Losing Control? Here's Why That's a Good Thing
What I have found during this time is that the better I hold to what I know, the more peaceful I will be. The world feels chaotic. It feels like the bottom fell out. Nobody knows how long we’ll be in this season. The only way I know how to do that is the Bible. I have never felt very confident about anything else except for this. This isn’t the first time the bottom has fallen out on the world. This isn’t new in history. And the Bible addresses this so well.
Let’s go back to the Old Testament. There was a King named Solomon and he was the wisest man that ever lived, and he wrote a book of the Bible, and today we’re going to walk through a little bit of it. It’s the most depressing book you’ve ever read. I won’t make you suffer through the whole book, but I want to read a few verses out of it. Because the bottom fell out for Solomon at one time. The whole poem reads like this sad poem. Friends are meaningless, work is meaningless, everything is meaningless, all of life is meaningless. But what's cool about it is he still finds hope. He faces the hopelessness of losing everything on earth and he still finds hope. That hope is where I want to take you guys today. I know there is a lot of hopelessness for some of you right now. I can’t imagine those of you who lost their job, whose parents are sick and in isolation, who just walked through cancer and is afraid. What I love about Ecclesiastes is it covers it all. It says even the best things end up failing us.
This season feels like a detox for me personally. I’m losing all these comforts, provision, and security that I’ve attached myself to accidentally. But when they start to disappear, you start to grab for something else comfortable.That’s true for an addict in rehab. They’ll pick up another habit. We’re losing a lot of things that are comfortable and we’re prone to pick up something else to give us that comfort. The thing with Solomon is his world falls out philosophically. He is a King, he’s rich, he’s got a lot of wives - his life is not bad. It is the mercy of God if we get every single thing we want on earth and we realize that it's not enough for us. It’s also the mercy of God if we lose everything on earth and we realize that God is all there is. That's the moment we find ourselves in.
Solomon found himself in God’s mercy of getting everything he wanted and realizing it was meaningless. In both cases, the only hope for our souls is God. It’s the only thing. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 2:11, “then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it. And behold, it was all vanity and a striving after the wind. And there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” Solomon is saying that the goal of his life, his purpose, the thing he has lived for, the achievements, the approval, it still was meaningless even after he got it. There’s something similar there to learn when we’re in moments where we’ve lost everything too. The similarity is that there’s emptiness on earth and that’s why we can’t catch that feeling we’re all craving that something matters.
I think if Heaven is real and the Bible is true, then this season is a gift. I don’t say that lately. I’ve heard what some of you are facing. I’m just saying, it is a mercy to realize that life means nothing if we don’t have God. So what does it look like to live this out and not live depressed?
The first thing I want to say is, if you are sad, that is okay. There is a time for mourning and sorrow - Ecclesiastes says that. God gave us emotions and those emotions are not evil. Even the negative ones, they can be great gifts. It's when those emotions begin to define our lives. It's when those emotions begin to govern our behaviors and the way we're going to live. That’s when it becomes dangerous. So many of us are coming to terms with the feeling of grief, and a lot of us have never been acquainted with it. We’re not familiar with that feeling. We've all somewhat lost something and so what does it look like to go through and feel the feelings of that?
The second thing is, what does it look like to still live with the loss in a way that helps people to see God? That helps us remember there is a God and that we're not hopeless. Solomon is going to tell you some of the things that he goes to after he realizes that there's not really satisfaction he's looking for in anything. I’m so convicted by this because this book was written thousands of years ago, and I’m sure a lot of us are doing this. Solomon says he goes to win to cheer himself up. He says, “my heart's still guiding me with wisdom and how to lay hold on folly till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life.” He’s basically saying, I’m just going to get drunk and have fun, because nothing else matters. We have to make a choice in this season and decide what we’re going to comfort ourselves with. This is hard, and our tendency is to not do hard. Nobody gets excited about a dark season where everything is lonely and difficult and hard and scarce and there’s a fear of dying.
I’m all for some Netflix and game nights and movies and having fun, but we can’t put our hope in those things. We are here because we believe that the greatest hope in the world is Jesus Christ. He's the only hope because he's the only answer to the biggest problem.
