Ecclesiastes 5 - Ground Rules For Dealing With God
Tom Shrader teaches from Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 about the proper way to approach God, emphasizing that God sets the rules for the relationship, not us. He outlines four key principles: listen more than you speak, don't make hasty promises, keep the commitments you make, and understand who you're dealing with - an awesome God worthy of reverential fear. Shrader challenges the cultural tendency to bring our casual, customer-oriented attitudes into our relationship with God, stressing that He is unchanging and non-negotiable in His standards.
“We study the Word of God so we might know the God of the Word.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Reflections From the Top of the Heap (2007)
Recorded: May 24, 2007
Duration: 39 min
Themes: reverence, listening, commitment, promises, respect, humility, obedience, worship, struggling with commitment, new believer, casual christian, making promises, worship leader, young adult, seeking deeper relationship, pastor
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 5:1-7, Ecclesiastes 1:2-3, Isaiah 6, Psalm 119, Isaiah 55:8
Theological Themes: fear of god, reverence, covenant keeping, biblical worship, divine authority, gods sovereignty, proper worship, reverent fear
Full Transcript
If you have your Bibles or your app or whatever you're using, open to the book of Ecclesiastes. It's been fun studying this book together. You all have been so complimentary of this study, and I love the book because it seems to me it just lays open life.
This is Solomon at the end of his life, and he's writing not a memoir as much as a reflection. It's a smidgen more philosophical it seems to me. It clearly is his story, and by way of reminder, he is the guy that God allowed to have anything you think would make you happy to allow him to experience it, and then to come back and report what he finds.
He doesn't hide it in the middle of the book. He gives it to you right away. Chapter 1, verse 2: "Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless." Then he introduces in verse 3 one of the key phrases of the book: "under the sun."
Solomon's Discovery About Earthly Satisfaction
Here's what he's saying: I can have all of this stuff—achievement, sex, power, fine wine, art, whatever it is. I can have it, but if it's just in the confines of looking horizontally at the world, it's not going to do what I want it to do, which is make me happy or, a better word, satisfy me. It'll be temporary. Solomon then takes that and spends 12 chapters expanding on it.
This week is a little different. I was telling Sandy last night—our discussion at Wednesday night dinner is always "How did P.L. go today?" I told her it's kind of a strange lesson in this sense. Last week we talked about work. Next week we talk about money. Kind of a parenthetical insert in this is a discussion that we've titled, and you have your outlines in front of you, "Ground Rules for Dealing with God."
Understanding God's Unchanging Rules
I like the title for this reason: it tells me there are rules, and it raises the question where do we get the rules? The answer is these are God's rules for dealing with Him. It's not up to you to define it. And they're unchanging.
There's a big discussion happening—baseball's having it, so is golf. Golf's in the process of reexamining for the first time in 50 years a major reexamination of the rules. One of the things they want to do is make the rules easier, which would be helpful, and speed up the game.
This is a mini pause button rant. They're trying to speed up baseball. They're trying to speed up golf. I think it's more of a comment on our culture than it is on those games that after hundreds of years, now we need to speed them up. Baseball's not made to be played fast. It's designed to eat a hot dog, look around, watch the jet, have a beer, have another hot dog, and you're in the bottom of the first. That's the way baseball goes. Putting a clock and doing all that isn't going to speed it up.
Golf is going to be slow, and it's going to get slower with how technical you've made it. You've got all of this thinking going on. I don't know if you saw the Mickelson interview with Faraday, but listening to Phil talk about what he does in a shot, and now every jerk that watched that is going to try to figure out spin rates and arch angles. It's going to take forever to play this game.
The rules in golf, the rules in baseball—they change. Basketball: how much can I guard? Football: they're trying to take less touch out, open up the offense. Then there's so much offense, they're going to give the defense more help. Here's the deal: God's not changing His rules. And He sets them. That's the premise of this lesson today.
Step Number One: Open Your Ears, Not Your Mouth
Ecclesiastes 5, verse 1: "Guard your steps as you go to the house of God, and draw near to listen rather than to offer sacrifice of fools. For they do not know what they're doing is evil."
Let me paraphrase it from Eugene Peterson: "Watch your steps when you enter God's house. Enter to learn. That's far better than mindlessly offering sacrifice. You're doing more harm than good." I need to listen.
I mentioned to you before, and I don't know if I read from this, but for Christmas, Sandy gave me three books. One of them was this book called *The Listening Life*. I don't know if there was a message in the title that she was trying to tell me.
