Well, what's going on? Hope Community Church. How we doing today? Alright,
well y'all are excited. I'm excited.
I am so looking forward to spending this time with you. Uh,
this has been a phenomenal series that we've been in for the past few weeks,
and I'm excited to close things out today.
And I wanna start service off with just this thing that I grew up saying when I
came to church. And maybe you've heard it before.
If you've been around church in any amount of time,
or maybe if you haven't been around church,
this will be the first time you hear it. But it's really good, I promise you.
Uh, I would walk into church and almost as soon as I got into the door,
no matter who was holding the microphone would say these words,
God is good all the time. All the time, all the time, right? And all the time
it was a thing. And they would say it all the time. .
I mean, I heard it so much when I was growing up,
and I would jump into it and I would share in it.
And I loved the sound of it, the rhythm of it. But here's the problem with it.
I wasn't a hundred percent sure it was true. You know, um,
my life was a struggle at times.
And so I wasn't a hundred percent sure that his goodness extended to me.
And the bigger issue was that the truth is, is that at that time in my life,
I had never opened the Bible. I had never really read it for myself.
I had never applied it's truth to my life.
I didn't have a clear picture of who Jesus was. And so for me,
I wasn't a hundred percent sure that he actually was good.
You see everything I knew about God that came from my picture,
that I received mostly from other people. And yeah,
I grew up in the local church and things were great,
and I loved going to service. But for myself,
I wasn't really sure that I knew that God was good.
You see, I grew up in a place where God was present.
I knew he was around our family,
and I knew he was somebody who I needed to know,
but I didn't know that he was actually something that was good for me.
And I think if we're honest, many of us struggle with this same reality.
And so because we have a lack of understanding when it comes to whether God is
good or not, we pour ourselves into a lot of other things.
You see, for me, those other things consisted of all kinds of stuff. Uh,
it was things like sports.
And so I tried to be the best athlete that I could possibly be. Uh,
it was accomplishments.
And so I tried to accomplish as much as I possibly could.
And then later in life, I joined the military.
And so I wanted to be the best marine that I could possibly be.
And so I did everything to pour myself into something with the hopes of finding
fulfillment in those things. And the problem is,
is that they never came. Fulfillment never came.
Those are really good things to pursue, but they weren't God things.
And you know what I think our challenge is,
is that I think sometimes we try to make good things into God. Things.
I think we make things that God created to, for us to enjoy and experience.
And those are good things for us.
But we try to turn those into little gods and we start pursuing those things
instead of pursuing the God who created them. You know? Um,
I am a dad of adults now, but when my kids were little, um, as a father,
I wanted them to enjoy their time.
And so I coined something called the 99 cent party. And dads, you can take this.
This is free for you, okay? You go buy a pack of bubbles, right? And,
and quickly, if you put 'em out in front of your children,
they will become the 99 cent party. You could just lay 'em out,
let 'em play with the bubbles,
and you watch as your kids just chase bubble after bubble after bubble.
And they try to break 'em and they try to grab 'em. By the way,
those ain't my kids. I'm just gonna say that right in front, .
But they try to pursue 'em.
And it seems like almost as soon as they try to get one in their hands,
it just burst. And and you would think that that would discourage 'em. But man,
if you've ever been around kids, like they don't get discouraged at all.
They just keep running and chasing bubbles,
and they try to burst another one and, and another one, and, and,
and another one. And, and soon enough they get tired. But man,
it's interesting to watch.
And I think that this is what we do.
I think this is a picture of how many of us pursue our lives.
We chase thing after thing after thing,
and we try to control life.
But just as soon as we almost have our hands around it,
life changes on a dime and the bubble burst and
we're left there with that same empty feeling. You see,
I think the big lie that many of us have been told is that a person can
find contentment or happiness apart from God.
And so we begin to pursue all these other things hoping that they'll bring us
fulfillment, that they'll bring us happiness, that they'll bring us joy.
And at the end of it,
we often find that they just leave us even more empty than when we started.
