398: Failed Strategy #3: Work | Dave Sloop

Introduction

Good morning, everyone. We're thrilled that you are here. I wanted to start this morning by asking you guys a question. I think my younger audience will know the answer to this question. Who has heard of the documentary Fyre Festival? A couple of hands, okay. Fyre Festival was a documentary on Netflix. In 2016, there was a guy named Billy McFarlane, a 26 or 27-year-old guy. And he partnered with Ja Rule, who's a rapper, most of you know, I'm sure. And he partnered with this guy and he was a marketing genius, and he was selling to the public. And here's the tagline of the Netflix documentary: it was the greatest party that never happened.

This is one of their ads, and it was promised to be this epic, unforgettable musical festival on this island that I believe used to be owned by Pablo Escobar. As you can imagine, I mean, they sold out tickets in a day. Thousands of people wanted to go there. Tickets ranged anywhere from $500 to $12,000 depending on your level of luxury. Let me show you a couple other pictures. Here's another one. These are the, I mean, it looks so appealing, right? Here's the next one. Oh, wait, this is what it actually became, okay?

The Fyre Festival Disaster

Thousands of people land on this island, and instead of getting luxury villas, they got leftover FEMA tents from Hurricane Matthew. These guys didn't start planning the logistics of this festival until two months before it happened, and it was a train wreck. The drinking water got left and lost at customs. It was too expensive to ship toilets over there, so they had a few porta-potties. I mean, thousands of people, 600 people didn't have anywhere to sleep, everybody's luggage was lost, and people got stranded on this island. They couldn't even get planes out of there. It was just a complete nightmare.

Chefs never got paid, so they quit. So instead of getting gourmet food, they got cold cheese sandwiches, salad with sand on it. It was a nightmare. Here's a couple of other pictures. These are the FEMA tents. Oh, and by the way, the celebrity, the A-list celebrities and the musicians, they didn't show up.

This is—look at this slide here—expectation doesn't always match reality, does it? Sometimes the actual experience does not match what was promised. And as we've been walking through the book of Ecclesiastes, essentially, is what Solomon, who we believe wrote the book, I do anyway, there's some debate. This is what he has been experiencing—a series of rug pulls or disappointments at life.

Solomon's Search for Meaning

In verse three of chapter one, he presents the question that the whole book sets out to answer. Do you remember it? What does a man gain from his labor in which he toils, where? Under the sun. Solomon is dealing with life on the earth, and he's wondering, is there meaning, fulfillment, purpose somewhere out there that I can find? He's looking for it, and by the way, so are you. Because if you're a human being, you are hungry for meaning. You cannot help it. If you are alive, you are aware of an ache inside you, and you go to get it satisfied and fulfilled.

But do you know that Solomon gives us the conclusion of can you find meaning in this life? He gives it in verse two before he even asks the question. Do you remember what it says?

Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless. — Ecclesiastes 1:2

He tells you, you're not gonna find it. But he goes looking anyway. And he tells you where he looks, and likely it's the same place that you and I look. Two weeks ago, we looked at Solomon trying to find meaning and purpose and fulfillment through his wisdom and knowledge. I will figure it out. But instead of being satisfied and fulfilled, what do we read? With more wisdom comes what? More sorrow. More knowledge, more grief. Because the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. The more you try to figure this thing out called life under the sun, the more you realize there are just too many missing pieces to the puzzle.

I'm not gonna figure this thing out unless there's someone above the sun. But down here, it's nothing. See, what Solomon is finding out and we're watching him find out is this: if everything that we see is everything that there is, then everything is necessarily meaningless. If your origin is meaningless and your destination is meaningless, then don't pretend that you can find meaning in between.

And this is what most people do, by the way. You're free to be atheist, but most people who claim to be atheist live as if there is some higher reality. See, if there is no meaning to our origin or our destination, then there cannot be meaning to our existence in between. This is why existential thought came into being, because they just, if there is no God, then there can be no meaning.

Solomon's Failed Strategies

Secondly, after he tries to find life through wisdom and knowledge, where does he go next? The very next verse, he says, I thought to my heart, come now, I will test you with pleasure. Food, drink, wine, women. And what was it? It was a chasing after the wind. It did not work.

And this week, Solomon turns to his next, his third failed strategy. And I wonder if we will see ourselves in it. Turn to Ecclesiastes chapter two, verse 17. And we're gonna walk through this thing a verse at a time.

