Enjoying Life Through Pleasing God
Ecclesiastes 2:17–26
So I hated life because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and is striving after wind. I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toil and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.
So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toil beneath the sun, for all his days are full of sorrow and his work is a vexation. Even in the night, his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.
There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God. For apart from him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment. For to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and striving after wind.
The Overall Theme of Ecclesiastes
The conclusion from last week comes into full force here: God has granted a better life for those who are pleasing to him than the vanity ultimately of a sinner's life.
One of the overall themes of Ecclesiastes is to create an utter sense of hopelessness with everything in life. It is intended to give you that sense of hopelessness with everything that you experience. Once it causes that sense of hopelessness, it gives one of the greatest pictures of hope in enduring and experiencing life with God.
It is a comparative issue: how do I live my life and avoid vain things? The only way to experience life outside of the vanity that Ecclesiastes talks about is to experience life with a relationship with God.
Vanity simply means pointless, worthless. There is no value to it. There is no reason to do it. The author of Ecclesiastes keeps talking about it as chasing after wind. If you were to think about yourself as running after the wind and trying to catch it, you see what vanity is. It is completely pointless and it is impossible to actually catch the wind. You will never achieve catching the wind.
Whatever it is that you would do—the sports that you would go into, the work that you would go into—no matter what, anything in life is like chasing after wind if you are living life without a relationship with God. It creates a sense of hopelessness in a life that is without God in order to give you one of the greatest senses of hope with a life that is with God.
There is so much negativity going on outside of a relationship with God. And yet there are such wonderful things to be experienced inside a relationship with God. Everything apart from God and all things that are distracting from God are vain. It has no significance, it has no meaning, and it has no purpose unless a person experiences life in relationship to God, in worship to God, in devotion to God, and in service to God.
Ecclesiastes tells us our entire purpose in life. It tells us why we are even alive, why we were created, why we were saved. It is not so that we can have no joy or find no enjoyment, but that we would find no enjoyment outside of our relationship with God.
Ecclesiastes gives us this picture of all this lack of joy, lack of happiness, lack of excitement. And yet it is one of the biggest books in the Bible to teach us about how enjoyable life actually is if a person lives life in relationship with God.
Christianity is about your enjoyment, your good pleasure, even your happiness. It is simply to teach you that you should find your happiness in who God is, in what God does, and in your relationship with Him.
The Fall and the Pursuit of Joy Apart from God
Part of the issue of the original fall when Adam and Eve sinned was not because God had created no enjoyment. God didn't just create this wonderful plush garden with all of these amazing trees, all of this wonderful fruit and then tell Adam and Eve no joy, no fun, no happiness. He told them there is one tree that you should not find food from or enjoyment from.
It even literally says in the text that there are all these other trees that are delights to the eye, that they are good for food, that they are enjoyable. They are not just there to feed Adam and Eve; they are there to please Adam and Eve. God had created a paradise for his people to enjoy, and part of their sin was to try to find enjoyment in something other than God—in fact, in something that God told them not to do.
When Eve looked at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Satan was doing the best that he could to deceive her, but what became most effective in Satan's temptation to Eve was when Eve found the tree delightful. It was desirable to make one wise, and that plunged the human race into sin, ruin, and misery.
So many people turn to other things to try to find a way to deal with what Ecclesiastes is talking about: toil, sadness, hardship. Our author even says he hated his life and he hated all of the work that he was doing. He had all of these really bad experiences with things, so much so that he even says he gave his heart to despair.
This is the life of every single person outside of a relationship with God. This is why people turn to things like psychology, entertainment, and all sorts of different things to try to deal with the vanity of life. People find significance in things that are not significant in order to deal with the difficulties of life.
God Is for Our Joy—in Him
The most fascinating thing about our passage of Scripture is recognizing that God is not against his people enjoying joy. He is against his people finding joy in things apart from and outside of him.
There becomes a way where we can begin to enjoy even material things if we recognize that every good thing that we have—whether it's a television set, the health that we all currently are experiencing, all of the good things that we do currently have—are from God. In that way, we are led into worshiping the gift giver. The problem comes when we're more excited about the gift than the gift giver.
God is definitely for our enjoyment. He is definitely about us enjoying things, but he wants us to find our enjoyment in him.
The way in which we find enjoyment is going to be radically different than how we're probably experiencing enjoyment. Typically, the understanding of enjoyment or things that we find enjoyable is very much concerned about ourselves: "I find this to be enjoyable." But the greatest area of Christian enjoyment actually comes from somebody else being pleased—and that somebody else is God.