The Natural Order of Listening
The opening paragraph reads: "Listening comes first. In this life, you listen even before you're aware of it. From within the womb, an unborn child is already listening to the voices of her parents. After her birth, she will spend the next months hearing the words they speak, whisper and sing to her until one day she will start echoing these words one imperfect syllable at a time. To master a foreign language, we have to hear it spoken by others before we can reproduce the sound our ears have heard."
Then the author writes this: "Somewhere along the way, we've started to violate the natural order. Speaking our minds and asserting ourselves takes priority over listening. We interrupt someone else because we're convinced we already know what he or she is going to say. We begin to take up more space than we allow for others. We consider ourselves experts on topics without anything more to learn. We tell God what we have to give rather than asking God what He wants us to give."
I need to have this idea of listening. I'm pretty sure that one of the problems we have as a culture—we had this discussion yesterday in a meeting I was in—I've become convinced it's almost going to be impossible to lead anything anymore. Everybody's so fragmented and convinced and polarized, and no one's listening. Rarely taking the opportunity to listen to and understand the other person, whether it's politics, whether it's sport, whatever the discussion is. As Sandy's old phrase goes, we don't have conversations anymore.
We have serial monologues. I talk, and so I'm careful of my words now. I talk, you don't talk. I didn't say I talk and you listen. I talk, you don't talk. When I take a breath, you talk. As you're talking, I'm not listening, I'm formulating my next thought in response to you. We go back and forth, but we can't move the ball down the field in that discussion.
Now I come to God and I bring with me those same habits. God, I want you to know what I'm thinking. God, we've got this situation, here's what I feel. Here's what the Fox News poll says. Here's what the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal combined say.
How God Speaks to Us
Well, how do I hear God? God speaks to me through people and through circumstance. His initial sermon is through creation. So I look around and go, wow. But His primary way of speaking to me is the application of this book, the scripture. There's no way I'm going to know God and know what He wants, and there's no way I'm going to understand me and the world I'm in if I'm not spending time in the scripture.
I'll confess to you, my flinch is I would rather read guys who are writing about the scripture than the scripture. I can't explain why, but I do. And I need to be in that word.
I was with a group of guys Friday and Saturday and part of my privilege in being there is to talk about God stuff. Each time I try to start by laying a foundation of getting on the same page. Getting on the same page starts with agreeing that the Bible is the word of God. It's infallible, it's true. It's our final authority.
The Nature of Scripture
In just studying and reading about the scripture and observations on it, I came across a passage that J.C. Ryle wrote. Ryle's an older guy, dead. They're always usually safer to quote because he's not going to screw it up now. But Ryle writes this: The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, the happiness of believers. Its doctrine is holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, its decisions immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, practice it to be holy.
It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you. It is the traveler's map, the pilgrim's staff, the pilot's compass, the soldier's sword, the Christian charter. Christ, its grand subject, our good, its design, the glory of God, its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart, guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently, prayerfully. It is a mine of wealth, health to the soul, and a river of pleasure.
It's God's ground rules, God's spoken, and God lays them out. It doesn't matter what we feel.
God's Way, Not Our Way
I was invited, I don't know how long ago, to one of the big prayer breakfasts we do in town. Don't do it anymore, big prayer breakfast. So there's close to 2,000 people there. They bring in a speaker, you would all know Him, so we won't mention His name, and He gets up, and He's there because He tells stories, and He's funny, so He's rambling. He happens to be a guy that I don't like. So that makes it a little painful, but then that's a long line, so it could be anybody.
But He says, you know, it's a prayer breakfast, I probably ought to talk about God. Good rule of thumb at a prayer breakfast. And then He said this: Let me tell you, I'm in New York a lot, and if I've got to get from New York to Atlanta, I've got a lot of options. I can take United, or Delta, or whoever else is flying JetBlue. I can go through Charlotte, I can go to Tallahassee and up, Cincinnati and over. I've got a lot of options. And that's the way it is with God. You're here, God's there, and you've got a lot of options, and it really doesn't matter which one you take, it's just that you get from here to God.
So I'm kind of thinking, I would bet the guys that put this together should have probably heard this tape before they invited Him, because that's not the way it is with God. And I didn't make it this way.
In a culture that we have, that more and more and more is user-friendly, customer-oriented, design it your way, you deserve a break today, just the way you want it, all those things. In that world, we're going to bring that cultural bias and perspective to God, but it doesn't work, because God is not somebody who's standing there ready to make whatever it is you're looking for your way. He says, if you want to deal with me, you're going to do it this way, my way, non-negotiable.
