This too is vanity, and good things increase, those who consume them increase. So what is the advantage to their owners except to look on? Sleep of the working man is pleasant whether he eats little or much. Full stomach of the rich man does not allow him to sleep. There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun. Riches being hoarded by their owner to his hurt. When those riches were lost to a bad investment and he had fathered his son, then there was nothing to support him, where he had come naked from his mother's room. So will he return as he came. He will take nothing from the fruit of his labor that he can carry in his hand. This also is grievous evil. Exactly as a man is born, thus will he die. What is the advantage to him be toils for the wind? Throughout his life, he also eats in darkness with great vexation, sickness and anger. Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting. To eat, to drink and enjoy oneself and all one's labor, in which he toils under the sun. During the few years of his life which God has given him, this is his reward. Furthermore, as for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, he has also empowered him to eat from them and to receive his reward and rejoice in his labor. This is the gift of God. He will not often consider the years of his life, because God keeps him occupied with the gladness of his heart. Let's pray together. Father, I do thank you for your word, even the parts of your word that are mysterious to us. They are difficult. We can't just glance over them and say, oh yeah, now I get it. Or there are parts of your word, we really have to dig into to understand. This is one of those passages. My prayer this morning is that you would give us the grace to have our minds illuminated by your truth and our hearts warmed by your love and our wills activated by your sacrifice. That you would use this word to mold us and to remake and reform us more and more into conformity to the image of your son, Jesus. His name I pray. Amen. I told you before how contemporary this book feels even even postmodernist book feels. And it feels contemporary because it deals with timeless issues. It deals with the issues of money, sex and power and justice and injustice and work and politics and income and yes, taxes, pursuit of pleasure and suffering and evil and the meaning of life. And where is God in the midst of all this? This book deals with these themes and so it feels to us very, very timely. The preacher says, I have seen the vanity and the futility of so many things this morning in this passage, Jesus. I've seen the vanity and the futility of looking to politics for justice. The futility of looking to politics for justice. Read carefully with the verse 8 again. If you see oppression of the bore, denial of justice and righteousness in the province, do not be shocked at the sight. The one official watches over another official. There are higher officials over there. Government corruption? Shocked I am just shocked. Who's ever heard of such a thing? Political patronage is nothing new. It's been going on since the time of the preacher who'd been king over Israel. 25 years ago it was going on hundreds and perhaps thousands of years before that. There is indeed nothing new under the sun here. All too often, all too often the line of power has each man kissing the feet of the one above him while he's stepping in the face of the one right below him. This is nothing new. Not a modern convention or a modern invention. It's been going on as long as there have been human beings in power. And all the time, everywhere appears this kind of oppression of the power full over the power less. The rich and those who have means against those who have little or nothing. Everywhere appears the Bible condemns it. The Bible says this is wrong. It's not how it ought to be. All men are made in God's image. All men and women are made in God's image and are not treated this way and stepping stones on your way is something else. The late great Mark heard my favorite Christian artist. He might not have heard of him. He wrote marvelous lyrics. The song, nothing is bothering me. He says very, very sardonic. He says we get the picture from week to week. The rich get richer and in here at the meek. That's the way it is in the world. What makes this passage unique though? This passage. What makes this passage so unusual is who wrote it? This is the one who'd been king. He said, I've seen this. I've been, I've not only seen it, I've witnessed, I've maybe even been part of it. And I as king, I couldn't stomp it out. As king, I couldn't change it and make the differences that I wanted to make. He says don't be shocked. It's been going on forever and it's been going on for as long as you have human beings in power and it will continue as long as you have human beings in power. As king, he knew the importance of a strong central government to keep a strong nation together. He knew you can't keep a strong nation together without a strong, coalescing government in the middle. Founding fathers found that out as well. They tried to keep the states together with the articles of the Federation. They found out that didn't do it and they had to get back together again and write a constitution. It was a binding covenant document for all the states, the 13 to begin with and eventually the final 50. As a Jew, and I can't feel healeth, that's a Hebrew word if you're new to us. The Hebrew word here is cohealeth, which translated preacher. As a Jew, the preacher also understood the sinfulness of man, the radical and pervasive depravity of man. He would have known what the prophet Jeremiah wrote, Jeremiah 179 when he said the heart is desperately wicked, deceitful, above all other things