So today my goal is through the word of God to
show you that God is indeed good. And because he is good,
we don't have to chase anything but him. You see,
there's a book in the Bible known as Ecclesiastes. And if you have your Bible,
I would love it if you go ahead and turn over to that book because it shares the
story of a man, uh, who really feels this out,
who really learns this oftentimes even the hard way.
You see the book lays out an example of an approach that many of us take.
And this guy who's in this book, uh, is probably King Solomon,
most believe he's King Solomon, but he may be another king in the line of David.
But he has done everything.
He's experienced everything and he's come to the end of his life.
This man has lived and he has learned,
and he shares what he's learned with us about pursuing things that are not God
as though they are.
And so today we're gonna look at some snapshots in the book of Ecclesiastes.
And I love the way the book is actually laid out because it's laid out from, uh,
the view of a person who is called Koheleth in the book. Now,
Koheleth is known as the teacher. That's what the word actually means.
It means the teacher. And so the teacher is at the end of his life,
and honestly, he's found out that this is a really difficult thing.
And so he's a little bit disgruntled in his tone.
And so when you get to the book right from the very beginning in chapter one,
verse two, here's what he says. The teacher says, vanity,
vanity all is vanity.
What's vanity? Well, it's pursuit for things. And when we think of vanity,
oftentimes we think of our current definition of vanity.
And so we think it's like this self-centered thing. It's this conceited thing.
We're looking for something that's gonna make us look better.
But that's not the vanity that he's talking about.
The word he is using there for vanity actually means meaningless.
It means meaningless.
It means that this pursuit for things often ends up in a place where we realize
that it's meaningless, that none of it actually really matters.
And so right from the beginning of the book,
he lets us know that there's a problem with this.
And so he goes on these five pursuits that we'll probably find,
we'll find familiar,
and these are things that he tries to pursue in place of God with the hopes
of finding fulfillment. The first one he looks for is something called wisdom.
And in Ecclesiastes chapter one, verse one through 13, he says,
I devoted myself to the search for understanding and to
explore my wisdom. Uh,
everything being done under heaven,
everything being done under heaven.
You see the teacher set out to try to find out how wise he can be.
And so he pursues wisdom in a very real way.
So he probably had the best teachers, he had amazing resources.
So he had the best teachers.
He probably had the great thought leaders of the day at his beck and call.
And he does everything that he can to pursue wisdom and ultimately leaves him
empty. And he probably had the same mindset that if we're honest,
many of us have. You see,
we say to ourselves at some point in our lives about wisdom,
if I could just insert narrative,
then I'd have all the wisdom I would ever need. And that plays it out,
self out in some different ways depending on what stage of life you're at.
And maybe you say to yourself like, if I could just get that master's degree,
then I'll have all the wisdom I'll ever need.
I'll be smarter than everybody in my office and everything will be great.
Or maybe you say to yourself, man, if I could just go to that conference,
you know, the one they sent the other guy to that I really wanted to go to,
and I'll have the wisdom that I need and everything will be great.
And maybe you're a high school student and you say, man,
if I could just get into the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,
then everything will be great. It won't.
.
But that's the pursuit. If I could just get into that honors class,
if I could just get to the next degree,
if I could just get to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
And what Solomon finds out here who's believed to have written a book,
what he finds out here is that those things never ever,
ever brought fulfillment.
He concludes that this is a waste of time.
He comes to the realization that not even the greatest attempts at attaining
wealth or wisdom or any of those things,
and not even the greatest attempt at obtaining wisdom will help him.
One officer says it this way. He says, here's the problem with wisdom.
Wisdom has the power to share with us what we need. We need God,
but it has no power
to actually help us get to God because we need
God.
And I think what I'm always surprised by with wisdom is that we pursue it
and we pursue it and we pursue it.
And what often happens is we get puffed up.
We start to tell people how wise we are or how smart we are.
Or.
How great we are. Well, Ecclesiastes chapter one,
the teacher says all of this wisdom stuff,
it's meaningless. It's like chasing.
The wind.
And so wisdom doesn't solve the problem for him. And so in chapter two,
he begins to move into another pursuit.
He goes after something that will also sound familiar. He goes, instead,
after pleasure, he says, okay, wisdom doesn't work. So let me pursue pleasure.