There's a book that John Stott wrote, and the title has something to do with church and mission or something, it's a crummy title, but the book was wonderful. And it was relatively small, 120 pages or something. I love the book. I went in the bookstore the other day, and I saw the book there, and it said, updated and expanded. You're never going to go over to the Bible section and see updated and expanded. A timeless God doesn't produce dated material. He said, these are the rules, and we aren't rethinking them. We're not putting together a commission to study it, to reexamine it. This is the way mankind is. This is the way I am.
Knowing God Through His Word
R.C. Sproul writes this: If you wish to know God, you must know His Word. If you wish to perceive His power, you must see how He works through His Word. If you wish to come to know His purpose before it comes to pass, you can only discover it in His Word.
So here you go, key phrase: We study the Word of God so we might know the God of the Word. I don't study the Word of God to know the Word of God. It's by studying the Word of God, I come to know Him.
And here you go, that tees it all up. Because until I know God and understand Him, I'm not going to understand me. But the minute I see Him, I start to see myself in its right perspective. So that's the old Isaiah 6. When Isaiah sees God, His first response is, woe to me for I'm undone. If I compare myself to you, or I compare myself to others, I'm going to do okay. But when I compare myself to God...
Come Quietly and Listen
To God, there's a chasm. I think I've told this story before. When I was in eighth grade, we used to go—so I lived in Davenport, Iowa, which is on the Mississippi. We say the river—what other river would there be? It's the only place in the country where the Mississippi runs east and west. So it's that bottom, if you can see the outline of the state of Iowa, it's that bottom hump. And right across the river, Illinois. The only reason we went over there was the airport was there.
In eighth grade, there was a Catholic church right over the river that had once a month a dance for eighth graders. My grandson is now in fifth grade, and I can see in him the relational awkwardness that starts to come when you realize something's going on. He watches Carl's Jr. ads—he doesn't know what it is, but something there's attracting him beyond the cheeseburger. He doesn't know.
So we're in eighth grade and we hear there's girls and you dance. None of us can dance, but over we go. One of our moms takes us over. About every half hour, they had a dance. I don't remember what they called it. But the rule was this: a couple would be dancing, and four guys would come around them, hold hands around them. And then the girl had to pick one of the four guys to dance with next. And then conversely, four girls, the guy would.
Well, you're already pretty ego fragile. This is immediate rejection. I went through this about three times and I realized the key is I've got to find three guys shorter, fatter, and uglier than me. Doesn't matter if they're nice. Doesn't matter if they've got a good sense of humor. She's going to look around and make a choice. And I had to create an environment where even I look good.
That's why when Sandy and I met—she had been a believer eight years. When God saved her, her life was changed radically. And those of you that know her, she's so disciplined. She said, "A guy will only screw this up. I'm not going to date." And the moral of this story is that after eight years, even I look good to you. That's my point.
Well, that's what I'm trying to create with God. "God, I may not be great, but look at these." And He's going, "No, look at you. And this is who you are. You don't see it." That's why we talk about the Bible as a mirror. I hold it up. I see myself. I find wisdom in it.
The Word of God as Our Mirror
Psalm 119, the longest of the Psalms—obviously I'm not going to read it to you—but it's just peppered with comments on the word of God. "Happy are people of integrity who follow the Lord. Happy are those who obey His decrees. They do not compromise with evil. They walk in His path. Teach me, O Lord, to follow every one of Your principles. O Lord, how I love Your law. I think about it all day long. Your decrees are wonderful."
God is sovereign. So in my ground rule with dealing with God, I want to come—and we're not in any way trying to say don't bring a bunch of questions, don't have a bunch of—we're not saying any of that. We're just saying when you come, come not arrogantly and pridefully, but come humbly and listen to Him for His answers and understand you may not like Him. You may not like the answer He gives. Or His answer may be silence to you.
Isaiah 55:8: "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts. My ways are higher than your ways." So come to God—the old Jewish proverb: God gave us one tongue and two ears and hid the one tongue behind a wall of teeth. Come quietly. Listen.
Don't Make Any Fast Moves
Here's rule number two: don't make any fast moves. Verse two: "Do not be hasty in word or impulsive in thought to bring up a matter in the presence of God." Ecclesiastes 5:2b: "For God is in heaven and you on earth. Let your words be few." In the terminology we use, He's God, you're not.
Ecclesiastes 5:2, according to Eugene Peterson: "Don't shoot your mouth off or speak before you think. Don't be quick to tell God what you think He wants to hear. God's in charge, not you. The less you speak, the better."