who can possibly know it. As a preacher, as king, he knew that applied to himself as well. As long as there are people in power who are desperately wicked and corrupt above all, this is never going to end in a world without God, including the king and political leaders, especially the king and the political leaders. Let me bring us to our American context again. Our founding fathers also understood that. The same men who wrote those soaring words at all, intercreated equiner, endowed by their career or certain unannulable rights among these reliant liberty and pursuit of happiness, wrote those soaring words at all, so they recognized the depravity of man, and that's why they gave us a separation of powers. The system of Jackson balanced as they did if any one person, or anyone, brains of government became dominant over the others, that corruption and oppression would occur above those in power. We see the hints of that today, do we not? Right now it seems the judiciary wants to write heard over the others, that are interpreting the constitution they want to rewrite it, according to the prevailing cultural winds. Our founding fathers understood that they had a world view that was steeped in and planted in the Bible. It was informed by scripture. No, they were not all Bible believe in Christians, but their world view was saturated in biblical truth. Now I have to tell you, verse 9, because we're people of the book, because I'm a Bible preacher, I have to tell you, verse 9, and let me just read it again, who have put it for you and your bulletin on the screens from the new American standard. This is a very difficult verse to translate. The new American standard says, after all, a king who cultivates the field is an advantage to the land. What does that mean? Now the new international version translates it this way. The increase from the land is taken by all the king himself profits from the fields. It's really difficult here. The Hebrew language is extremely rich, but it gives off a number of meanings. And it leaves out certain words that we want to see in English, so it's hard for us to translate. I believe the best sense of it is putting it in context is I believe the best sense of what the preacher is saying here is that we work like dogs. And the one who promises the king, we get up and go out to the fields at dawn and we plant, we clear the fields and we plow, we put in the seed and then we water and we irrigate, when we read the crops and the king's the one who profits from it. And again, who's ever heard of such a thing that those in power let the workers, the drones go out and earn the money and they stick their hands so far down into their pockets and pull out and you wonder, is there going to be anything left for me? And the preacher, the king says, this is not right. This is not right, this taxation without representation. I'm struggling hard to find a tie in here with our contemporary culture. I'm struggling to find an application here. I wonder, I really wonder what he would think if he saw what goes on today in this country. Human nature does not change ladies and gentlemen. Human nature does not change. Knowledge accumulates, technology advances. Human nature does not change. We face the same kinds of problems today. Don't look to politics, politicians to find justice. This and I have one who believes that God's people ought to be involved in the political process. I really do. We've got to run for office, make ourselves available for a point of office and by all means we've got to vote. There's no excuse if you're 18 years of age or older. If you are, there's no excuse for my voting. We make it so easy to vote today. Consider other people around the world risk to go to a ballot box. All we have to do is show up, might have to wait in line a little bit, might have to mail it in. I have to vote early. There's no excuse for us to not be involved in the political processes in our country. And of course, in praying to those in power every Thursday night, the group prays right over here in our administration conference, pray for our leader and pray for our nation. I'm going to pray with him if you can. 30 minutes. Prayer just for the nation. If you can't do that for a reason then maybe carve that time out at home. How appropriate. And I'm preaching this passage. My Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. Tomorrow's the day we celebrate. I remember Martin Luther King Jr. I'm going to link to it on our website again, that incredible document he wrote. I will urge you one more time if I have for about the last 50 years since the ink was drying on the document as he wrote it. Please read that letter. Incredible. Again soaked in scripture, well-versed in church history. And in that document he echoes Martin Luther King Jr. echoes Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and others when he says that the church, the church is not to be the master of the state. The church is not to be the servant of the state, but the church is to be the conscience of the state. Let me say that again if that's new to you. The church is not to be the master of the state and we become filthy rotten corrupted. Here's not to be the servant of the state. Then we become enasculated. We become totally wimpified. That's a technical theological term. The church becomes weak and ineffective. The church is to be the conscience of the state and has there ever been a time and history of our nation. When our government, those of power, more need is somebody to be their conscience for them because they've demonstrated they will not be their own conscience. Pardon my cynicism, but their conscience begins with who can pay me the most money to help me get reelected. I hope the NSA enjoys listening to the