Meaningful And Meaningless Worship Series

I would like to open today’s sermon with a question. Why do we even bother to go to church? I imagine if I was to ask everybody, I would probably get different answers. I think some go out of tradition. Some go because they are feeling pressure from a spouse. Others might be feeling a sense of guilt. Maybe some come for the music. Possibly a few might come for the preaching. And maybe some people come because they actually want to worship God, which should be the reason that we should come. But the question is not so much of why we come to church but what makes good worship? What makes worship worshipful? In fact, what makes worship meaningful? Sometimes the best way to locate that is to find out what makes worship meaningless. That is what we are going to do as we go into the book of Ecclesiastes. We have been going through a series on the book of Ecclesiastes called Under The Sun. It is one man’s pursuit of life of meaning apart from God. Really looking at life totally from man’s perspective. This man was King Solomon who had the time, talent, power, and wealth to pursue meaning in pretty much every avenue of life. We saw early on that he tried to pursue meaning within the various cycles of nature. We saw how he looked at the accomplishments of men over the years, and he looked at the seasons of life for people. And last week we looked at the idea of finding meaning within the work. Pretty much again the conclusion would be that, apart from God, life is pretty much meaningless.

Today, he seems to take a little bit of an interlude. It looks like he is trying to examine meaning from the perspective of the Old Testament temple. The temple in Jerusalem. You may recall from our study in the series called The Story, we talked a lot about King Solomon. He was actually the second king after King David. The kingdom got divided because of his willingness to follow foreign idols. In the process, he did actually build a beautiful temple there where he also helped get it furnished and helped put all the policies and procedures in place to make sure there was a very efficient and effective worship center. In this particular context that we are going to be looking at, we really don’t know exactly the situation. As I have said before, some suspect he is writing the book of Ecclesiastes as an elderly man and maybe reflecting back on his life. Possibly, then, he would have gone up to the temple and just sat on the steps and began to examine and watch the people that would come and go through the temple during the various festivals that took place there. I suspect that, similar to anybody else observing people coming out of church, he might have been a little bit discouraged because he probably sees people who just came to the temple for tradition or because they were feeling pressured to go into the temple by maybe a spouse. Or maybe they were feeling a sense of guilt. Maybe they knew when they did a sacrifice there was often meat leftover that they would be able to partake in. But probably this gave a very negative taste in Solomon’s mouth. It is under that backdrop that we look at the scripture today, which is Ecclesiastes 5:1-7. As I said before, I would like to have somebody stand up and read from the NIV and read through Ecclesiastes 5:1-7. (Scripture read here.)

The context is we have Solomon who built the temple, and he is probably observing the temple, and he is looking at the various people coming through it and realizing that maybe some of the people aren’t taking worship as seriously as he would like. We see in this passage that he begins to give a series of instructions, kind of commands, they call them imperatives technically, to the readers. We don’t know who those readers are exactly, but he seems to give out a series of commands on how they should act within the temple environment. Starting with verse 1 where he writes “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.” A couple things to know here. When he says guard your steps it just means be aware of what is going on here. When he uses the words house of God, he is referring to the temple. Oftentimes, the temple would be referred to as the house of God because back in the Old Testament days they did believe that the spirit of God lived within the dwelling of the temple. Today, we know that God doesn’t reside in any particular building or denomination. Really, he is part of every body of believers. He is part of the body of Christ collectively. That is where Christ dwells. In either case, whether it is back at the temple or today, we should have an awareness that we are entering into the very presence of God when we enter into the church or, in their case, when they entered into the temple.