Enjoy Your Ice Cream Cone - Ecclesiastes 1:1-3, 2:24-25 Series

Ecclesiastes 1:1 The words of the Preacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 "Absolute futility," says the Preacher. "Absolute futility. Everything is futile." 3 What does a man gain for all his efforts that he labors at under the sun?

2:24 There is nothing better for man than to eat, drink, and enjoy his work. I have seen that even this is from God's hand, 25 because who can eat and who can enjoy life apart from Him? 26 For to the man who is pleasing in His sight, He gives wisdom, knowledge, and joy, but to the sinner He gives the task of gathering and accumulating in order to give to the one who is pleasing in God's sight. This too is futile and a pursuit of the wind.

Introduction

Getting Ahead

How can you get ahead in life? How can you gain an advantage, and get an edge so you are ahead of the game? I typed that question into Google, and a Wikihow.com page came up with seven steps to getting ahead.

1) Read

2) Figure out your goals

3) Make friends

4) Let go of your limiting conditions

5) Develop a positive outlook

6) Get control of stress

7) Make a to-do list

If I do those seven things, Wikihow.com promises that I will have an advantage over everyone else. The problem with that is this – that page was at the top of my results in my search, which means millions of other people saw that same list. So now my question is this – how do I get ahead of them? They are all reading books and making to do lists and controlling stress – I now have to do those seven things just to stay even with all those other people. It does not give me any advantage. I am still dead even with the people who have read that same list. And I am a few steps behind the people who found an even better list.

Is it possible to get really ahead in life and gain a true advantage? Well, you can gain an advantage over fools by being wise. And there is a better list than the Wikihow webpage. It is called the book of Proverbs. Follow the wisdom principles in that book, and you will be ten steps ahead of all the fools.

But what if I am not content with that? What if I am not satisfied with just having an advantage over the fools? Because let’s face it, you can live according to wisdom, and make all the right decisions, and still run into trouble. There are people who make their to do list, and read books, and they work hard, save for a rainy day, control their tongue, plan for the future, avoid bad friends, trust in the Lord and lean not on their own understanding – they live out all those wisdom principles, and still, they get leukemia. Or they get fired from their job at age 50 and can’t find any other work. Or their house burns to the ground and they lose everything. Or their children go astray.

If you live according to wisdom, then generally speaking things will go better for you – many things will go better, but many other things won’t. Job was wise and lived well and made good decisions and he had more trouble than anyone. In the big, overall picture, whether you are wise or foolish – things happen that are totally outside of your control and they affect you right along with everyone else. And everybody wants to know – how can I get ahead of that? How do I get a handle on the wildcard of divine providence? The world calls it luck or fortune or chance or fate; we understand that it is divine providence, but one thing we can all agree on – whatever we call it, it is a wildcard. It is like an unpredictable wild animal – you can never know what it will do. It might run away, it might bite you – there is just no predicting it, no controlling it. Isn’t that how life is? These seemingly random things just happen to you all the time, and you can’t control them or even see them coming.

A few weeks ago I was about to leave for the conference on biblical counseling, and right before I leave my computer dies. I didn’t see that coming. But I had the hard drive backed up as a disk image so that if that happened I could restore all the programs and all the settings and files and everything else with one click of a button. I use so many programs, restoring everything on my computer takes a huge amount of time. And so in my effort to use wisdom, I even backed it up with two different disk image programs, just to be sure, in case one got corrupted or something. So I get back from the conference, I have my new hard drive, I hooked it up to my backup hard drive to restore it, I hit the button, and at that moment the dog walked by, caught the wire, pulled it off the shelf and broke the backup drive and I lost everything. Since then I have spent over 100 hours getting my computer all set up. That was 100 hours I didn’t have to spare, and I cannot even begin to tell you how far behind I am on everything now. I didn’t see that coming. I tried everything I knew to avoid that, and it happened to me anyway. And I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem like it’s good for the church, or good for me, or good for anyone.