And in the next few verses, you see him use some very interesting words.
He uses the word laughter. He goes after laughter, he goes after pleasure.
He goes after wine or strong drink, and he also goes after foolishness. Now,
listen,
if you add the all star at the Waffle House at two o'clock in the morning,
that directly describes my twenties.
.
Because I too pursued pleasure.
And I thought that it would land me in a place where I had a lot of friends and
I had a lot of fun, but it didn't land me that place at all.
At the end of it, I actually had a loss of hope. You know,
one of the hardest things for me as a pastor to watch is to watch young people
grow up in our ministries here at Hope Community Church or at other churches.
And we have phenomenal children's ministry all the way up to high school and
even a great, uh, young adults ministry when they enter into college.
But I watch as young people grow up in the training of the Lord, and,
and they're rooted and locked into Jesus,
and then they get to high school or they get to college and for whatever reason,
because they wanna be popular or because they wanna have fun,
they stray away from God.
And I have watched as many, a young person
has stepped away from their.
Faith.
It's one of the hardest things to watch.
And I watched over and over again as 20 year olds and 30 year
olds,
and even 50 year olds have pursued pleasure instead of
God. I mean, have you ever experienced this
where you have this desire for the next party or the next event
or the next thing that will hopefully bring you pleasure even for some of us the
next vacation or the next trip or the next getaway,
and it becomes bigger and bigger and bigger of a desire,
and all of a sudden you find yourself just moving away from God and moving
towards this need for pleasure
because pleasure was never meant to be something that fills the emptiness in our
hearts, but I see it over and over again
and Solomon goes after all of it. And Ecclesiastes chapter two,
here's what he says.
I found that this too was meaningless.
Just a side note for parents and for students parents,
if you see your kids go in this direction,
just know that you don't need to lose your cool,
you need to point 'em towards Jesus.
What I've found is that when you lose your cool, you often lose your child.
And if you're a kid,
you might think your parents are trying to destroy your fun.
They're probably trying to save your life because they've seen what it looks
like to get to the end. Did not work either.
So pleasure doesn't work, wisdom doesn't work.
And so what does he pursue after that? He says, you know what?
Let's try work and see if that works.
And so he begins in Ecclesiastes chapter two, verse four. He says, I,
I also tried to find meaning by building huge homes for myself
and by planting beautiful vineyards,
I made gardens and parks and I built reservoirs.
I made good things is what the teacher says. You see,
he began working on any and every project that he could find for himself.
He poured himself into his work.
And I'll tell you when this became really real for me, uh, during Covid, um,
I would try to build stuff, not because I'm particularly handy,
I'm the kind of man that needs a man around.
But I tried during Covid to build stuff.
And I'll tell you exactly why I tried because everybody was in the same house
for every minute of every single day. And so I said, you know what?
I'm gonna find stuff to build. I think we can replace the sink.
I think we could do that. I've never done plumbing a day in my life,
but I was gonna figure it out because I needed to do something to deal with what
was happening in my household. And lo and behold, I go to Lowe's,
I would go to Home Depot and I would see a hundred dads just with the same lack
of handiness that I had trying to build something too.
I saw some of our staff there. I'm not gonna say your names.
The truth is is that we weren't there to build stuff.
We were trying to find peace.
And so we began to build a bunch of stuff with the hopes that that stuff would
bring the fulfillment or the peace that we needed.
And all of a sudden we got a bunch of rec projects all around our house.
Because.
The work was never gonna fulfill us. See,
I want you to understand that work is a good thing.
I believe that God gave us work.
I believe that we are supposed to work as though we're working for the Lord.
As a matter of fact,
Christians should be some of the best workers in all of the world.
We should work hard, we should be diligent,
and we should reflect the faith of following Jesus and what we do in our
day-to-day work. That's how work is supposed to work.
But work can sometimes go a little too far.
Sometimes we can not set healthy boundaries.
Sometimes we can work so hard that we neglect our faith or we neglect our
family. You know, in a recent study about American work habits,
the author says these words, he says that in America that we have longer days,
we have less vacation time,
and that we retire almost later than any other nation all over the
world.
