WISE LIVING: WARNINGS OF THE HEART
Ecclesiastes 11:1-10
#wiseliving2022
READ ECCLESIASTES CHAPTER 11:1-10 [Person from the Congregation]
INTRODUCTION… ‘The Heart Ramon’ (retelling of Final Duel from ‘A Fist Full of Dollars’)
In the best western movie scene ever written and acted in the history of all movies, explosions go off in the distance in town and the eyes of every bad hombre on the street looks to the horizon. The big boss of the bad guys, Ramon, steps forward and peers into the smoke. The smoke blows through town and when it clears, the Man with No Name, the good guy, is standing there. He just stands there as a challenge. Each of the bad guys look at each other and they don’t know what to do.
Ramon gathers his rifle and his gang members and steps forward. The Man with No Name also steps forward. It is a classic wild west standoff in the middle of town. Townsfolk cower. Mothers and fathers hide their children.
“Heard you wanted to see me?” the good guy says.
“You are dead,” Ramon says. He shoots the good guy and he falls back to the ground. The bad guys chuckle until the hero rises from the dirt and is clearly not dead. Shock. Awe. A little bit of worry.
“What’s wrong Ramon,” the hero taunts, “Are you losing your touch?”
Another shot. The hero falters, but he does not go down.
“You afraid Ramon?” the hero questions. Then he instructs, “To shoot to kill you better hit the heart. Those are your own words, Ramon.” This was what Ramon thought he had already done twice. Two more rapid shots and the Man with No Name is again on the ground. He gets up. There is doubt on every face.
“The heart Ramon, don’t forget the heart,” the hero taunts again moving closer to the desperados.
Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.
The hero rises. And then it happens. Ramon fears.
The Man with No Name steps forward and lifts his cloth poncho to reveal a metal plate slung over his neck and covering his chest. The large metal plate slides to the ground. Every shot Ramon made had hit home right to the heart. There is much tension.
The desperados draw on the hero and he not only takes out all of the bad guys, but shoots the rifle right out of the hand of Ramon, the chief bad guy. I don’t need to tell you the end of the story, the good guy wins the day.
We are in Ecclesiastes 11 today and King Solomon says to us the very same thing the Man with No Name says to Ramon… “The heart, don’t forget the heart.” Solomon mentions the word ‘heart’ 34x in Ecclesiastes so he talks about the heart a lot and the condition of our heart is always in view. I would say that much of the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon, the Teacher King, has a whole lot of rottenness in his heart he is dealing with. Ecclesiastes is one long attitude problem after another where his heart is jaded, cynical, sad, angry, clueless, lost, and wants desperately to find a wise way of living. He rightly sees that life is difficult and unfair and many times he’s not sure how to deal with it all.
For King Solomon, the heart is an unhappy place whether his heart is seeking after wisdom or he is throwing himself into foolish things. In 1:13 he says…
READ ECCLESIASTES 1:13 (ESV)
And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.
And then in 2:1 he says in contrast…
READ ECCLESIASTES 2:1 (ESV)
I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity.
His heart is so lost that in wise things and in foolishly pleasurable things he finds no meaning. We talked a few weeks ago about how Solomon is also often shaken to his core about death. He sees wise people die and he sees foolish people die. It all seems pointless. His heart is filled with sadness. In 2:15, he says…
READ ECCLESIASTES 2:15 (ESV)
Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity.
He also knows that it is in the heart where bad things lie. He specifically in chapter 7 identifies that anger is a problem in the human heart as well as cursing others which to me sounds a lot like anger in action…
READ ECCLESIASTES 7:9 (ESV)
Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the heart of fools.
READ ECCLESIASTES 7:22 (ESV)
Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.
SUPREME WARNING OF THE HEART
Like I said, the human heart is in full view in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the human heart takes a final bow at the end of chapter 11. The thing is, Solomon is not wrong to focus on the human heart. Our hearts are an important part of our identity and how we view the world.
