1. "2020 vaporized the illusion that we're in control of our lives. 2020 shouted that life is fleeting and futile."

2. "Life is a mist. Mist appears more substantial than it is. It looks solid until you try to grasp it in your hands or you walk right through it. Mist soon disappears. Let the sun shine on it for just a few minutes and it'll disappear without a trace."

3. "We all yearn for a meaning in life that will not disappear as fast as a lungful of air. But there is a hopeless, irreparable break between what we want and what this world can give."

4. "Spend your whole life knocking on every door in creation that you can find and behind each one, when the door opens, you'll hear a voice saying, I'm not what you're looking for."

5. "Ecclesiastes demolishes in order to build, but most of the book is demolition. And Ecclesiastes demolishes far more thoroughly than we are ready for. You have to let this book hurt you before it will heal you."

6. "The preacher is saying that all of our cherished ambitions are blazing fluorescent bulbs that keep us from seeing the light that comes from far above."

7. "These people were partially responsible for your own existence and this is how you repay them by forgetting them completely. It's what happens. In all probability, a hundred years after your death, no one will ever know that you lived."

8. "Our appetites are a sign, they're a pointer, they're a sign of two realities. First, we're meant to be filled. Second, the satisfaction we're looking for cannot be found in this world."

9. "Ecclesiastes is about why having everything will never be enough."

10. "We thank you for this frigid, scouring wind of the book of Ecclesiastes. That shakes us, that wakes us up, that makes it so that we can't go back to the bed of comfortable illusions."

Observation Questions

1. According to Ecclesiastes 1:2, what is the Preacher's thesis statement, and how many times does he use the word "vanity" in this single verse?

2. In Ecclesiastes 1:3, what specific question does the Preacher ask about human labor, and what phrase does he use to describe the realm in which this toil takes place?

3. What does Ecclesiastes 1:4 say about the relationship between human generations and the earth—what happens to each?

4. In Ecclesiastes 1:5-7, what three elements of nature does the Preacher describe, and what pattern of movement does each one follow?

5. According to Ecclesiastes 1:8, what is said about "all things," and what does the verse say about the eye and the ear?

6. What claim does Ecclesiastes 1:11 make about the remembrance of "former things" and "later things" among those who come after?

Interpretation Questions

1. The Hebrew word translated "vanity" is "hevel," meaning breath, mist, or vapor. How does this imagery help explain the Preacher's view of life "under the sun," and why might God have chosen such a word to describe human existence?

2. The Preacher uses the cycles of the sun, wind, and water (verses 5-7) to illustrate his point. What is the connection between these natural cycles and the claim in verse 3 that there is "no gain" for human toil?

3. How does the phrase "under the sun" define the perspective or angle from which the Preacher is examining life, and why is this distinction important for understanding the book's message?

4. According to the sermon, Ecclesiastes is "the question to which Christ is the answer." How does the Preacher's observation that the eye is never satisfied and the ear never filled (verse 8) point to a need that only something beyond this world can meet?

5. The sermon states that Ecclesiastes "demolishes in order to build." How do the bleak observations in this prologue serve a redemptive purpose, preparing readers for the hope found beyond the sun?

Application Questions

1. The Preacher says all human toil produces no lasting "gain" (verse 3). What specific ambitions, achievements, or possessions are you most tempted to treat as though they will provide permanent security or meaning, and how might this passage reshape your relationship to those things?

2. Verse 11 declares that there will be no remembrance of us among those who come after. If you woke up tomorrow and reminded yourself that you will one day be completely forgotten, what would you do differently with your time, energy, or relationships this week?

3. The sermon challenges us not to put all our hopes in a return to "post-COVID normal" or any other earthly circumstance. What current situation or future outcome are you banking on to bring you satisfaction, and how can you practically reorient your hope toward Christ instead?

4. The Preacher observes that the eye is never satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing (verse 8). In what ways do you experience this insatiable appetite—perhaps through entertainment, social media, or consumption—and what is one concrete step you could take to seek satisfaction in God rather than in endless novelty?

