Why Funerals Are Better Than Birthday Parties | J.D. Greear

0:04 And now, if you would, if you have your Bibles at all of our campuses, and I hope that you do, why don't you take them and I want you to stand with me and I want you to open them to the book of Ecclesiastes. And I want you to listen as I read God's word for us this morning. I'm going to read the first six or seven verses of Ecclesiastes 7. You listen as I read it. Solomon says, Ecclesiastes 7, 1, a good name is better than precious ointment. And the day of death is better than the day of birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. For this is the end of all mankind. So the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter. For by sadness of face, the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

0:59 It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fools. This also is hevel. This is vanity. So verse 14, in the day of prosperity, be joyful. And in the day of adversity, consider. God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to God indeed. You may be seated. Let me start our reflection on this chapter with a little pop quiz, if I could. Please, I implore you, answer honestly in this pop quiz. Do not try to over-spiritualize it or out-think it or answer these based on the passage that we just read. I just want you to answer how you would instinctively if I walked up to you on the street randomly and asked you these questions, okay?

2:00 By raise of hand, here's what I want you to answer. How many of you, by raise of hand, like to laugh more than you like to cry? Raise your hand, okay? All right, how many of you prefer weddings to funerals? Raise your hand. How many of you would rather celebrate your birthday than your death day? Raise your hand, okay? How many of you would rather be complimented than corrected? Raise your hand, okay? How many of you love finding a good shortcut? God, I mean a good life hack or a more efficient way of doing something. Raise your hand. All right, last one. How many of you sometimes find yourself yearning for a past season that you think of as the good old days? Be honest. Raise your hand. Well, the bad news is that every one of us just failed Solomon's pop quiz. The good news is that we have exactly the instincts that Solomon expected us to have, which is why Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes 7.

2:59 Ecclesiastes 7 is one of the most counterintuitive chapters in the entire Bible because in this chapter, Solomon turns almost every natural instinct that we have upside down and inside out. When I first read Ecclesiastes 7 or when I read it a few weeks ago, getting ready for this series, y'all, it felt like a random junk drawer assortment of Solomon's thoughts. almost like Solomon had emptied out his desk drawer of miscellaneous Proverbs, didn't have anywhere else to put them, so he put them in this chapter. One verse is about funerals, another one's about criticism, another verse about anger, then there's one about nostalgia. And I was like, it just seems random, but there's actually a single unified vision running through this entire chapter. Did you notice when I was reading it, how often Solomon repeated the phrase better than? The day of death is better than the day of birth, The day of sorrow is better than the day of laughter.

3:57 The rebuke of the wise is better than the praise or literally the songs of fools. Altogether, Solomon uses that phrase better than 11 times in this chapter. And almost every comparison that he gives to it sounds completely backwards. Solomon is deliberately turning our instincts upside down so that we will discover a profound truth. And that truth is this. the hardest things in life, the things we try to avoid are often the very things that God uses to teach us the most important things. First, let's get our minds around Solomon's vision. That's going to be verses one through six. And then we're going to look at the ways in the rest of the chapter that we try to resist that vision. Verse one, Solomon says, the day of death is better than the day of birth.

4:51 Again, if you had some way of knowing what day in the year you were going to die, would you throw a party on that day to celebrate it? I mean, y'all, that'd be a weird party to come to. Am I right? I mean, would you bring gifts to that party? Right, what kind of card would you give the person? And yet Solomon says celebrating your death is better than celebrating your birthday. Verse two, it is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. The house of mourning represents anywhere that you would weep, the funeral home, the hospital bedside, the divorce court, the bankruptcy judge. Why, according to Solomon, are those places better than parties and all-you-can-eat buffets? He explains his answer, for this, you see, is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Sadness and tragedy have a way of waking us up to the unpredictability and the uncontrollability of life. By the way, I would remind you, especially if you're new and you haven't been with us in this Ecclesiastes series, I would remind you that Solomon was not some kind of morose, melancholic man who always lived under a dark cloud. No, no less than eight different times in this book, So Solomon commands us to enjoy life to the fullest.

