Wired For Eternity Series

Wired for Eternity

Ecclesiastes 3:9-22

Rev. Brian Bill

August 10-11, 2024

During the Paris Olympics, the best athletes in the world have been competing against each other, including Rocky grad Courtney Lindsey, who ran anchor for the 4x100 men’s relay. One article referred to him as a “a quiet champion in everything he did and didn’t draw attention to himself at all.”

On the other hand, a few Olympic athletes appeared to be self-centered and proud as they strutted around the track wearing bling before their races started. Some of them were quoted as saying, “I’m the best…I’m doing this for me…it’s all about me getting a medal.”

I celebrated how some Christ-followers chose to leverage their platform for gospel purposes, like Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone who broke the world record and won gold in the 400m women’s hurdles on Thursday night. Rather than boasting about herself, she gave all the glory to God: “For a long time, my identity was in track and field. But I realized that first and foremost, I’m a child of God. It set me free to run the race God has set out for me to run…records come and go, the glory of God is eternal…I don’t deserve anything but by grace, through faith, Jesus has given me everything.” She is obviously living with eternity in mind.

The title of our message today is “Wired for Eternity.” Here’s our main idea: While we are mired to earth and tethered to time, we are also wired for eternity and will live eternally, in either Heaven or Hell.

How many of you have been reading through Ecclesiastes this summer? Anyone read it three times yet? I received a note from an Edgewood couple on Friday which made me chuckle.

We had finished reading through two readings of the book of Ecclesiastes and were moaning and groaning about having to do the 3rd reading thru (as you had instructed). When along comes in the mail the other day “Today in the Word” and the heading of “What are we here for?” This caught our eye and sounded familiar and lo and behold it’s a devotional on the Book of Ecclesiastes! Soooo…just to keep you in the loop we are now enjoying a daily dose of Ecclesiastes from this little book and doing our 3rd reading.

Please turn to Ecclesiastes 3. This chapter begins with the temporal and ends with a focus on the eternal. If last weekend helped us see there is a season for everything, today we’ll learn that there is a reason for everything.

Last week we made some observations and applications from the opening verses as we discovered this truth: Because God has a reason for each season in our life, we can trust His timing. We’ll circle back to the opening verses and pull in the rest of chapter three. I see six insights we must embrace.

1. Trust God’s timing (3:1-8). Solomon states his thesis in verse 1 and illustrates it in verses 2-8: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.” Using twenty-eight statements, of which fourteen are negative and fourteen are positive, Solomon describes both disquieting and delightful times.

Let’s walk through these contrasting pairs, noticing the key word is “time.” We’re called to receive rather than resist these rhythms of life so we can say with the psalmist in Psalm 31:15: “My times are in your hand.”

• A time to be born and a time to die (2a). God appoints both our first day and our last day on earth. Just as we accept birth as God’s gift to us, we must accept death as being under God’s control. Unless the rapture comes first, everyone must keep the two appointments of birth and death.

• A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted (2b). This is true in the plant world as well. God gives seasons to sow and seasons to reap. Proverbs 20:4 says, “The sluggard does not plow in the autumn; he will seek at harvest and have nothing.”

• A time to kill, and a time to heal (3a). The word for “kill” is not murder but is the word used for capital punishment (see Genesis 9:6). There’s a time to heal wounds by making things right through reconciliation.

• A time to break down, and time to build up (3b). There’s a season for destruction and a time for construction. After surveying the ruins of the walls, we hear Nehemiah rally his team with this charge in Nehemiah 2:17: “Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.”

• A time to weep, and a time to laugh (4a). In some sad situations, we should weep and in happy times we should laugh (Romans 12:15). I think of Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”