Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: Ecc 7:11-13; 12:13

N:

Welcome

Welcome to Family Worship with Eastern Hills Baptist Church, and I’m glad you’re here this morning whether you are in the room or online.

I’m Bill Connors, the senior pastor here at Eastern Hills, and if you’re visiting this wonderful church family this morning, thank you for being here.

We’d love the opportunity to say thanks, to get to know you a little more, and to meet any needs that you might have.

If you’re in the room, if you could just take some time during the service to fill out the communication card that is in the back of the pew in front of you, we’d appreciate that.

You can just drop it in the offering plates by the doors at the close of service, or if you’d prefer, I’d like to invite you to meet me at the end of service, where I have a mug filled with chocolate to give to you to say thanks for being here.

If you’d rather fill out a card online, you can text the word “WELCOME” to 505-339-2004, and you’ll get a text back with a link to our digital communication card.

You can do that if you’re joining us online as well.

The video we just saw was another way that the Mission New Mexico Offering is used by the Baptist Convention of New Mexico to impact this State with the Gospel—through helping pastors and their families be refreshed and enjoy a couple of days of being ministered TO by our Convention staff.

The Ministers’ and Families Retreat is only held every three years, and I know that it has been a great blessing to me and to my family.

While Brother Manuel shared about how the Retreat is a blessing to pastors, can I also share what a blessing it is to pastors’ families?

Especially our kids.

I know that both Maggie and Abbie have enjoyed connecting with other pastors’ children from around the State at the Retreat.

Abbie even shared with me that sometimes being a pastor’s kid can make her feel a little different than some of her peers, but there, she knew she was with other kids who go through the same things that she does, so she didn’t feel different at all.

For some pastors, I know that the Ministers’ & Families Retreat might be the only time they are poured into and encouraged, and it wouldn’t be possible for them to do something like that if it weren’t for the Mission New Mexico Offering.

Our church goal for the MNM Offering is $10,000, and through last Sunday, we’ve given $6,492.

Thank you for your generosity, church family!

Please continue to pray and ask the Lord to direct you in how you might give to the Mission New Mexico Offering this year.

We will be taking this offering through October.

Announcements

I’d like to say thanks to Joe and Trevor for filling the pulpit for the past couple of weeks while I took a little time off and really started planning for the kickoff of our Endeavor generosity campaign on 10/16.

Could I just ask everyone to plan to be here every single Sunday from October 16 through November 13 as we take this journey together as a church family?

I’m so excited to see what God is going to do in the life of this church as we think deeply about biblical stewardship and generosity along with anticipation of what God wants Eastern Hills to be as His hands and His feet in the years to come!

There are already some big things that He’s doing in preparation for 2023, and I know that Endeavor is going to be a big part of that.

Let’s take this discipleship journey together.

Opening

For this morning and next Sunday, we will be finishing up our look at the book of Ecclesiastes.

Joe brought a great perspective on where we find our identity, and then Trevor addressed the question of doubt in Ecclesiastes with tremendous honesty and hope.

This morning, we are going to look at two other aspects of life “under the sun,” and how they go together: fear and wisdom.

Our focal passages in Ecclesiastes will be in chapters 7 and 12, just four verses in total.

Let’s stand in honor of God’s holy Word as we read 7:11-13, and 12:13 this morning:

PRAYER (FBC Belen, Pastors David Guerrero and Ernest Sanchez)

Fear is an interesting thing.

Fear can go two ways.

Some fears are irresponsible or even irrational.

Some fears, however, are completely reasonable and consistent.

When we are told in Scripture not to fear, that isn’t God saying that we should never be afraid for any reason.

He made us with healthy, reasonable, life-sustaining fears.

The question is the part that wisdom plays in the application of our fears: how to respond to fear, and whether we should be afraid at all.

This past May, Melanie, Abbie, and I went with the Tedford family to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore.

One of the things that we decided that we were going to do on that trip was to take what is called a “Buffalo Jeep Safari,” but to be completely accurate, it’s really a “American Bison Jeep Safari.”