6:11 Solomon is simply saying that it is good to go through seasons of mourning because seasons of mourning have a way of waking us up to the fragility of life much more than seasons of prosperity and partying do. Blaise Pascal, who was an 18th century French philosopher, once compared life to a grand ballroom where everyone is dressed in their finest clothes. The music is playing. People are laughing and eating and talking and dancing when suddenly he says the doors burst open and in walks a terrifying monster, grabs one of these guests seemingly randomly and drags him away. At that point, all the music stops. Everybody is stunned. They're terrified. But after a few awkward minutes, the orchestra starts slowly playing again, and everybody starts dancing again as if nothing had happened.

7:10 But then the monster comes back and does it to somebody else. Then it happens a third time and a fourth time. And eventually, eventually it becomes clear that that monster is going to end up taking every single person in that room out. And so these people are just sitting there thinking, what is happening right now? But every single time, after sitting stunned for a few seconds, everybody goes back to dancing. Pascal said that is how most of us live. That monster represents our death. And we spend our whole lives distracting ourselves from the one certainty we know that we all share. A funeral or a moment of tragedy briefly interrupts the music and it forces us to remember what we have spent years trying to forget or to ignore. And that is, it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all mankind and wise people will lay it to heart.

8:06 Verse four, the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. Fools hate funerals because they're total buzz kills. They're like, get me out of this place. This is a downer. Fools prefer the delusion that life lasts forever and that everything ends happily ever after. So the fools are like, you know what? Give me the all you can eat buffet. Give me the feel good music. Give me movies with a Disney ending. That's where I want to live. And the same way, verse five, it is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fools. This also is vanity. Thorns in those days were what they used for kindling. Nowadays, we use newspapers or dry leaves. Maybe you'll use a copy of one of my books that we've given you for free here at the summit, okay? something that is light and cheap. The thing about kindling is that it flares up really fast, makes a really bright fire, makes a lot of noise, but then it's gone. Solomon says this is what people who build their lives around having a good time are like, bright, noisy, gone.

9:13 You know, it's interesting, the very first straight up lie that Satan ever told humanity was you will not surely die. See, God had told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that if they ate of the forbidden fruit, they would surely die. But then Satan comes along, he's like, nah, you're not gonna surely die. In other words, before Satan lied to them about the fruit, he lied to them about the fragility of life. He tried to delude them, to make them forget how short and how fragile life could be. I would say that is still where he starts today. To every teenager, to every college student, every young adult, he says, oh, death, don't worry about that. That is so far off, you don't even need to think about that yet. Maybe one day when you're your parents' age or your grandparents' age, maybe then you can think about it, but not now.

10:06 No, now you're in the prime of life and life basically lasts forever. Solomon says that remembering the certainty and the relative proximity of our death is where wisdom starts. Moses, in the only song he ever wrote, said the exact same thing. Psalm 90 verse 12, a verse that if you are a teenager or a college student, you should have memorized. Lord, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to learn wisdom. In other words, it is only by thinking about the fragility and the brevity of our lives that we learn to live wisely. And it is places of sadness and bereavement and weakness that teach us that. You see, places of sadness and failure and death remind us that life is hevel. And remember, that word hevel is a word that means vapor, like a cloud, something that looks good from the outside, but is actually substanceless.

11:03 So let me just ask, what specifically is Solomon saying that we can learn from funerals, hospital beds, and bankruptcy courts? I'm going to give you three things. Number one, Solomon is saying you can learn from them that your life is shorter than you think. For those of you who are near my age, you're mid-30s. One of the most depressing things, right? Those of you who are my age, you know, identify with this. One of the most depressing things is to see pictures of all those stars that you admired as a teenager side by side with what they look like now. And then the second depressing thing is to realize that most of those people have spent tens of thousands of dollars to try and make it look like they're not aging, which makes you then realize really quickly how you probably look since you haven't spent that kind of money. See, those people who once seemed forever young are now in their 60s and 70s. Y'all, there was a movie that came out in 1980 called Fame. Anybody remember this movie? And the tagline from the movie, or at least the main line from the theme song? Anybody remember it? Fame. I'm going to live forever. Hollywood remade that movie in 2009 and it cast a whole new group of younger, prettier actors. Not one of the actors from that first movie was in that latter one. In fact, the lead actress who sang the theme song, she died in 2022.