We are literally sometimes working ourselves to death.
And again, I don't think there's anything wrong with work.
Work is a great tool to share the good news of Jesus Christ.
Work in and of itself was never meant to be The thing that we worship.
You know,
I think we've gotten caught up in this idea of something called the work life
balance, where we try to say, you know what? We need to have as much work,
50% work and 50%, uh, life.
And so our family gets 50%, our job gets 50%, and we try to balance it all out.
And it's like this lifelong effort of trying to balance the skills.
And here's the problem with that.
The scales actually never balance because our families and our faith we're
always meant to have a higher percentage of our heart.
See,
I read an article recently from Jack Welch who's the former CEO of General
Electric.
And in the article he says that we hire more people than anybody in America.
And here's what he says about the work-life balance. He says,
there's no such thing as the work-life balance.
It's nearly impossible to raise a family and to have a successful
executive level career.
And so he has people in his organization who are working their way all the way
up to the top,
and they're hoping that they're gonna have this work-life balance,
and it doesn't exist.
Maybe you found yourself in that position where you have
worked so hard at something and right before you got
to the big promotion and right before you got to the big moment when everything
was gonna be perfect for you, you reached out for that bubble
and it burst right before your eyes. Well,
here's what I want you to know.
I want you to know that while work is important,
it was never meant to be the source of your hope.
It was never meant to be the source of your contentment.
And when I see people pursuing work like this with reckless abandon, uh,
it often reminds me of a question that I ask myself regularly and I'll ask it to
you today. Uh, it's a series of questions that you can simply answer. Uh,
anytime you want to think through this or work through this,
has your work has working yourself to death have working yourself so hard?
Has it ever gotten you to a place, has work,
ever produced hope for you?
Has your work.
Ever.
Actually given you.
Joy?
I'm talking about joy that comes from the Lord, not temporary happiness.
Joy.
Have you ever worked your way to happiness?
Have.
You ever worked your way to the place of fulfillment?
See, when I hear someone answer, yeah, work's, has done all those things,
my worry is that you might be missing out.
And what actual fulfillment and contentment actually looks like?
What real hope, what real joy in a relationship with Jesus.
Looks like?
Maybe it's time to reevaluate. Maybe it's even time to make some decisions.
You know,
maybe you're at one of our campuses or you're watching online and you're a
college student and you're thinking about stepping out into the workplace for
the first time.
Consider what you're about to do very carefully and make sure
that your faith is a real part of how.
You live.
See the teacher try work and that didn't work either.
And so he turns to something else. He goes to the place of pursuing wealth.
In Ecclesiastes chapter two, verse eight says that, he says,
I collected great sums of silver and gold.
I collected treasure,
the treasure of many kings and many provinces.
And it's believed that Solomon had one of the greatest, uh,
amount of treasure as anybody had. I'm talking about big money. Uh,
by today's standards, he would've had $2.6 trillion.
That's like Elon Bezos money. That's like big money.
And so he asses all this fortune so much so that he can do anything,
that he can go anywhere.
And he comes to these conclusions as you move through the book about money. Uh,
here's what he says, conclusion number one, we are never satisfied.
No matter how much money we get,
we're never actually satisfied with that amount.
The Bible says that those who love money will never, ever,
ever have enough because we just keep pursuing it and
pursuing it and pursuing it. Conclusion number two,
he says that the more money that we have, the more we worry about.
It.
We worry about losing it all.
We worry about somebody else getting a hold of it. The more money you have,
the more people come to help you spend it, especially our children.
Number three, the more money you have,
the more you worry about losing it all.
He says that the rich seldom get a good night's sleep.
They seldom rest in the words of the great theologian,
biggie Smalls mo money, more problems.
.
So money doesn't fulfill them.
You know what I've learned after reading all this stuff,
money is a great tool.
It's a resource that God has given us to make a difference in the world with.
And when we learn how to do money God's way,
it's really important to use it for his glory and to share it with people around
us, our family, our friends, our neighbors, uh,
even people who are far off in distant lands.