When we talk about ‘the heart’ we mean…
… most of all the seat of all our emotions both good and bad
… the part of us that connects our emotions with wisdom and decision making
… a symbol for love and lust and kindness and compassion
… a memory of our relationships
… a place where much of our identity resides and how we feel about ourselves
Ecclesiastes 11:9-10 lays out for us a supreme warning of the heart.
RE-READ ECCLESIASTES 11:9-10 (ESV)
9 Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment. 10 Remove vexation from your heart, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.
I want to read this passage from the Message Version as well:
READ ECCLESIASTES 11:9-10 (MSG)
You who are young, make the most of your youth. Relish your youthful vigor. Follow the impulses of your heart. If something looks good to you, pursue it. But know also that not just anything goes; You have to answer to God for every last bit of it. 10 Live footloose and fancy-free— You won’t be young forever. Youth lasts about as long as smoke.
I want to read this passage from the King James Version as well:
READ ECCLESIASTES 11:9-10 (KJV)
Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. 10 Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.
What does he say? No matter how many times I read this passage and no matter what Bible translation I choose to read from, the message and meaning is exactly the same. In these verses are a supreme warning to our heart!
HEART EXAMPLES
I do not know how to talk about these verses without giving concrete examples so I am going to do that. What do these verses mean? Are you ready?
Yes, you can give into youthful passions and hormones and sexual desires. Yes, you can have sex with whoever you want whenever you want and you can live together before you are married and… yes… you can make physical pleasure a priority, but on the other side of that is the judgment of God on sin and suitcases full of emotional baggage. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying! God’s boundaries about sex, for any person of any age by the way, are not to remove anything from our lives other than hurtful emotional ties and physical baggage that wrecks our soul.
Yes, you can give into whatever your eyes want to watch. Yes, you can watch pornography and hide it and think that it is no big deal, but every single time you watch you heap twisted sin into your life and your marriage or even your future marriage, your view of beauty, your view of sex, and your view of yourself. It all gets twisted by Satan. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying! When a heart is filled with lust, Satan uses that to draw us away from God because of our thoughts, feelings, and actions which lead us right to judgement.
Yes, you can believe you are gay. Yes, you can absolutely give yourself over to same-sex attraction and say to yourself that you are just following what your heart is telling you to do. The heart wants what the heart wants. It is what it is. Yes, you can, but any homosexual relationship in no way can produce life and such a relationship is not blessed by God. Yes… you can make your sexual identity the defining characteristic of your heart, but on the other side of that is the judgment of God on our sin and complete brokenness. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying!
Yes, you can get divorced. You believe that love is a feeling and when that feeling is gone you feel like the other person just isn’t worth it. You decide that you don’t love your spouse anymore and that divorce is the only option. The reason for marriage is love and sex and companionship and so many other feelings, but when the feelings of love go away we decide that getting out of the marriage is best. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying! Following the whims of our heart leads us to give up on a marriage relationship and cause pain for kids, pain for grandchildren, brokenness in promises, and more than anything we break a covenant we made with God. Judgement is on the other side of the sin of divorce.
Yes, you can smoke or vape or drink alcohol or snort or sniff or shoot up drugs for the purpose of hiding emotional pain or physical pain. Yes, you can drink beer to relieve stress. Yes, you can get addicted to prescription drugs because you are tired of pain. Yes, you can, but being mastered by such things is a sin and an absolute lack of self-control and damages you and the people around you. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying! Letting our heart dictate what it needs often leads us to sin and more sin and then another sin and pretty soon we are foolish in our actions and natural consequences are more than we can bear.
Yes, you can decide to not forgive and hold a grudge and give into the emotions of hate and un-forgiveness. Let me let you in on a little secret… people suck. Yes, you can hold onto hurt in your heart and decide to completely cut people off from your life if they hurt you. Yes, you can remove emotional pain in that way and on the outside that seems like self-care and we are being emotionally healthy. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying! You can do that, but giving into our heart’s desire to not forgive only hurts us in the end and it also, based on other Scripture, removes God’s willingness to forgive us. Heart health and emotional health comes not from removing those that hurt us and thereby exacting our revenge, but rather forgiveness and mercy and pity.