sermon. The church is to be the conscience of the state. The preacher says I've seen the vanity and futility of looking to politics for justice. He said I've seen the vanity of looking to money for happiness. He who loves money will not be satisfied with money. He who loves abundance with his income. This is a guy that had a lot of money. This is a man with a lot. This too, as vanity says, when good things increase, those who consume them increase. It was the advantage to the owners except to look on, there's a key word of these verses. Half or five or eight to twenty-four times the word consume or consumption appears. He's trying to save them into us. He says this, consumption minds at the consumption in town and even warns of the dangers of it. I have to wonder again, if you were alive today, let's see what goes on in our American consumerist culture. All those Christmas presents we just had to get out and buy. We had to wait and lie at the mall for. We had to order online so that the drones could drop them off at our doorstep. All those Christmas presents we had to buy, so our retailers would have a proper little fourth quarter. It's humiliating our economy. How you like paying for them now? Listen, I'm all for free market capitalism. I really am. I'm all for the free market because I believe it does the best job of saluting. The fact that we've got image bears and we want to achieve, we want to produce, we want to do well. At the same time, we understand we're also sitters and we'll lie cheat and steal and we need to check some balances. And I believe, and I'm not an economist, but I believe that the free market economy is the best way of lifting people up out of poverty and giving them an opportunity to have decent lives. Look around the world which countries, which nations, which cultures are the most profitable and the best job of taking care of poor people is capitalist economies. Anyway, this is not less than economics, but he says, I've seen what happens. I've seen what happens when you look to money for happiness without any sense of restraint, any sense of morality, any fear of God. I've seen this, it's a one way ticket and do a free phone and economic collapse as we witness here again recently in this country. I'm not anti-money. I am not anti-money. You are in New York, I'll take it off your hands. I'll do good things with it. I'm not anti-money, but money cannot buy happiness. Look at the ranks of incredibly wealthy, the world's eyes incredibly successful people whose lives have become flaming train wrecks. Howard Hughes is a byword for somebody who's great wealth, not only good at making happy, but joking absolutely crazy. Look what happened with Elvis, Michael Jackson, people have fame and money beyond imagination, and they meet such tragic ends. I think of the Bernie Madoffs of the world and all those faces, names, people who won lottery, ended up bankrupt, addicted to drugs and maybe even homeless because they did not know what to do with it. They thought money was going to buy him happiness. They're a kidner in his commentary on this book. He speaks of the folio riches and mentions three things in particular. He says, first of all, greed creates an insatiable appetite and an unquenchable thirst, the more you have the more you want. John D. Rockefeller, who, by all accounts, was a good man, a great philanthropist, a hundred years ago, or a little more, the richest man in this country who was asked famously how much money is enough and his line was just a little bit more. He asked a little bit more, just a little bit more. Again, from all accounts, he was a good, a generous man. But when's enough? When is enough? What is enough? Kidner says it also attracts a lot of fair-weather friends. Boy, those lottery winners suddenly find all kinds of friends and family they never knew existed. I think of the athletes who come from very poor backgrounds, suddenly caching that big picture. Look at Mike Tyson. Look at all the pro football and basketball players who come from really poor backgrounds. Suddenly get trusted with a lot of money into their hands where the hangers on come out of nowhere. Greats. Kidner says it's that kind of my greats' tension and stress and ulcers. Because I was going to solve all your problems, great problems you never knew you had. I saw the first movie Wall Street. I didn't see the sequel to it. The first movie, Wall Street, what, 25 years ago? And the byline, money never sleeps. Money never sleeps. And those who worship it, they get let around by it. They don't sleep so good either. I know they don't sleep so well, don't correct me. They don't sleep so good either. So what do we do for that? The gospel is the answer. I preach it not a lot ago. I'm preaching the book of 1 Timothy. The 1 Timothy chapter 6 for the Apostle Paul writes, but God in us with contempt is great gain. But we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich, volunteer temptation and a trap, and there are many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruined destruction. For the love of money, not money, the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people eager for money, have wander from the faith and pierce themselves with many griefs. But you, man of God, and I don't think Paul would mind if I paraphrase, woman of God, young person of God. Leave from all this and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness. What do we do with the love of money? We substitute it with the love of God and the things of God. It remains a great tool. It's a very useful servant, a terrible God, a terrible, terrible God. So the preacher says, I've seen the vanity and the futility of looking to politics for justice, looking to money for happiness, looking to possessions