We are supposed to use money as a tool. And it's a great tool.
Money is a wonderful tool, but it's a horrible God.
It was never meant to be our God.
And if you are having a hard time, but doing money God's way,
could you go to get hope.net/classes because we have a great ministry
called Financial Peace that will help you with that.
We want every person who attends Hope Community Church to be a good steward and
to use money God's way. See, money doesn't work for Solomon either.
And so he goes to his fifth journey,
he goes to relationships and he starts pursuing relationships with
reckless abandon. And I'm talking about horrible relationships.
He moves his way towards women and he starts trying to fulfill desires that he
has with those women. In Ecclesiastes chapter two, verse eight says that I had,
this is Solomon talking. I had many beautiful concubines.
I had everything that a man could desire. He didn't just do relationships,
he did relationships to the fullness that you can ever do relationships.
The Bible says that he had over 700 wives and over
300 concubines at the time,
reckless abandon.
And he tried to pursue these relationships with everything that he could pursue
'em with. He tried to provide for these folks,
he tried to build a relationship with these folks,
and he did it over and over and over again.
And just like all the other things, it left him empty.
You know,
our relationships sometimes depict what we see in the movies because
we start entering in these relationships with folks and we believe the hype that
this person completes me. You ever see it in the movie? You
complete me.
And then we get into the relationship and we find out that the person
doesn't have the ability to complete us and that we don't have the ability to
complete them.
And oftentimes we take what is rightfully God,
we take our hearts and instead of giving it to the Lord and letting him instruct
us on how to use it in the midst of a relationship and how to have our heart led
by the Lord, instead of that, we give our heart to somebody else.
And oftentimes that person may not have our best interest in mind.
And if anybody is trying to take you away from a relationship with God and
trying to steal your heart from God, that's not a person who's for you.
So we have to be very careful to give our hearts to the Lord. First.
Solomon learns this the hard way because as you move through the text just
a little more, the Bible says
that they actually end up turning his heart away from God.
It says that these concubines, that these wives,
they took him off course.
And so he's tried everything.
He's tried to pursue this whole host of things in order to find fulfillment.
Things that many of us, if we're honest, we pursue it as well.
And he goes after thing, after thing after thing.
And he comes to the same place that none of it really matters.
And he learns these two lessons because he is lived and now he's learned and he
learns these two things.
The first one is that we cannot control any of it when we kid
ourselves.
Oftentimes it's because we think that we have the power and the ability to
control this life.
So we pursue these things with the hope of grasping them.
And the bubbles pop right before our eyes,
right before we get 'em in our grasp, the burst.
The second thing that he learns is that apart from God,
none of this,
none of these things can ever bring fulfillment.
None of these things apart from God can ever bring
fulfillment. You see,
all of these things are created things given to us by the
Creator.
And what I think happens sometimes is we begin to pursue these things because we
believe that these things will fulfill us.
And so we think in our minds that maybe God isn't good enough and so we have to
pursue something other than him to find fulfillment.
And there's just one problem with this Is that he is good
and he is the ultimate fulfillment.
Solomon gets to the end of all of this. And when it's all over,
he says these words, all has been heard.
Here is the conclusion. This is the whole of the matter.
What we are here to do is to fear God
and to keep his commandments.
For this is the whole duty of all of mankind
because God will bring into judgment every good deeded,
including every hidden.
Thing.
You see when you have an accurate picture of who God is. Uh,
when we have a good understanding of who it is,
we enter into this state of adoration. Like we,
we love him because we realize that he's majestic and he's intimate that he's
God and he's near that He is good and he's faithful.
So because of that truth,
our response is to live a life connected to him and worship.
So we fear God, but at the same time, we're fearing God.
We also keep his commands because his commands are the guardrails that help us
actually live a life of fulfillment.
And it begins with us putting our hope and our trust in him.
You know how we find real fulfillment by following Jesus?
Because he has already done the work on the cross of
fulfilling us for all of eternity. And through a relationship with him,
we get access.
We get access to a life of abundance and goodness,
and we begin to put those things that we pursue into the right perspective.
We begin to look through a different lens.