Solomon says, verse 17:

So I hated life because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. — Ecclesiastes 2:17

Those are strong words. We're gonna take one phrase at a time. Let's start with that second one. He says, the work done under the sun was grievous to me. That word for work is activity, and that word for done is accomplishment. Accomplished. He's saying here, the works that I've accomplished, the stuff that I have done. And then he says, it was grievous to me. That word grievous—that's actually a soft translation of that word. You're gonna see this word show up again later in the chapter. And it's translated in the ESV as evil or bad. It is a great misfortune, is how the NIV interprets it. It's the same word. He's saying, my accomplishments were bad. They were evil. And let me tell you what he's not saying. He's not saying that I did bad things, though Solomon did do some bad things. But that's not what he means here. He's saying that the works that I accomplished—and by the way, Solomon accomplished all that he set out to accomplish. If you look earlier in this chapter, he accomplished more than anyone who had gone before him. He expanded the kingdom. But what he was saying was that it just, it didn't do the trick. He was disillusioned.

In fact, you watch this evolution happen earlier in the chapter. I'll just read you parts of verse ten and eleven. He says, my heart took delight in all my work and this was my reward for all my labor. I enjoyed it. But then in verse 11, he says, yep, when I surveyed—that word is to face something head-on— all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. And then he answers this question that is posed in verse three of chapter one. He goes, nothing was gained under the sun.

Solomon is disillusioned here by his work, which makes sense because listen to his emotional response. Okay? It almost sounds like an overreaction. Did you catch it? I hated my life because the work that is done under the sun was grievous. Does this sound a little bit like an angsty teenager? Okay? Who had a bad day at school and comes home and goes, I hate my life. It can't get any worse, right? Is Solomon a drama queen? Or is something else perhaps going on? Is it possible that his strong emotional reaction is pointing to something?

Maybe it's pointing to what work had become for Solomon. Is it possible that when Solomon talks about his work, he's just not talking about what he does, but rather who he is? See, Solomon's identity had become inextricably tethered to the work of his hands. His accomplishments, his achievements—they were the same thing as himself. His identity was his activity.

And the moment that you do that, the moment that you take that bait, verse 18 happens. Listen to what it says:

I hated all the things that I toiled for under the sun. — Ecclesiastes 2:18

That's what it says in the NIV. In the ESV, it says, actually, I hated the toil in which I toiled. And that's a better translation. It's just working for the sake of work, and it's not producing anything, and I hated it.

What is toil? You know when that first shows up? Toil is a negative connotation of work. See, work wasn't originally intended to be bad. God created you and I in his image, and he is a worker. Do you know that? He is a creator. And when we create, we are imaging God. We are bringing glory to him. We are doing what he does. He put Adam in the garden, and he said, cultivate it. In other words, make it better. And when you do it, it's going to bring me pleasure because you're doing what I do.

But the moment that Adam and Eve reached for life apart from God, when they tried to find life under the sun apart from the one that made them, something happened. Sin entered the world, and it cursed everything, including work. And listen to what happened in chapter three of Genesis. God says,

Cursed is the ground because of you. And then listen to this, through your painful toil, you will eat of it all the days of your life. — Genesis 3:17-19

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food. You know that in the King James, that word food is translated bread. Because that is the sustenance for the people. It’s their bread.

What is this telling us? After the curse, here’s what work had become: sweat and pain and toil. Why? So that you can eat, so that you can survive. Before the fall, all this food's for you, Adam and Eve. After the fall, you work to sustain yourself. The lie that you believe now is that I’m the one, I will provide for myself.

Do you know that by Genesis chapter 11, they're not just working the ground—which, by the way, does not produce what you think it will, it produces thorns and thistles instead—but they're also making bricks with their hands, building a city, and building a tower to reach the heavens. Why? So they can make a name for themselves. No longer are they just seeking to provide for themselves; they are seeking to make a name for themselves.

You see, the lie brought about by the curse is this: my worth is in my work. My value is in what I produce. And what did God do? He went down and scattered them because God would not let them find ultimate worth and meaning through the work of their hands. He frustrated it, and they scattered.

This is what Solomon is experiencing here. It is a disillusionment. And when he says I hated my life, it makes sense that he said that because he had attached his identity to his work. And when his work let him down, he had no sense of purpose in life anymore.

The Inheritance and the Disillusionment

Is this a trap that you and I can fall into? We can. Solomon is going to tell us more specifically why this was troubling to him. And he's going to tell you a couple of things explicitly, but then I want to go back and look at what he implies in all of it.