for security. We live at a time. We probably all realize that having money and things doesn't provide the security we once thought it did. Just take back in the last 20 years of those who lost their life savings, those who lost everything they had in the Enron scandal and Tyco and Tyco rather. They're world calm and, again, I mentioned Bernie Madoff here locally, Scott Ross team, those who can victims of identity theft. Just everything they have gone overnight through somebody's crookedness dishonesty or the click of a mouse from another country. And everything you have is wiped out. There's nothing new under the sun. Verse 13 says, there's a grievous evil which I've seen under the sun, riches being hordered by their owner to his hurt when those riches were lost through a bad investment. He had father's son. There was nothing to support him. That was my identity theft and it wasn't some sort of an insider trading move I don't think. Something happens and a sudden, an angel reversal and ruin and the man who staked everything he had on that money back and then it's gone. Nothing to leave his son. There were no safety nets back then. There were no unemployment checks. There were no welfare provisions in ancient Israel when it was gone. Nothing to support him. Bording is money to pass on to his son. Don't know there's nothing left. From the world point of view, that's utter claim. The utter disaster. Nothing but hopelessness. Nothing but darkness. But from the perspective of what he knows, God, he's never completely dark. Never completely hopeless. I've told you before, the story of Maxi Jarman, and he came from some of my humble beginnings in Tennessee and came to the CEO of that time as general shoe company became Ginesco. He took the company from 75 employees to 75,000 names of a very wealthy man in the process. One time in the 60s there was the largest apparel company in the world. And then financial reversal hit. And Maxi Jarman was wiped out. He was a man who had millions and suddenly had absolutely nothing left. And Fred Smith, who I got to know a little bit in his later years, Fred Smith was a good friend of Maxi Jarman's. And this is something Fred wrote about. Maxi Jarman in Christianity Day. He said even when Maxi was at his lowest personal fortune, he gave a check for $13,000 to use for Christ for a project we were undertaking. It was the last of his mother's estate, which he had completely given away just as he had given his inheritance from his father's estate, starting the Jarman Foundation for Christian causes. During the darkest days of his temporary financial crunch, which he didn't try to hide or exploit, I asked him if he ever thought the man he had given away. Of course I have, he said, but remember, I didn't lose a penny. I gave away. I only lost what I kept. As he had come naked from his mother's womb, so will he return as he came. He will take nothing from the fruit of his labor, he can carry in his hand. Here the preacher is just echoing Job. Maybe you know these words from Book of Job. Make it I came from my mother's womb, make it I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. The preacher says I've seen the vanity and futility of looking to possession for security because they can be taken away in a heartbeat. I've seen the futility of looking to politics for justice, looking to money for happiness, looking to possession for security, seeing the vanity and futility of looking to what is temporal to find what is eternal. We are longing for eternity, ladies and gentlemen, we are made for eternity. We are a French physicist and philosopher, Blasphus Callshead. There is a God-shaped vacuum in each one of our hearts and nothing and no one can fill up God himself. We try to fill everything else we can with our families, with our jobs, with our recreations, and our vocations, with our achievements, we try everything we know to fill that God-shaped vacuum. It doesn't work. There's temporary alleviation of distress and discomfort. Maybe we find that in a bottle or a bottle of pills, or a new romance or another sporting event, but nothing and no one can fill that gap but God himself. One day, all that other stuff, all the stuff we've acquired, all the stuff we've accomplished, one day that will all mean nothing. The gospel, again, is the answer. Jesus said in these famous words from the end of the sermon on the Mount, you not store up for yourself treasures on earth from off and rusts destroying with these, break in and steal. The store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, or neither moth nor rusts destroying with these, do not break in or steal. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. We said every Sunday when prayer, the Lord's Prayer, give us this day our daily bread. But we said, Lord, we would mind a little cheesecake after that. You know, we would mind a little extra on the side, or we appreciate the daily bread, but could we have just a little bit more? I understand that, of course. That's natural. But we look to the things that are temporal to fill what can only be filled by the eternal. You probably know, at least in other words, the story of Jim Elliott, the man who was martyred, seeking to reach the fierce head-hunting tribe of the Acha Indians in what is now Ecuador, seeking to reach the Acha Indians in the gospel of Christ. Jim Elliott and four of his co-workers, his fellow missionaries, had out of a plane one sunny day in 1956. Within minutes, they were struck down by a hail of spears from the Acha's and their blood ran into the river at the edge of the tribal lands. But not long before he died, Jim Elliott wrote these in moral words, he is no fool who gives that which he cannot keep in order to gain that which he cannot