Make No Promises You Don't Plan to Keep
And when you do speak, our third point: make no promises you don't plan to keep. Verse four: "When you make a vow to God, do not be late in paying it. For He takes no delight in fools. Pay what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay it." If you say you're going to do something, do it. It matters.
Now, we're talking about big vows before God. Here's Eugene Peterson again: "When you tell God you're going to do something, do it now. God takes no pleasure in foolish gabble. Vow it, then do it. Far better not to vow in the first place than to vow and not pay."
Let Your Yes Be Yes
So we're talking about with God, but in our language and our interchange, let your yes be a yes. It stuns me in dealing with Christians. It stuns me how often they're late for a meeting. I have no file for this. I can't understand it. I cannot understand how you decide you're going to go to the nine o'clock service and somehow you think it's okay to come in there at 9:07.
I don't understand it. And I think it says a ton about you. It's not a small thing. It's disruptive to the whole service. It's disruptive to the people around you. And you say you're going to be there at nine, be there at nine.
Years ago, our women's ministry had an idea that every time we get together, we study something, we do music—let's do something for fun. Seems like that ought to work. And they decide they're going to do a shopping excursion—I don't remember the detail, doesn't matter. So Susan is working with the group that's going to do it and they have 24 ladies sign up. Susan said, "Rent a 12-passenger van."
And of course, the lady, energetic and exciting, is saying, "Well, that's not going to work. We've got 24 people." And she said, "You have 24 people signed up. You're not going to have 24 women show." She said, "They're not going to show up." They had 10. We can now predict.
that you won't keep your vow. That's why, I met with a guy the other day. He's a coach here in town. And one of his former players has asked him to perform a wedding, to marry this young man and his fiancée. And he wanted me to go through the service.
And we're going through it and I said, listen, here's my favorite point to make. The easiest time it is to keep this vow is right now. We got $20,000 worth of flowers. We got a $1,500 cake. You're wearing a $2,000 gown. You've rented a fine tux. But listen to these vows. Better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health. They imply poor, sick, tough times.
And we know, roughly, 50% of the people who have hand selected, in most cases... I don't know, when's the last time, you're old enough to remember this, when's the last time you were at a shotgun wedding? Been a long time. They don't have many of those anymore. And ironically, most of those worked out well enough.
The Problem with Broken Promises
Now we got people hand selecting voluntarily, I love you, for better or worse, richer, poorer, it's beautiful. And every time I do it, I'm going, this is a big deal. And the rehearsal dinner started late, and the rehearsal practice started late, and the service started late. So you got a long track record of not keeping your promises. And this is a big deal.
And when I start to talk about this, it's like people glaze over and go, it doesn't matter. What matters to me, it matters to me if you say eight o'clock and show up at 8:15. You now have a generation, it's fashionable to beat up millennials, so I don't want to pile on. To schedule a meeting with a millennial is brutally difficult. And then when you schedule it, my experience, at least a third of the time, they'll reschedule or cancel. And 90% of the time, they'll be late. And of the 10% they finally arrive, half of them will walk in distracted, which at that point, you should have just stayed away.
These things matter. And He's saying, now, if you're doing that with me, if you say you're going to meet me for coffee at nine and show up at 9:15, or you're going to be in church at 10 and you show up at 10:07, you can't bring that attitude to God.
Don't Try to Void Your Foxhole Contracts
It's the fourth point. They come together and I want to make a giant point. Don't try to void your foxhole contracts. Verse six: "Don't let your speech cause you to sin. Do not say in the presence of the messenger of God that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry on account of your voice and destroy the work of your hand?" Again, paraphrase: don't let your mouth make you a total sinner. When you're called to account, you won't get by with saying, sorry, I didn't mean it.
And I like the term foxhole conversion because we're around enough that we know what that means. It means in a time of desperation, calling out to God. Well, I'm going to give you something here, really important. Every conversion is a foxhole conversion. That's the whole point of conversion. I'm at a point where I'm saying, I'm a sinner, I'm lost. That's all of this.
A Story of Grace and Accountability
And I had totally forgotten about this. And I found a note the other day. I don't know how many years ago. It was a time to do a baby dedication, and a young lady, I'm going to say girl, but a young lady, 15 years old, from the church, came to us. She had a baby, she wasn't married, and she wanted to do a baby dedication.
Well, now we're going to sit. Now, I'm smart enough to know what I want to do, but I'm smart enough to know I'm not going to do it until we all have a conversation, because I know it's going to happen, I know that discussion. Well, she's 15, I understand that. She's not married, I understand that. Are we going to dedicate this baby? And I said, well, yeah, I mean, she loves Jesus, she obviously sinned, she's repented.