5. Jesus invites the weary to come to Him for rest (Matthew 11:28). Given the weariness that Ecclesiastes describes as filling "all things," what burdens or frustrations in your life right now need to be brought to Christ, and how will you do that this week?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Genesis 3:17-19 — This passage describes God's curse on the ground after the fall, explaining why human toil is marked by futility and why creation itself is subject to frustration.

2. Romans 8:18-25 — Paul describes how all creation was subjected to futility and groans for redemption, directly connecting to Ecclesiastes' theme while pointing to the hope of future glory.

3. James 4:13-17 — James echoes Ecclesiastes by calling life a mist that appears briefly and vanishes, urging humility about the future and dependence on God's will.

4. Matthew 11:25-30 — Jesus offers rest to the weary and heavy-laden, providing the answer to the weariness that Ecclesiastes says fills all things under the sun.

5. Psalm 90:1-12 — Moses reflects on the brevity of human life compared to God's eternity and prays for wisdom to number our days, themes that parallel the Preacher's observations.

Sermon Main Topics

I. Life Is a Mist: Introducing Ecclesiastes in Light of 2020

II. No Meaning: The Thesis of Vanity (Ecclesiastes 1:1-2)

III. No Gain: The Futility of Human Toil (Ecclesiastes 1:3)

IV. No Legacy: The Certainty of Being Forgotten (Ecclesiastes 1:4, 11)

V. No Progress: The Endless Cycles That Lead Nowhere (Ecclesiastes 1:5-6, 9-10)

VI. No Satisfaction: The Insatiable Human Appetite (Ecclesiastes 1:7-8)

VII. Finding Rest in Christ: The Answer Beyond the Sun

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Detailed Sermon Outline

How was 2020 for you?

What do you expect from 2021?

For many people, 2020 was a year of crushing, staggering loss. And even for those who didn't fall ill or lose loved ones, 2020 was a year of constantly disrupted plans.

2020 vaporized the illusion that we're in control of our lives. 2020 shouted that life is fleeting and futile.

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, 2020 taught us that life is a mist. Mist appears more substantial than it is. It looks solid until you try to grasp it in your hands or you walk right through it. Mist soon disappears. Let the sun shine on it for just a few minutes and it'll disappear without a trace.

And mist hides things. If you're in a mist, you can't see what's ahead. You can't tell where the road ends or what might be coming at you from the other direction. Life is a mist. And that is the thesis of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.

Before the pandemic was upon us back in January of 2020, I had started to make plans to preach through Ecclesiastes in the second half of what is now last year. Now at the start of this new year, I can't think of a single book of the Bible that is more relevant to the situation we and our country are in and indeed most of the world is in. If you have a Bible, please turn to Ecclesiastes. It comes just after Psalms and Proverbs. So if you go straight to the middle of your Bible and scoot forward a little bit, you'll hit it.

This evening, we will look at chapter 1 verses 1 to 11, which serves as a prologue to the whole book. Please follow along with me as I read Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verses 1 to 11.

The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises, and the sun goes down. And hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north. Around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, There they flow again. All things are full of weariness.

A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there's nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, See, this is new; it has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.

What do you expect from 2021?

What should you expect from 2021? Our passage offers five answers. Point one, no meaning. Point one, no meaning. This is the shocking, provocative claim of verses one and two.

Verse one provides the title of the book, the words of the preacher. And its author, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Preacher is a job title. The Hebrew noun is Kohelit, which means one who calls an assembly, presumably so as to instruct the assembly. And because this preacher is called the son of David, he's traditionally taken to be Solomon.

But it's important to note that the book is formally anonymous. The source of its teaching is not stated explicitly.

And Son of David could designate a more distant descendant. In any case, whoever the preacher is, verse 2 announces his thesis: Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, vanity of vanities all is vanity. The Hebrew word translated vanity here is hevel. It's repeated five times in the verse and it's difficult to translate, to capture all of its nuances in just one word. Its basic meaning is breath, mist or vapor.

