Fear God, Literally

Well we are back in our study of Ecclesiastes, a book of perspective on how to live life under the sun. Today we are in chapter 5 so if you have your Bible’s turn there with me. So far, we have found that Solomon gives us some incredibly helpful wisdom as it pertains to enjoying life: lower your expectations so that you can increase your joy. Solomon says, our problem is, we expect too much from the good gifts of God. We want the gifts of God to be God, to fulfill us in ways that only God can. And the gifts backfire tremendously when we try to forcefully extract fulfillment from them in this way.

Here’s an illustration. Cats and humans have a symbiotic relationship. Humans like to pet cats and cats like to be petted by humans (on their terms of course). So we benefit from one another. Now, we’ve all had the experience where we bring home the baby kitten. And the thing is so adorable and cuddly with their shaking little limbs and their developing infant purr and their tiny meow and their rough little tounge. I mean there’s something that goes off inside of you that can’t help but nuture that thing. And to a kid this desire is way powerful and completely uncontrollable. And so the kid just smothers the cat. And he’s choking the poor thing and the abdomen is getting compressed in some horrific ways and the eyes are bulging. And out come the claws and the kid gets scratched in the eye and he goes away screaming that the cat doesn’t love him.

That’s an illustration of how so many of us approach life. Life is intended to be enjoyed:

Work is intended to be fulfilling.
Marriage is intended to be enjoyable and stimulating.
Kids are intended to be entertaining. All that is good.

But it can only deliver so much. It’s intended to be petted and not strangled. Money can’t fulfill you. Kids won’t stay small forever. Marriages won’t be non-stop bliss. And if we try to strangle them and demand that they yield beneath our squeeze we get clawed in the eye.

This is the lesson that Solomon has been teaching us. It’s a wonderful lesson. It’s a counterintuitive lesson. In order to increase your joy, stop strangling the gifts God has given you. Stop expecting them to fill this giant void inside your heart that only God can fill and instead just pet it. Just allow the gift to do what it was designed to do and pursue God for fulfillment.

Now last week Deral taught us from Ecclesiastes chapter 4. And if you remember from last week, Solomon is pointing out the problems that will always exist under the sun. And there’s two problems he points out.

So Problem #1: There are those who are oppressed and are not happy.

The tears of the oppressed will always be with us.
There is an acuteness to the loneliness of the oppressed.
Poverty and injustice are like flies that just buzz around us and land on our food at inopportune times. Nobody will figure out how to create a world in which justice prevails.

So the oppression of the powerless is a big problem. Not having power is a cause of great unhappiness. Problem #1: Those who are in power are not happy either: - Greed is the engine that drives everything.
- Envy is the locomotive of progress. - No matter how much money, power, influence a person has, they will always want more.

So in chpater 4 Solomon observes these two problems and says this world is broken. The problems are unfixable. You’ll be miserable if you are the oppressor and you will be miserable if you are oppressed.

Chapter 4 is Solomon describing the exasperation of the kitten suffocator. He’s just squeezing and squeezing and squeezing.

Why isn’t life the way I want it? Give me what I want!
Why can I ever get enough?
I thought this job was going to be so great.
Why does my marriage have all these problems?
Why are all these innocent people suffering?
Why doesn’t this house or vacation or new car satisfy?
Why can’t I find justice?
Why is there inequality?
Why is my marriage not what I hoped it would be?
Why did my kids turn out different than I expected?

In all these questions there’s an expectation of fulfillment, isn’t there?

This should fulfill me and how dare it not.

And the guy in this state is just squeezing and squeezing and squeezing ….and all these wonderful gifts of God are clawing his eyes out.

Now chapter 5 addresses the guy whose in this state. He addresses the kitten squeezer, the guy whose just full of questions and exasperated and feels like he’s justified at tossing accusations against God for the ways in which the world has let him down. This dumb cat you gave me, all he does is scratch at my eyes.

And here’s the summary of what God wants to say to those of us feeling this way. He’s got two commands: Listen Carefully. Speak Carefully.

If you want to understand this life and have joy you are going to have to listen carefully and speak carefully. God says let me tell you how to handle this life such that it won’t scratch your eyes.

Let’s take a look at this first point: Listen Carefully.

How do we handle this world so our eyes don’t get scratched out? We need to stop talking and listen carefully. What is so bad about talking? He gives us three things to consider:

See this in the text itself.

There’s a progression of thought.