Let's look here at what he says. He says, I hated all the things that I toiled for under the sun, this is verse 18, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the work into which I have poured my effort, my skill under the sun. This too is meaningless.

What is he saying here? He's saying, I am pouring my skill, my effort to build what I built. Someone else gets it. And who knows whether or not they're going to be wise or a fool. Let me ask you something: Why would Solomon care about the quality of the character of his heir or successor? Because he wasn't just handing over stuff, he was handing over himself. This was his identity. The person that would come after him was going to either preserve or destroy his legacy, and it mattered to him.

See, because Solomon's worth was in his work. He was letting him down.

Here's the second problem with someone else getting the product of your work. He says this in verse 20: so my heart turned over to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun, for a man may do his work with, and here he goes again, with wisdom, skill, knowledge, and then he must leave all he owns to someone, listen, who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless, and then here's that word again, evil, and a great misfortune.

What’s he saying? He’s saying, I poured all my skill and effort and energy and work, and someone else just comes in and gets it. And they didn't have to work for it. They may not even have the skills that led to me getting what I got, and they just get to reap it. And he says, this is meaningless. You get this sense that there's just this injustice that he has in mind, but I think there's probably something more because he doesn't just say it's vanity. He says it's also a great evil. It's bad. It's a misfortune. Why would he say that?

He knows that someone who didn't work for it is going to get a massive fortune. We're going to talk about wealth next week, how people do who inherit great fortunes that didn't earn it. Have you followed the statistics on this? How people do when they win the lottery? Doesn't always turn out so good. How about the children of billionaires? They don't turn out so good. Perhaps what Solomon knows here is that his great inheritance, it might go to a fool, but even if he's wise, it's probably going to ruin him because he didn't have to work for it, and it's going to spoil him. That's what he says explicitly.

But now, I want to show you what he says implicitly. You find this phrase used twice in verse 18 and I think in verse 21. Listen again what he says: I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun. And then he says, because I must leave them. And then again in verse 21, man may do his work with wisdom and knowledge and skill and then he must leave all he owns. You know what I think he's catching a sense of here? That all of this striving, all of this work to build, he's striving for something that he just can't keep. Even when he has it, he senses that he just isn't gonna be able to keep it. It is a striving after the wind, and there's complete disillusionment.

You see, if your worth is in your work, then you are endlessly searching and trying to prove yourself to others and to yourself that you matter, that your existence is important, and it's endless. Anybody been following the Olympics over the last week or so? I got home on Friday night after being at the office looking at this passage actually, and I sit down with the family to watch swimming. Anybody ever heard of Caleb Dressel? Caleb Dressel, I think he got like five gold medals or something like that at the last Olympics. He's a swimmer. He set a world record. And what we're gonna watch here is two minutes of a backstory on Caleb Dressel and his experience of the last Olympics.

And this was right before he was going to swim live in this Olympics. Take a look.

How are the Tokyo Olympics for you from a competitive standpoint?
You would think this would be an easy question for me to answer.
And Caleb Dressel is gonna win gold up there in lane five.
He did it. Yes, sir.
At this point in time where I'm at right now, amazing for me.
Absolutely fantastic.
And look at this guy just explode off the block.
And Caleb Dressel will get it done again. Another goal for Dressel.
World record.
I think I won every time I step up to the blocks individually.
I think I got my hand on the wall first.
Three for three. It is individual events.
And that that's a that's a tough feat.
Gold medal again.
Watching his dreams come true was incredibly emotional.
Much.
Five gold medals at a single Olympics.
Seeing some facial expressions or body cues from him, and I'm like, I know this is a little bit of a smokescreen. I don't think a lot of people really realize the toll that it takes to be great.
On the plane ride back, I was thinking that was not the games I wanted to have.
That I didn't fulfill what I felt like I was capable of fulfilling.
You didn't work hard enough to get the results you wanted.
You should have gotten a world record in 100 free as well as 50 free.
I shouldn't say me. I should say a part of me thought that.
And I call that that part of me the the critic.
He had wild success.
You know, you come home with a suitcase full of gold medals.
Like, there was no room at the time for joy or celebration around these incredible things that he had just done.
When your worth is in your work, then your work is never done.
There's always more to do.
There's always someone right behind you, you can hear the footsteps, they're about to surpass you.
If not in this life, then the next.
You know Caleb Dressel got up on the blocks right after this defending his gold and he got sixth place and he wept.
It was a chasing after the wind.