And the preacher of Ecclesiastes plays on this basic sense of the word to say that absolutely everything in this life, including life itself, is fleeting and ungraspable like mist. So what does everything in this life add up to? If it were a little bit colder even than it is right now, you could step outside if you're more than six feet from another person, breathe out, see the cloud that comes out, grab hold of it, that's your life. That is the thesis of the book of Ecclesiastes. But does that mean that everything, strictly speaking, is meaningless?

Well, it depends what you mean by meaning. Our problem is that the meaning that we incurably crave is a meaning that nothing in this life can finally give us. We all yearn for a meaning in life that will not disappear as fast as a lungful of air.

But there is a hopeless, irreparable break between what we want and what this world can give. There's a tragic mismatch between reality and what we try to get out of it. In that sense, everything is meaningless. Spend your whole life knocking on every door in creation that you can find and behind each one, when the door opens, you'll hear a voice saying, I'm not what you're looking for.

And that's exactly what the preacher does in the rest of chapter 1 and chapter 2. He goes on a quest in every realm of life that he can possibly think of to see, is there meaning here? And I won't spoil the answer. We can read those chapters next week. Lord willing, you can study ahead.

Ecclesiastes is a difficult book. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, welcome to church. Everything is meaningless.

It's not exactly ten steps to a new you in the new year.

Ecclesiastes is a difficult book because it systematically shatters our illusions. As the poet T.S. Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality. Ecclesiastes is a hard book because it's a bleak book. But what if life is hard?

What if life is bleak? Well, then only a hard, bleak book can cut through the shiny, superficial surfaces and show you what your life really is.

Ecclesiastes is also a difficult book because it's hard to know just how to fit together the bleak parts, which is most of the book, with the more positive parts that occasionally pop up. So to help orient you to the whole book, here are three kind of overall summary takes on what Ecclesiastes is. You can sort of put this in your toolkit for the whole sermon series. Here's sort of big picture overview from three different angles. First, Ecclesiastes is a question.

Ecclesiastes is a question. There are far more questions than answers in this book and that's very deliberate. That's just the point.

You could say that Ecclesiastes is the question to which Christ is the answer. By inspiring the book of Ecclesiastes, God is acting like Socrates. He is the one putting the questions to us and they are uncomfortable questions. They're questions that are hard to answer. They're questions that make us squirm.

That's what Ecclesiastes does to us. Better a good question than a bad answer.

What G.K. Chesterton said of Job is just as true of Ecclesiastes. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Ecclesiastes is like a photo negative of the rest of the Bible. It draws the outline of our need, our want, our emptiness, the vacuum where something solid and stable and satisfying should be.

Second, Ecclesiastes is a journey. It's a question, it's also a journey. The preacher takes us on a quest for meaning and truth and value. Journeys take time. They call for patience.

Teleporting to the finish line is not a journey, that's cheating. So on this journey, Ecclesiastes calls us to walk many long miles that are hard on our hearts and hard on our heads.

But the view that we gain at the end will be worth it. Third, overall perspective on Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is just a little bit like a stand-up comedian's routine. Bear with me if the parallel is not immediately obvious. Every stand-up comedian adopts a certain point of view, a certain persona, and they do so to try to reveal the truth from an unexpected angle.

Their goal is to wound from behind, to catch us off guard. Consider, for instance, how Jim Gaffigan compares parenting to being in a cult. Using the American Family Foundation's definition of a cult. The group members, parents, display an excessively zealous, unquestioning commitment to an individual, their child. Members, parents, subservience to the group, children, causes them to cut ties with family and friends and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.

Standup comics and Ecclesiastes both squint in order to bring the picture into focus. So like a standup comic, the preacher of Ecclesiastes comes at the truth from an angle and here's his angle. His angle is really located in that phrase, under the sun. You'll see it as a repeated refrain. We already heard it twice in the passage.

