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.
His father had written many psalms, one of them is psalm 38, and in psalm 38 David, in characteristic fashion lays himself bare before God. You know prayers before God are not meant to be restrained, we are meant to come to God with nothing on us, naked if you like, nothing to conceal our hearts and our minds, God desires the truth in our innermost parts, and King David, Solomons dad shows us the way, and shows us that he too was affected by this same condition at times, in psalm 38 verse 17 he writes, I am on the verge of collaspse, I am in constant pain, and then he goes on and says, I confess my sins I am deeply sorry for what I have done. Remember a week or two ago we talked about how David had sinned by committing adultery and by committing murder.
This sin was a burden to him, it was causing him to despair so much he felt like dying. IN psalm 101 in one of his happier moments David writes, I will refuse to look at anything vile and vulgar, guys here this morning especially because we are such visual creatures, can we honestly say that of ourselves, and therefore do we feel burdened by our own inadequacies, by the things we do and continue to do wrong, do they burden you down, do they steal away your contentment?
But the truth is we do have everything we need right here and right now to be content.
Some of us here this morning have deep seated grief, deep seated resentment at God for taking something from us, some of us have bitterness towards God, bitterness towards someone else who has wronged us, and it steals our joy, it takes away our contentment.
I think the key to contentment is celebration, is thankfulness. Because if you base your contentment on what someone else is going to do, you will be miserable again and again and again. People, even good people who we love, people who do care about us, will at some point let us down, just as we will let them down. You know that there are people in your life that you have trusted, that have let you down. Even some people who thought they were acting in your best interest, have hurt you. If we base our hearts peace on what other people do, if we think if that person will just say sorry, or if that person will just do what I ask them to do, then I will be content, no you wont, you will want more. That is control, that is not love. You cannot base whether you are going to be content and peaceful on what someone else does, your contentment cannot in any way be governed by someone elses action, you alone are responsible for how someone makes you feel, whether you take on board their stuff or not.
If we base our contentment on our emotions, we will be miserable, contentment is underneath our emotions, it is deeper than our emotions. Sometimes we get a pay rise and we are happy, sometimes we lose our jobs and we are sad, contentment and peace have to run deeper than circumstances and how they circumstances and events make us feel.
We have a choose to be grateful Or bitter, thankful or complain.
How we will respond? How will we be content I think we have to make a choice, a hard choice, a choice of faith over despair, a choice of hope over hopelessness in fact a choice of being thankful over wanting more. Because we can never get enough to make us content.
Will I approach my life to celebrate what God has done, to say God can do this, or will I allow myself to wallow in despair. Celebration, thankfulness confronts my despair, works against it.
In fact it boils down to what we want to focus our minds upon. Just as David did not want to focus his mind on anything vulgar, I would say dwelling on the negative, dwelling on what you don’t have, dwelling on the pain all the time, well that is dwelling on the vulgar, instead of seeing what good you have.
How do we be thankful, well can I suggest a great place to start is to look outside of ourselves to others.
Going to church, is not more spiritual than you sitting down and listening to your friend share their pain. That right there as you bring Christ into the conversation is holy ground, and it can be for you a place of contentment as you look to someone elses pain.
As you pick up someone who has broken down and you give them a lift to BP, that there is a holy car. There is contentment to be found there.
In fact In Isaiah 61 we read this beautiful passage in Isaiah 61, 1The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me, because the LORD has appointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted and to announce that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed.[a] 2He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the LORD’s favor has come,[b] and with it, the day of God’s anger against their enemies. 3To all who mourn in Israel,[c] he will give beauty for ashes, joy instead of mourning, praise instead of despair. For the LORD has planted them like strong and graceful oaks for his own glory.
Jesus applies this passage to Himself, when He comes into our life he will give beauty and joy instead of mourning.
We live in a society that is one of mourning and despair. We all know the sequel is not going to be as good as the original, we all know the movie is not going to be as good as the book, we all know the bands second album is not going to be as good as their first, we all know things are going to get worse, not better, don’t we? Why do we hunger for nostalgia? Do you know what the surprise number one show is at the moment? It’s the show 20 to one, where on channel nine Budd Tingwell takes us on a stroll down memory lane,. Even the commercials were better a few years ago.
Our culture our society our souls are conditioned for fear and despair.
Yet we have everything we need for contentment right here right now.
This passage from Isaiah tells me that as believers we are the ones who are sent to bring joy and comfort, to bring peace to the broken-hearted, to release the captives, in fact we are to bring the message of Jesus to bind up the wounds and the scars and the pain of those who have lost hope.
You know a word that is not found in the Bible, realist. A realist says I am just being practical, this cannot happen, lets look at what has gone on before, take off 15% and that is probably what will happen. In fact I a realist is masking something. They have got something in them. A deep wound, a deep pain, and they need something to cover that up, they use the mask of a realist, and really what a realist is masking is hopelessness. They will not allow themselves to hope. Don’t allow yourself to become a realist. Because a realist says that God can not break forth into someone’s life. A realist says well look how things have been they are only going to get worse. As we journey through life together, as we walk along the path of life, we need to know that that path is not leading us to destruction and despair, it is leading us towards the light, towards hope, towards a better day for our homes and for our family. We are not of those who cower away and hide, we are of those who believe that the best is yet to come. What is more we are those who are to grab hold of those others whose life is characterised by hopelessness, who are maybe masking that and say to them, the road of faith and hope is a much brighter one.
If you have experienced pain and sorrow, then you can dare to hope again, if you have had someone taken from you, if you have seen someone suffering, if you yourself are suffering, do not allow that to dictate to you how you will live your life, instead hope again. Until you are dead, there is always another chance.
God has made us as a people to celebrate, to rejoice, to be still and know that He is God.
We believe that the world God created is good, and that every human being, everyone, has the image of God in them. And everyone can be redeemed, everyone can come under the hope and grace of God of God and be changed.
People come to celebrate with God in a hundred different ways, in a thousand different ways. Sometimes we jump up and down and sing, sometimes we find ourselves on top of a mountain, sometimes we find ourselves with a small group of people praying, sometimes we are sitting having a cup of coffee, reading the paper, listening to our kids play outside, and we are struck by how good it is to know God, and be known by Him. Its not a place, its not even a specific activity, it is knowing Gods presence is with you.
You see Solomon, back to Solomon, Solomon built all those things, he slept with all those women, he drunk all that wine, he worked on all those projects, and none of it brought solace to his aching soul.
It is only in the celebration of knowing God, experiencing God in our lives trusting in, hoping in a better day with God that we will find contentment, that we will find peace.