Christian enjoyment of life has to take place through God being enjoyed and being pleased with us. To enjoy life, we must be pleasing to God. Enjoying life only happens through pleasing God—learning to enjoy life through God's pleasure.
1. The Probability of Depression
One of the magnificent things about the book of Ecclesiastes is how it paints such a bleak picture of life without God. As Charles Spurgeon said, a diamond shines its brightest when it's pitted against a black surface.
The author of Ecclesiastes, whom we believe is Solomon, introduces himself in chapter 1 that way. King Solomon, who wrote the wisdom literature, tells us about how we can enjoy life in the world. His life without God provides a black surface to the diamond of Jesus Christ, to the diamond of God himself.
He pictures life as a very bleak and miserable experience without God. Much of Ecclesiastes is his testimony of sinful living, unbelieving living, and how miserable it is. He uses words like he hates his life, hates his toil, his work.
One of the reasons he hates his work is because he could be as wise as possible. We understand him to be one of the wisest individuals of all time. He amassed all this wisdom and says, what good is that? What good does it do to be exceptionally knowledgeable and wise? You die just like a fool dies.
Why would it matter if I gained all kinds of wisdom, especially because my life is as nothing before the Lord? My life is a breath. I exhale and it's gone. There's no remembrance of me, no remembrance of the things that I do.
That's complicated by the fact that people can work so hard and yet those who did absolutely nothing can enjoy the fruits of their labor. Solomon says this is a great evil. All the toil that I have, all the wisdom that I amassed, everything that I worked hard for, somebody else could get. What if that person is a fool? I could be this wise man building this wise legacy and yet a fool could take it over.
Imagine you are an amazing cook. You grill up the best steaks ever, bake the best goods ever. You put all this hard work, money, time into it, and you don't get to eat a single one of them. Then somebody who did absolutely nothing comes in and ruins your legacy. You might start an amazing business, but then you die, somebody else takes it over and runs it into the ground. It might even be with a church where pastors fought tenaciously to establish it with godly biblical truth, but then a group comes in that doesn't care about that truth and the church goes off the rails.
Someone can ruin all of the work and effort that we put into something. Ecclesiastes teaches us that the things that we do in life, if they're not focused upon our relationship with God, are likely to decrease the quality of the way that you experience life.
We're not focused on the way that we live life because outside of a relationship with God, everything we talked about is a reality—and a recipe for sadness and misery because all of it is pointless. When you're living in that kind of pointless life outside of a relationship with God, there is a very significant chance that you could end up hating your life.
The church is not a building; it's the people. We are the church. We don't stop being the church when we're not in the building. The church goes everywhere we go.
If you're the cook, you're a blood-bought by Jesus's blood cook. You're a sanctified, saved cook. What you do and the work that you accomplish should be a means for more significant opportunities.
Imagine if you cook a knockout steak and somebody says, "Man, this is fantastic. Tell me more about yourself," and you say, "I'm a Christian, and part of what I'm doing is to be excellent in what I do for the glory of God and to give him credit for everything."
Some of you might be involved in sports. Who cares if it's not unto God's glory? If I'm not attributing God with the credit for creating me, for gifting me with my abilities, for enabling me the opportunity to be saved and to go through life as a Christian, then it's pointless.
The only reason why there's soccer or volleyball is because God said, "That's okay." He gives permission to his creation to experience those things so that his people would give him the honor and glory. It's the church that is doing those activities, and it's only within that context that they have any significance, meaning, or value.
We can't push the church to the backseat of our lives while we go out and do all sorts of different things. We get caught in the cycle of American Christianity where youth group becomes glorified daycare.
People get more concerned about what college they're going to go into than what ministry they're going to go into. Everyone in this room is called to ministry. Ephesians 2 says he gave the apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists to equip the saints for the work of ministry.
If you claim sainthood—which you should, because a saint is someone bought by the blood of Christ, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit, who will be glorified—you are called to do ministry.
Ecclesiastes refers to the ecclesia, the Greek word for church. The ecclesiastes is a preacher in a congregation or simply a member of the ecclesia. Ecclesiastes is a handbook of church membership, teaching us that we should live as members of a church in every area of life.
Outside of living as a member of the church in every area of life, you will inevitably have an area of life that does not have any meaning. You are not a Christian only on certain days. Christian and church member are synonyms. You cannot have joy of the highest value if you are not living as a Christian in that area.
2. The Possibility of Joy
We pendulum swing in Christianity. At one point, we hear "if you just had enough faith, you would be happy, financially set, healthy." But that's not the Bible's teaching. Why was Jesus not rich? Why did he say foxes have holes but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head?
