Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript

Having sung about the magnificent work of God, the work that we’re called to engage in as well as his imagebearers, we’re going to be shortly turning to Ecclesiastes to consider our ninth sermon on work. And in the providence of God, we’re looking at the futility of work, the pointlessness of work on Thanksgiving Sunday.

Two things by way of announcement. First, a Christmas event is coming up on December 6th and we’re doing this with One by One here in Oregon City. It’s really their lead, but we’re providing help as well and they’re hosting it here. If you have any interest in that, please let Angie know today. Today’s the last day really to let her know. I’m excited by the event because at our family camp, one of our workshop talks was on ministry and women and there was a great deal of interest to get other things going. And then the Lord put this in our lap—this great opportunity to work with other women and other churches in Oregon City. So it’s a great opportunity to begin to do some of those things.

And then secondly, we’ve talked about evangelism for the last two years in the community groups. And this event really is aimed at getting you to bring someone that you’re sharing the gospel with.

So that event is coming up on December 6th and today’s the last day. I also wanted to announce that for the next three Sundays, beginning next Sunday, the alms offering will be given to the deacons’ Christmas fund. Every year the deacons determine folks in our congregation whose joy could be enhanced by the alms that you give—to help people in our congregation that are having difficulty financially. So that’s the next three Sundays. Please give and give generously for that fund starting next Lord’s Day.

So today we’re going to talk about giving thanks for pointless work. The title promises too much, but we’ll attempt to address the general topic. We’ll begin by reading Ecclesiastes 2:16-23 and we’ll spend most of our time today in Ecclesiastes, considering the wisdom of Solomon as he instructs us about pointless work.

So please stand for the reading of God’s word, Ecclesiastes 2:16-23.

“For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come. And how does a wise man die? As the fool. Therefore, I hated life because the work that was done under the sun was distressing to me. For all its vanity and grasping for the wind. Then I hated all my labor in which I had toiled under the sun because I must leave it to the man who will come after me.

“And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Let me pause for a moment. This is rather ironic and prophetic—the words of Solomon talking about the one who will come after him, considering his son and the division of his kingdom.

“Returning to the text: Yet he will rule over all my labor in which I toiled and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity. Therefore I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I toiled under the sun.

“For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill. Yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. For what has man for all his labor and for the striving of his heart with which he has toiled under the sun? For all his days are sorrowful and his work burdensome. Even in the night his heart takes no rest. This also is vanity.”

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures again and we thank you for helping us to be honest about the questions that we have and the difficulties we have. We thank you for work, Lord God, and we’ve learned much about it over the last three months and we bless you for it and bless you for correcting our understanding of it. Now help us as we struggle with this text and others that resonate with us at times where our work seems not just fruitless but pointless, even though fruitful. So bless us, Lord God, by your Holy Spirit. May he instruct us in the futility of work that we might, even in those things, give you thanks. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

So we’re in this place in the providence of God where last week we talked about work becoming fruitless, and this week work is pointless or futile. And as we’ll see here in a couple of minutes, that includes Solomon’s assessment after he’s done all kinds of great things—when he’s been very fruitful, almost as fruitful as we could, certainly fruitful as an imagebearer of the Creator. We’ll look at that in a couple of minutes. But yet in the midst of all of this there are these times when our work seems pointless and our labor futile.

And you know, if you remember nothing else from today’s text, Debbie Shaw posted something on Facebook last week about the sermon—she said, you know, yeah, our work will be fruitless at times, but we still—that’s okay. You know, it’s not always your fault that it’s fruitless. In fact, frequently it’s not your fault. And if you remember nothing else from today’s sermon, remember that while your work is pointless at times or seems pointless and feels pointless to you, that’s not necessarily because of your fault. And it is something that you’re going to experience, and that we all experience.

This is the wisest man to live, you know, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. At least that seems to be what the text tells us. And in his wisdom, he tells us of the futility of work. So, you know, at least feel like, okay, I understand that sometimes when my work seems pointless, then maybe I’m not out of sync with the Spirit of God and wisdom. Maybe there is some wisdom in the pointlessness of it under the sun in this life.

And then we’ll look at, just like last week we talked about from the Genesis account, that there are thorns and thistles that make our work less than fruitful. And you know, that’s always true. Our work will never really attain to what we want it to be. And yet there’s also elements throughout the text as it talks about thorns and thistles that instruct us how to avoid some thorns and thistles. So there’s an inevitability of our work having times of fruitlessness. And yet there’s also instruction from God’s word about how to make it more fruitful and how to avoid some forms of fruitlessness. We did that last week. We looked at thorns and thistles, and this week what we’re going to be looking at is that work is futile or feels that way at times, and yet there are certain elements in which that futility are linked to what Solomon will teach us from the book of Ecclesiastes that can help us avoid some of that futility.

