Know Yourself - Ecclesiastes 7:15-29 Series

How righteous are you? When you think of how much success or failure you have in your effort to obey God, – how accurate do you think that assessment is? That is an important question because your assessment of your own righteousness controls a number of important things in your life. If your estimation is too high that will cause problems, and if your estimation is too low that will also cause problems. This passage will help us gain a more accurate understanding of ourselves.

Ecclesiastes 7:15 In my futile life I have seen everything: there is a righteous man who perishes in spite of his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who lives long in spite of his evil. 16 Don't be excessively righteous, and don't be overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself? 17 Don't be excessively wicked, and don't be foolish. Why should you die before your time? 18 It is good that you grasp the one and do not let the other slip from your hand. For the one who fears God will end up with both of them. 19 Wisdom makes the wise man stronger than ten rulers of a city. 20 There is certainly no righteous man on the earth who does good and never sins. 21 Don't pay attention to everything people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you, 22 for you know that many times you yourself have cursed others. 23 I have tested all this by wisdom. I resolved, "I will be wise," but it was beyond me. 24 What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it? 25 I turned my thoughts to know, explore, and seek wisdom and an explanation for things, and to know that wickedness is stupidity and folly is madness. 26 And I find more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, her heart a net, and her hands chains. The one who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner will be captured by her. 27 "Look," says the Teacher, "I have discovered this by adding one thing to another to find out the explanation, 28 which my soul continually searches for but does not find: among a thousand people I have found one true man, but among all these I have not found a true woman. 29 Only see this: I have discovered that God made people upright, but they pursued many schemes."

8:1 Who is like the wise person, and who knows the interpretation of a matter? A man's wisdom brightens his face, and the sternness of his face is changed.

Introduction

How righteous are you? God commands us to behave in certain ways – we sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. When you think of how much success you tend to have and how much failure you tend to have – how accurate do you think that assessment is? That is an important question because your assessment of your own righteousness controls a number of important things in your life. If your estimation is too high that will cause problems, and if your estimation is too low that will also cause problems. So today Solomon is going to help us gain a more accurate understanding of ourselves.

Most of us assume we know ourselves almost perfectly. But just think about how many times you do something and then think, “Why did I do that? I didn’t want to do that, I resolved not to do that, I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t gain anything from it – why on earth did I do such a dumb thing? What was I thinking?” You don’t even know what you were thinking, and you were the one doing the thinking. How could you not pay attention to your own attention? How could you think about your own thoughts and not know what to make of them? And if you did finally figure out what you were thinking, then you have the much more difficult question of why you were thinking it. Why were you thinking what you were thinking, and why were you feeling and desiring what you were feeling and desiring?

Proverbs 20:5 The purposes of a man's heart are deep waters

Our motives are so complex and so hopelessly mixed that only God is capable of fully sorting them out.

1 Corinthians 4:4 My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.

So we can never have a perfect understanding of our own hearts. However, we are going to see in today’s text that it is important that we have as accurate a view of ourselves as we can – especially as we measure our own righteousness.

Retribution Principle

In our verse-by-verse study of Ecclesiastes, we left off last week in chapter 7 at verse 14, where he says everything – both the happy days and the hard days – all of it comes from the hand of God. And verse 15 is an example of that.