Under the sun tells us what the preacher is doing. Here's his angle. His angle is considering all that can be learned simply by observing and pondering and analyzing life down here. He's telling us the truth about life as it really is. That's why this book is so uncomfortable.

But he isn't telling us the whole truth.

Everything under the sun is vain, fleeting, futile, a mirage.

But what if someone came to us from beyond the sun?

Ecclesiastes demolishes in order to build, but most of the book is demolition. And Ecclesiastes demolishes far more thoroughly than we are ready for. You have to let this book hurt you before it will heal you.

Throughout most of the book, the preacher systematically shuts off the lights in our lives one by one.

Work, learning, pleasure, leisure, even politics. He just clicks them all off. Each one is a mirage. It's a mirage in that once you get close enough to it, it flickers out and fades away. The room goes dark.

Finally, the room gets so dark that there's no light left. And it's only then that you see the crack in the wall that lets in a very different kind of light. If you want to see the stars, you have to shut off artificial light. The preacher is saying that all of our cherished ambitions are blazing fluorescent bulbs that keep us from seeing the light that comes from far above.

Point two. No gain. What should you expect from 2021? No gain. This point and all the remaining points will be briefer.

Look at verse three. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? The Hebrew word for gain here comes from the realm of accounting. It describes a profit, a remainder, something that is left over and secure after all has been said and done. And the preacher is saying that when all is said and done, there won't be anything left over for you.

His answer to his own rhetorical question is nothing.

Verse 3 offers an initial summary support of the thesis in verse 2. Everything is fleeting and futile because there is no life after death. Lasting gain. When everything is said and done, that is when you're dead, what gain will all your work have gotten you? When the fraying cord of your life is cut, whether 60 years or six hours from now, what will your work have achieved for you?

What benefit will your CV be? Or your net worth or your bank balance or your reputation? Can you put any of those into your casket?

What good will they do you there?

As a 17th century philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal said, The last act is bloody. However fine the rest of the play, they throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.

In Charles Dickens' short story, A Christmas Carol, Scrooge sees himself talking to a woman he once loved. She rebukes him for coming to love money more than he loved her. And then he protests that the world will condemn him either way, either for being poor or for trying to get rich. Then she says to him, you, fear the world too much. All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.

I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one. Until the master passion gain engrosses you.

What kind of gain most tempts you? Is it money? Owning property? Success in your field? Reputation?

Whatever it is, the saying is true: you can't take it with you. That saying comes from Ecclesiastes 5:15, As he came from his mother's womb, he shall go again, naked as he came, and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand.

Point three, No legacy. No legacy. We see this in verses 4 and 11. The rest of our passage, verses 4 to 11, is a poem that rounds out the prologue to the book. Like so many Hebrew poems, this one is shaped like an X, which scholars call a chiasm.

You could think of the poem as a sandwich that goes like this: Bread, cheese, meat, cheese, bread. Or like the new houses we've built on Sixth Street, dark red brick, lighter red, white, light, dark. When you walk past the Sixth Street houses, you will now forever have an illustration of a chiasm. Whenever you encounter one in the Psalms or the prophets, you're welcome. There you go.

So Isaac, wherever you are and Megan, you guys are in the middle, right? And the middle is where you find the key to a chiasm. It's where the meaning is. It's the kind of point that it all comes to. It doesn't come to a point at the end, it comes to it in the middle.

So what we're going to do in the rest of the sermon is work our way from the outside to the inside and end with the middle. This poem in verses 4 to 11 zooms way out, not only in space, but also in time. Imagine watching a movie where every second is 100 years. What would human life look like sped up to that clip? That's what this poem does.

In other words, this poem sets the transience of all human life against the backdrop of the repeated rhythms and stable cycles of the whole created order. By doing this, it provides three illustrations that support the claim of no gain in verse 10. Three. So those three illustrations will be our last three points. Point one is the thesis, point two is the support, now we have three illustrations.