You see, when we see God for who he is,
he shapes all of those other areas.
And I believe that those things are good things,
but they're not God things.
He is our God. You know, in the first week of the series,
chase Gardner shared a quote with us from a w Tozier where he said,
what comes into your mind when you think about God
is the most important thing about us?
And so for the past four weeks,
we have been trying to get a clear picture of who God is.
He is good, but he is a whole lot of other things.
When we recognize that truth,
it helps us to live our lives very differently.
As we close our time today,
I want every single one of us watching online or every one of us watching at one
of our physical campuses to take a look at the picture of
God, not from what we've heard, like me when I was a kid,
not from an image that we made up in our minds,
but directly from the word of God.
Let's take a moment and pray,
and let's spend some time reflecting on this truth. Father God,
I thank you for today.
I thank you so much that you are a good God.
And because you are good, it means that I don't have to pursue any other thing.
It means I don't have to chase after anything else for fulfillment.
See, what Solomon found out is that there is no goodness apart from you.
And so Father, we just take this moment
to reflect on your goodness,
to remember the image that you have shared with us of who you are,
right from your word.
And we pray that as we leave this place today,
it will guide our steps. It will shape our lives.
And instead of pursuing other things to find fulfillment or happiness or joy,
that we will pursue you
through a relationship with you. All of those things,
all of that stuff will be fulfilled.
In Jesus name we pray, amen.
God is great. God is gracious.
God is glorious. He's good.
This.
Is who He is. And this is our God.
This is who He is, and he loves us.
And this is our God. This is what He does.
He saves us. He bo the cross,
beat the graves. Let heaven and earth broke.
This is our God, king Jesus.
Can we sing that again? Proclaim it tonight.
And this is our God. This is who He is,
and he loves us. Who this is our God.
This is what He does. He saves us.
He bo the cross beat the grave. So let,
this is our guy, king Jesus.
It.
Is just continue to respond and worship to his goodness, our king.
The he's my,
the,
the.
My song.
You declare.
Isn't he good tonight? Hope Isn't he gracious and glorious?
He's worth.
You know, this message that God is good.
It's the greatest message the world has ever known.
And I think it's a beautiful thing that we can come together and hear,
that we can be together in here and we can celebrate in that.
We can revel in that. We can remind ourselves of that.
But I'm willing to bet, um, you know, I was sitting right over here and, uh,
there were plenty of moments where I was like, yeah,
I needed to hear this because there are times where I'd pursue all of those
other things over, uh, just resting in the fact that God is good.
But the truth is, is that you probably could think of a few people in your life,
maybe your kids, maybe a friend at work or someone else who you know,
who has, you also see them pursuing these things from a distance. And you may,
I just, in my brain, I was like, man,
what would it be like if every single person in here echoed the goodness of
God wherever we went?
What if we echoed the message that our God is good and he is good enough so we
don't have to pursue after all this other stuff?
What would that actually look like? The beauty of that is,
is that each and every one of us, we have the words. We have.
We've been given this gospel to go and spread out to everyone as well. But man,
I love that while we all get a chance to do that on an individual level,
we get to do that as a church also.
And so it does my heart well to see all the things that Jason reminded us of at
the beginning of this service of ways, uh,
that as a community we're making an impact on the world around us and echoing
the love of God around us. So I just want to give you a moment,
and I want to invite you, uh, into being a part of that as well,
if you're not already. And the way that we're asking for you to do that is if,
if you feel like, man,
I want to contribute to what God is doing throughout the world,
through Hope Community Church, uh, we want to invite you to give,
and there's a couple of different ways that you can do that.
You can always go to get
hope.net/give and you'll be able to get tons of information on that here on the
screens. We have options, uh, for digital, for in-person.
If you're watching online, there are opportunities there for you as well.
But man, the reason why we do this,
the reason why we give from this place is to echo the truth to the world that
our God is good and we want them to experience that goodness as well.
So as you get ready to head out, as you get ready to log off, think about, man,
how this week, what can I do to echo the goodness of God to everybody around me?
Can we do that? Yeah. Love spending time with y'all. We'll see you next time.