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.
We should have the attitude that Moses had when he encountered God in the burning bush way back in Exodus 3. How many of you know the story of Moses and the burning bush? About half. That means the other half don’t know it, so we are going to read through it. Exodus 3 and starting at verse 1. If somebody would read from Exodus 3:1-6. Imagine again that scene as Moses is hearing his voice come out of the bush. He doesn’t know what is going on there. He realizes as he gets closer that it is actually God speaking to him. God says take off your sandals Moses because you are walking on holy ground. Moses gets so panicky he covers his face. When we think about it, do we have that same sense of anticipation when we come in? Do we expect to meet God in this place? The song we sang earlier was about we come with anticipation and expectation that when we come through that door we are going to meet God. Really, do we do that? I would say I am guilty myself that we don’t. We come in in a hurry and hurry up and get our seat. Do you actually anticipate that when you have the body of Christ here individually and collectively that God himself is in this place? Think if we had that attitude how it might change our view of worship. It might even change our Sunday morning.
That is what Solomon is trying to get across. He says guard your steps when you go in there. Be aware that when you go into the temple, you are going into the very presence of God. Then he goes on to say how we can make sure we are guarding our steps. He says “Go near to listen rather than offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know they do wrong.” Again, the idea is they are in a temple situation where the animals, grains, and different oils were sacrificed. They come through and it was actually a place of dead silence from my understanding. A really silent, reverent type place. Then at times, they would have a rabbi, who was a teacher, a priest, who would open up a big scroll and read through the scroll and then interpret it for the people and give them a lesson and an application. Then there would be a time of prayer and possibly a time of song that was followed by a blessing or a benediction as the people left. Does that sound familiar? It sounds like our church today really. A lot of the modern-day churches are really modeled off of the Old Testament and the temple system there. Aside from the whole sacrifice of animals because we know that through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we don’t have to continue to offer animal sacrifices. The point is that the people should go to listen. And listen, as it is understood here, has the idea of understanding and application. To listen is not just to hear with your ears but to hear with your heart and then apply it.
This would be in contrast to what he would talk about as the sacrifice of fools. When we think of a fool, we think of somebody who may be lacking intelligence. In the Old Testament, the term fool is used a lot, but it is not really lacking mental intelligence. It is lacking spiritual intelligence. In other words, lacking the wisdom and knowledge that you should be worshiping the God almighty, the God that made you and that you should be obeying that God. That is what some believe he is talking about when he talks about a fool back then. A sacrifice of a fool, some suggest, is when people brought the sacrifices in there were people who tried to pull the wool over God’s eyes, so to speak. They would try to slip by some defective animal and still expect atonement for their sins because of it. While Solomon referred to this person as sacrifice of a fool, a guy named Malachi would actually refer to this person as a cheater. He said “Cursed is the cheat who has an acceptable male in his flock and vows to give it, but then sacrifices a blemished animal to the Lord.” Someone who has an acceptable animal but chooses to give something less to the Lord. We know that even today when we offer our sacrifices, which in many cases have to do with our time, talent, and treasures, we don’t always offer our best. We offer a diminished part of ourselves. Whether it is finances or talents or those types of things. What we are really offering, what he would suggest, is a sacrifice of a fool. In other words, the sacrifice is lacking any sense of substance or any sense of meaning. In these opening sections, he is reminding us that we have to be cautious when we step into the presence of God. We have to be aware that we are meeting God. We have to be aware that we should not be just offering empty sacrifices, but we should be offering the sacrifice of ourselves and really placing ourselves on the altar and be willing to listen and receive what God has given us and to put it into application. That is what he is talking about in the first verse.