So it’s the same kind of thing. There’s an inevitability to our fruitfulness and our futility or pointlessness. And yet the text of God’s word gives us wisdom so that we might know how to be not as fruitless and not as futile in the context of our labors.

And all of this is set today in the context of thanksgiving. This is the last Sunday of the church year. It’s the great culmination of all things and the giving of thanks. I like that rather than celebrating, as some churches do, Christ the King, because Christ the King celebrated at the end of ordinary time seems to indicate that his kingdom is put off till the second coming. We don’t believe that. His kingdom—he’s now reigning from the right hand of the Father.

But so we have this thanksgiving. And as we talk about the futility or pointlessness of work, we’re called to give thanks today. It reminds me—I frequently am reminded at Thanksgiving time of a sermon I heard well over two decades ago by Greg Bahnsen called “Unnatural Thanksgiving.” I don’t know if we have it in our church library or not. And you know what he says is that it’s easy to give thanks in good times, but Thanksgiving is a holiday that reminds us to give thanks in all times. And today, it’s a reminder to us to give thanks even when our work seems futile and purposeless.

Now, we know we’re supposed to give thanks in all things, right? We know it. But let me read a couple of verses anyway.

Ephesians 5:20: “Giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Giving thanks always for all things.

Colossians 3:17: “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

Okay? So, whatever you do, give thanks in the context of that pointless work we could say today.

Romans 1:21: “Because although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts. The essence of the fallen—our fallen nature—is an unthankfulness. That’s what fallen man is. He’s unthankful. So, the thing that will distinguish us as Christians and help us to rejoice in the life that God has given us as in Christ is to give thanks in all things, including in the context of pointless, fruitless work.

In fact, if we remember from last week, what we said was that Adam and Eve decided not to have a mediated relationship to one another, to the created order, et cetera. And we believe that God—well, we know that God has called us to have a mediated relationship with him, his will, and his word between us and whatever else we engage in and actually even within ourselves. And the essence of the fall is to throw off mediation and in unthankfulness to determine for ourselves what is good and evil. And it is that lack of mediation that fallen man exists in the context of.

And our job as Christians is to grab hold of ourselves, our work, our communities, our governments, and to restore the voice of mediation, a call to see all things in the context of the Lord Jesus Christ and the triune God who created these things and gave them to us. And when we give thanks, this is exactly what we do. When we give thanks in everything, we’re declaring the mediation of God, and that mediation of God is a good and loving gift from him to us. Even though it’s difficult, even though the thing is difficult, even though the trials are real, even though the pain is real, even though loss is real, we give thanks in the context of it because the Lord God is the sovereign of all things and we know his character is loving and good.

So we’re to give thanks, and if we don’t give thanks, we’re really repeating the sin of Adam and Eve. And when we do give thanks, we’re walking in the Holy Spirit. That is exactly what we do.

Colossians 3: “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body, and be thankful.” The essence of the peace of God is linked to our thankfulness.

1 Thessalonians 5:18: “In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Everybody wants to know what’s the will of God for my life. The will of God for your life is to give thanks in everything and see everything mediated through God. And that includes the difficult times and trials, the times of what Greg Bahnsen referred to as unnatural thanksgiving.

Okay. So Solomon tells us here some things, and we’re going to look at Ecclesiastes, that are linked to his declarations that he finds work at times pointless and futile, and always mistlike. While under the sun, while in this life, it is always mistlike. It’s always trying to shepherd the wind, trying to grab hold of things and make them always the way we would want them to be. So there’s always this kind of transient nature of our work.

But in the midst of that, he’s going to give us several key markers. Right? And now what I’ve got to do first is say we need to listen to Solomon in Ecclesiastes. You know, a lot of some people, some churches kind of write it all off. Well, he was an old man. Well, he was sinning. Well, this, well, that. But he declares, he tells us near the beginning of this book that he remained in his wisdom while he did this, right? And God put that in his inspired text.

Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 2:8: “So I became great and I excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also listen, my wisdom remained with me.” So Solomon did become great, tempted to pride and all the temptations that come along with success. But he tells us explicitly in the early part of the second chapter that his wisdom remained with him. And so his wisdom is what’s being conveyed to us.

Wisdom literature helps us to attain to wisdom, though we haven’t attained to the years or the experiences of the one giving us the communication. Right? We can be wiser than our years if we listen to Solomon, the voice of wisdom that God calls us to consider in the book of Ecclesiastes. Okay?

And this is the same Solomon who throughout the book of Ecclesiastes tells us of course the other part of work, which is for instance in Ecclesiastes 2:24: “Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink and that his soul should enjoy good in all his labor. This also I said was from the hand of God.” So, you know, even though he’s going to tell us some things about futility and work, he’s also telling us at the same time that there’s nothing better than to enjoy the fruit of our labor. Our work is good and that this is a gift from God. Right?