The Rest in Christ

Look, hard work isn't bad. Work isn't bad. It's just not very good at being God. And that's what it had become to Solomon. It's what it had become to Caleb. And what that produces is this: in verse 23. In verse 22 actually, what does a man get for all his toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days, pain, grief, even at night his mind does not rest. There is no rest when your identity is a product of what you produce. There is no rest.

Now, is there hope? I want to give you a little preview into what we're going to be talking about in a couple of weeks. Tim is going to teach us the first part of our series. Right now, we're looking at the failed strategies. In two weeks, we're going to start looking at our best options based on what we've learned from Ecclesiastes. One of them is just to take life as it comes.

But look at what he says here in verse 24:

A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work.
This too I see is from the hand of God. — Ecclesiastes 2:24

He is saying that there is a way to take joy in your work. There’s a way to just live and work and enjoy it. But he says, this too is from the hand of God. What does that mean? We’re going to come back to it.

What I want to focus on first is that he says, this too is of the hand of God. What's the implication? What came before it is also from the hand of God. Verse 23, your sorrow, your grief, your sleepless nights over you're trying to find worth from your work—that's from the hand of God too. He will not let you be satisfied by your work, by what you produce. He will frustrate it, just like he did with the Tower of Babel, and he's pleased to do it. Because we're not meant to find life here under the sun. It will always leave you wanting.

But he says that there is a way to enjoy and be satisfied by our work. How is that? It almost sounds like he's putting us back in the garden. When work was something a way to just glorify an image our creator. It's almost a reversal of the curse.

I want to show you something. Look at Genesis chapter five. This is in verse 28 and 29:

When Lamech had lived a hundred and eighty-two years, he had a son and named him Noah.
You know what his name means? Rest.
And he said, "This is what they said about Noah, he will comfort us."
That word in the Hebrew is to sigh. It is to stop striving. It is to just breathe. It's relief.
He will comfort us in the labor and the painful toil of our hands by the ground that the Lord had cursed.

What is he saying? There is relief coming from the curse. What was the work that Noah did? What was the product of his work? It was a boat. And if you hid yourself in the product of Noah’s work, you were spared from the coming judgment. But when that boat hit dry land, you know what there still was? There was still a cursed ground. It did not fully and finally reverse the curse. It did not satisfy or give ultimate rest.

But Noah, you see, points to someone who does. Noah points to the one that would one day say, come to me, I will give you rest. And the people would say, like the rich young ruler: what must we do? What must I do? Because it's about my work. In our scripture reading, the gospel reading today, did you see it? John chapter six, people said, what is the work that God requires? What must we do? Jesus said, the work:

Believe in me. — John 6:29

Believe in the one that he sent. Jesus goes on to say, I’m the bread. Do you remember the curse? By the sweat of your face will you eat bread. Jesus said, by my work will you be satisfied. It's my work. His work is a finished work. And anyone who's willing to hide himself in the finished product of his work will be spared from the coming judgment, but also they will enter into rest. Why? Because there's no more striving. There's no more trying to find fulfillment through my work.

Do you know why? Because he has fully and finally accepted me. It is him who validates my worth and my existence. That which I’ve been trying to find through my work and what my hands produce, I get completely from him. My work couldn't give it to me, but he does. And when you identify with the reality that you are completely accepted, completely loved and pursued and adored, not on the basis of what you do, but on the basis of what he has already done, then you stop striving.

And you know what happens? Work just becomes work again. We're doing it not to gain some sort of validation of my existence. I'm doing it because it's what my creator does, and it glorifies him when I work. But I don't need it.

Solomon's greatest fear is that an undeserving fool would get his inheritance. Do you know God's greatest joy? That an undeserving fool gets it. He loves you. He's the only one who can give your soul rest. Come. Let's pray.

Father, we need you. We look in all kinds of places for a rest we will never find and that we could never produce. Thank you for being pleased to frustrate our efforts so that we might find you, the one for whom we were made. If you're here today and you'd like to come have some time of prayer during this next worship song, rails are open for you. And if you would like someone to pray for you, we have some people—they are awesome, they are trained to pray with you—and instead of at these straight rails, we're actually doing something new today: back in this corridor where it's a little quieter, we have some people that would love to pray with you. Don't miss a chance. They'd love to do it.

Father, love you. Thanks for this time of worship. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Would you please stand as we sing?