His son lived in poverty, and we are not greater than he is. When we swing away from those dangerous teachings, we might think no joy, all bad. But there is a possibility of joy.
The big issue with joy is that even when you're suffering and things are going bad, you can still have a sure and steady joy because your joy is not dependent upon your circumstances. Circumstances change. Your joy should be put into something more stable than your circumstances—God who saves us.
That's why one man built his house on the rock. There was stability even though waves and hurricanes came. That's the reality of Christian life: put your joy in God so that it cannot be robbed by circumstances.
When you recognize that you are the church, members of the church, you see the significance of what Solomon says: "There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat, drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God. For apart from him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment?"
Eating and drinking here is not living the high life. It's the two fundamental things of life to keep you alive: eating food and drinking water. Then finding enjoyment in your work—and the only way you find enjoyment in the middle of your work is because God is giving it to you.
It's a gift of God for a person to be able to eat, drink, and find enjoyment in toil. Even in the midst of sweating and laboring hard, it is possible to find enjoyment because God gives it.
Even the person who eats—everybody's eating—is purely from the hand of God. It's similar to Genesis when God breathed life into man. He kept breathing life to keep him alive. The very breath I draw, the very food I eat, is from the hand of God. Complete reliance upon God even to stay alive.
And that same God who gives you what you need to stay alive can give you enjoyment in the middle of toil.
John 15:10-11: If you keep my commandments you will abide in my love just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you and that your joy will be filled up completely.
We're talking about having Jesus's joy. Hebrews 12 says it was the joy set before him that he endured hostility from sinners. What got Jesus through his suffering? The joy of bringing glory and honor to his Father by accomplishing the gospel.
That joy—the joy that got Jesus through the cross—is available to you. Solomon says there's a chance you can have joy, by the hand of God. With New Testament revelation, we can have Christ's joy itself.
3. The Prescription for Joy
Here's total sadness where you hate your life, and here's Christ's joy where you enjoy God through your life. Your response should be: how do I get that joy?
Verse 26: For to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom, knowledge, and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and striving after wind.
That last phrase refers to the business of the sinner. They don't accumulate anything for themselves; even the good they produce is given to God's people. God has decreed that the sinner's activity goes to the believer. The activity of the unbeliever is vain, the activity of the believer isn't, and the believer receives the good of both.
In some ways, we benefit from unbelievers: secular institutions, restaurants, farmers working insanely hard. We reap the benefits. Many in government are unbelievers securing our religious freedom.
But ultimately, it's in the realm of salvation, like Romans 9:11-13:
Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God's purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." As it is written, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
The unbeliever ultimately serves the believer in salvation. As the unbeliever becomes a believer or stays an unbeliever, the believer is pleasing to God.
To enjoy life, not hate your life, not experience vanity, the believer's life needs to be pleasing to God. This is your prescription for enjoyment: by being pleasing to God, you have the ability to enjoy God specifically, but life in relationship with God.
How do I please God? Romans 8:8 says those who are in the flesh cannot please God. The mind set on the flesh is hostile to God.
First, being saved: believing in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus died on the cross to forgive you of your sins. Faith is realizing something that already happened in Jesus.
Imagine every crime you committed against the lawgiver, offending Almighty God. You're guilty, with no case. But you bring the evidence that God's law was satisfied, your penalty paid by his Son, who was obedient in life and death. You plead the blood of his Son. The anxiety is removed; you cling to Christ's work.
1 Corinthians 10: They were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased.
They did not believe, rebelled, grumbled. Imagine being brought out of slavery, seeing God's miracles, Pharaoh destroyed—and then wanting to go back to Egypt because you're hungry. They made a golden calf.
Do not be idolaters, do not be sexually immoral.
Colossians 1:9-11: That you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.
Learning more about God is pleasing to God, and doing more to serve God and his people is pleasing to him. God is fully pleased in Jesus, so model your life after him.
1 Thessalonians 4:1-5: Finally, brothers, we ask and urge you in the Lord Jesus that as you received from us how to walk and to please God, just as you are doing, that you do so more and more... For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality, that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God.
Your purity in relationships, avoiding sexual immorality, controlling your body—not letting passions take over—is an important way of pleasing God.
1 Timothy 2 talks about praying for everyone, and that's good and pleasing in the sight of God.
Hebrews 11:6: Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
With faith, it is possible to please God. If you seek him and believe he rewards you, you are pleasing to God.
Hebrews 13:16: Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
It is possible to experience enjoyment by devoting and committing your life to God being pleased with you. Your source of joy is achieved when you know that God is pleased with your life.
