which you are going. Here he commends to us simple things, simple gifts. Tonight he'll tell us why simplicity is so difficult to attain. He'll talk about a simple lifestyle, simple things that undergird these simple gifts, and that make our life either very painful and complex, or a great joy. He says beginning in verse 11, again, it's not an observation. He's just coming to make friends, it's something he said again and again and again in different ways. It remains the carping, repetitive theme of these memoirs. Again, I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bred to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. Our man does not know his time, like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare so the children of man are snared at an evil time when it suddenly falls upon them. I've also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great to me. There was a little city with a few men in it, and a great king came against it, and besieged building great siege works against it. But there is found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city, yet no one remembered that poor man. But I say that wisdom is better than might, though the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words are not heard. The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools. wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good. Solomon makes three observations here tonight that I want to unpack for you. Three keys to simplicity. Here's the first one. Time is not under our control. It's under the control of God. Number two, chance, he calls it, or we would call it providential events, or not under our control. They're not even something we can predict. They're under the sovereign guidance of God and people that we trust, or don't trust, are not under our control. They are subject to God. These three things, time, unexpected events, and difficult people, sinners, he calls them, make a simple life very complex. We call these things the rat race, time, or unpredictable events, he calls it chance, and difficult people, sinners. And he says that these three sides of life that kind of force us into a triangle of complexity, we could call self-reliance, self-assertion, and self-absorption. What Solomon's going to show us is that the reason we struggle with simplicity and the reason our lives are complex is because of our idolatrous reliance upon self rather than God. It's real, simple, but profound proposition that he sets before us. God is so great and so sovereign that managing us are times the events of our lives and all the people in the world for him is relatively simple. But for you, or you, or you, it is a very complex thing. Once Adam and Eve decided that they would take their lives, their time, and their events into their own hands, the simplicity of Eden became the complexity of our fallen world. And since that date, at least God's people, and probably more, have sought for simplicity by trying to unload their lives from things and commitments and activities only to find that life didn't get more simple, and that is because, loved ones, they never dealt with the three root problems of self-reliance, self-assertion, and self-absorption. Pope John Paul the 23rd, who died in 1963, said, the older I grow, the more clearly I perceive the dignity and winning beauty of simplicity and thought, conduct and speech, of desire to simplify all that is complicated, and to treat everything with the greatest naturalness and clarity. He simply expressed the longing of the human heart to make life less difficult and simpler. To be a gift to be free, free of self-liance and free of self-assertion and free of self-absorption. Let's look at these three things, as Solomon unpacks them in almost poetic language. First, he says, a man of simplicity must overcome self-reliance. Again, and by the way, folks, there was no one in the Bible in his youth, more self-reliant, intelligent, handsome, gifted, rich, powerful young Solomon. Man who had it all and could do it all, and saw that relying on himself ruined his life. Again, I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bred to the wise, nor rich is to the intelligent, nor favored to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. Solomon does not know his time, like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time when it suddenly falls upon them. Solomon says, this whole idea of simplicity has to do with time. Time and chance, three times in these three verses he mentions time. It's something that we have to manage. It's a limited commodity, a gift, there's just a finite amount of time. There's always more of this or that, but never more time. And so his first observation about the complexity is about our self-reliance. That the foolish man is caught up in the rat race because he assumes that he can manage his own time in his own life, not so, says Solomon. Time remains in the hands of God and no one else. Walter Kaiser says, human ability cannot guarantee success. In fact, more frequently than not, those who trust the most in their own abilities are the very persons who are caught unsuspectingly and suddenly by their own devices and in an ordinate, indiscriminate reliance upon their own skills. Things who appear to be doing so well in this life end up being the greatest losers of all. Believers must judge these books not by their covers. Things are not always what they appear to be, especially in relationship to time. That alone is under the charge of God. I mean, we don't have any greater parable about this than the late Joe paterno, a man who was riding the crest of success in his time. Now, there was not a greater college football coach, his abilities, his understanding of the game, his capital he had with people, it was just unlimited. Most winning coach of all time in college football and he was the coach there for 40 some years. There was his statue outside the stadium, he was still alive and in the span of six weeks, he was dead, the statue was torn down, his record was diminished, his reputation tarnished, a sad end to a good, a gifted and as far as I can see, a God-fearing man at least, but time and chance overtook him because perhaps he was too self-reliant. Another alliance is the deadly drug that fills the veins of our American way of life. I would imagine at this point, some of you are shutting down because I'm simply speaking about something that's untenable, but I'm telling you that self-reliance is a deadly drug that fills the veins of our American way of life. This conviction that we can make things happen in our way, in our time, by our