Then he goes on to address what we would consider probably prayer. We don’t know for sure because he doesn’t mention prayer, but he writes “Do not be quick with our mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” This comes from the idea that, back in the day 3,000 years ago, there were a lot of pagan religions. A lot of the worship would be very similar to Christian worship or Jewish worship back then. They would have sacrifices and prayers. A lot of what would happen is the pagan people would do a lot of prayers and they felt that the more words they offered in their prayer time, the more likely the god or goddess is going to hear their prayers or their incantations or their magic spells or whatever. Solomon here is offering a corrective to that. He is offering a warning. He says let your words be few. Do not utter anything before God because “God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few.” What he is doing is saying there is a great distance between God and man. He is not really talking about a physical distance. He is talking about a spiritual distance where you have a holy God that is way up there and be aware of your own sinful nature. There is this separation there. Just as you wouldn’t walk into the throne room of a king and begin to spout off words without thinking, he is saying you wouldn’t do the same thing here. You would probably hold your tongue a little bit.
This is where I take a little bit of exception with Solomon because, as I have said before, Solomon didn’t live during the time of Christ, which means he didn’t live during the time of the crucifixion, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, so he had a more distant view of God. Kind of a hands-off type view of God. He is looking at it from an angle under the sun. Really, it is an angle that many of us or at least people out in the world tend to view. God is way out there and wants nothing to do with us. Solomon saw that there was kind of a wall or, specifically, a curtain between the people and between God. That curtain couldn’t be separated. Only certain people could go behind it and go into what was called the most holy of holies. But we know that when Christ came, specifically the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, when he offered that one-time sacrifice, they say at that moment the curtain became torn in two. I think it might be in Hebrews where it talks about through the blood of Christ, he became a new doorway or entryway into the throne room of God. In other words, he broke down that dividing wall between us and God and created this new wonderful, spiritual, intimate relationship that he would compare to a son and a father or a daughter and a father. In Galatians, Paul speaks of this when he writes “Because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts. The spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’” This is an amazing passage because it speaks about how we have the spirit of God amongst us to the point of even dwelling within us. That is the relationship that we have available to us. Such an intimate relationship that we can refer to God as father or as he says Abba, which some translate as daddy. That is a good translation because that is the intimacy that he is talking about here. That is the relationship that we have with the Father through the blood of Jesus Christ. We have a conversational, easygoing relationship with God. We can converse with God. There are people that are terrified to pray because they are not worried about what God would think about them. They are worried about what other people think. I am like that. I am sometimes thinking about what are the other people thinking about. Am I using the right words? Here it is basically saying it is just a conversation. A conversation you would have with your own father. I am having a bad day daddy. That type of thing. I cut myself. I am having this thing going on in my life or I have a friend who needs healing. It is just conversation with God. Having said that, we still have to guard our words a little bit because sometimes as humans, we tend to like to speak a lot, like I sometimes do when I am preaching or in a meeting. Maybe it is a nerve thing or a pride thing, but when they get in certain prayer circles, they feel they have to go on and on and on. At what time do you stop talking to God and begin talking to other people. There is an appropriate time for lengthy prayers. Don’t get me wrong. But I think some people begin to speak too long and they are looking for the right words to say and they are looking for quantity and quality. They think there is some sort of a magical formula to prayer that God will hear if they only use the right words or if they use enough words. What happens more often than not is that people get turned off. I would suspect that even God turns off because after a while, the person is not even thinking about their words. It becomes empty chatter. It becomes meaningless. What he is warning us here is be careful with your words. Make sure that you choose your words carefully. Jesus reminds us of this in Matthew when he says “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him.” Babbling is empty words. It is just talking and talking and talking and the words are empty. What is interesting here is that Jesus goes on and a few lines later this is where he gives the instruction on prayer and leads into what we call The Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father, who art in heaven…” Solomon uses the fact that God is in heaven and we are on earth to use few words. That is basically what Jesus is doing. Your Father is in heaven. You are on earth, but it is not this fearful separation. It is really because as your daddy, he already knows what you need before you ask him. That is the difference. That is why we don’t have to babble on and on because God knows what you need.