So then there's always the super spiritual guy who said, what's the message we're sending to our teenagers? And I said, the message we're sending to our teenagers is God's a God of grace and forgives. It's the same message we're sending to our adults. It's the same message we send at baptism. It's the same message we send with every conversion. Every time I cry out to God in desperation, it's that foxhole moment.
The Reality of Commitment
And here's what He's saying. If you say you're going to do it, do it. I'll never forget the baby dedication, because we were really, this is really going to mess the church up, this is going to be really wrestling with this. And I'm saying, well, not if we do it right.
And when I said, what's the matter? That's the way I did it. There was some concern about this, let's acknowledge it. Allison's single and 15, and she sinned. She can't wear her sin any more boldly than this. And yet in spite of that, she wants to come up here and she wants God and this church to come together to help her in this process. The message we're sending is not sin is okay, but the message we're sending is sin can be forgiven and God's grace is beyond any of our sin. It was, and I know it could have been a disaster. It was really a sweet moment. And it changed my view. It deepened me.
If you're going to make these kind of commitments, then you have to keep them and understand that in the midst of those foxhole conversions, it doesn't mean everything is necessarily going to be okay. There was a man who was in one of our studies and God saved him. And in the next 10 months, his mother died an agonizing death. He had a fiancé that he really loved, she left, and his business failed. That's not the time where you go, oh God, I made this mistake, okay?
God's Purpose in Adversity
Now, you might have made it in your mind and thought, all right, everything's going to be smooth, but it's not necessarily going to be smooth. Here's what God knows about you and me. We go best through adversity, not through good times. I don't do as well. I don't pray as much. I'm not as prone to listen when things are good as when things are bad.
Understand Who You're Dealing With
In verse 7, our final point: "For in many dreams and in many words, there's emptiness. Fear God." Let me give you Eugene Peterson's translation of verse 7: "But against all illusion and fantasy and empty talk, there is always this rock foundation. Fear God."
Reverential awe for God. Understand who you're dealing with. It's not just a nebulous, undefined higher power. It's the God of the universe. And the fear of Him is not just trembling afraid. It's a reverential awe.
God Is Truly Awesome
Haley had to be about 12 or 13. I came in one day, and she was in her room with a tape player and headphones on her bed listening. I came in and waved, and she took them down. I said, "What are you listening to?" She said, "I'm listening to a tape you did. Somebody told me about it." I thought, well, I don't know. So I said, "Well, I'm not going to interrupt you." She said, "Well, I'm near the end."
So she finished it up, and I was out sitting, watching TV or something. She came out and said to me, "You are an awesome dude." I said, "Well, I might be a dude, but I'm not awesome. God is awesome."
We've got these terms we use all the time. One of my favorite shows is Check, Please Arizona on Channel 8. I love Check, Please. Three people go eat at restaurants and report on them. Every week, usually when they're talking about a dessert, they'll say, "This dessert was awesome" or "to die for." "This chocolate double chocolate cake is to die for." No. Faith and family and country are to die for, not cake. It's cake. Rather than die for it, it's most likely killing you. So you'll die from the cake.
God's awesome. Pizza's not awesome. Pizza's really good. Baseball's really good. We're coming up on spring break, and when spring break's over, baseball starts for the boys. That means two nights a week, I'm going to be sitting down the third baseline in my chair with Haley, with Sandy, with Lucy, with Harmony, watching the boys play baseball. It's that cool night where you can put on maybe a short sleeve jacket or something light. It is beautiful. It is almost awesome. But God is awesome.
Maintaining Proper Perspective with God
My fear of Him - I know He's my friend. I know He loves me. I got all that. But He's not just one of the guys at the end of the bar having a burger and a beer with you. He's not just one of the ladies at the spa. He's not just one of the guys you're shopping with. He's God.
Can you see that? He's in heaven. You're not. His ways are higher. He's non-negotiable.
God Defines Everything
In this mini conversation over these three weeks of work and money, in the middle of that, we have to put those, as we do with everything else, in the context of how God defines our relationship with them and with Him. Step one is for me to understand God and come into a relationship with Him on His terms. And now He defines everything.
Now He defines work. He defines marriage. He defines raising kids. He defines how I live. It ought to permeate every aspect of my life - how I drive, how I talk, how I treat other people.
Next week, and for me personally, we're into an area I love. We're going to talk about money and what Solomon says about stuff.