Sermon: Ecclesiastes Resumed (Part Thirty-Nine): Ecclesiastes 11:9-10

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Given 14-Dec-24; 42 minutes

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The wonderful fleeting time of youth is a time of strength, exploration, and boundless opportunities, offering the freedom to try new things as well as make mistakes. Ecclesiastes 11:9-11 cautions young people that while they are encouraged to enjoy life, they will still be held accountable for their actions. Even though youth is a time to experiment, all behaviors must be conducted within the boundaries of God's law, as all individuals will ultimately be held accountable for their behavior. Overly restrictive, helicopter parents, interfering with their offspring's freedom of explorations, may crimp the attainment of responsible godly character. God fearing parents must teach their offspring godly principles. But draw back allowing them to make decisions. The process of training children to think for themselves and trust in God's way of life is essential spiritual maturation.


transcript:

Youth, it is a wonderful thing most of the time, I think. I guess some people have a bad experience when they are young, but I think for most people the time when we are young is a really positive experience.

When young, we are healthy and strong and everything is fresh and new. Our potential is before us and we feel like we can do anything. We are strong, we are forward-looking, in most cases, and youth is just a time to be out there and learn new things. Our opportunities are boundless and it feels like all we have to do is stretch out our hands to grasp those opportunities and put a little effort in, and they can be ours.

Life is fun. We have friends, so there are things to do. We can go camping or do this or that activity and we just take a lot of joy out of it. We can play more when we are young, and work less, and I think a lot of us that are a little bit older would rather do that as well, play a little more and work a little less. But when we get mature, we end up having responsibilities and we have to put more time into our work.

We get to try new things when we are young. We can learn things that interest us. We can test our skills, compete against others to see if we can outdo and outlast other people. And all this is really fun for us because that is just life. We can consider all those possibilities, and do all these things because we do not have a lot of responsibility at that time, at least not as much as we will have when we are older.

This all sounds great. In our world, this time of youth runs from birth until about 25 or 30, at least until the end of college for many, and then some go on from college into graduate studies and things. But once you are in graduate studies, you are fixed on a line where you want to accomplish something and things become less fun because you are really getting serious and taking out a lot of responsibilities.

Now, 25 or 30 as the end of one's youth seems high. It has always seemed high for me. I guess that is because of my personal experience when I felt like I started to really mature at 18 after high school and started really thinking deeply about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. But even that is late for the people who came before us. The period of our youth used to be much shorter, when boys were considered men in their mid-teens when they could do a full-time job and support a family with what they were doing and girls were marriageable in their early teens. You know, as soon as they could become pregnant, they were considered adult in that sense.

Really, teenage years are a modern invention. It used to be that once you hit 12 or 13 years old, then you were expected to do what you could to earn a living. I mean, everything happens sooner in a time when life expectancy was so low. But now we are slow to mature, we take a long time to mature, and many of the youth put it off even farther to avoid the responsibility of adulthood. I mean, they call it "adulting" and they do not want to do adult things.

But truly, youth is a time to enjoy life to its fullest. One can imagine, explore, take risks, experiment, have fun. Most older people, I think, would love to return to the time of their youth and relive that time. But they would always probably put a caveat on that and say they would love to do that only with the knowledge they have now so they would not make the same mistakes that they made when they were younger. Because with man, youth is a time of making mistakes and most youths make a whole lot of them. And sometimes when they make such mistakes the effects linger for years, and maybe even a whole lifetime. And so, even though this is how life is under the sun, that youth is a time of being bold and maybe taking more risks than we think, we also make more mistakes.

Now, the Bible pictures youth in three overall ways across its pages.

1. It pictures youth as a time of strength and potential. The glory of a young man is his strength, the proverb says. And so the Bible looks at youth as a time when people are the strongest and able to bear more, able to do more because of their energy and strength.

2. The Bible says that youth is a time of willfulness and folly. When some people, rather than trying to use youth in a good way, they use it in a bad way, and they end up being willful or wayward and doing a lot of foolish things.