We have to be aware of our words, but we also have to be aware of words in the sense of vows. He says “When you make a vow to God, do not delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasures in fools; fulfill your vow. It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it. Do not let your mouth lead you into sin.” What he is suggesting is when you make a vow that you don’t keep, it is going to lead you into sin. A vow is a promise to God. God if you do this, then I will do this. It is based on an Old Testament passage in the book of Deuteronomy where the writer writes “If you make a vow to the Lord your God, do not be slow to pay it for the Lord your God will certainly demand it of you and you will be guilty of sin. But if you refrain from making a vow, you will not be guilty of sin.” Vows were very, very common in the temple system in the Old Testament. If you type in the word vow, you would find a lot of places in the Old Testament where they take vows. We have the situation with Hannah who was a barren woman who wanted to have a child. She made a vow to God if you give me this child, then I will commit this child to serve you. Sure enough, she had a baby, a little boy, and she submitted that child to God for service. But even in the New Testament we find people taking vows. The apostle Paul in Acts it says “Before he sailed, he had his hair cut off at Cenchreae because of a vow he had taken.” We don’t know what the vow was, but apparently he said if you do this, I am going to shave off my hair. He fulfilled that vow. The point being that vows were taken very seriously back in the Old Testament. People took them very seriously because they knew that they had to keep the vow. Sometimes with tragic results.
How many of you know the story of Jephthah? He was a judge who was fighting the enemies of Israel at that time, the Ammonites. This is what it says about him back in Judges 11. It says “And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: ‘If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.” Who came out the door? His daughter came out. It says “When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sounds of timbrels!” She was all excited he was coming home. “She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, ‘Oh, my daughter! You have made me miserable and wretched because I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break.’” It doesn’t tell a whole lot of what happened but she was offered up as a sacrifice. Again, a big warning about the vows we take. In modern day, I don’t think we take vows very seriously. We make loose promises and loose vows and if we break them, we break them because who really cares. I think we see that in all sorts of ways. Obviously marriage is something where we stand up here and take these beautiful vows and say these beautiful things to each other and forgetting that not only are we making a vow to the other person, but we are making a vow up to God. That is a very serious thing. In fact, I have changed how I perform weddings. There was a time when I felt I would do weddings for anybody whether they were a believer or not because I felt like if I had a nonbeliever in my office, I could minister to them and teach them about the proper view of marriage. But I finally realized that when they make the vows, they just want to borrow the church. They aren’t really making a vow to God or they don’t take it seriously. What I realized is it is making a mockery of the institution of marriage. I didn’t like that. Now I will marry somebody who says they are a Christian or at least one person is a Christian, but I try to avoid making people that aren’t Christians make a vow to a God they don’t believe in. It doesn’t make sense and makes a mockery of the whole institution of marriage. But we are very free, even Christians, about breaking those kind of vows.
Then there are vows that I think most Christians would take once and that is the vow of baptism. Baptism is a vow. You stand up here in the water and recite the words “I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and I accept him as my Lord and my Savior.” What you are saying is I am vowing to you to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. I am putting away my past. I am walking forward. I am not looking behind. I am going to follow you whatever. That is such a beautiful thing. But we get people who say it is getting too hard. I don’t like this Christian thing anymore. Within two or three weeks in some cases, they are back to their old ways. I haven’t totally stopped doing baptisms, but I tell people if you want to be baptized then first you have to ask yourself if you want to be a disciple. Baptism isn’t something you just do and then you are done and you have your ticket into heaven. Baptism is your ordination to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. It is the beginning of your ministry. If you want to be baptized, don’t do it just to get your ticket into heaven. Do it because you want to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Then you have something like membership. Membership is something we instituted around here because we believe when somebody places membership into a church, they are further committed. We would like to think that, but it is not always the case. People come forward and repeat their baptismal prayer and they come into membership and they say I am going to make a vow that I am going to commit my time, talent, and treasures to this body of believers and the body of believers says we are going to help you and we are going to commit our time, talent, and treasures to helping you become a disciple. Then somebody gets in a fight with somebody else and they are gone. They get mad at somebody. This is a family here. You don’t just leave your family over the first instance. That upsets me because when you are placing membership, we take it seriously. You are saying this is my family. All of you have interesting families, including mine. The first sign of Uncle Harry doing something weird or insulting Aunt Mary, everybody doesn’t split. A family stays together. Then there is the whole idea of ordination or institution of staff, ministers, elders, deacons, trustees. When you stand up here and you want to be an officer, take it seriously. You have given vows to God that you will be faithful to this church. No matter what happens, you are going to faithfully carry out your ministry of the church and not just simply split town because you don’t like something that is going on. It means you show up for meetings when somebody calls a meeting. It means you are there for people when the people are hurting. You are the co-shepherds. You are the under-shepherds of the church. If you don’t want to take that seriously, I would say don’t be an officer because what you are doing is breaking a vow and sinning before God. We take vows all the time. God if you heal me from this or if you get me out of the debt, I will serve you. What happens is you get out of debt or you get healed, and you forget that vow. We are all guilty of making empty promises. Those are what are called the sacrifices of fools.
