Today we have before us Ecclesiastes 5:10-20. I must tell you, I struggled with this text. Along with the new hymnal, we made some updates to the lectionary, that is the three-year series of repeating text that are assigned to a given Sunday. This is the first time this section of scripture has been presented as an option to preach on. Now, of course I could have preached on this text as part of a sermon series, but this is the first time this text has been assigned as one of the readings for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost in year C.
I have never preached this text before and as I dug into the text, I found myself feeling like a young preacher again… and not in a good way. You see a young preacher is notorious for preaching a sermon that resembles a hunter firing bird shot into the sky. For those of you not familiar with bird shot, it is a shell full of 100 separate led pellets that are flung far and wide. When a young preacher looks at a text for the first time, he sees 100 different lessons that can be taught, and in his eagerness and excitement to share those lessons with his people he decides to fire every single one of them at his congregation in one sermon. That’s what I found myself wanting to do when I started digging into this section from Ecclesiastes. It didn’t help that all the Atlanta area pastors studied this section of scripture at our circuit meeting this last Monday. Each pastor was assigned one of the ten verses to translate and present to the group. By the time we were done I realized there were at least ten different lessons that could be taught from this text, and I found I had a strong desire to fire every one of them at you this morning.
But I forced myself to remember bird shot is effective at bringing down easy prey like a dove, but if you want to go after the big game (yes, I am referring to y’all as big game), you need something more powerful than bird shot. You need the focused firepower of a riffle. If you want to penetrate the hide that has been hardened by sin and get to the heart of person, you need to pick one lesson and only one lesson to fire at your people. That is what I am going to attempt to do this morning.
As I sorted through all the lessons this text has to offer, I eventually narrowed it down to two. The first and most obvious lesson that can be taught from this text would focus our attention on money. A sermon about money would easily fit with our Epistle lesson that tells us “the love of money is the root of kinds of evil”[1] and our Gospel lesson that tells us “you cannot serve both God and money”[2]. This section from Ecclesiastes has similar warnings about money, but what I was really excited to share with you was what Solomon wrote about enjoying your money. I was going to talk to you about billionaires in the bible like Job, Abraham, and Solomon and help you to see that money is not bad and having a lot of money does not make you a bad person, in fact God gives us money to bring us joy.
I was this close (a finger breadth) to preaching a sermon about a godly enjoyment of money, but, beneath that sermon, I realized there was a more foundational lesson cradled in the arms of this text. That lesson is indeed intertwined with a lesson about enjoying money, but before I can talk to you about the enjoyment of money, we should probably talk about where money comes from. Therefore, the sermon I have decided to preach today is about work, or what Solomon so cheerfully calls our “toilsome labor under the sun”.
But before we really dig into this text allow me to interrupt myself and remind all of us that the book of Ecclesiastes was written to and for believers. The author of Ecclesiastes is King Solomon. In this book Solomon invites his readers to contemplate the meaning of life, but the only ones who can truly contemplate life’s meaning are believers. The believer knows what they deserve because of their sin but they also know what they get because of their Savior. The believer knows, in Jesus their sins are forgiven, and their salvation is secured. Therefore, they are not trying to live a life that will earn God’s forgiveness or show Him that they deserve salvation. The believer knows God has already done everything that needs to be done; there is nothing that God requires of us, “it is…”, as saint Paul so beautifully reminds us, “…by grace we have been saved.”[3]
Since it is true that we are saved by grace and grace alone, what then is left for the believer to do? That is the question that Solomon addresses in the book of Ecclesiastes. And the recuring answer throughout the book of Ecclesiastes is to find satisfaction in your work. Solomon refers to this is once in chapter 2, twice in chapter 3, later in chapters 8 and 9, and here in chapter 5 verse 18 Solomon writes, “18 Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him—for this is his lot.”