Notice first, there is an ignorance described. They do not know that they are doing evil.
Well what is this evil thing they are doing, this thing they think is good but is in fact evil?
They are offering a sacrifice. Well that sounds quite nice. How can that be evil? Well the text calls it a sacrifice of fools.
Now in the context here, what is the sacrifice of fools? This entire section is about our speech and words. So the sacrifice of fools is the words they speak, their confident opinion. Fools give their opinion. They speak openly, freely, often believing their words to be good and wanted, even needed.

And this is evil. Why is talking too freely evil? There are tons of answers; the proverbs is chalk full of insights into this.

Speaking too much is evil because it can be a form of self-love. The fool according to this passage just loves himself and to hear himself satisfies himself. The reason it’s foolish is because he has the wrong goal.

The end goal is not understand.
The end goal is to hear himself.

So those who have the goal of hearing themselves can’t self evaluate.

Why is over-speaking evil? Because there’s no self suspicion. In order to self-evaluate you have to believe that there is something in you that needs to be evaluated and changed. The fool vents his spirit with no such suspicion. A wise man knows that what’s inside his spirit shouldn’t always be vented. The wise man understands that there are parts of his spirit that are toxic. I distrust myself. I know that what I want to say is probably not good. It would feel good to release these words pent up inside but I need to temper my immediate impulse. That’s wisdom.

When in particular do we really feel built up pressure to talk. I think the greatest pressure happens when we don’t like something and we feel the need to open our mouth and COMPLAIN.

The political system is letting me down in some way
My neighbors are annoying to me
My friends aren’t following through

And whether it’s conscience or not, these complaints to people are ultimately complaints to God. The kitten squeezer says, “God why is this world not making me happy?” And he vents and tell God about his disappointments. He’s in the mood to explain to God his mismanagement of the universe.

But instead of venting what should he do? Answer from the text: Draw near to listen.

Listening is a fundamental shift of the disposition. It’s a massive paradigm shift. Listening puts you in the opposite mode of talking. We have to understand that both listening and talking are important; however, they are opposites. You are either listening or talking. You can’t do both. It’s a binary thing. God has given us serial interfaces not parallel.

You see you have to use the right tool to self-evaluate!

Picture the heart like a tank with a hose coming out of it. That hose is directional. You either pump water into the tank or you siphon water out of the tank. You have to choose. You can’t be simultaneously filling and emptying the tank through the same hose.

So listening is filling. Talking is emptying. If you are talking you can’t be listening. If you are listening you can’t be talking.

So the question is this: "When you come before God, what mode are you in?" Are you in listening mode where he is filling your heart? Or are you in talking mode where out of your heart you are informing God? Given the being before you, what is more appropriate?

When you talk, you are in a mode where you are taking all the data, all the knowledge and all the information you have about the world and you are making some assertion based on that data. You are making best-guess statements about the nature of reality based on your current understanding of the world. SO LONG AS YOU ARE TALKING, that cannot change. In order to change, you have to stop talking and start listening. You have to let the hose go the other direction. You have to fill your mind with information you don’t yet have in order to have a different conception of the world. You have to stop talking and listen in order to be informed differently so that you will then talk differently and experience life differently and more in alignment with reality.

A person who arrogantly speaks and lets us know he’s right can’t be convinced that he or she is wrong until what? Until he or she stops talking and starts listening.
A child who whines and complains that things aren’t fair can’t be convinced that in fact the verdict is fair until what? Until he or she stops talking.

Talking plugs the ears. You fill the tube with outbound opinions so that no other perspectives are allowed. Inbound perspective doesn’t have a chance when we talk. Some people never change because they talk too much.

Of course listening is very important interpersonally, but that’s not the type of listening mentioned? The text is talking about our relationship with God. Within our personal relationships, it is often the case that when they speak to you to try to inform you of reality, they are wrong. Not so with God. Every time you listen to him, he is telling you something that shapes your conception of reality in a true direction. EVERY time you listen to God, your world is transformed so that next time you choose to speak, it is more accurate.

So if you are crying out for answers to a problem in your life?
If you are struggling thinking that something isn’t fair?
If you are struggling with contentment and can’t figure out why?
If you are just absolutely at the end of yourself because you can’t fix something in your life that is causing turmoil and stress and frustration, what does this text tell us to do?

Stop talking. It’s not wrong to talk. God wants you to bring your requests to him. He is honored that you would turn to him and ask him why? But at some point, the questions need to end and you need to start listening for answers. And I mean really listening.

God gives us answers to our questions in the Bible. And most of us know those answers. We just don’t like them.