lose. He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain that which he cannot lose. Paulie is manly, he looked at the temple to provide what only the eternal can provide. Please, he asks you to feel so contemporary because it deals these timeless truths of money and sex and power, politics, justice and injustice and work and income and taxation and the confiscation of that income of suffering and evil and the meaning of life. The question of where is God in the midst of all this and the good news this morning is, he's right where he's always been. He's right here in the midst of life and death and suffering and injustice and money and power and politics. He came and he inhabited the world and he was such right into the middle of it, he didn't avoid it. He came and he suffered all the slings and arrows that this world can heap upon a person. He took it and he absorbed it. He took the evil of this world and then he crushed it and his body was broken and crushed. He took upon a cross, paid the eternal sacrifice for your sins and mine. That's the good news of the gospel that all these things are fulfilled. The fulfillment and happiness and joy that the hunger and thirst for eternity, all these things are met in Christ Jesus. He is here in the midst of all that we do. John Tandy says, I've found that you might have life, have it more abundantly. When I was off the week after Christmas, typically there's something to be gravity. I'm sure a lot of you have probably seen it. If you haven't seen it in theory, you're probably not going to. I won't spoil it for you. But there's a very pivotal scene at the end, toward the end of the movie. We're Sandra Bullock, who's playing a scientist by name of Dr. Ryan Stone. She's making her first fifth board space shuttle and a disaster occurs. And toward the end of the movie, there's a scene in which he is facing death. According to the instrumentation on the panel in front of her, she has two minutes to live. And so she begins to talk just to say how loud all the things that she's not sure of. I think she doesn't know how to handle herself. And then she says these words. I'm sure you can see the movie is extremely well done. It's been nominated for the Academy Award. I have no idea what to win, but the only one that I've seen. It's extremely well done. But she says these words there as she is facing what she thinks are the last 120 seconds of her life. She says, I don't know how to pray. No one ever taught me how to pray. And as a Christian, as a pastor, as a father, I had heard those words and I thought, how tragic your whole life has been geared to the temporal to accomplish in the scientific realm these great things. And this was to be the pinnacle of your life, your greatest achievement to go aboard the space shuttle and help advance science to push the frontiers of science back in a minute in a heartbeat. It's all come apart and you're looking at death and you never ever considered what to do. No one ever taught you how to face the eternal. Well, I don't want that to be true of any of you. I don't want that to be true of anybody that ever hears me preach. Anybody that ever comes and comes and comes. I want you to know that you get one life and I hope God bless you and gives you all kinds of money. If you get in politics, be a good one, okay? But every single one of us, at one point, sooner or later, we come to the point where all that stuff passes away and it's just you and God face to face. I don't want anybody to get to that point, so I don't know how to pray. Nobody ever taught me how to do this. Let's close this morning in prayer. I'm going to offer a chance for a new body if you don't know Christ. If you've ever received him as your Lord and Savior, I'm going to offer you the opportunity to do that now this morning. If you know Christ, I would ask you to pray for those who might not. Either who are here this morning or might hear this sermon on the Internet. An obvious chance to receive Christ as Lord and I'll close this with prayer for all of us. Heavenly Father, I thank You again this morning for the truth of Your Word and I thank You that, whereas we have the written Word here that we can all open and read and study, I thank You so much for the living Word Jesus who came, who dwell among us to be in our midst, to be one of us, to take upon Himself our sins. I pray for that man or woman or young person who's listening to me now, who has never ever come to terms with who He is, with who She is, with who You are. Father, for that person I would pray Lord Jesus, I've heard these words and I've considered my ways and I realize I have not been living for You, I've been living for myself, I've come to the end of myself and I have made a total mess in my life. I've never dealt with You, eternal, I've never dealt with You. So now my faith, I receive the payment that Jesus made on the cross for me. He paid the payment, paid the penalty for my sins, receiving my faith into my heart. I ask You to be my Lord and my Savior from this day forth and forever. I ask You to teach me how to live for You and give me the grace. I love You with my whole heart, mine and soul to love others. I love myself to live for You by faith, to Your grace and Your mercy. I receive You now by faith in Jesus' name. And Father, for all the rest of us, who made that decision many years ago, received Christ as Lord and Savior, so I must don't even remember the way to the hell. The press upon us again. I bless We are and know You, be able to call You Father. I make this prayer in Jesus' name. Goodbye, please never see the Lord's benediction. Go now in the love of God the Father, the grace and mercy of God the Son, fellowship and companionship of God the Holy Spirit. This is the life I'm in.