12:28 Anybody even remember her name? Irene Cara. Okay, very good. I want you on my Trivial Pursuit team. All right. Most of us don't know. We've never even heard that name. Every generation thinks it's the one that's going to stay young, feeling 22, the one that's remembered forever until the next generation arrives and takes center stage. See, it's the house of mourning. It's the funeral home that reminds us that our turn on the stage is pretty brief. Recognizing this was a big part of how God brought me back to faith as a teenager. See, I had a friend from grade school who got killed in a tragic car wreck. We had been best friends up through middle school. He was so funny and so smart and popular and good looking. He was rich. He had it all, but he did not know Jesus at all. And I never told him about Jesus.

13:24 And then we went to different high schools and he got killed in this car wreck. And I stood there by his casket It was closed because the wreck had been so bad. And I remember standing there thinking as a 16-year-old, nothing that he and I bonded over matters anymore. All that matters is whether he was ready to meet God. And I didn't know whether he was or not. Solomon's like, your life is shorter than you think. Number two, it shows us that your future is less certain than you think. many years ago when I'd just begun here as a pastor. I taught with a professional athlete who visited our church who had just signed a multi-million dollar contract but then got into an accident doing something stupid that voided that entire contract. He'd come to visit our church and he asked if he could meet with me and he told me through tears, I can't believe I threw all my career away for a few seconds of stupid fun at a party.

14:28 We talked together for a long time and eventually I told him, I'm like, hey man, with all due respect, but what if God was doing something way bigger in your life? Something so important, something so important through this that one day you might actually look back on this tragedy and say it was good. He said, what do you mean? How could that ever be? And I said, well, I said, well, You said, I can't believe I threw away my whole career for a few seconds of stupid fun. But what if the bigger tragedy is you were about to throw away your whole eternity for a few seconds of stupid fame?

15:07 See, it was clear that his athletic career had become his idol. And so I told him, like I often tell you, sometimes God has to put us flat on our back so we will finally be looking the right direction. I had the privilege that afternoon of praying with that athlete as he gave his life to Jesus. It's in the house of mourning, not the house of mirth, that we learn the unpredictability and uncontrollability of life. Here's number three, third thing Solomon says we can learn. What matters most is different than what you think. New York Times columnist David Brooks said he noticed that where he lives in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, how hard everybody there works to build their resumes. But then he noticed, he said, that whenever he goes to a funeral, even in Manhattan, nobody ever talks about that person's resume they spent their whole life trying to build. It's not displayed by their casket. Nobody stands up at the funeral and says, man, that guy had an incredible LinkedIn profile.

16:04 Or wow, she closed a lot of deals. Or man, he finally got that corner office. No, they talked about whether you loved your family. They talked about whether you were generous, whether you made other people feel seen and valued. David Brooks says we spend our whole lives building resume virtues. But then funerals remind us that what really matters are not resume virtues, but eulogy virtues. See, that's the kind of wisdom Solomon says you can only learn in the house of mourning. Johnny Erickson Tada was a beautiful teenage girl with her whole life ahead of her, who broke her neck in a diving accident and became a quadriplegic. Through that suffering, she came to know Jesus more deeply than she ever imagined she could. And God has given her one of the most fruitful, enriching ministries of the last 60 plus years. She is now 76 years old, still a quadriplegic.

17:02 And she says, while I would never wish quadriplegia on anyone, I do wish everyone could know Christ the way I have come to know him through my quadriplegia. You see, that's the paradox of Ecclesiastes 7. The suffering itself is not the gift. The God you meet in the suffering is. And Johnny Erickson Tata, by the way, is not the only one who discovered this. There's a great cloud of witnesses, y'all, throughout Christian history who all say the exact same thing. For example, Samuel Rutherford, an old Puritan. By the way, Puritans are not known for their roaring good time, right? Here's the way Samuel Rutherford said it. When I look in the cellar of affliction, I look for the Lord's choices wines. Or Welch's grape juice for us Baptists, okay? That's what we look for. Or the prince of preachers, Charles Spurgeon. I've learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the rock of ages.

18:01 None of those people love suffering. Nobody loves suffering, but they love the Savior they found in suffering. and the place they learned to love him, y'all, was not in the parties. It wasn't in the times of happiness. It wasn't even in the places of worship and praise. The place they learned to love him was in the funeral parlors and the hospital beds and the divorce courts and in front of the bankruptcy judge.