So, there’s a tension here, and like many tensions in the scriptures, we want to get rid of the tension and jump into one ditch or the other ditch. And God calls us to a life of balance and an understanding that even while we’re doing this, while we come rejoicing to our tables on Thursday this week and hopefully in all of our tables with our family, friends, community, and with God, even while we do that, there may be real problems, real fruitlessness, and real futility that we experience in the context of our relationships or in the context of our work. And that’s okay. That’s okay. That’s okay. This is the experience of a very wise, very successful man.

So, what are the problems? I’m going to list seven or eight problems that Solomon identifies for us. And I’m going to go through the book of Ecclesiastes to identify these things, which means I should probably get my watch out of my pocket to make sure we don’t go through too much of the book of Ecclesiastes. Unless this sermon becomes futile, but you’ll give thanks for it even if it is, right?

Let’s set it up correctly, I hope. Okay, so in Ecclesiastes 1, Solomon describes what he does, what he’s done, and all the blessings he’s had. And you know, it’s very interesting. We won’t take the time to look at the text, but if you look at Ecclesiastes 1, you know what you’ll see is that Solomon declares that he’s been like God in a way. He’s created great things. He’s has people around him. He’s populated his world. He’s built his kingdom. It really is an act that would befit an imagebearer of God in this. And that’s not being prideful. That’s what we’re called to do—engage in the same work that God engages in and to find success and delight in it.

And so this is what he does. And yet in the same time, he tells us in verse 13: “I set my mind to ask and search out my wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven. This burdensome task God has given to the sons of men by which they have been exercised.”

So the burdensome tasks of God, in part, are there for our sanctification, are being exercised properly, I think, and that’s one of the first things he tells us. But what he tells us is that he’s seen all these works that are under the sun and indeed all is vanity and grasping for the wind. So there’s a transient nature to everything, and there’s some degree of futility linked to that in the context of our lives.

He says in verse 15: “What is crooked cannot be made straight and what is lacking cannot be numbered. I commune with my heart, saying, ‘Look, I have attained greatness and I have gained more wisdom than all who were before me in Jerusalem. My heart has understood great wisdom and knowledge.’”

So again, as we begin to consider what he’s going to tell us about work, he’s been blessed. His work has not been fruitless. His work has been very fruitful. And that fruitfulness is not just in the attainment of his kingdom, but in wisdom and in knowledge. And he tells us this as we begin to consider what he tells us about work.

But listen to what he goes on to say: “And I set my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceive that this also is grasping for the wind. Why? For in much wisdom is much grief. And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

Now, okay, so right away he’s telling us about his work. His work is to attain wisdom, do things wisely. And what does he find in the context of that work? He finds a degree of futility to it because the more wisdom we have, he says, it seems like you get a lot of grief along with that. And when you have knowledge, you have sorrow.

Now, you know the truth of that, right? Hopefully, you do. I do. You know, the old saw is “Ignorance is bliss.” And in a way, Solomon’s saying that in this fallen world, to increase in wisdom and knowledge is to recognize the folly and foolishness of so much of what goes on. And so the more you grow, the more your work actually is fruitful and giving you wisdom about things, it’s accompanied at times with a sense of pointlessness to it because experientially the result of that is increased sorrow and difficulty.

So Solomon tells us at the beginning of some of these investigations of his investigations of work: There’s a problem with it. There’s a blessing to it. We want to gain wisdom and knowledge. But understand that coming along with it is the futility of sorrow and grief increasing in our lives because of our increase of wisdom and knowledge—sorrow.

Now, so, so one of the reasons why our work seems pointless and we evaluate it as pointless is because it’s accompanied by a proper grief and sorrow as we look at our work, who we’re working in the context of, what the world does with our work—all those things, right? Actually can lead to a pointlessness by means of increasing sorrow and grief.

Now, this is something we really can’t do much about. Okay? You can give God thanks for it, right? But why would we give God thanks for the sorrow and the grief? Because the Lord Jesus Christ promises us that after this short life is over and we’re in eternity with him, he will wipe away every tear. We will—how will he do that? Just, oh, just forget about it? No, we’ll look back on it all and we’ll see that even in the sorrow and grief, the almighty, loving, compassionate, merciful, just hand of God was at work in the circumstances in which we observed in the world that brought us grief and sorrow. They bring grief and sorrow to Jesus, right? He wept over Jerusalem, right?

So even the grief and sorrow that is related to our pointlessness is something that Jesus has shared and he understands it. And at the end of the day, so to speak, when we’re with him in eternity and one another here on this transformed earth, he will wipe away every tear. Wipe away every tear.