In closing, he wraps this up with a nice summary statement. He says “Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore, stand in awe of God.” He ends this section the way he ends a lot of other sections. This whole idea of what I have just told you makes life meaningless and really empty. When I see that type of worship going on. When I see those broken vows. When I see that type of thing. When I see the empty prayers. It seems to make life meaningless in many ways. It contributes to that. The corrective for that is stand in awe of God. What does that fix? He is saying get back to your understanding of God. There is nobody in this room, including me, who has a complete understanding of God. There is always something to learn about God. As we learn about God, as we learn about his grace, as we learn about his goodness, as we learn about his character, as we learn about his love, as we learn about his power, we can’t help but stand in awe of God. When we learn to stand in awe of God, these other things don’t become an issue any more. We know if we are standing in awe of God and we get up Sunday morning and we are going to church, we aren’t going to church just to see other people or for tradition or whatever. We are going to church to meet God. To the point we should probably take our shoes off when we come into the church because we are standing on holy ground. We have to take that whole idea of walking into the presence of God seriously. As we learn what it means to stand in awe of God, we will begin to develop that habit. No matter what anybody else is doing around us, when we come to church, we know that we are coming in to stand with God. We are coming into the presence of God. We also know that when we stand firm, it also means when we come to church our minds won’t be wandering everywhere. We will actually say I think God is going to give us something. I anticipate something wonderful is going to come. I anticipate that something is going to be said through sermon, music, possibly even another believer that is going to impact my life in an amazing way. I come with anticipation. I come to listen. If I receive something and receive a rebuke, I don’t just put it aside. I think it seems like Chuck might have been talking to me today. I am going to think about that a little bit. I am actually going to try to apply it. I am going to really listen. I am going to understand and I am going to apply it. When we stand in awe of God, our prayers seem to take on more substance. When you are around people that really have a close encounter with God, when they pray, every word has substance to it. It is not just rambling on and on. People that have a great relationship with God don’t have to use a lot of words because the words they choose are few, but they are powerful. They have impact. As you stand in awe of God, as you begin to understand God, you begin to be a real prayer warrior. Someone who is not praying to impress those around you but just praying by what the spirit is leading them to pray because they have that relationship with Daddy. They have that relationship with their Father. Finally, it is the vow thing. We are all guilty of taking vows. Think of many places you have placed promises to other people. Start by fixing those vows. Start by making things right with people that you might have made a promise to and for some reason you decided that you are not going to carry out this promise. Really, you are not just making the promise to the other person. You have made that promise to God. God is going to hold you accountable, so when you don’t follow through with that vow, it is sin. I don’t make this stuff up. This is not my judgment. It is clear that when you make a vow as a Christian in the presence of God, and you don’t carry that vow, intentionally you sin. I know there are times we haven’t been able to do it and we seek repentance from God. There might not even be a way to make it up, but if we have made a vow that we know we can still do good on, I would suggest that you would do good on it. All this stuff that we went through, being in God’s presence, understanding the need to recognize whose presence you are in, thinking about the idea that when you come into this place you are anticipating so you are listening, you are coming with a sense of understanding or a desire to know, and actually apply it to your life. You are thinking about the idea that if you are going to pray, you are going to use your words selectively and you are going to pray in a manner that is not to impress anybody else but to just speak before God. And finally, that you hold true to your vows. Let us pray.