18:30 That's the counterintuitive vision. And the rest of chapter seven is Solomon asking, if this vision is true and we all deep down know that it's true, then why do we spend our whole lives running from it? And Solomon's answer is fascinating. Listen, the human race, he says, has come up with these ingenious but insane ways of pretending this is not true and that we are all still in control. Ways that we close our eyes to the fragility of life so that we can keep dancing. In the next few verses, Solomon is gonna give you four alternatives to submitting to the wisdom of pain and death. Four ways we hide ourselves from the truth. All four of these things I'm gonna give you that from him have one thing in common.

19:23 All of them are built on the illusion that we can control life. Four ways we resist wisdom by pretending control. The first one is money. Verse seven, surely oppression drives the wives into insanity. It makes wise people insane and a bribe corrupts the heart. Solomon warns us, listen to this, that money corrupts even the wisest and best people. Let me say this very clearly. Money is the most powerfully corrupting element on earth. If you got access to money and you do not know this, Solomon would say that you're a fool. If you got a lot of money, praise God. But you need to know that you got something more dangerous to your family in your house than a snake in their bedroom.

20:21 I'm not saying money is bad. I'm just saying it's dangerous and you should know that Jesus said that money was the one thing you could not love it and God. Jesus never said anything that dramatic about sex or wine or even people's praise. Yet he said, Matthew 6, you cannot love God and money. If you love one, you are going to hate the other one. If you love being able to make that money and you love the art of the deal and you love being able to score that, you love looking at your bank account, you're gonna end up hating God. The apostle Paul says that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And that is because, listen, in a modern market society, money is power. Money promises control. With money, you can basically go where you want and do what you want. And you think if you have enough money, enough leverage, you can basically insulate yourself from tragedy. But then you sit in a divorce court and you learn that all your money can't keep your family together.

21:19 Or all your money can't make your kids want to talk to you. or all your money can't reverse the Parkinson's diagnosis or keep a loved one alive or you go to a funeral and realize that when you die, none of that wealth is gonna go with you. In fact, I learned this from my mom through one of my favorite childhood board games, Monopoly. Man, y'all, I loved playing Monopoly as a kid. Now I'm like, who's got seven hours to waste on a board game? But man, back then, that was like my glorious, this afternoon. My whole goal in that game, my whole goal was getting Boardwalk and Park Place and Pacific and Pennsylvania Avenue. I would try to get that whole side of the board because then I got to watch with glee everybody wince when they rounded the corner to pass through my little streak of doom where I had loaded up every property with houses and hotels. And y'all, I remember one time doing this and slowly taking all my mom's money. And when she was completely bankrupt. She smiled with approval. She told me I was finally getting the point of the game.

22:25 But then after I had thoroughly trounced her, she taught me the most important life lesson that Monopoly could ever teach you. She taught it to me in one fell swoop, literally. She scooped all my motels and all my houses and all my cash back into the Monopoly box and said, son, congratulations, you won, but now it all goes back in the box. Go clean your room.

22:49 When you die, it all goes back in the box. What are you gonna do with it? You're gonna line your coffin with it? No, you're gonna leave it all behind and you're not gonna take any of it with you into eternity. Solomon says money is a foolish way of pretending that you have control. Here's a second way that we do it, anger. Verse nine, be not quick in your spirit to become angry for anger lodges in the heart of fools. Verse 13, consider the work of God who can make straight what he has made crooked. we get angry, listen to this, because the universe refuses to cooperate with our plans. And the more we expect to be able to control the world and the more we think we ought to be able to control the world, the more we resent the uncontrollable. So my friend Bobby Jameson says, our anger is proportional to our illusion of control.

23:45 Those of you guys who have anger problems, this is where you should start right here. Think about the place you're angry right now. Chances are it involves somebody or something that is not doing what you want them or it to do. Somebody who is frustrating your plans for what you wanted life to be like.