I don’t know if this is quite on target or not, but I’m going to read a quote. I’ve read it before here, but there was a short story by Chekhov, Russian writer—Uncle Vanya, right? And there was a wonderful dramatic presentation of it years ago called Vanya on 42nd Street. But I want to—at the end, so the movie or the play, this book, the short story is actually very germane to our discussion of work.

Chekhov looked around him in his Russian setting and saw lots of very slothful, lazy people. That’s what he saw. And we can talk about the reasons for that, but that’s not the point. Much of what Chekhov writes is an indictment of sloth, an indictment of no work. And so the movie takes place and there’s a farm and there’s things going on and then a professor who is related to them comes and lives with them and throws the whole thing into sloth and all the work on the farm stops. The accounts aren’t balanced, bills aren’t written, production stops, and they just fall into a deep hole of despair and weird relationships in the context of the story.

And finally, the professor leaves and Vanya and his niece are left to return to their work. And I know this is a little bit long and maybe it isn’t to your liking, but I’m going to read it anyway, part of the futility today, maybe listening to me read stuff that I think is interesting. But here I am called by God to do this.

So, so here—this is a dramatic example of the wiping away of our tears. That’s why I read it. So Sonya, his niece, says: “What can we do, Uncle Vanya? We must have our lives.”

“Yes, we shall live. Uncle Vanya, we shall live through the long procession of days before us and through the long evenings. We shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us. We shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old. And when our last hour comes, we shall meet it humbly. And there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter. And God will have pity on us. And then, dear, dear Uncle, you and I shall see that bright and beautiful life. We shall rejoice and look back upon our sorrow here with a tender smile. And we shall rest. I have faith, Uncle. Fervent, passionate faith. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall hear the angels. We shall see heaven all shining with diamonds. We shall see all evil and all of our pain sink away in the great compassion that shall comfort and infold the world. Our life will be a peaceful and tender and sweet, as sweet as a caress. I have faith. I have faith.”

My poor Uncle Vanya, you are crying. And he’s crying in the story. You have never known what happiness was. But wait, Uncle Vanya, wait. We shall rest. We shall rest. We shall rest.

Now, it’s Russian. It’s a little depressing. What can I say? But the point of the story is that when Jesus wipes away every tear, we shall know the grace and compassion in fullness that we now accept by faith. And we’ll look back on all the things that seem pointless and futile, and more than that, seemed sad and produced grief in our lives. And we shall see it all bathed in the love and the compassion of God. And we’ll look back and understand how all of these things work together for the glory of God and the well-being of his people.

So, you know, work produces knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge and wisdom will produce grief and sorrow in our lives. But, and that’s just the way it’s going to be. That’s the way this life is. There is a degree of futility in our work. But at the end of all time, when all this is over, we’ll look back done it through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ who wipes away every tear. And I’m convinced that Chekhov was right—that one of the ways he wipes away every tear from us is to show us everything bathed in the compassion and love of God.

You know, as you meet together with people on Thursday, you know, extended families, sometimes that can be a really difficult day. You know the truth of this—that even over the griefs and sorrows you might have in various directions with this or that family member or this or that friend or the lack thereof, try to get this eternal perspective on what’s going on. And though what this all ends in is a feast, and it’s a feast at which all grief and sorrow will be wiped away.

All right. So the first accompaniment Solomon says, or first reason why our work is pointless, is the grief and sorrow that it actually leads us into a consideration of.

There’s a second one: the futility of pleasure.

He says in chapter 2:1: “I said in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with mirth.’”

I remember years ago, I saw this old magazine that had a sermon in it. “I will test you with mirth.” And it was all about how comedy is the way to kind of test people and evaluate them. It’s really not the point here. “I will test you with pleasure.” In other words, it isn’t comedic mirth necessarily. I think it’s more like the idea of pleasure.

“Therefore, enjoy pleasure, but surely this also was vanity. I said of laughter, ‘Madness,’ and of mirth, ‘What does it accomplish?’ I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine. Now listen, while guiding my heart with wisdom. Okay? He—even though he, you know, it’s not bad to drink wine—he was still guiding his heart with wisdom. The problem was not that he had too much wine. He was enjoying wine, but he was guiding his heart with wisdom.

“And how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under heaven all the days of their life. I made my work great. But I built myself houses and I planted myself vineyards. I made myself gardens and orchards.”

This is where he’s acting like the Creator, right? He’s building a world. And he does all these things. And then he continues on and he says in verse 9: “So I became great and excelled more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also, my wisdom remained with me.”

So he’s still wise. Okay? He tells that to us twice. He says: “Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor, and this was my reward for all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done, and on the labor in which I had toiled, and indeed all was vanity and grasping for wind. There was no profit under the sun.”