3. The Bible pictures the time of youth as one of setting a pattern for life. That the things you do when you are young end up remaining with you for the rest of your life as a pattern of behavior. And so when you are young you set those patterns and they are very difficult to break once you get into maturity. And they could very seriously harm one's, let us say, spiritual development if they are negative patterns. But if they are positive patterns, then they actually help you a great deal because you have set up good patterns for following God's way of life.

Now, we need to keep all three of these factors in mind as we consider Ecclesiastes 11, verses 9 and 10 today. We are only going to go over two verses here because of the limits of my time.

Solomon (who is also called Qoheleth, meaning the preacher), has just encouraged adults in the earlier parts of chapter 11, particularly the elderly, to squeeze as much joy from life as they possibly can, while remembering that death is inevitable and their lives and works under the sun are utterly worthless.

So yes, you have time. There is time before you, and death is approaching those days of darkness that are coming and there are many, as he says, and we should have that in mind because now we have that limited window to get things done that we want to do. Whether it is to learn more, do some sort of project, get it done, have a goal that we want to reach, cross things off our bucket list, whatever they happen to be, or to leave a legacy for our children and our grandchildren. There is only a short window once you get to be an old person and the aches and pains of life start coming upon you where you can actually finish the goals that you have started and make something of oneself beyond what you are at the present.

So in verses 9 and 10 of Ecclesiastes 11, he turns to address the young. He has addressed the adults, he has addressed the elderly, and he does not want to leave the young out because they could benefit from what he has to say too. So he turns to address the youth.

Ecclesiastes 11:9-10 Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes; and know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh, for childhood and youth are vanity.

There is that word again. Now verses 9 and 10 here act like Part Two of the previous two verses. So let us read 7 and 8 because 7 and 8, 9 and 10 are like a paragraph within a paragraph here.

Ecclesiastes 11:7-8 Truly the light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun; but if a man lives many years and rejoices in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. All that is coming is vanity.

Did you notice that 7 and 8 have a similar structure to 9 and 10? Let us read 9 and 10 again.

Ecclesiastes 11:9-10 Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh, for childhood and youth are vanity.

They are saying the same thing basically to two different groups, but they use a similar structure to get the information across. So, what we have here in the organization is that first, Solomon calls on people to enjoy life. Take joy out of life. You are here partially to have that joy. God wants you to have joy. It is a fruit of His Spirit, so He wants you to be full of joy like He is. Secondly, Solomon warns that darker days and death are coming. And these things that we do, everything we do essentially, is ultimately worthless, under the sun, I should say. All the things that we do under the sun are ultimately vanity and worthless.

And so we have in the second two verses of this mini paragraph here, applying them to the youth: Enjoy life, he says, in your youth, but remember, judgment is coming. He does not use death, but he uses judgment. Judgment is coming. And face it, all those things you do in your youth are worthless—under the sun.

So, he is giving essentially the same advice to the youth that he gave to the seniors. In this way, he shows that this particular advice applies to everybody. Everybody under the sun has to face the same conditions, and they have to also face the fact that the things that they do are ultimately worthless under the sun.

Solomon has already told us in earlier chapters what he means about these things are worthless, because even kings, you know, he says, My son might be absolutely terrible and rotten, and here I am giving my throne and all my wealth and my legacy to this kid who just cannot cut it. Is that not worthless? And all these other joys and everything that you take in life, once you die, they are worthless. What did they mean? Unless, of course, you could take some over the sun wisdom from it and learn from it and grow in character. But great monuments or great accomplishments or whatever we do in this life really do not matter a hill of beans. And as the years go on and generations go on, fewer and fewer people remember us; our monuments fall down, the buildings we lived in fall down, the landscape changes, new governments, new this, new that. What was it worth? Eternally, it is worth nothing.

So we have to understand that the things that we do are negligible in the long run and really do not get us anywhere. Only for a short time and then we are forgotten. So human life under the sun ultimately means nothing. It has no eternal value. Only when you start doing over the sun things, spiritual things, godly things, is there any worth in those activities. Those will be eternal in their value.