24:06 You expected your spouse to become this person that you wanted, needed them to be, and they haven't become that, so now you're angry. You thought your children would turn out a certain way and you deserved for them to turn out a certain way and you were angry because they haven't. In some ways, and you would never say this out loud, but you feel like they've let you down. They haven't fulfilled the future you had planned for yourself. You thought your career would have advanced further by now so you were angry at the boss or the company or the system or maybe even yourself. You always thought that your body would be healthier and prettier and it's not. and you're angry. Truth is, y'all, if you peel back the layers, a lot of times you would see that you're not just angry at a person, you're angry at God because God did not co-sign the story you had written for yourself.

25:02 I want you to think about what all those examples I just gave you, what they all have in common. In every case, life refused to follow the script you had written for yourself. Write this down. Anger is often the emotion of frustrated sovereignty. Anger is often the emotion of frustrated sob. Hear me, I'm not saying all anger is sinful. God gets angry, Jesus got angry. Sometimes anger is the right response to evil, but Ecclesiastes exposes a different kind of anger. The anger that comes when life doesn't deliver something that it never promised in the first place. Anger is the emotion of frustrated sobrenatry, which is why Solomon says, consider the work of God. Who can make straight what he has made crooked? In other words, there are things in your life you may never be able to straighten because God in his wisdom and sovereignty has chosen not to straighten them. And you're gonna have to decide if you're okay with God being God or you're only okay if you're God.

25:59 Wisdom begins when you stop demanding that reality conform to your plans and you begin trusting that God is writing a better and wiser story than you ever could. anger is the second way we try to control life number three or second evidence we're trying to control life here's the third way nostalgia verse 10 solomon says verse 10 don't say why were the former days better than these in other words don't look back to some former time and think man those were the good old days why why because nostalgia lies nostalgia always edits out the pain and leaves only the beauty. Through nostalgia, we convince ourselves that if we could just go back, back to that neighborhood, back to that church, back to that decade, back to that relationship, back to those college years, we'd finally be happy. But here's the thing. First, you can't go back. That was just a moment in time. Second, way more importantly, listen, even if you could go back, what you would see is that during that time period, you actually weren't that happy.

27:13 Here's how I know that. During that time period, you were dreaming about some other time period. One of my favorite 80s songs illustrates this. Summer of 69 by Brian Adams. And that song, Brian Adams looks back on that summer as a teenager when he got his first real six string, bought it at the five and dime, played it till his fingers bled, was a summer of 69. Then in the chorus, he croons, right? You know the chorus. If I had the choice, yeah, I'd always wanna be there. Why? Because those were the best days of my life. Catchy, right? Nostalgic. But have you ever thought about the lyrics? During that glorious summer that he is singing about, the summer of 69, he tells us in the song that during that summer, he was dreaming about becoming a professional musician. In other words, he's nostalgic to go back to a season during which he was longing for the season he's in now.

28:12 I want to go back to 1969 where I was dreaming about becoming the person I am today only to get here to find out today that I was dreaming about the person I was then. That is the trick nostalgia plays on us. We think happiness was back there somewhere, but back there we were convinced happiness was somewhere else. See, that's the trick nostalgia plays. Really important, listen to this. in his book, The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis explains why that happens. He explains why we all get so quickly deceived by nostalgia. See, Lewis says we all have moments in life when beauty awakens an ache that we can't explain and that nothing in the world seems able to satisfy. And so we think, he says, that we're longing for a place to go back to or we're longing for people that we've known. But C.S. Lewis says, no, no, those experiences are only signposts. And they're not signposts pointing us backwards. They're actually pointing us forward.

29:06 They're pointing us to heaven, not to a time on earth under the sun, either in the past or the future. They're pointing us above the sun to eternity. In fact, here's his statement. We'll look at it more in depth next week, but it's so good we probably should look at it twice and we will. The things, he says, in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trusted them. It was never in them. It only came through them. And what came through them was longing. See, those things, the beauty, the memory of our own past, they're good images of what we really desire. Watch. But if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself. Watch this.

29:57 That nostalgia you feel, they're only the scent of a flower you've never found before. They're the echo of a tune we have not heard. They're news from a country we have yet to visit. You see what he's saying? That yearning you experience in nostalgia is actually a yearning not for the past. It's a yearning for something in eternity, a yearning for life above the sun, life in a world without the curse. And nostalgia becomes foolish when we expect the past can give us what only something in the future, something in eternity can. And that brings me to our fourth instrument of control. And y'all, this one is the trickiest one of all. Self-righteousness. Check this out, verse 15. In my vain life, Solomon says, I've seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness.