So Solomon tells us in those verses that when he does this thing—looking at things from pleasure, the pleasure, the fruit of his work, the pleasure of work, the delights of what God gives us to do—keeping his wisdom and his wits about him, not sinning, but even in pleasure, in the kind of rejoicing we might have in our homes on this Thursday, he says, even in the midst of that, it seemed empty and vacuous under the sun. It was transitory. It is transitory this side of our death or the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So even in our pleasures there is this futility or emptiness that we can feel, and Solomon felt the same thing. Okay. And there’s really—you know, so if you put—if you evaluate things on the standard or basis of your delight in the world, this is linked to a sense of futility in our labors. And I would say here we can do things about this.

I’d say here that what Solomon is telling us is that if you make as your valuation pleasure or the reward for your labors that are good and your good work, if that becomes your measure, then you’re going to have this sense of futility and a loss of hope, and your work is going to become kind of pointless to you, right? And I think this is actually pointing us away from using that as our evaluation and standard of course.

So have a good time on Thursday, but understand that if you don’t have anything to eat or if the wine has gone bad or if difficulties happen, it’s okay, because your evaluation point is not your pleasure, right? Your evaluation point is the providence and sovereignty of God in your life.

So, you know, if we use the wrong evaluator, it can actually increase our sense of pointlessness in our work. And you know, we’re to give God thanks for that, right? Why would we give God thanks for that? We give him thanks in the sorrow we talked about because we—it’s a reminder to us that this life is not the end of things. We look beyond this to the great consummation of all things. We give God thanks for the futility of seeing things on the basis of pleasure because when we do that, we are tempted. We’re leaning toward becoming idolatrous. And why would we want to experience idolatry with a sense of fulfillment? We wouldn’t. So we give God thanks even for the pointlessness of pleasures that don’t leave us fulfilled, recognizing that they need to be mediated through the Lord Jesus Christ and his kingdom. Okay?

So, pleasure.

Third is death.

Ecclesiastes 2:12-16: “Then I turned myself to consider wisdom and madness and folly, for that what can a man do who succeeds the king? Only what he has already done. Then I saw all wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness. So wisdom is good. He’s saying it actually is better than foolishness.

“The wise man’s eyes are in his head, but the fool looks in darkness. Yet I myself perceived that the same event happens to them all. So I said in my heart, ‘As it happens to the fool, so it also happens to me. And why was I then more wise?’ Then I said in my heart, ‘This also is vanity. For there is no more remembrance of the wise than of the fool forever, since all that now is will be forgotten in the days to come. And how does a wise man die? As the fool!’”

So, a third cause for our kind of seeing wisdom and our work of wisdom as pointless is that we know we’re all dying. And the older you get, the less you can deny that and the more obvious it becomes. I won’t be living another thirty years in my case, for instance, probably not even twenty. Ten would be great. But we know that more and more.

And now that’s a reality that you can’t do anything about. And it does sort of give you this sense of eternity. And so it’s a recognition that our work is futile because really it’s going to go away. You’re going to die and that work is probably for the most part going to disappear into the ages of ancient history, and your kingdom like Ozymandias will be in the dust. It’ll all be crumbled and there’s nothing left of it really, right?

Now that’s a truth. Now it isn’t quite true. There is some connection, right? We got to remember Ecclesiastes 4:9-10. There is this relationship to eternity, but much of what we do and the labor we put in is very transitory because it’s under the sun. It’s in this life, and our death is a reason to understand why our work can seem rather pointless to us.

But we give thanks to God for that too. Why? Because our recognition of our death is what helps us put proper priorities on our work and what gives us a sense of the beautiful hope of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Without the pointlessness of death and recognizing our death, we would continue to deny it, to put it off in our minds, and Jesus becomes, yes, maybe part of what we do, but not at the center, not the central mediating factor for all of our lives.

So we give thanks to God for our deaths and for the recognition of our deaths. Remember the Puritans, right? They’d hang those funeral clothes, you know, whatever they were going to be buried in, early on in their lives. They would get a set of that stuff, hang it up in their bedroom, and they would look at it every day. And you can think of that as morbid. But what it does is it gives you a sense of significance to the work you’re actually doing. Your work becomes more, you know, actually significant because it’s going to be ended. And yet your work is put in the context of the transitory nature of it, which is a good thing.

So even when work is pointless because of a recognition of death, we give God thanks for that because it’s a reminder to us of the hope of life through the Lord Jesus Christ and only what’s done for him has this eternal significance and value to it.

Fourth: succession.

Time to look at my clock. Sorry, the band broke, so I can’t do it subtly right now. Okay, succession. This is a big problem for Solomon. And if you think about it, it’s a big problem for us. I’ve already alluded to it, but in verses 17 to 26, he says he hates his labor.