The problem is not the answers. The problem is us. If God’s answers do not feel satisfying, we need to listen deeper. We need to really start listening with fresh ears, question the presuppositions that make those answer feel uncompelling.
Talking Reveals Arrogance
So Solomon is explaining the danger of talking too much, especially as it relates to God. He says be careful not to talk too much because talking prevents self-evaluation. He give a second reason.

Let’s see this in the text.

Now the point here is very simple. We are not experts on everything even though we think we are. I saw a cartoon this week that made me laugh.

We all think we are experts at everything. Solomon says, be careful. Be not rash with your mouth. Know your place. Know your credentials compared to others around you. Know your qualifications. Know your limits. Imagine standing in a room with a group of people and someone asks, "Hey, what do you think the chances are we will get corona virus?" Now you’ve read a lot of articles. And you’ve looked at the real-time maps and you’ve got the statistics and so you confidently give your opinion.

Now what if standing in that room was Brian Garibaldi the world’s leading expert on respitory diseases, a PhD from John Hopkins who leads the biocontainment unit. Would you kind of feel dumb having vented your opinion. Absolutely. Now, just translate that. Translate it.

God you don’t know what you are doing here allowing this suffering in the world.
Here’s what we need to do. You need to stop this misfortune. You need to reverse this crisis.
You need to give me a better marriage, more money, well-behaved kids.

Your just speaking out of ignorance. God is in heaven and we are on earth. It’s time to listen not speak.

This is not a power play. This is not God saying to you, “shut up fool.” This is a call to reasonableness. Do you realize what a privilege this is. We have the most brilliant mind in the universe before us now is giving us answers to our questions. God is here. Stop talking and give him the mic so we don’t waste an ounce of time. If the answers are not satisfying, who should you suspect needs to change…me or him?

This is a call to observe that answers are actually here for the taking, and given his credentials, every word that comes out of his mouth are pearls to be collected.

Let me ask you, to love this book. Do you see it as totally worth lapping up. Are you ready to be transformed by it? When you read sections that don’t square very well with our culture, do you shy away and try to cover up those pages or do you press in?

I think this is the greatest change that’s happened to me personally as I’ve grown in the past 10 years. I actually love it when I read something in the Bible that rubs be the wrong way because I know we’ve come upon something in me that’s totally off and needs correcting. I would never say it that way, which means I’m messed up. I’m robbing myself of joy because I have a misconception of how the world ought to be.

You have to approach God ready to listen. You do have to pause and be prepared to surrender an entire worldview that is incorrect. What if I actually changed my believe that this world is all about me and made it all about him? What if our happiness comes from making it about God not us. And you say, “Well isn’t that self-centered of God.” Ah, are you listening or talking?

If God was a good God why would he allow suffering? The Bible says suffering refines us. “Well how come God couldn’t do that another way?” Are you listening or are you talking?

Meditate on the answers the Bible gives for the questions you have. Really listen. Say to yourself, “What if I oriented my worldview around those answers, instead of around my conception of how things ought to be.”

Have you ever started an argument convinced you were right and ended up so surprised that you were 100 percent wrong? Take that experience to the bank with God. You will never be right and God wrong. So, just assume it from the start.

He is big. I am small.
He is smart. I am dumb.
He is patient. I am not.
He lives a long time. I don’t.
He is powerful. I am weak.

And you listen and you listen and you listen and then you trust God. You don’t trust yourself.

Here’s where we see that in the text.

When I was a kid I had a job where I had to move spinkler pipe. I had to do it twice a day on a schedule and I was always so scared I would forget or not wake up on time. And so I’d basically just dream all night about moving sprinkler pipe and wake up and I’d have to do it all over again. I felt like getting paid double.

It’s under these conditions, it’s in this state of activity, inevitably that dreams will come. The precondition for dreams is activity. And in the same way, the precondition for foolishness is talking.

Not all who talk are fools but all fools talk. The more you talk the more liable you are to reveal whatever foolishness exists in your heart. I’ve heard it said this way.

We all have foolishness in us. It’s just inevitable. You may say wise things, helpful things, really insightful things. But the foolishness is there and with enough words, eventually you are going to reveal your ignorance.

The difference between the wise man and the fool is not the amount of foolishness inside. Both are equal part fools. The difference is that the wise man suspects that it is there and so he shuts up. The fool vents and believes that all care.

Now, I want to add one more qualifier here for a certain type of person. You may be saying to yourself, “I know these kind of people. Man they bug me. Just talk, talk, talk. All they do is just talk.” Be careful with that mental conversation you are having with yourself, because that is a form of talking as well.

In fact, it’s the most common way of speaking too many words. It is the conversation going on in your head.