30:53 And there's a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evil doing. And then Solomon says, maybe the most confusing words in the entire Bible, verse 16. So you know what? Why don't you just give up being overly righteous and don't make yourselves two wives because why should you wear yourself out? Wait, what? Since when does the Bible warn us against too much righteousness or too much wisdom? Remember throughout Ecclesiastes, Solomon is exposing the false assumptions that we make about life under the sun. And here he is exposing one of religion's biggest lies. And that lie is this, listen. If you live a certain way, God is obligated to make your life easy. Solomon says, but I've lived long enough to know that's not true because I've watched righteous people die young and I've watched wicked people live long, prosperous lives. I've watched people who worked hard and tithed and saved. I've watched them get wiped out in a bad business deal going wrong, even when it wasn't their fault. Meanwhile, I've seen other people who manipulated and cheated their way to the top. I've seen them retire with gobs and gobs of money. I've watched parents who did everything right, who taught their kids the Bible, who live consistently and generously in front of their kids. I've watched them have those same kids wander from the faith or even turn on their parents. While at the same time, I've seen parents who basically ignored their kids and their kids turned out awesome. And all I could say is WTH, what the hell? You religious people, which is all of us, right? If you think you've cracked the code and some of you think you have, that through righteous living, you can control the future, it's not gonna work.

32:34 You see, religious people often think, if I obey enough, God has to give me the life that I want. See, that's a way of control. Through your righteousness, you're trying to control God. But y'all, that's not faith, that's bargaining. Your righteous living is just a contract in which you expect God to give you what you want. It's actually not righteousness at all. It's self-righteousness. And self-righteousness is just another attempt to control God and the uncertainty of life, which you cannot do. So there you go. Four ways we try to resist the wisdom of the funeral home, the hospital bed, and bankruptcy court. We do it through money, through anger, through nostalgia, and through self-righteousness. All four ways we attempt to control the uncontrollable. And Solomon says that if you're a wise person, you will give up on all that. Because, watch this. When you do, when you stop trying to gain life, then you can start to receive life as a gift.

33:34 The running theme for the book of Ecclesiastes is this right here. There is no way to gain life under the sun. Remember, gain in Ecclesiastes means to hold onto. It means to make permanent. It means to have it fulfill your deepest longings, to be your foundation. Attempts to control are just another way to try to gain life. But when you try to control the uncontrollable, it is going to leave you disappointed and bitter. And the harder you work to control it, and the more you think you deserve control it, the more bitter you will be when life proves uncontrollable, which it always will. So Solomon says, stop trying to gain life. That's a fool's errand. Stop trying to control the uncontrollable because when you do, then you can actually start to watch this, receive life as a gift. Listen to me, your life can be happy. I know some of you don't believe that.

34:32 I don't care what your situation is. It may be terrible, but your life can be happy. It can be enjoyable, but not when you're trying to gain permanence or satisfaction through it. You could only enjoy your life when you receive it as a temporary gift and find your permanence in God. Only then can you enjoy the blessings of each day as God gives them. Fleeting gifts, temporary gifts, but gifts he wants you to enjoy to the fullest. Gifts that are just a taste of what he has for you in eternity. But gifts you are never supposed to cling to as your substance or your gain because you have found your substance. you've found your gain, your permanence in Christ. The very reason you cannot be happy in life is because you're looking to life to make you happy.

35:27 And see, that brings me to the other great theme of Ecclesiastes. You need to make the most of your midst. See, if everything under the sun really is fleeting and fragile, well, then when you think about it, there's only two things in the world right now that really last forever, right? only two things that are going to last forever, the word of God and the souls of people.

35:50 And y'all, if that's true, we need to leverage our midst of a life, which we can't hold onto anyway, into those things. I've told you that Christians with a bucket list overlook the fact that in eternity, in life above the sun, we're going to experience every joy we had under the sun only without the curse of futility. And see, the reason for that is a New Testament reason. It's because God himself entered into our Hevel under the sun and took upon himself Hevel's curse. You see, God did not originally create a world of Hevel. We're under the curse of Hevel because we sinned. But God so loved the world of Hevel that he sent Jesus, his only son, into that Hevel to absorb its curse into himself. And God says that if we receive Jesus as our savior, He will forgive us of our sin and take us with him into eternity where we will experience in his presence the fullness of joy and at his right hand pleasures forevermore.