In verse 18: “Why I hated my labor in which I had toiled under the sun? Because I must leave it to the man who will come after me.”

And so succession—I mentioned this already a little bit while we were reading through it—but he says it’s a real problem. I don’t know who’s coming after me. Whatever I do, I’m going to have to pass on because of my death. And this idea of succession and the transitory nature, I can’t really control succession of what’s going to happen next. This makes my work kind of pointless and futile as well.

And as I mention, in his case, it was prophetic because his son Rehoboam would ruin the kingdom, right? He’d listened to the young Turks rather than the old wise guys. And what Solomon had done in building the United Kingdom was now destroyed, split up, and ripped in two. That’s the way to prepare something for throwing away—to rip it in two. And that’s what happened to Solomon’s work.

He says in verse 20: “Therefore, I turned my heart and despaired of all the labor in which I toiled under the sun. For there is a man whose labor is with wisdom, knowledge, and skill. Yet he must leave his heritage to a man who has not labored for it. This also is vanity and great evil.”

So another factor that makes work appear pointless and futile to us is succession. And what’s going to happen with everything we’ve done after we go? Or will it hold up at all? We live in a 120-year-old house, Christine and I, and you know, the question is not who we’re going to give it to. The question is will it be standing to give it to anybody after all the things that it’s gone through. It continues to break down around us just like our bodies do.

So the future and succession and thinking in terms of what happens after your death—which is a great thing to think about for the Christian, the future tense is a positive assertion of hope because of Jesus. For the non-Christian, the future tense is a vague hoping to get by in life by kind of a moral fiction. But for us, the future tense is a great thing. And God wants us to think in terms of the future, the day after our own death, right?

But because of that, our work seems futile because we don’t really know and can’t control what’s going to happen in the future. Now, this can be mediated a little bit, and a little bit not, right? So we can certainly make efforts, and we should, in terms of who to pass on whatever work we’ve accomplished to next, but we really don’t know whoever it is. However good they might be and wise and knowledgeable and pious at the time, you can find out as I have over the last thirty-five years that people you thought were one thing were completely different. And so you really can’t know what’s going to happen to the result of your work.

So from one perspective, this is a pointlessness to our labor—not knowing if the person that will take it over will just run it into the dust. We’ve seen this over and over again in the history of America where Christian men built up godly fortunes, turned them over to trusts at their death, which then became funding mechanisms for communism and socialism. This is what’s happened over and over again. And so this is a pointlessness to our work.

And ultimately, we have to say that this is one that again we can’t really get rid of. You can try to mediate who’s what’s going to happen after your death with the result of your labor, but ultimately you can’t know. And so there is a sense of pointlessness or futility about it, right? But even here, we give thanks for the pointlessness and futility of not knowing who our successor will be.

Why? Because we know the trend line of history. We know that the heritage of the wicked is saved up for the righteous. And if for a season the heritage of the righteous becomes given to the heritage of the wicked, it’s being saved and used in some way and entrusted by the allseeing God who is sovereign over everything for the accomplishment of his kingdom and the well-being of good.

So succession is a problem if we don’t think long enough. If all we’re thinking about is the next generation, pointlessness and futility to our work will be a component of this. But if we remember that God’s word tells us that long-term the heritage of even the wicked is saved up for the righteous, then we have hope and we can see things as not being pointless.

Okay, let’s see six: no balance in life.

Ecclesiastes 4:5 and 6: “The fool folds his hands and consumes his own flesh. Better a handful with quietness than both hands full together with toil and grasping for the wind.”

So Solomon seems here to give us two examples, two ditches, again. One is sloth, and you’re consuming your own flesh—pointless, you know? And then the other is overwork. People who are addicted to their work, we would say, who have an improper sense of priority to their work above all other things, and as a result they don’t really have a point to their work either. Their labor is kind of futile. But what Solomon tells us is better: a handful with quietness than both hands full together with toil and grasping for the wind.

So a sense of balance, right? So some of our futility and pointlessness that we feel about our work is just related to our own sinfulness in terms of seeing work as everything and not having a balance. One hand full of work and labor and the other resting. And of course, the Lord’s day is the great balancer for us in terms of that. So there’s an example of fruitlessness that actually we can do something about.

And then finally: Ecclesiastes 4:4, envy.

“Again, I saw that for the toil and every skillful work a man is envied by his neighbor. This also is vanity and grasping for the wind.”

So sometimes our work seems futile because we work hard, we try to do things, and envy by our neighbor is striving is causing them to tear down what we have, right? Actually envy can be our own motivator as well. We’re being warned of that in this text. But envy, an understanding that people around us are trying to tear down our work, it can then seem like our work is pointless and futile, right?

