Searching For What's Right?

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. We are in our third week of this series called Catching Smoke, which we found is an apt metaphor. It comes right from the text of the book of Ecclesiastes. The Hebrew word for Ecclesiastes is koheleth, which we've found means researcher, professor, philosopher, collector of ideas, someone who's looking for things under the sun. And I was asked by someone, well why don't you mention that it's, well the first verse mentions it's probably, well he's king of Jerusalem it says, so it's probably Solomon, though it doesn't say specifically that, but basically Solomon who tradition says is the author of this book, had everything, right? I mean you couldn't get someone who didn't have more fame, more wealth, more pleasure. You could go down that path. But also seems to have lost all sense of purpose and meaning, even as he saturated himself with everything that he could possibly have, all the power, all the glory, all the honor, everything. And he found it was like grasping on to smoke. It just kind of went through his fingers, it was impermanent, etc. So it is now going to be the, we only have one more Sunday in this book and you're probably going, thank God, because it's really a depressing book. I don't know, have you ever had sermons on Ecclesiastes before? Anybody ever? Probably not, because it doesn't come up that often. It's one of the oddest, outside of the norm, if you want to say, books in the Bible. It's misunderstood a lot of times because of its tendency to not even think about God, to just look at life on its own. The next series, though, that we're going to do is called Emotional Jesus. Now you might go, like, what? When you hear people say they're emotional, it's like, we always say it's a bad thing, but if you look in the life of Jesus, he expressed all sorts of emotions. And I love the idea of, we have a God who understands our emotions. We are not rational beings, by the way. I'm not as logical as I want to believe I am. I'm pretty emotional. Our desires move us a lot more. And God created those, and God himself expresses those throughout the entire pages of Scripture, especially in Jesus. So we're going to be looking at how he has compassion on the crowd, how he is filled with joy over one who returns, right? How he is surprised at the unbelief of some, and surprised at the belief of others. How he is dreading the cross. All of those aspects for a number of weeks. I think you're going to get a lot more out of it. It might be a, it's an easier service, series to preach, actually, than Koheleth and Catching Smoke. So I'm looking forward to that. So all he is looking at is what's going on right in front of him, not what's above, not what's below, not what's before, and not what's after. It's just what he can see and taste and touch and experience and understand in his own limited way. This is, in a lot of ways, called what secularism is. This is a secular viewpoint. And the word secular, actually, it's the word saeculum in Latin, and it really means age, span of time, lifetime, generation. But the best way to understand it is now-ism. It's just what we have now in front of us. And we're going to be looking at what it means if all you have is now, right now. Not yesterday. You can't hold on to anything in the past. It slips through your fingers. Not anything in the future. No future at all. Just now, what's in front of you. That's what Koheleth, this book, is looking at. We're going to look at two points today in this text. The first, the present tense. Play on words. And then finally, freed by the present, which I have to kind of go outside of the text of Koheleth to find, by the way, because the book itself is not real hopeful, okay? But the present tense, that is a play on words. Don't you feel the present time is tense? Huh? You see, yeah, a little tense. High, strong, tight. I think people are fearing something's going to break. All it takes is the cosmic shoe is going to finally drop, or the pressure built up in our society is just going to explode like magma out of a volcanic event of some type. And you might think, oh yeah, yeah, it's tense, but you know, just get past November 6th and things will calm down. I think we've said that a few times already. It hasn't happened. Or we're just hoping something good will happen that will take it away. But I don't think the tension that we have in our society is based specifically on the fact that we went through a pandemic called COVID, nor is it because we have Vladimir Putin and what he's doing, or what China's doing, or what's going on in the South China Sea, or what's going on in the Middle East. It's not because the economy is iffy in any ways. It's not because of inflation or immigration. They all might kind of add to the tension, but what's really behind it is the whole idea of this is what we experience w...