You can be a very quiet person and still be a total fool who never listens by having this conversation going on in your head that blocks what someone is telling you. Maybe a boss or spouse or sibling or friend is trying to tell you something but your mental conversation is blocking it.

“That’s not right. He’s not being fair. She’s just got a grudge.”
What an idiot. I can’t believe they are trying to explain that when they are just as bad at it.
Man, the audacity to confront me in my position. I’m far more qualified.
I’m the one with experience on this. Do they really think they can teach me?
That person has an emotional IQ of 3. What right do they have to instruct me on people skills?

The hardest thing to listen to is other people’s unflattering evaluation of us. That’s really hard to accept. It attacks us in our pride. It might look like you are listening but really your just talk, talk, talk, talk….hose is going out and nothing is going in.

What if I really accepted my spiritual condition as God said it was. What if I really listened and accepted the grace as God explains it to me? What if I stopped insisting I know how it ought to be and change certain parts of my thinking to align with what the Bible clearly says.

So that’s the first point. Listen Carefully. Now you might think it wrong to speak at all given the risk of being foolish. But that’s not the case. God wants you to speak. He just wants you to speak carefully. So the second part of fearing God is speaking carefully.

So God wants us to speak carefully and with circumspect. He wants us to analyze and consider our words and weigh the words we want to say against a healthy suspicion of our own heart. Look at it carefully in the text.

Now the point here is that a wise man will speak to God knowing his weakness. He will be very careful to vow anything because he knows how easy it is to break a vow. And he understands that with enough broken promises, with enough lies, eventually a person’s words mean nothing.

A fool on the other hand, will paper over his problems with vows. He will get angry at their kids or spouse or whatever and feel terrible. And then in a fit of resolve he will deceive himself and say with all sorts of conviction, “I promise, I’ll never do it again.” And he and he alone is the only one convinced. Everyone else has been trained and conditioned to ignore it. In fact, the vow is painful to even hear. It’s so unbelievable.

It’s such a self-deception. It’s like the guy whose a collector and shows you his collection. And there’s hundreds of antiques. And you ask, “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff. How much did all this cost.” The answer that comes back is almost certainly not the true answer. It is the human tendency to hide the real cost. Oh, I got a smokin deal on this baseball card. But he didn’t tell you the story about the giant loss that’s hidden in the closet. The financial reality is the collection is a waste of money. The bottom line is he got reamed. Stop telling yourself you got a good deal.

Why do we deceive ourselves. Why is it when people golf they always say, “Give me a 4 on that one” when they really got a 6 but you never hear a guy say, “Give me a 12 on that one when he really got 4”

We lie to ourselves. Why do we do this? Because it’s hard to be honest with our failure. We don’t like to look at the parts of us that are not very commendable.

The guy who is quick to speak doesn’t want to look at that black pit. He doesn’t stop and consider how likely it is that he will keep his promise. It certainly feels sincere so let’s go with that. The wise man will resist that impulse and consider the factual reality that these feelings will pass and the real problem within me will surface again. And so he will restrain and temper his words and dial back the vows and promises to a realistic level.

This is important because words create or break trust. I see this all time. I’ll have a couple come into my office and sit down and want to talk about their marriage. And I can see in 5 seconds, this poor couple, they don’t trust each other. All trust is broken.

How did that happen? It happened through vow after vow after vow after vow being broken. It happened by them saying, “I promise I’ll never do it again, and then it happens again.” And eventually their words are like monopoly money that don’t have any value.

No, be sober minded in your promises. We are weak people and we cannot promise much. God can do miracles, and we trust in that, but we can do so little.

Don’t putty over the seriousness of your problems with shiny words and vows.

Don’t do that kind of stuff with God. You can’t trick him. You can’t pull the wool over his eyes. Don’t “promise to God that you won’t ever do it again.” Stop talking. Just listen. Just listen to the problem. Just let the reality of it soak in.

And once you realize, “Oh, this is a foundation problem.” Then you’ll be in the place to make realistic promises. This isn’t going to be fixed today. I need to first go to Lowe’s and buy some tools. Tuesday is the drywall demo day. Then we have to repour the foundation. Then we frame. Then we brace. Rehang sheetrock.

Vow something you can keep, after you have listened to God as to what the real problem is.

God I promise, then when I fail, I will make no promises about my future success. And when I break that promise and you reveal it to me, I will repent.
That’s about the only promise you can vow that has no expiration date. Who in their right mind, can promise something forever?

