Eternity in our Hearts.
(Sermon Notes by Howard Taylor)

(Some of the wording of this sermon I owe to Derek Kidner's commentary on Ecclesiastes.)

Someone said:
"We are all fascinated with the future because that is where we will spend the rest of our lives."

Time and Eternity - Ecclesiastes.
(Esp chapter 3)
In the last year many: 

  • born, 
  • die, 
  • first job, 
  • retire
  • lost work, 
  • promoted
New conflicts started, old wars ended.

Much weeping,  ....  rejoicing.

Acts of cruelty,  .....  kindness and courage.

Spring, summer, autumn, winter.

This ebb and flow of life described in Eccles.

Each of us living in one experience, and then later living in the opposite.
Sadness, and and then gladness.

Life has a rhythm!

Is there any point to it?
Ecclesiastes  starts with: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Seems to say: No point to life
Written by a cynic?
Why is it in the Bible?

However right in the middle of the apparent cynicism:
Light.
That light, is something that God has put in all our hearts 
 - something that makes us question why we are here.

 A question to which the rest of the Bible gives an answer.
Come to that later in this message.

Earlier we read from Chapter 3.
"Time to plant, reap, cry, laugh, be born, die, etc. etc."

2 Ways of reponding to this.
1. It can make us cynical.

 a. Life is just endless circles.
 So in chapter 1:
Eccl 1:24, 8-11. 2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless." 3 What does man gain from all his labour at which he toils under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
8 All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
11 There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

Sheer pointless drudgery.!

Perhaps even worse:
b. Not just endless circles, but time seems to be a tyranny of seasons and events outside our control
Do we really have free choices? 
Are not our real masters the circumstances beyond our power?
Is it not true that we merely respond to winter, summer; childhood, old age etc.?
Are not our lives dictated by the march of time and circumstance?

Sometimes we say: 
 "Who would have imagined I would be doing such and such .."

Is everything we do imposed on us by events beyond us?
Are we no different from the animals?
Eccl 3:1920
19 Man"s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless.
20 All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.
(NIV)
This is what we think of as the atheist"s belief.
Bertrand Russell: 
 "The life of a man is a long march through the night,  toward a goal which few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long.  One by one as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death.  Brief and powerless is man"s life.  On him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls, pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. 

Doctrine of determinism - everything is fixed by the laws of science that control our bodies, brains and circumstances."

So why is Eccles in the Bible?
Well in verse 11a we meet something different. (Writer not an atheist after all)
Eccl 3:11a
11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; 

Beauty and Eternity!

Beauty: Atheist has to say that there is not really any such thing as beauty. All there is to us believing a flower or a sunset is beautiful, is the  movement of stuff in our brains. 

C.S.Lewis. 
Since childhood he had a longing for beauty, holiness and eternal, everlasting joy that is beyond all earthly satisfactions.
Whilst an atheist he said all these things are imaginary.
Then he asked himself whether one can really have a longing for something that does not exist.
Joy is longing for and that sense of awe that comes from being aware of that which is eternal beauty.
That sense of awe can only exist if that eternal beauty actually exists and calls it forth.
We get glimpses of it in the temporary beauty of this world and its experiences.

There really exists beyond us beauty, holiness, and eternal love.
   God exists.

Next stage: God has a claim on his life.
Reluctant convert.
Referred to his life away from influence of God: 
I had wanted (mad wish) "to call my soul my own."

But then how he was converted:
You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted for a second from my work, the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I had greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. ...    The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compusion is our liberation. (page 182/3 in Surprised By Joy)

Eccl 3:11a
11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; 

Augustine: "Thou hast created us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."

So now we know God and believe in Him.
How do we see the changing seasons?
 Not cynically - not pointless BUT:
1. Everything has beauty in its time.

God has given us changing seasons for beauty.
Flowers of the field are not eternally plastic.
Change, blossom, wither, die, and return to new life.
Changing and revolving seasons - not drudgery - beauty.


2.  Changing circumstances of our life not pointless - 

Prepare us for eternity.
Even terribly difficult times:
A Christian relief worker in  former Yugoslavia says the war has made unbelievers "eternity conscious,"  He (Turner) was in Mostar, Bosnia, distributing medical supplies and thousands of copies of a Christian booklet "Help From Above". Although Bosnia is  44 percent Muslim, only three people turned down a copy of the book. "One thing that has intensified that urge to know God, is that they might see Him any minute," 

Some say: 
 'By the time we have learnt from experience 
  - too old to put our learning into practice.'

Grain of truth but our experience on earth is also preparing us for beauty of Eternity. 

Character shaped by life and the decisions we make to be with or not with Christ.

3.  We are not slaves of circumstances.
We do have free will. 
Not just circumstances and seasons that shape our lives.
We can effect our destiny and our character and the well being of world around us 
   - for good or bad.

We can all get out of tune with God"s timing.

  • Time to make peace but we continue to quarrel
  • Time to be quiet but we spoke.
  • Time to speak but we kept quiet.
  • Time to pray - we watched the telly.
  • Time to go to Church - we read the newspaper.
  • Time to relax and be with our families and we   continued to work.


Yet through all our human failings - God"s purposes will be accomplished.
Eccl 3:14
14 I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere him. (NIV)
Destiny of the world not in our hands but the hands of God.

Eternity and time brought together in a verse in Revelation (13:8) 
 "Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world".

Cross of Jesus stands over all of time.
Yes it took place at one particular time - 2000 years ago.
 - at one place - Jerusalem.

But it stands over and envelops all of time - 
From the time man first sinned the Lord suffered. 
His love for us was always a self-giving love.

He has always known the frailty of man!
Ps 103:1314
13 As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
14 for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.

With Him there is mercy and forgiveness.
Coming of Jesus - living among us - actualisation of that which was eternally in God.

Let that cross be ours now!
Seek its forgiveness for all the past times of our lives.
Seek to take it up and follow Jesus for the future.
  - in tune with His timing.

Then - whatever happens - nothing will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Rom 8:28, 31,35, 38-39
28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. 
31 What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 
38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (NIV)

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