Look first at verse four. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

Roughly three generations are alive at any given time. Right now there are 7.5 billion people on this earth. And in this phrase, A generation goes, and the time it takes you to blink, the author is dismissing one of those generations from the planet. One goes, one comes. Blink once, 2.5 billion people.

Blink twice, another two and a half billion. Blink a third time, and no one who is presently on this planet is still here walking and breathing.

Now look at verse 11. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.

As with stand-up comedy, the genre of Ecclesiastes is no place for footnotes and careful qualifications.

So, the proper response to verse 11 is not to throw back a what about? What about the American founders? Don't we still read their words and celebrate holidays in their honor and visit the monuments that we've set up for them? Well, yes, but if you want to throw out a what about? What about Kai Lun?

Also called Jing Zong. He lived in the second century AD. He was a court official in the Eastern Han Dynasty and he invented paper and the modern paper making process, one of the most influential technologies in history. Ever heard of him? Or what about Norman Borlaug?

He only died 11 years ago. He was an American agronomist whose agricultural innovations are credited with saving Over a billion people from death by starvation. Ever heard his name before now?

Or what about your own great grandparents? Of your eight great grandparents, how many can you name?

Of those you can name, for how many can you say anything at all about who they were or what they did?

These people were partially responsible for your own existence and this is how you repay them by forgetting them completely.

It's what happens. In all probability, a hundred years after your death, no one will ever know that you lived.

How should the certainty that you will be forgotten. Shape your life today.

What if you woke up early tomorrow, looked in the mirror in your bathroom and reminded yourself, one day soon, you and everything you have ever done will be completely forgotten. How would that change your day?

What should you expect from 2021? That whatever footprints your life leaves on this earth, another year or 10 or 100 and the sands of time will blow them completely away, leaving absolutely no trace of you. Point four, no progress. What should you expect from 2021? No progress.

Here we come one layer into the sandwich with verses 5 and 6 and also 9 and 10.

Look first at verses 5 and 6.

The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north. Around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits, the wind returns.

All that effort, and the sun and the wind wind up right where they started. If the sun or the wind ever wanted to criticize the other, they could say, Boy, look at that guy. Look at all that effort he is putting in to winding up exactly where he started. He is expending the most possible effort and taking the greatest possible distance to absolutely nowhere.

The preacher's point is that for all that motion, their starting and ending positions are the same. Just like our lives. We start out as nothing and end up as nothing. We start out with nothing and end with nothing. And then the corresponding reflection in verses 9 and 10, which makes the application to our lives explicit: what has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done and there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said, See, this is new? It has been already in the ages before us. What example would you offer to object to the claim that there's nothing new under the sun? Space travel, iPhones, democracy, a COVID-19 vaccine?

Here's the question to ask about each of those and about everything else under the sun: Does any of them alter the fundamental human condition? Does any of them break the cycle of seeking and not finding? Does any of them put something in the gain column that death will not absolutely wipe out?

Our culture lives on novelty and worships progress, but novelty is an addictive drug. You need more and more of it and get less and less from it. As C.S. Lewis said about novelty in the Screwtape Letters, speaking through the character of the senior demon Wormwood, the horror of the same old thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart. An endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.

And what about progress? Here's how the pastor Zach Eswin applies verses 9 and 10 to modern life.

Putting a space station in the skies has not kept our families intact. Delivered us from dictators, or eradicated a selfish heart. New inventions make our bones heal quicker, but not our minds, not our hearts. So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us point five, no satisfaction.

What should you expect from 2021?

No satisfaction. We now arrive at the middle and the point of the whole poem in verses 7 and 8. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness.

A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Verse seven uses the water cycle to illustrate verse three's claim that there is no gain for humanity under the sun. How? Think of all the rivers in the world constantly gushing into all the oceans of the world, and yet they never raise the water level an inch.

This is not a sort of pseudo-scientific observation, it's a poetic one.