Put a time limit on your resolution. Lord, for the next 10 minutes, I am going to pray to you. You can likely do that.
Put a boundary. I can’t care for everyone in the world, but when I get home from work today, with your help Lord, I’m going to ask good questions and really listen to my family for the first 15 minutes before I do anything else that I want to do. You can keep that.

And if your heart nags at you that you may not be able to keep a promise like that, well then, DONT PROMISE. Just keep listening instead.

This language comes right out of the text.

God is pleased with the wise and is angry at fools. He is angry at those who speak rashly and pleased with those who speak circumspectly.

Now don’t read into this point. God likes talkers. This isn’t a criticism for daily word count. We need talkers. If you are a talker, God made you with that disposition. Without talkers, there would be no life groups. Imagine how awkward it would be. Praise God for talkers.

This isn’t a point about personality. It’s a point that whether you use a lot of words or fewer words, how you use those words is important. What we mean when we say, “Fewer words please God” we mean fewer than what you would have said without first stopping to think.

We need to think about how we use words. What are the consequences of using this word in the way I am using it? Diluting language is one of the most dangerous things we can do and it seems so innocent.

C.S. Lewis once wrote a book called, “Letters to children” where he gives 5 tips for writing. If all that was taught in writing classes worldwide were those five tips, the world would be 300% better at writing. Tip #5 is this.

When we say, fewer words please God, this is what we mean. If you use awesome to talk about your dryer, what word do you have left to describe the truly ‘awesome’ God. It didn’t seem like any big deal when you said it. It seemed so innocent.

If someone tells you every single week that you are are doing an awesome job then it stops meaning anything. You can only ‘please’ that person if their are fewer words.

When you make a vow and you break it, you not only break the vow, you break other people’s trust in your words, but perhaps the worst of all, you break your trust in your own words.

Your words over time start to mean nothing and you don’t believe that nothing is sacred, everything is common and change is not possible. When that happens, the enemy has won.

All of our words are like mini oaths. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “let your yes be yes and your no be no." Instead of having to qualify everything you say, "okay, this time I’m super serious. Last time I was just serious but this time I’m super-ultra serious.” Wouldn’t it be better if what you said is what you meant.

Gravity doesn’t have to remind you with an oath that if you fall, you will get hurt. It keeps its word every time and is severely respected.

For our book club this month we’ve been reading the journals of Lewis and Clark. And it just cracks me up to listen to him understate everything.

He says things like, “The mercury fell to 20 below zero this evening and I had but a light coat. The cold left me unsettled and not as well as I had hoped.”

He describes trudging through feet of snow, frostbitten, sawing off people’s toes, with the most reserved language, “It was an unpleasant night." There’s one point in the book where he says, "I was the coldest I had ever been in my entire life.” I said to myself, that dude was cold.

How do people hear your words? How does your exaggeration hurt your reputation? Where are you overconfident? How do you break your promise?

With regard to God, where does your language mix the common and the divine. You are sacrilegious with your words. You speak of God too casually.

This is why I generally dislike Christian satire. Satire has a place. Yes, the Babylon Bee can be funny, but way too often, a linguistic concept is desecrated so that there is nothing left to talk about the sublime.

This, by the way, is the reason that God does not want us to take the Lord’s name in vain. Don’t use it in a trivial manner. Don’t be casual and non-serious in it’s usage. Don’t make associations with it which would drag it down to the common.

What happens when it’s time to now be a messenger for the seriousness of the God we serve? You have nothing left. You have no captiol from which to draw. Your reputation is untrustworthy and so your testimony to the greatness and gloriousness of our God counts for very little. In the court of people’s minds, your testimony is thrown out. This is among the most tragic of situations.

It’s the boy who cried lamb….you are John the Baptist crying, “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” But you’ve cried lamb too many times.

In a court setting you can absolutely discount the power of someone’s testimony by attacking the character of the witness. If the witness is accustomed to lying, is flippant, is known to hang out with the wrong crowd, well then, this is going to really change the way that testimony is heard. That is what is being said here.
Application
Now this sermon is entitled, “Fear God, literally.” When you get on an airplane, you can’t say, “I’ve got a bomb” and then say, “Oh I was just joking.” You can tell that this is not a joking matter. They want to speak carefully and listen carefully because it’s serious and important.

So this is Solomon’s conclusion. When it comes to God, listen more than you speak and do both carefully. How do we enjoy life under the sun? You listen carefully to God. When something isn’t going your way, let your first impulse be to listen. And when you do speak, speak carefully to him. Boom. That was simple. That’s how you fear the Lord.

Let’s close by speaking carefully to our good and gracious God.