And so envy is a tremendous factor. Solomon tells us in the pointlessness and futility of work and to be resisted in ourselves and understood as a mechanism in the world round about us. And as a result of that understanding, we can do something about it. Not, again, we can’t fix it totally, but we can try to engage in what’s known as envy avoidance, right? Not be ostentatious about our blessings—various ways to try to avoid people envying us, right?

So envy is a specific thing that Solomon says is related to pointlessness or futility of work. Both our own envy, which can lead ourselves to think our work is pointless, and the envy of others, which can tear us down.

I mentioned last week this movie Amadeus, which is based on a play, which is a telling of actual historical characters—Mozart, of course, and another composer named Salieri. And Salieri was envious relative to Mozart, and his work became totally futile and pointless to him. He saw no reason for it. He had been fairly satisfied with his work. He was an accomplished composer. Some of his symphonies are still performed. Some of his music is still performed. But when he saw Mozart and when he saw the best composer that he thought ever lived, when he saw, well, essentially the incarnation of the God who loves music and creates men to make good music, he couldn’t live with his own sense of his own mediocrity in relationship to Mozart. He envied Mozart and as a result of that envy struck out at him and contributed to his death, and just absolutely hated him.

But worse than that, Salieri turns against God. Let me read a couple of quotes from Amadeus.

He says: “While my father prayed earnestly to God to protect commerce—that’s what his dad was about—I would offer up secretly the proudest prayer a boy could think of. ‘Lord, make me a great composer. Let me celebrate your glory through music and be celebrated myself. Make me famous through the world, dear God. Make me immortal after I die. Let people speak my name forever with love for what I wrote. In return, I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility every hour of my life. Amen.’”

Now, now that’s the sort of prayer that’s very revelatory, right? And what the author of this play is telling us is that Salieri’s problem from the beginning was idolatry of himself, right? He wanted to seek immortality through his work. He really wasn’t really seeking mediation from God with his work, but he was making a bargain with God. I’ll be very devout, very devoted. I’ll give you my chastity, blah blah, if you’ll give me this exchange. And of course, Salieri’s idolatry is seen in this.

But that’s what he wanted. And of course, because of that the judgment of God made his work futile, at least in his own eyes. Later he says this to a priest:

“All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute. Made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If he didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant this desire like a lust in my body and then deny me the talent?”

We feel that, don’t we? We wouldn’t necessarily—this is exaggeration, for a fact that we’re reading here—but we feel that way. You know, I want to give great sermons, right? And not because I want to be immortal, but because I really want to do a good job in my work. You want to do great work. You want to be the best at your job. And there’s something kind of admirable about that in one sense, but on the other sense, we’re being warned by this play Amadeus and by the scriptures to talk about envy, that can be a tremendously destructive force in your life and can lead you to see your life as futile because then along comes Mozart and he calls the incarnation here and now. Salieri’s work seems to make him—he calls himself the saint, the patron saint of mediocrity in relationship to Mozart. This is what he says in the movie or in the play, addressing a crucifix. He’s actually talking to the cross. And this is the fact of envy in our work.

He says: “From now on, we are enemies, you and I, because you choose for your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy, and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because you are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block you. I swear it. I will hinder and harm your creature on earth. And as far as I am able, I will ruin your incarnation.”

And that’s what he set out to do was to ruin Mozart. And he was a contributor to his death. Now, that’s what happens, right? Solomon warns us that in our labors, to compare our labors to others can lead to a sense of enviousness that will then make our own work futile and pointless, and will turn to the work of destroying the person that we’re envying.

We have a tremendous problem in this area in our day and age. You know, how many Mozarts could you run across in the average nineteenth-century time in which you lived? You didn’t see them that much, right? But you know what we’ve got? We’ve got smartphones. We have iPods. We listen to the best music in the world on those things, right? We listen to the most wonderful choirs that could be produced. And then we come to church and we hear the choir sing. And somehow it just seems mediocre to us, right? Because it isn’t the best. It isn’t the most astonishing thing. It isn’t the greatest music. You hear from other people that you know—preachers, you know, this is a real problem.

It’s a great blessing to go on the internet and to hear wonderful preachers from all over the world and to be benefited by them and to know that your congregation is doing the same thing. And I pointed you to some of them. But you see, if we’re not careful, our own work can become futile and pointless to us because we have unrealized ambitions when compared to the greatest of the preachers. I will never be a great preacher. It’s okay. You’ll never be the best at your particular job. It’s good to strive. It’s good to strive for excellence to honor God with your work. But look, it’s okay that you’re not the best in the world, even though you’re confronted with the best in all kinds of electronic mediums.

So: envy.

We can give thanks to God for the sort of pointlessness that we experience when we envy other people. Why? Because God’s convicting us of our sin. He’s trying to drive us away from that envy, back to him, back to true meaning and purpose in life.

