God Knows Best

Big Idea: Stop! Look at what God is giving you, and quit looking for what you want Him to give you.

Ecc. 3:1-8 - Time

Verse 1

The institution of Time

Time is a product of God’s Creation

A tool we use to help us understand and interact with the rest of God’s creation.

Verse 2-8

A poem about Time

Aspects of a complete life, or demonstrates God’s thoroughness.

Demonstrates that God’s creation is complete and orderly, not random.

Therefore, we are complete and orderly.

God has a purpose for us. He alone knows what that purpose is. He alone knows how make that purpose a reality.

However, we will often make decisions that get in the way or slow it down.

1st Fill-In-The-Blank: Does God know the timing that is best for you?

YES!

Are you seeking His timing or yours?

Are you willing to change your timeline for His?

He is all-knowing, and even created time itself.

Timeline Illustration

Personal Illustration

Ecc. 3:9-15 - Seek God

Verses 9-11

Ultimately we have no gain for our work.

God has given us things to do.

What God has given us to do is both beautiful and appropriate for His plan.

His plan involves His entire creation, and we are just a piece.

We realize that we know there were things before us, and there will be things after us.

We don’t have the ability to understand the magnitude of God and His plan.

However, we want to; don’t we!

Verses 12-13

We should take joy in what God has given to us.

The work that God has given to us is a gift for us to take pleasure in.

Which is why we should be seeking God to help us figure out what we need to do.

Instead of seeking to try to understand the vast scope of reality.

Verses 14-15

God is everlasting and so is all that He does.

God has done these things to be revered and worshipped by His creation.

God is seeking us! Because we have been driven away because of sin.

2nd Fill-In-The-Blank: Are you seeking God or Understanding?

Meaning are you trying to build a relationship with God, or are you trying to figure out God and His creation.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of using the Bible as a textbook. Instead treat it like God’s Journal. So, that as you read it you grow closer to Him.

Textbook Illustration

Ecc. 3:16-22 - Eternal Life

Verses 16-17

Even if you are the most righteous or just person you are still wicked.

There are many examples of righteous and just people succumbing to wickedness in the Bible.

David, Moses, Solomon, Abraham

Romans 3:22-23 “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”

Sin is an infectious disease that only one was immune to, and He also holds the cure.

Spoiler: It’s Jesus

Verses 18-21

How are we any different from the animals?

We start and end the same.

We live the same; eat, drink, breathe, sleep.

Genesis 1:26-27 “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

We are created in the image of God and the animals are not.

We are created to rule over the animals.

We were created to have a relationship with God, and the animals were not.

Verse 22

Apart from Jesus we are no better than the animals, because we don’t have that relationship with God.

3rd Fill-In-The-Blank: Who can bring you to see what will be after you?

Jesus

Illustration with school

Salvation

PRAYER