36:52 And y'all, if that is true, I don't need to have a bucket list down here or at least one I take that seriously. I don't need to try to cram everything into these 70 or 80 years because this is not my only life. I don't YOLO. I don't only live once. I yell if I actually live forever. So it is okay if I don't hike every mountain. It's okay if I don't eat at every restaurant. It's okay if I don't get to every country in the world. It's okay if I don't own every watch, drive every car. It's okay if I don't own a beach property or this property over here or that property. That's okay because whatever I miss out on down here, I'm gonna receive out there a thousandfold. And yet, and yet there is one thing, there is one thing that I cannot do up there that I can only do here. There is one thing that eternity is not gonna give me another chance to do. And that is bring people here to Jesus. So this, these fleeting 70 or 80 years This is the only chance we got to bring people to Jesus all over the world.

37:47 Which is why some of you should consider uprooting that mist of a life of yours to join one of our church planning teams. And maybe it's in one of these global cities, Nairobi, Cape Town, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Madrid. I know it's radical, y'all, but life is short, the mission is urgent, and eternity is forever. So you need to leverage your mist for the permanence of eternity. others of you should leverage your resources so that other people can go all that stuff you're trying to buy and build is it really that important why are you stocking up so much that's just going to fade away and burn some of you should step forward to care for and support and pray for these teams that we've got going out by the way this is what live scent is all about I'm just saying whatever you do don't waste your mist collecting things that's all gonna go back in the box anyway make the most of your mist use this brief mist of a life to bring the word of God to souls that last forever hear me, hear me, hear me one day somebody else is gonna live in that house that beautiful house that you built that thing you're so proud somebody else is gonna live in it somebody else is gonna drive your truck somebody else is gonna wear your watch have your job and blow through whatever money you left behind.

39:07 The only question is going to be what will still be echoing in eternity because you were here. Make the most of your nest. That's the point. Why don't you bow your heads at all of our canvases. Let me just give the Holy Spirit a moment. what's he telling you to do? I believe there's some of you right now that he is starting to you saying, I got something more for you than what you're doing right now. Maybe he is calling you. to do something radical. I don't know.

39:58 But could you just right now say, yes, Lord, yes. I don't know what the question is, but yes. and could I ask you to just take the first step this is the step this is maybe what the Holy Spirit is putting in some of your heart come to live set night come to live set night so you can hear about what's what's there maybe it's to go maybe it's to support in a new way maybe it's just to start praying maybe it's to think about a short term trip I don't know but come this Friday. Could you just listen just for a moment? Is the Holy Spirit saying something to you right now? Father, I am praying that this would be a yes Lord church who grasps the futility, the fragility of life and the permanence of eternity.

41:04 Help us not to live for things that don't matter so that we can devote ourselves to the things that do. I pray in Jesus' name. I pray in Jesus' name. I want you, Summit, to stand up at all of our campuses. Stand to your feet. We always end our services by giving you an opportunity to pray. So I'm going to, at all of our campuses, ask our prayer teams to come. They're going to stand off to the side here. If there's something in your life you need to pray about, I want you to make your way to one of them when we dismiss, okay? If you've got questions about Jesus, you want to start a relationship with Jesus, or you're like, what is this all about? Please come talk to them. They will show you how you can have a relationship with Jesus today, how you can receive him and know for sure you're going to heaven. Maybe you just need somebody to pray with you about a burden, you can do that. But they'll be on the sides at every single campus. Every week we come in here for just a few moments to remind ourselves that the lie that Satan tells us is not true. Death is real. Life is short. Eternity is forever. And then we go from here to preach the hope of Jesus to a world that is desperately looking for a foundation.

42:10 So I am going to commission you and send you and tell you to go in the power of the Holy Spirit and testify in a world of constant change that there is a God who never does and his love is extended to all who will receive it. Summit Church, you are loved and you are sent.