Anyway, we traveled out to this lodge where they hosted these safaris, where you all pile into a stretch jeep that holds 8 people and drive around this preserve to see a bison herd and other animals.

When we arrived at the lodge, I went inside to check us in.

While I was in there, the rest of the group noticed a statue of a big adult male bison near the lodge entrance.

It was pretty impressive.

Looked really legit.

Here’s a picture.

Mel suggested that Abbie go over and put her hand on it so that she could take a picture and mess with her grandmother a little.

As Abbie, started moving toward the statue, Wayne noticed that it looked like it was breathing.

I thought I saw it blink.

Wayne said, “That’s some really impressive animatronics.”

And then we realized… it wasn’t animatronic.

It was a real live 1800 lb male bison that my 13 year old daughter was walking up to.

Obviously, we stopped Abbie immediately and called her back… she had gotten about 8 feet from the thing.

The bison started scratching his head against the rock he was standing next to shortly after that.

I went back into the lodge and said, “There’s a male bison out there, and we thought it was stuffed, so my daughter almost went up and touched it.”

“Oh, don’t do that!

That’s Carl!

He comes down out of the hills and hangs out here sometimes.”

Carl was still out there when we came out to go to the jeep, and we looked at him again and were just amazed at his size.

The National Park Service actually has started a campaign in the last few years that says “Do not pet the fluffy cows,” because of the increase in people who have thought that the bison in South Dakota and Yellowstone were so docile and calm that they were somehow domesticated.

And people have been severely injured in their run-ins with these far-from-domesticated animals, who are both powerful and fast.

It’s actually recommended that you stay at least 25 YARDS away from bison if you’re not in a vehicle.

In honor of our experience with Carl, we bought each of the kids a t-shirt with the “Do not pet the fluffy cows” warning sign.

So: was fearing Carl right and reasonable and rational?

Yes.

Were we terrified of Carl?

No. Did we respect him?

Absolutely.

Was this wise?

Completely.

Now, please hear that I am by no means in this message comparing God to Carl the bison.

I’m just using our experience to get us thinking about the correlation between fear and wisdom.

So where does wisdom come from?

How would we define it?

And how does it relate to fear and God?

1) Wisdom is defined by God Himself.

My standard way of defining wisdom is that wisdom is knowing how to live a life that glorifies God.

The reason that this definition makes sense to me is because of where wisdom comes from in the first place.

It comes from God Himself.

He determines what is wise, just like He determines what is true, on the basis of His own character.

What is true is what coincides with reality, and God is the ultimate reality and thus, the definer of truth.

Likewise, God’s wisdom is perfect because His character is perfect: He never makes a mistake, an error, a bad decision, or a failure.

Therefore, human wisdom is what coincides with God’s wisdom, which always brings Him glory.

Job, when discussing his situation with his “friends,” expressed an ode to wisdom in chapter 28 of that book:

And in Proverbs 8, where Solomon writes what wisdom would say if it were a person, he writes something very similar to what we see in Job:

As we have seen several times throughout our study of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth’s point in the decisions that he made and then in writing this book is to see what the benefit of wisdom or work or wealth were “under the sun:” in the normal flow of human life in the world, and most of what he’s discovered so far in our study has been hevel: meaningless or futile.

As Trevor mentioned last week, part of the reality of living under the sun is that God created the world with certain limitations placed on us, and those limitations are set by Him.

One of the fascinating parts of humanity is that we constantly want to push against those limits, to go our own way and to do our own thing.

We see this all the way back at the Fall of humanity in Genesis 3.

There was ONE moral limitation placed on the humanity in the Garden.

And it was the one place humanity decided to push against.

And we still do this.

We think that God’s ideas of wisdom are somehow less than our own—that we know and always do what is wise and moral and right and holy, and that somehow He doesn’t.

This is a position of arrogance, pride, and idolatry.

The truth is that we don’t see life the way that God sees life, and we don’t think the way God thinks.

He is completely and totally beyond us: