Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: Ecc 3:1-11

N:

Welcome

Good morning to those of you here in the room and those of you online, and welcome to Family Worship service with Eastern Hills Baptist Church.

My name is Bill Connors, and if you’re visiting the family of EHBC for the first time, thanks for being here!

It’s great to have you with us today.

You’ll find a connection card in the back of the pew in front of you, it’s this black card with “WELCOME” on the front.

If you wouldn’t mind filling that out during the service and either bringing it down to me at the end of the service, or dropping it in the plates as you leave later on, I would appreciate it.

We’d love to get to know you better.

If you’d rather fill out a form online, you can do that by texting the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004, and you’ll get a link back that takes you to our digital communication card.

I’d like to take just a moment as say thanks to our praise band, Worship 4:24, who are so dedicated to leading our church family in musical praise and worship each week.

Announcements

Well, we’re one week away from the launch of Endeavor.

I’m really excited about it, and I’m thrilled that we’re going to be on this discipleship journey together, considering the work that God has done in bringing this church together in this place at this time for His purposes, what He wants to do in and through us in the years to come, and how we can be involved in His work through our prayers, generosity, commitment to our church family and our neighbors, and our pursuit of Him.

Please plan to be here every Sunday morning if at all possible for the next five Sundays as we start this Endeavor together!

Also, the Endeavor Prayer Team has set aside a special time for worship and prayer as a church family, which we’re calling Endeavor to Worship.

It will be held here in the Sanctuary on Thursday night, October 20 (not this Thursday, but next), at 6:30 pm.

Please set aside this time to come and worship the Lord and pray as a church body.

Finally, for the last 5 Sundays, we’ve watched videos relating to our Mission New Mexico offering to support the ministries of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico throughout our State.

We take up this special offering each Sunday in September and October.

Our church goal this year was $10,000.

As of last Sunday, we have given $10,491!

Thank you church!

If you haven’t had the chance to give to this offering and would like to do so, you still can.

Just because we’ve exceeded our goal doesn’t mean you can’t give to this important offering.

We’ll continue to mention and update each week through October 30.

Opening

Today, we will finish up our series on Ecclesiastes.

Now that we’ve preached through it, it’s kind of funny.

I regret that we subtitled it “The Meaningless & the Mundane of Life.”

Instead, I think we should have subtitled it “Life Under the Sun.”

I can say that before preparing for this series, I’m not sure that I had fully grasped the meaning behind the message of Ecclesiastes.

We started with the Vanity of Life back on September 4, and in that opening message from the first chapter, we saw the question that permeates the entire book: “What in the world can bring meaning to life?”

And Solomon’s answer is definitive: “NOTHING!”

There is nothing under the sun that can bring our lives ultimate, eternal meaning.

For that, we’d need something radically different than anything that we’ve seen before.

Since then, we’ve looked at what it looks like to trust God even though we struggle, where we find our identity, how we can face doubt, and what it means to have wisdom: to fear the Lord.

This morning, we’re going to return to our initial question to close out the book, by considering what is the most well-known passage in the whole book: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11.

Let’s stand as we are able to in honor of God’s holy Word and read this passage this morning:

PRAYER (First Baptist Church of Bernalillo, Pastor Al Carroll)

There are lots of people who have never opened a Bible who know what it says (though not in exactly this order), because the song written from it “Turn!

Turn! Turn!” as recorded by The Byrds was the number one hit single in late 1965.

Some of you are singing it in your heads now, aren’t you? “To everything (turn, turn, turn) there is a season (turn, turn, turn)...” Only seven words of that song don’t come from verses 1-8 of Ecclesiastes 3.

But do we know what this passage means and how to apply it?

Let me start by saying this: there are times when I have no choice but to preach a message that I haven’t fully assimilated into my life and thinking.

Just because I don’t fully get it doesn’t mean that it’s not true, or that I somehow have no business sharing the truth that the Bible contains.

