We Have Everything We Need To Be Content

A message before November 20th

Hi everyone,

Just a quick reminder about next week, don’t miss next week, don’t not come to church next week, not for my benefit, but for your own benefit, and for the benefit of the ones who will be demonstrating their obedience to Jesus, come and pray, and support and be blessed.

“God there are so many things that would distract us, so many things we are thinking of, so please God, please speak to us this morning, help us to go deeper into our hearts this morning and go to those things we find hard to deal with, those things we find hard to confront, and help us to deal with some things about ourself, that You would like to deal with.

You have everything you need right now to be perfectly content, we have everything we need to be perfectly at peace, right now and right here, in this place.

Do you agree? I would say this morning that there are people in our church who you know who have terrible diseases, who have terribly sickness, and yet are perfectly at peace with their lives, maybe they could even say they are happy. There are people here this morning that have experienced great grief and pain in their lives, there are many here who live week by week off their pension, yet many of them would say they are content.

Lets have a look this morning at someone who had it all.

Lets go to the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 2. Turn with me please, the author is a great king, King Solomon, and he was King davids son. His father David was the warrior, and he had stretched out his hand, stretched out his army and defeated all his enemies and gained more land for the nation of Israel than they had ever had before, Solomon continued that, but without as much fighting, and now at this point in the nations history they had more of the territory God had promised them, than they had ever had then, and in fact have ever had in their nations history up till the present day. Solomon’s kingdom, his age was a prosperous one, there was no unemployment, everyone had their own vineyard and grew their own produce, if you were a tradesmen you had interesting projects to work on, if you were a mother you could afford to stay at home and raise your children, the people and the King especially were prosperous. Here the writer, the author, the philosopher, is going to talk about what he has learnt, chapter 2.4 4I also tried to find meaning by building huge homes for myself and by planting beautiful vineyards. 5I made gardens and parks, filling them with all kinds of fruit trees. 6I built reservoirs to collect the water to irrigate my many flourishing groves. 7I bought slaves, both men and women, and others were born into my household. I also owned great herds and flocks, more than any of the kings who lived in Jerusalem before me. 8I collected great sums of silver and gold, the treasure of many kings and provinces. I hired wonderful singers, both men and women, and had many beautiful concubines. I had everything a man could desire!

King Solomon had it all, money, projects, exciting work, song dance, beautiful woman to look at and posses, anything he looked at, he could have,

9So I became greater than any of the kings who ruled in Jerusalem before me. And with it all, I remained clear-eyed so that I could evaluate all these things. 10Anything I wanted, I took. I did not restrain myself from any joy. I even found great pleasure in hard work, an additional reward for all my labors. 11But as I looked at everything I had worked so hard to accomplish, it was all so meaningless. It was like chasing the wind. There was nothing really worthwhile anywhere.

We have in us this gnawing sense of despair, our age is characterised by a lack of peace, by a sense that we have no purpose.

Some of us have dealt with this by pushing, by working harder, by pushing the merry go round just that little but hard, so while its spinning on its zenith we think we can have that ahhh moment, that will mean we have rest. Some of us here this morning may know what that feels like to chase after something assuming that if we get it, we will be content, and then we get it, and we find we are not content, so we chase after the next thing, only to find that when we get that, we are still miserable.

Solomon also did not deny himself any pleasure, drink, women, music, parties. And he found that the more he gained and the more he had, the more he needed, he found that in fact it was all meaningless, and once he grabbed something to put in that hole, to fill up that was missing, as he placed it in there he found that in fact it had not filled the hole, it had actually made the desire larger, the desire for more grew, the more that he had. And Solomon found himself in despair.