Yes, you can decide to only do what makes you happy in life. There are some relationships or situations or events or experiences that are guaranteed not to make us happy and bring us anxiety. Yes, you can actively avoid those things in an effort to pursue peace and happiness and tranquility and remove all anxiety from your life. Yes, you can, but only pursuing what makes you happy you will miss worthy difficult things God has for you. Yes, that is what Solomon is saying! Life is not always an easy happy path and sticking to only the easy happy path will at times lead us outside of the will of God and land us square into God’s judgement.
None of these things are easy because they all are rooted in our hearts.
Yes, all of these things are what Solomon is saying!
In Solomon’s jaded sinful attitudes in the Book of Ecclesiastes about life and death and money and pleasure and sadness and purpose and work, he realizes that our heart is not on our side. It is never on our side. The default of our heart is to be on sin’s side. Your heart does not have your best life in mind. Please understand that our hearts are colored by the sinful nature and so if we allow our hearts top priority in decision making, relationships, or our identity… we end up nowhere but away from God and subject to His judgment.
Your heart is not your friend.
Your heart is not to be trusted when making decisions.
Your heart lies to you about relationships.
Your heart warps your identity in Christ.
Your heart helps you to sin.
Your heart pushes you to seek out only happiness.
ILLUSTRATION… ‘You are Breaking My Heart’ (retelling of scene from Revenge of the Sith)
In a very moving scene near the closing of Revenge of the Sith (Star Wars), we see Princess Amidala and Jedi Anakin Skywalker, two main characters, having a tear-filled and moving argument. The scene is a landing pad with a space ship. Fire and smoke fills the air. There is a lot of anger and sadness in the air as well.
Anakin looks at the pregnant love of his life with angry eyes and hate and says, “The Jedi turned against me. Don’t you turn against me.”
The young lady is crushed. Her eyes fill with tears. She shakes her head not understanding anything about the man standing in front of her. She does not recognize her husband.
“I don’t know you anymore,” she says with tears. With even more pain she says, “Anakin, you are breaking my heart. You are going down a path I cannot follow.”
Referencing their mutual mentor, he asks her, “Because of Obi-wan?”
She responds immediately: “Because of what you’ve done. What you plan to do. Stop now. Stop. Come back.” She is begging him to step away from the anger and hatred that has filled his heart. She wants him to return to the way he was and to goodness. He seems unwilling to do so.
Anakin looks behind her into the space ship where he sees his mentor, Obi-wan, waiting in the distance to see how this conversation goes. He is not pleased to see him. Anger wells in the young man.
The young lady cries out in desperation: “I love you.”
The young man yells back in anger which has now fully consumed his heart: “Liar. You are with him. You brought him here to kill me.”
Princess Amidala is in shock. She backs away in fear. Anakin Skywalker uses the force to choke the love of his life and she is in visible pain. The mentor from the ship sees that things have not gone well, comes forward, and he shouts, “Let her go, Anakin!”
The end result of this argument is an epic lightsaber battle of good versus evil as the teacher and former student face off. The immediate end result of the battle is Anakin Skywalker is severely and life-changingly wounded. The final result of the choice of Anakin Skywalker to give into his heart is that he becomes Darth Vader.
I know that it is fiction, but the path of Anakin Skywalker to become Darth Vader is indeed one of the heart. His heart wants certain things that are out of bounds. His heart is consumed with guilt and anger and fear. His heart wants what it wants and eventually, he destroys himself because of the desires of his heart.
TRANSITION
King Solomon in Ecclesiastes is not the only one warning us that our heart is not our friend and will lead us down a path that someone might say to us: ‘You are going down a path I cannot follow.’
FURTHER WARNINGS OF THE HEART
I want to briefly cover three other passages from the Bible to show you that King Solomon is not off his rocker in Ecclesiastes 11 and that the message of Scripture is united in communicating Truth. The united message of Scripture is that our hearts should not be trusted and we need to seek God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to redeem our mind our actions and even our heart.