The point is all that activity doesn't budge the needle. Hence the conclusion of verse 8, All things are full of weariness. Again, in verse 8, what does it mean that the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing? It means your eyes are never going to turn to you and show up at a staff meeting for your body and say, just to give you a status report, We are at approximately 98% capacity. If you choose to watch three more streaming shows online, we'll be done.

We will be unable to and we'll have no desire to take in any other spectacle for the rest of our lives. The appetite continues, always wanting more.

Our appetites are a sign, they're a pointer, they're a sign of two realities. First, we're meant to be filled. As C.S. Lewis put it, creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger.

Well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim. Well, there is such a thing as water. The second thing that our insatiable appetites point to is that the satisfaction we're looking for cannot be found in this world. World.

Lewis again, if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it to suggest the real thing. This world doesn't satisfy us because it was never meant to. God created us to be satisfied in him, but we have all sought our ultimate satisfaction in everything but God.

As Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.

Genesis 1 tells us that God created humanity good and he created a good world for us to enjoy. But Adam and Eve rejected God and ever since then we've all rebelled against him. That's why this world is vain, fleeting and futile. Genesis 3 tells us of how God subjected the world to a curse as a judgment against our sin. And as we heard earlier from Romans chapter 8, all creation has been subjected to futility.

After the fall and this side of eternity, life is a breath. And all of Scripture warns of an even worse curse, an even worse judgment to come for all who persist in rebelling against God. As Pascal said, Between us and heaven or hell, there is only life halfway, the most fragile, thing in the world.

But God did not simply leave us to suffer this curse. Instead, in the person of his Son, he came to us. He came from beyond the Son to rescue us from the curse of life under the Son. On the cross, Jesus paid the penalty for all the sins. Of all those who had turned from sin and trust in him.

And he rose from the dead three days later to repeal the curse of futility forever. He rose again to a life that will not end, a life of glory and joy that no sands of time can ever sweep away. If you've never turned from sin and trusted in Christ, turn to him, embrace him as your savior, your rescuer, your deliverer from this hopeless condition that your sin has put you in. Where can you find rest from the oppressive weariness of the world?

And if you have not yet found this world to be weary, if you have not yet found all things to be full of weariness, just keep living.

Where can you find rest? In Jesus. Matthew 11:28, he invites us, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Where can you find satisfaction for your eyes and ears? In seeing him face to face and hearing him say, well done.

Good and faithful servant. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, we're glad you're here. You're very welcome here and at any of our gatherings. In light of all we've studied in this passage, here's my question for you. What is your strategy for finding meaning in life?

And how's it going? Is it still out there and you just haven't laid hold of it yet?

Would you say that you have found it and you're not sure what reasons Ecclesiastes has for being such a downer? Or maybe, have you knocked on door after door after door and then they've opened but they only opened onto emptiness?

What then? What if you get the thing you most want, and it turns out not to be enough.

Ecclesiastes is an especially crucial book for people who are young and successful and prosperous.

As our pastor Marcus said in his overview, the chapter and sermon on Ecclesiastes, Job learned about the vanity of this world by losing it all.

The preacher saw it by having it all.

Or as the philosopher Peter Kreeft has commented, again comparing Job to Ecclesiastes, because God speaks, Job has everything, even though he has nothing. Because God is silent. Ecclesiastes has nothing, even though he has everything. Ecclesiastes is about why having everything will never be enough.

So what should you expect from 2021? Here's what you shouldn't do. Don't. Put all your hopes in a return to a post-COVID normal.

You don't know how that will happen, when that will happen, or even if that will happen. And even if it does, you don't know that you'll be around to see it.

James 4:15, Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As the verse just before that one says, what is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while.

And then vanishes. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this frigid, scouring wind of the book of Ecclesiastes.

That shakes us, that wakes us up, that makes it so that we can't go back to the bed of comfortable illusions. Father, we pray that we would submit to the wisdom of this book. We pray that you would teach us to number our days. That we would get a heart of wisdom. And we pray that we would hope in that which is certain to come because you've promised it.

We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.