Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Good News: It's Not About You | The Writings | Ecclesiastes 5

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Do you go to church to be served or to serve? Do you have cat theology or dog theology? Should the church cater to your needs or God's?  In today's episode, Keith looks at Ecclesiastes 5, reminding us of what it means that God is in heaven and we are on earth. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Ecclesiastes 5

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Gravestones always tell us when a person died, but sometimes they tell us how a person lived. Sometimes they tell us what they believed. Mel Blank was famous for being the voice behind many of the well-known cartoon characters. For example, he was the voice of Porky Pig, but so many more. He would end all the Looney Tunes cartoon.

by saying, that's all folks. But that wasn't just a saying to end a cartoon. That was his perspective on life. And that phrase, that's all folks, that ended up on his tombstone. There's an unknown woman's grave that I came across. Her name was Margaret. She died before she was 50. And all her tombstone said was waiting.

Well, those are two different ways to live. That's all folks versus waiting. Those are two different approaches to life. One thinks that you have to go for it now because your life is contained here in this world. And the other approach says that there is more to your life than what happens in this world. There is another world, a future world, a world with God. Margaret, whoever she was, didn't think her life here was everything. No, her years here were like the first chapter of a book.

Well, maybe not even the first chapter. Like maybe the first paragraph of the first chapter of a much longer story, but maybe it's not even the first paragraph. Maybe it's like the first sentence. She knew her life here in this world was like the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of a much longer story. Here's what we do know. We all know that we have a finite amount of time on this earth. Are we going to live our life for the here and now? Or are we going to live our life with eternal perspective?

We also know that we don't control the length of our life. Job 14 says, God, you have decided the length of our lives. You know how many months we will live, and we are not given one minute longer. We know that in our head, but somehow we are never prepared for our death. I think the book of Ecclesiastes encourages us to live our life backwards.

In fact, there's a great book about Ecclesiastes that goes by that name, living life backwards. Sometimes people ask, what does Ecclesiastes mean? Like, where does that come from? Ecclesiastes is a Greek word, not a Hebrew word, which is surprising given that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. But Ecclesiastes is a form of the Greek word Ecclesia, which is translated church in the New Testament. So taken most literally, Ecclesiastes means one who speaks to the congregation. Or you might think of it as the preacher who is the main character in the book of Ecclesiastes. So it's not a surprise that the topic of church or being a part of God's community shows up in the book of Ecclesiastes. Here's chapter 5

1 and 2. Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools who do not know that they do wrong. Do not be quick with your mouth. Do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in heaven and you are on earth. So let your words be few. Do you catch what he's saying about God? He's saying he's in heaven and you're on earth. So in the context of the church, which I think is what he is referring to when he talks about going to the house of God, what the author of Ecclesiastes is doing is helping you put things in perspective. He's saying you're not a big deal. He's saying it's not all about you. I think this is hard for us to get. That's why C.S. Lewis said, we don't really worship God. We worship our image of God,

which, if that's true, it should make us ask, how close is my view of God to the reality of who God is? Does the God I believe in actually exist, or is he just a figment of my imagination that's kind of loosely based on the Bible, but based on a lot of my own intuition of what I think God should be like? Here's Psalm 50. When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. See, Psalm 50 is rebuking us for thinking that God is like us. God made us in his image. And now we have returned to the favor and made God in our image.

So we believe that God likes the people we like and not the people that we don't. Or that if God had a vote, he would vote like I do. You heard of that movie, Honey, I Shrunk the Kid. What about a movie that says, Honey, I shrunk God? When Ecclesiastes says, God is in heaven and you're on earth, he's saying, God is all wise and you're foolish.

God is the creator and you're the creature. God is the potter and you're the clay. God is all powerful and you are weak. God's ways aren't like your ways. God's thoughts are higher than your thoughts. God is God and you aren't. But there's always a tendency to reverse those roles. To make us king and God are servant.

there's a tendency to make life about us to put ourselves at the center. That kind of thinking always has negative effects, especially inside of a church. But we see those effects all around us. American Christianity has become me-centered, so that the central goal of our life and the central goal of our faith is to be happy and to feel good about ourselves. I hope God can help me be the best version of me that I can be. God is my cheerleader.

God is my therapist. It's possible to make our church's worship service all about us to ask questions like, what do I get out of it? Is this what I like? Is this meeting my needs? Is this convenient? Is it too demanding? Entire worship services are planned around the thoughts and concerns of the worshipper

rather the one who's being worshipped. It's easy to turn worship into something that is all about me, my desires, my likes, my preferences, what I want. And that is nothing less than idolatry. Do you know the difference between dog theology and cat theology? It's been said that dogs have masters and cats have staff. Dogs are eager to please their master. Cats tend to think that you are there to take care of them.

A dog says, you pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me, you must be God. But a cat says, you pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me, I must be God. In a similar way, many Christians look at all that God has done for them. and while they say he is master, we really treat God like he's our staff. We really think that life is about us, and then we use God to make us happy. It's easy to think that a church should cater to us, because this is how we've been conditioned to think. We're used to restaurants saying, have it your way, because consumerism is the air we breathe. We curate our social feed so that everything we see fits our taste and our leanings.

If a tweet annoys this, we just block the person. On Netflix, we populate my list with all the movies I want to watch. If we start a movie and we find the first 10 minutes are boring, we just remove it from the list and forget about it forever. Consumerism is about unlimited choice and unlimited speed. We choose exactly what we want. We take only what we want, and then we move on. And this mindset has infiltrated the way we approach church,

that we can design a church according to our checklist of preferences. And if a church stops catering to our desires or makes us uncomfortable, or the pastor has said something that we don't agree with, or the worship music isn't exactly what we want, or someone raises their hands and makes us feel uncomfortable, or a church asks me to serve or to be generous financially, or if a church starts a capital campaign, well, then we just move on. There are other churches in town or online, or I just won't go. For too long, the consumer logic of Christian culture has been, find a church that meets your needs. find a church where their worship music moves you, where the pastor's preaching compels you, where all the people look like you and think like you and vote like you and welcome you. It's all about you, you, you, you, how does anything in your life go when you make it about you? A healthy relationship with a local church is like a healthy relationship with another person.

It only works when grounded in selfless commitment, not a consumerist mentality. But Ecclesiastes starts with God is in heaven and you're on earth. He's God and you're not because your life is not about you. When I think life is about me, I become a consumer and I start asking consumer kinds of questions. When I realize that my life is about him, then I commit to serve him. And I even join a flawed church made up of flawed people struggling along to please God and walk with Jesus. See, a lot of this comes down to realizing that what I think my needs are aren't really what my needs are. We spend so much time focusing on ourselves and yet we're still still.

not satisfied. We try to find a church that meets our needs, but that's a hopeless task, because my needs are never satisfied. I can always imagine that there's something better out there. See, what I really need from a church is to come into God's presence, to be shaped by the community, to be correct and encouraged by His Word, to learn to serve, to give, to be a part of something that points me away from myself and toward God, toward Jesus. In my church, I need to be to learn to endure difficult people. I need to serve people who are really different than me. I need to learn to die to myself. So let's end where we started. God is in heaven and you're on earth. It's not about you. It's always about him.