abilities, Solomon says this is not so. The swift do not always win the race. Remember when you were a child, grandma told you a story about a tortoise and a hare that had a race? That little parabolic fairy tale had a point to it. The strong do not always win the battle. Britain lost the revolutionary war and the American empire lost Vietnam. The strong do not always win the battle. The wise do not always eat well. There are many, godly, saintly, wise, biblically-craprowned saints in Sudan tonight starving to death. The intelligent do not always get rich. There are a lot of people with PhDs driving buses or busing tables, and there's more than a few bums who've won the lottery and are filthy rich. And knowledge does not always receive favor with God or with other people. Many educated scientists with vast knowledge and engineers and technical people are lost. They're atheists, and there are more than a few lawyers who have a great knowledge of the law, who are held in very low esteem because they're ambulance chasers. Solomon says, if these five economists that are listed here, none of them guarantee success or prosperity, because none of them enable you to control the time of your life. I think a sure indication that we have this problem of self-reliance is the American addiction it's an addiction to technology. It is an absolute addiction. I mean this is no offense to anybody because I'm looking at some of them right now, but the engineer has replaced the theologian bad idea. The idea that smartphones and iPads and nooks and laptops and the internet, we've invented a whole new language. When I was a young man, I didn't know what a droid was, what Verizon meant, what Intel or cyberspace or Facebook texting, a noun has become a verb. All this new language around this new world in this culture of a techno-urban society gives a ground for an ugly seed to bear even uglier fruit. The idea that we can do things simply because we're able to do them and we will them to be. I've heard more than one computer scientist and more than one engineer and more than one great technical brain tell me that it's just a matter of time and we do X, Y and Z. Maybe it's just me. But how many times does your internet go down? Or how many times do your calls get dropped? Or how often do you have to call somebody because one of your devices is infected? And how much time do you spend updating your apps? That means applications or downloading new software. How many new versions can there be of something where people line up for hours or days in advance to get the latest new, you know, joy 27E? And how much money do we spend on the latest Macintosh device or the newest Microsoft gadget before it becomes immoral and even obscene? I don't see many of you laughing about this. And you should be because it's absolutely stupid how we behave around gadgets. But you know why it's not funny to us because it strikes home. Some of you are looking at your gadget right now because when I go on a self-reliance, you close the Bible and turn it on to Gizmo. And it's evidence, it's a betrayal that this technology strikes at the very heart of the problem of simplicity. It strokes our egos and stokes our delusions that abilities can shape the future and God's world on our own destiny that technology can accomplish things that religion can't. That's why technology has always been the enemy of religion and probably will be to the day we die. This is why so many scientists, especially, have a difficult time holding on to faith in God through Jesus Christ. And yet Solomon says, look at 1st 12, a man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net and like birds that are caught in a snare. So the children of man are snared at an evil time when it suddenly falls upon them. What's he mean to evil time is death. For all of their talk about managing time and shaping life and making things easier, technology just cannot first all. The inevitable, we die. Solomon is describing the folly of the rat race, fueled by self-reliance and facilitated by technology. He's warning us to do five things to break the power of self-reliance. Slow down the pace. The race is not always to the swift. Re-less competitive, nor the battle to the strong. Read fewer manuals, nor bread to the wise. Get out of school and go to work, nor riches to the intelligent, and spend less time on the internet, nor favor to those with knowledge. You want to read what this looks like in real life, go read the sermon on the mount, and especially chapter six. Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life. What you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will put on it. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air. They need to sow, or reap, nor gather into barns, and yet their Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they? Isn't it James who says in chapter four, that we say, we will go to such and such a city and do such and such, and make a living and become prosperous? James says, you fools, you do not know what time your life will be required of you. You ought to say, if the Lord's will is this, we will go there and do such and such, for this is wisdom. Our self-reliance is bound to make our life more complex than we really want it to be. And it is assisted by self-assertion. That's the next thing that Solomon talks about, that the man of simplicity overcomes not only his self-reliance, but his self-assertion, his aggressive nature. I have also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great to me. There was a little city with a few men in it, and a great king came against it and besieged it, building great siege works against it, but they were found in it a poor wise man, and he had by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man, but I say that wisdom is better than might, though the poor man's wisdom is despised and his words are not heard. Solomon turns from self-reliance to self-assertion. He tells the story, perhaps a real story, perhaps it happened to him. Maybe he was that great king that tried to take a city, or maybe it was one of his king friends that he hung around with when the nations met together, or maybe it's just a parable. But it's a story of a powerful king who attacks a little town, a cakewalk, a minor skirmish. And the reason the king is so shocked that the city does not fall is because he no doubt was armed with great force and a great battle plan. But in the city is an unknown poor fella, wise as can be, who organizes the team within a city, and finds the chink in the armor no pun intended of the great king's plan, and the city is not full, and