First, we have the Prophet Jeremiah who shares with us that we should not trust our heart because it is deceitful.
READ Jeremiah 17:9-10 (ESV)
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
Notice that not only does Jeremiah tell us that our hearts deceive us, but also he doubles-down that it is desperately sick. Then he triples-down, if that is even a thing, and says that we cannot understand our own heart. God says in verse 10 that He tests the heart and judges what He finds there. Same message as Ecclesiastes 11. To say to someone to ‘follow your heart,’ is literally the worst advice you can ever give because you are telling them to follow a source that by default is deceitful and sick.
Second, we have the Prophet Ezekiel who more than once in his book uses the same metaphor talking about the heart. You see our heart can become hard and calloused and refuse to listen to God. Our heart can become weighed down by sin and become hard.
READ Ezekiel 36:26 (ESV)
“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
We need God and His Spirit to change our heart from a hard heart to one that accepts Him and will listen. It is not an automatic thing to accept the Word of the Lord into our heart. It is a decision and it is a changing of our heart. If our heart was fine and dandy just the way it is, God would not need to change it out.
Third, let’s listen to Jesus. Jesus Christ lets us know where all the bad stuff in our life comes from. Jesus teaches us that our sinful actions begin in our heart.
READ Matthew 15:18-20 (ESV)
“But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”
We are unclean and sinful people because of our heart. It is our heart that is the problem. Jesus says so. If you want to murder someone, it started in your heart. If you are having an affair, your heart is off. If you are dealing with sexual immorality, your heart is the problem. It is the same with theft and lying. Our heart defiles us.
TRANSITION
So what do we do about our heart?
ECCLESIASTES 12:13
The answer in Ecclesiastes to any question we have leads us to 12:13. Yes, here we are again. Every single chapter in Ecclesiastes leads us to the end where Solomon concludes with correct godly wisdom for the issue at hand. Our issue today is our heart.
READ Ecclesiastes 12:13 (ESV)
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.
You see life is absolutely meaningless, pointless, futility, fleeting, a brief breath and a quick vapor and absolutely completely unjust and terrible unless you and I have a God-given perspective about life. Our hearts will lead us into foolishness and away from God unless we give our heart over regularly to God. The meaning and identity that God gives us in our relationship with Him washes over our heart and chips away at the hardness and reconditions our heart towards God away from sin.
The end of the matter for the wisest person who ever lived was that the whole duty of a human being is to live in a proper right relationship with God which is the wisest relationship we can have. He will change our heart. He will allow us to navigate life properly even though our heart is deceitful.
It is the right relationship with God that brings meaning when our heart is lost.
It is in following the commands of God that our heart finds real purpose.
It is when we seek after God and His Kingdom that God gives us a healthy heart.
CONCLUSION… last.fm/music/Eddie+Espinosa/+wiki
As we close this morning, I would like to remind you of the words of a worship song written by Eddie Espinosa in 1995. He said about this song: [It is] a heart cry song that came to me after a time of being in the presence of God during a private time of worship. The experience that I had was very similar to that of Isaiah, chapter 6. During my time of being in God’s presence, sin and attitudes of the heart were suddenly glaring me in the face. I realized that in order for me to walk uprightly before the Lord, I needed a heart transplant. I desperately needed for God to change my heart in order to love the things that He loves and to hate the things that He hates. I also was aware that only He could change my heart. I began to sing without paying attention to the melody, it just flowed from the depths of my being.
Verse 1: Change my heart, O God,
Make it ever true; Change my heart, O God,
May I be like you.
Chorus: You are the Potter, I am the clay;
Mold me and make me, This is what I pray.
PRAYER
INVITATION
I invite you today to come forward and pray here at the front if there is a heart adjustment that you know you need to make. Nobody is going to judge you. You come and pray and ask God to change your heart.
I invite you today that if you have never accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior and He has never, as Ezekiel 36:26 says, “remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh,” I invite you to make that decision today. God can change your heart through His Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