Now, admittedly Solomon doesn’t make the meaning of life sound very enjoyable when he refers to our work as “toilsome labor under the sun”. But that is just a recognition of the affect sin has on work. There is an old wives’ tale that says, “if you do what you love than you will never work a day in your life.” But that’s just a bunch of Pollyanna[4] propaganda that falls apart as soon as you start working in s sinful world. The truth is work, even work that you love to do, can be, because of sin, toilsome. In the garden of Eden God told a freshly fallen Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.”[5] Any aversion we have to work, any frustration that comes from work, any negative connotation we associate with work is a result of sin.
Because of sin, like our own sin of laziness or the various ugly sins we deal with in other people, our work often feels like a painful toil. But don’t let that lead you to believe that work, in and of itself, is the curse. Solomon reminds us that work is our “lot”; it is what we were designed to do. Back in the garden of Eden, before Adam and Eve condemned creation to the curse of sin, we find a perfect man and a perfect woman, working; they were ruling over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every creature that moved on the ground. In Genesis 2:15 we read, “15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” When God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, He did so with the intention that man would work.
A man or woman who refuses to work refuses to do what God designed them to do. That is why all of scripture speaks so harshly against the sin of laziness calling such a person a sluggard saying they are doing what is disgraceful and threatening that those who will not work shall not eat. Thankfully, for those of us who have given in to the sin of laziness, we have a Savior who worked Himself literally to death on our behalf. Jesus did what He was designed to do so that we could be forgiven and the word sluggard would not be used to describe us.
In view of that forgiveness we want to do what we were designed to do and when we do what we were designed to do we are even able to find, what Solomon calls, “satisfaction” in that work. Again, this is why it is important for us to recognize the book of Ecclesiastes is written to and for believers. Only the believer who has been saved by grace; given the gifts of forgiveness and salvation can find true satisfaction in their work because only the believer wants to express their gratitude toward God by doing what He has designed them to do. And one of the beautiful things about work is God provides us with so many different things to do. You see godly work is not restricted to those who stand behind a pulpit. Anything that we do as believers is godly work. From the poets and the artists to the educators and administrators, from the public servants and corporate professionals to the stay-at-home moms and community volunteers, all the work that we as believers do is an expression of gratitude to our God of grace. When we look at our work as expressions of gratitude, suddenly even the most undesirable jobs, the most menial tasks, and the most degrading chores, fill us with satisfaction.
It is satisfying to know that when we do what we were designed to do we are expressing gratitude to our God of grace. But there is one more benefit that work provides. Solomon refers to that benefit when he writes about the things, we “eat and drink”. Not only is work something we were designed to do, not only does work provide us an opportunity to express gratitude to our God of grace, but, through our work, God provides us with… money. With that money we are able to buy things to eat and drink and the other necessities of life. With that money we are able to meet our social obligations like paying taxes and provide for the poor. With that money we are able to give offerings to the Lord so that the gospel may be preached here at Messiah and all over the world. With that money we are able to have fun as we go on exciting trips, drive nice cars, wear comfortable clothing, and live in secure homes. Through work God provides us all that we need for body and life and often He provides us with even more than we need.
When you recognize that work is one of the ways God blesses you as you live out our days under the sun you understand what I meant when I said this lesson was intertwined with another lesson and you are ready to hear about what Solomon writes about enjoying your money. Like a young preacher I am tempted to preach for another 15 minutes so that I can talk to you about what Solomon means when he writes in verse 19, “Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God.” I really want to talk to you about what Solomon says about enjoying your wealth and possessions, but that is a sermon for another time. I’ll tell you what, in three years, when Ecclesiastes 5:10-20 shows up in the lectionary again, I will preach that sermon.
But for today let’s focus our attention on what Solomon writes about work. Let’s thank God for our ability to do what we were designed to do when we work, let’s thank God for the opportunity to express gratitude to our God of grace in whatever work we do, and let’s thank God for all the necessities of life and abundant blessing God provides us through our work. Today, let’s thank God for the gift of work. Amen
[1] Timothy 6:10
[2] Luke 16:13
[3] Ephesians 2:8
[4] Pollyanna syndrome, the name being taken from a book of the same title, means “an excessively or blindly optimistic person.”
[5] Genesis 3:17