So we can mediate some of these pointless, futile kind of things that we think about work. We can see them all in relationship to the plan and providence of God. We can see frequently what God is doing by driving us to pointlessness and despair, drilling us out of our own sin, making us aware of sinful envy in other people, right? Making us aware of our own idolatry and exalting our own glory, making us aware that our work now is not mediated as something done for the King, the Lord Jesus Christ, but becomes an end in itself.

So we have two hands full of trial and trouble, and yet we have a futility. So we can give God thanks for these things, knowing that in part, unnatural thanksgiving that we give to him for our difficulties is because God is sovereign. He’s loving. He’s compassionate to us. He’s driving sin out of our lives. He is producing sanctifying effects in our lives, right?

We can give thanks to him for that. We can give thanks because we know that ultimately, 1 Corinthians 15 says that our labor in Christ is not in vain, right? Paul says in verse 10: “But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain, but I labored more abundantly than others. I am what I am by the grace of God.” That’s who you are. Give thanks for that. Give thanks.

And then going on in this text and later in the same chapter, Paul says this: “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing what? That your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

Ultimately, we may feel like it. It may appear fruitless and pointless. We may go through those times. Understand that’s part of living under the sun in a fallen created world. There’s some things you can do about it, but there’s some things you can’t do about it. You’re going to feel that way. But ultimately, what we know about our work is we can give thanks even in those times because the word of God has declared to us—because of the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ, killed by the envious, raised up from the dead by the Father, ascended to the right hand, mediating all of things to us through his Holy Spirit, through his will, and through his love—the Lord Jesus Christ has assured us that our labor in him is not in vain.

We grab hold of that and that sustains us even in the midst of difficult times. We can understand the sanctification process that God sometimes uses in this. But you know, folks, there are times that our work is fruitless or futile when difficulties happen to us and we do not understand the purpose.

Bahnsen in that sermon on unnatural thanksgiving told the story of the man who wrote the words for “It Is Well with My Soul.” A guy named Spafford who was a businessman in Chicago in the nineteenth century, a wealthy Chicago lawyer who had a thriving legal practice, a beautiful home, a wife, four daughters, and a son. He was also a devout Christian and a faithful student of the scriptures. He had a circle of friends that included Dwight Moody and Moody’s songwriter Ira Sankey. And so this Christian man committed to evangelism, et cetera.

At the very height of his financial and professional success, Horatio Spafford and his wife Anna suffered the tragic loss of their young son. Shortly thereafter, on October 8th of that year, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed almost every real estate investment that Spafford had at that time.

So then in 1873 he schedules a trip to England for his family so they can kind of recover from the tragedies and the trials and the loss that had beset them. Something comes up, so he doesn’t make the boat on the first voyage over, but his wife and four daughters are going to take it, and he’s got to follow up within a few days. Something happens in that voyage. His ship has distress. There’s a shipwreck at sea, and Spafford gets a telegram from his wife that says: “Arrived safe alone.”

His four daughters had drowned in that accident at sea.

So look at what God had piled upon Spafford in terms of loss. How can he understand that? How can you see how that’s part of the sanctifying process of God? God, you can believe it ultimately, but you can’t understand it. You can’t see the way you could see that God driving out envy in your life or something is going on. It’s just a tragedy. And we have those kinds of tragedies in our lives that are completely unexplained, right?

Spafford gets on a boat and, as the story goes, goes over the same route that his family had. And at the place where his four daughters had drowned, and his wife had survived, he penned the hymn to that soul: “It Is Well with My Soul,” right? To that hymn rather.

It’s well with my soul. You know the words. I suppose most of you, right?

First verse: “When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whenever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.”

Today’s about unnatural thanksgiving. Our work will be fruitless at times. Our work will be pointless and futile to us. We’ll have difficulties. We have difficulties in different directions. But in the midst of everything, we remember today as we prepare for this week, as we prepare for the great conclusion of the church year and the beginning consideration of Advent next Sunday, we recognize that in the midst of all of these things, we’re to give thanks for every bit of it.

We’re to say: It is well with my soul. Not because we understand intellectually the relationship of everything to everything else, but because we know God, we know his compassion, we know his love, we know his sovereignty, we know his wisdom. And we know that everything to us is being mediated through the love and compassion of God, through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And so we can give unnatural thanksgiving for our work when it’s fruitful and when it’s fruitless, and we can give unnatural thanksgiving for our work when it is futile and for the different trials and tribulations that come our way.

May the Lord God grant us this thanksgiving, not just a commitment to give thanks but a commitment to unnatural thanksgiving as well.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for your scriptures. Thank you for the wisdom of Solomon and for making us wise beyond our years and experience by giving us this wisdom through him. Bless us this week in our labors. Bless us in our rest. And most of all, Lord God, bless us in our thanksgiving.

In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.