With that said, I need to share that in very practical ways God helped me to apply our focal passage this week to my own life.

I’m not going to go into details, because the details don’t matter, but I had a kind of tumultuous week.

And I’m going to be honest with you: I didn’t handle it very well.

Even though I knew what I was preaching and had my outline basically done on Monday morning, it would appear that I didn’t really get the message that God was giving me in our focal passage of Scripture, so I was given the opportunity by God to really apply it.

And I’m not afraid to admit, because we’re family here, that I didn’t do a particularly good job.

It’s true.

I even thought through this passage several times while I was in the midst of the turmoil, but still didn’t apply it well.

Want to know why? I’ll say for two reasons: 1) I can be selfish; and 2) I bought into the false idea that somehow, a person who follows God should have it easier, which let back to #1: selfishness in the form of feeling sorry for myself.

It’s silly and it’s sinful, and it’s something that I needed to repent of before I could get my head and my heart in the right place for writing my message.

God needed to do some work on the heart of your pastor this week, folks.

I’m glad that He did.

I’m really preaching to my own heart first this morning.

So before we talk about how we might apply this passage, we need to look at it first.

What does this well-known passage mean?

It’s telling us about all of life.

1) This is life “under the sun.”

As I said in my opening before reading our focal passage, life “under the sun” is what Ecclesiastes is all about.

It’s The Teacher, Qoheleth, King Solomon, looking back on his life and seeing it as a field trip that he took in order to answer that initial question “What in the world can bring meaning to life?”

And now we have the opportunity to learn in the classroom of his experience.

He opens with a statement that might confuse us:

So The Teacher says that there is an “occasion” and a “time” for everything: every activity under heaven, which is another way of saying “under the sun.”

So we might think that we’re about to receive advice about how life should look.

But what we’re actually reading in verses 1-8 of chapter 3, isn’t advice.

We don’t see Solomon telling us anything other than what happens in life “under the sun.”

He’s not telling us when these “occasions” and “times” are for everything, or when they ought to occur, as if he’s being prescriptive.

He’s being descriptive—he’s just telling us what he’s seen about how life IS.

We’re going to quickly look at verses 2-8, just making a few stops to bring some explanation to them.

I have never studied this passage with the depth that I did this week, and I don’t want to bore us with a lot of academia and language stuff.

A lot of these are pretty straightforward and clear.

But there’s three things that I noticed in my study that I think help us to understand this passage a little better.

First, we need to remember that verse numbers weren’t added to the Hebrew Old Testament until the 15th century.

However, when Rabbi Nathan did this, he put two lines per verse in this passage.

This retained an important aspect of the poetry of this section, as Hebrew poetry often uses what’s called a chiastic structure, where the parts of stanzas correspond to each other.

This is a form of parallelism, where the lines say almost the same thing, just with a couple of words changed.

And each pair of lines shares a basic theme between them.

I’ll start with verse 2 as our example:

“Give birth” and “plant” correspond to each other, as do “die” and “uproot,” so you can see the chiastic structure.

You can also see the parallelism, because they are the same words, with just those terms changed.

The third thing I need to mention is that each line is what is called a merism.

This is when you say the extremes of something to explain it’s total being.

So “give birth” and “die” refer to our entire life cycle.

“Plant” and “uproot” refer to the entire life cycle of a crop.

There are other examples of merisms in Scripture as well:

“Heaven” and “earth” are a merism including everything that God made.

There are actually three merisms in this verse alone: “Alpha/Omega” (literally the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet), “first/last,” “beginning/end.”

God is all in all.

Nothing is beyond Him, and everything owes its existence to Him.

He is necessary, everything else is contingent.

So we need to notice those things: chiastic parallelism, merism, and theme as we look at these seven verses in Ecclesiastes.

What would the theme of verse 2 be?

All of life has limits: a beginning and an end.

The word for “kill” here is not “murder.”

In fact, this word is most often used of taking a life in battle, or even for destroying a nation.