the great king returns home frustrated, foiled, and embarrassed. But no one rewards this simple man, in fact they don't even remember what his words of wisdom were that gave them victory in life, because they don't care. Solomon's point, self-assertion will ultimately fail in the face of Godly wisdom, because self-assertion is born out of pride, while wisdom grows out of humility in the fear of the Lord, a thing called reference. I have noticed this about American society, my friends, and has developed in my short lifetime, especially my time in the ministry. Americans are absolutely obsessed with master plans and vision statements and long-range goals, and surveys and studies and audits and assessments and consultants and information research and seminars, and people who always have the next 20-page binder to tell us how to accomplish our goals and seven easy steps. I want to tell you that there is, in my office, a drawer full of such master plans that Christ covenant came up with over the years, none of which have we ever worked and none of which ever accomplished what the booklet said they were going to accomplish. I know something about this. Before I left for seminary, I worked for a Fortune 500 company called International Harvest Actor Company, who had hired a consulting group known as Kempner Trago. We paid them literally millions of dollars for a master plan of management by objectives. It was my job in the personnel department to make sure that 800 managers, superintendents and division leaders in our company had their quarterly master plans in order run through me and approve by the plant manager and the chief executive officer over the plant. I spent five years doing this. I was the most hated man in the plant because I was the guy who came down every week and said, Fritz, haven't got your master plan for the next year yet. All of your goals and what you would produce and how much money you would make and the new innovations you'd offer and the changes you'd make. Now forget the fact that Fritz was just one manager at a 3333 employees in a corporation that had over 14,000 employees and we were all going to change the way the company worked by a little master plan, which somehow had to all fit together even though they were really not coordinated. It was a nightmare and a colossal waste of money. And four years after I left the company and went to seminary, an international harvester company folded, probably because my decisions caught up with them. If you don't know that before you hired me as a pastor, you'd have changed your mind on the front end. There's the subtle arrogance behind all this. Hand in hand with our technology which implies that we can plan and orchestrate and will into existence and motivate people through our self assertion to reach our goals. And if they don't fit with the goals of other people under the master plan of God, Tony Robbins, you've seen him on TV a hundred times. He has made millions by talking about self assertion. He's a high school dropout who was depressed and working in a car wash in Southern California when he made his first speech about motivating yourself to accomplish your own self will. By following your own dreams, by making your own plans of success. Now the problem is that as far as I know, Tony's never done anything that details people can be done. But we flock to listen to this man. He's a multi million. In fact, he's over worth over a billion dollars now simply by fueling the idea, the myth that if we make a plan and will it into existence, what we want will become reality. Solomon says, you know, it's not true. You can master plan and vision eyes and strategize all you want, while you could be a man with a massive army and come and try to take podankaiwa and in an afternoon fail, despite all of your great abilities. All of your great plans, marriage, family, the local church, community, even the nation doesn't need a new master plan. They don't need a new vision. God is my witness loved ones. How many presidents have we elected who take us into a new vision for America, only to end up four or eight years later, mired in the same complex failing mess? How many times has that happened in your life? Why? Because the plan is obviously not the lords. In the story, the king decided to do something that in Solomon's opinion was against the sovereign God and the little guy who knew nothing except biblical wisdom, foiled the great master in his plan and brought God's will to bear. I think we love these strategic planning sessions, these vision statements, these master plans because they cloak four unpleasant realities, the reality of avoidance, because it's always easier to plan than to do. It's cheaper to talk than to obey pride. We believe that we can need to improve upon God's models and God's goals, self-assertion. We prefer to will into existence what God has said when reality can only be reached through faith and faith is difficult and finally worldliness. We know how to be corporate rather than how to be spiritual. I believe that God has intended life to be fairly simple. Go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the church, teaching them what the Bible says, growing them up in community, helping them love others and serve the world, so they can worship me in spirit and truth. That's the plan. To work and Jesus Christ's will will bring it to pass. Self-assertion will not be honored by God, but as simple obedience to His plan will. That's why at the end of that discourse on the complexity of life and simplicity of faith, Jesus said, seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these other things your plans, aim at, will be given to you. Don't worry about tomorrow with your master plan, your vision statement, your strategic smart goals, each day has enough to worry about just following the plan of God. From self-assertion, He goes to the root of the problem, which is self-absorption. He says, the man of simplicity overcomes self-absorption, the words of the wise, verse 17, the words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools, wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good. This is a little, you know, he's figured, what's he talking about, he's talking about self-absorption, and he's not really knocking rulers who he considers fools, or armies that he considers evil with the weapons of war, no, he's really critiquing you and me. Here's what he's saying, it is necessary for rulers to shout over the crowd, and at times to use their power to oppress the people, because one sinner after another decides in his self-absorbed life to do his own thing and destroys any hope of cooperation that makes life simpler and easier. How much are we surrounded by incessant, omnipresent noise, rulers and fools on talk radio and cable TV, constant advertising, sound bit propaganda, the media, the internet, and one political slogan after another broadcast, odd nauseam into the racket of the American mosaic, and how omnipresent is power? Things that continue to force us into a mold that we really don't want to go to and force their intrusive will into our life, whether it's lawsuits or intrusive government or increasing policies and regulations, or the forces of law or police or military, and yet the problem is simply the last line of this paragraph. One sinner destroys much good. Who is at one sinner? Is it the ruler? Is it the noisy fools who listened to him? That he asked to shout over so he's heard? Is it the cruel dictator with his powerful army of weapons? No. The one sinner is I. And you, why does the ruler shout? Let me ask you a question. Would you like to be Barack Obama tonight and try to bring 368 million people to one grand vision of where we're headed? When all 368 million said, I need, I want, I demand, I have a right, I voted for this, you promise me that? How could anybody lead that, cacophony, of self-absorption? Do you blame him then that he says, shut up, here's the executive order, here's the law, this is where we're going, if you don't like it, vote me out the next time and win by the slimmest margin, which is happening every single time. We have an election with a nation of deeply divided self-absorbed people. We tend to think, I want you to look at what Solomon's saying. Don't read these verses to your own greater, let the man speak for himself. What is the problem with the Cornington Solomon? It's not the rulers or the generals. It's the one sinner that destroys much good. We tend to say, this is the American cop out, the reason we're like this is we can't trust our rulers. And I say no. The reason the rulers are like they are is because they can't trust you. It's your self-absorption, and mine, quite honestly, that causes our leaders to shout over the cacophony of fools and to use their power to get something done, half of which half of the people won't like. It's a terrible mess, but it has to do with sin. One sinner destroys much good. How would you describe the sinner except someone who if self-absorbed? That is the essence of sin loved ones, myself at the center of the universe. It's all about me and mine and what I want. And that is what makes life so complicated, because no one can give every sinner what they want and still do what that's how one sinner destroys much good. So the solution to complexity and the way to simplicity is for you and I to overcome by God's grace and by Christ's power, self-reliance and self-assertion and self-absorption. I want to ask you a question before I close and I'll close on time. What is the distance between this pulpit and where you're sitting? David Kraus, what is the distance between this pulpit and you? 50 feet. Jane? You're a mathematician now. Come on. 20 feet. Zach, how about you? The distance. 60 feet. Okay. Three different people, three different answers. You say the pastor, they're all sitting in different angles. Oh. Well, how many of you hunt? How many other centers besides I like to kill things? There you go. Well, you know when you hunt you have this little thing called a range finder. You know what that is? It's like a set of binoculars and you look through this thing and you get this little crosshairs with a box in the middle and you press this thing down this knob and it tells you how many yards that thing is from you. Every time I hunt I'm surprised. I had buck in my sightseer day, didn't shoot him because he wasn't legal, wasn't big enough, but I figured this thing's probably 50 yards away. I put the range finder on him and guess what? He was 87 yards away. Now again, what's the distance between this pulpit and you? It's a world of distance. It's not a matter of yards. It's a manner of life. It's how we look at life rather than listening to God's wisdom. It's how we are going to accomplish what we want rather than let God tell us what He says should be done. It's our concern about what we want and we need rather than what God says we're going to get. And the man behind that box be impaster or president has a difficult time closing that distance if we refuse wisdom. That is Solomon's whole premise here that wisdom is better than folly and that we really need to reach a life of blessed simplicity is to see things from God's perspective and to walk by faith. Faith in three things loved ones. One, that God loves you more than you love yourself. Two, that God is more absorbed in blessing you than you are self-absorbed and blessing yourself. And three, that God knows best what you need in your life even more than you know yourself. We walk by faith. The Old Testament learned for that is wisdom. And when we move into God into His love, into His providential provision and care and into His knowledge, life becomes less complex and more simple because as we move into Christ, self-reliance, self-absorption and self-assertion seem to die and wisdom prevails. Unless we do that, we may think we're closer to God's word and will than we are when really there is a world of difference between how we see life and how Jesus Christ does. And that difference is what makes life uncomfortably complex. Let's pray. Father, we are meant to be simple creatures. People of body and soul, made in your image. One of your great attributes, theologians tell us, is your simplicity, that you are what you appear to be and that there is no confusion or mixture or lack of understanding in who you are and what you do within your own person. We are sinners and therefore have become horribly complex, making life in your world even more complex, and causing us to get lost in the rat race, to be absorbed in our master plans, and to be ruined by our own self-focus. We repent of these things tonight and we pray in faith to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom in Christ who lives in us, that we might become more of a people who walk by faith and move inward to you so that your love and your provision and your concern for us in this world would master our self-assertion, our self-reliance and our self-absorption. And in the process, you would give us the gift to be simple and the gift to be free, the gift to come down where we ought to be in Christ and in His will. And we would ask for this grace in a simple prayer tonight in Jesus' name, amen.