Let us make sure we get some understanding in verses 9 and 10 here. What we see in verse 9, "Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment."

What he is doing here is not contradicting himself, but he is bringing two very important truths to one's attention, and these two truths are both true, let us put it that way. They are in tension, they are kind of fighting one another and one has to find the ground that makes them work.

The first truth is that youth is a time to be joyous and to try new and attractive things. That is when you must do them and they will be most helpful, because as we get older a lot of things change that makes, maybe, doing some of those things harder or less attractive or what have you. The second truth is that, yeah, you can go try these new things and take risks and have a lot of merriment in your life, but the second truth is that God will not absolve a youth of sin just because he is young. He is saying that, yeah, go out there and try these things and have fun and take a few risks and if your eye sees something or your heart knows that something would be helpful or something you want to do, go ahead and do it. But make sure you do it within the bounds of God's law because God is going to still hold you accountable for whatever you do.

Now remember, we have already gone through something like this before because two of Solomon's themes in chapter 11 pop up here. Two of Solomon's themes are: You need to do things before it is too late to do them, before you do not have the energy, or the opportunity is passed. Do not hold back if you have an opportunity do it before it is too late. You can see this in verses 7 and 8, which we read. Also he goes on in chapter 12, verse 1 and chapter 12, verse 6 to say this sort of thing, do things before it is too late.

The second theme that comes up here is prepare now for the future. We have seen this in Ecclesiastes 11:1 and 11:6.

What I am saying here, the two truths that he has shown in chapter 11, verse 9 are not mutually exclusive. They are in tension because they seem contradictory, but they are not. A youth can have some good times. A youth can experiment with his tastes and ambitions and the various people he associates with and other things, but he must be responsible for his behavior.

So if you want to play baseball, great, play baseball, but do not play baseball on Friday night and Saturday. See what I mean? If you want to be a ballerina, be a ballerina. Take dance courses, be as good as you can be, have fun doing it. But again, you have got to watch to make sure that you can dance your heart away without sinning. Of course, the Sabbath would come in there as well. But there are other things. Hey, we could go to a high school football game if it is not on Friday night, and if we do not carouse with the wrong crowd and get drunk and do all those things that people do.

You can experience life, but always remember that God is going to hold you accountable for what you do. So if you think you cannot do all those things without sin, well, you had better not do it. But they are available to you if you have the control, the self-control not to sin while you are doing them.

So whatever your hands find to do, do it with your might, as he says elsewhere, but you have to do these things within the confines of what God considers good, right, and lawful behavior. Hey, you want to be an airplane pilot? Get up there, take your lessons and learn how to be a pilot. That would be a great thing. I have known young people who have done that, and they have been able to do it without breaking the law. Either man's law or God's law. That is the time to do it. Just make sure you have an even number of takeoffs and landings.

Now, I think that some parents in the church have been overly restrictive about their children's involvement in the world, as they would say. That is, as we were studying Ecclesiastes, their involvement in things under the sun. I have seen parents who never let their children do anything remotely interesting, fun, or exciting, as if those things will ruin them forever due to this world's taint. And they do this out of fear. They fear that their children are going to get just sucked into the world and go away. Go away from the church, go away from the family.

But Solomon is saying here, by giving us these two truths in tension, that you have got to strike a balance. You have got to strike a balance between the one truth: that youth is a time to have fun, experiment, take risks, do new things. And the second part, which is you have to be accountable for your actions. God will certainly make you accountable for them because He will not pardon sin except through the process of repentance. He will still judge you and say, this was wrong. This is not hitting the mark, this is missing the mark, which is what sin is.

And so in youth, we have to learn and parents have to learn how to allow their children this freedom on the one hand with responsibility on the other. Now, I am definitely not saying allow your children to do sinful things. I just want to make that clear. They should never do sinful things. Solomon is speaking about enjoying things that are permissible under God's law. And there is a wide world out there of things that we can do that are right and good. Remember, this world is based on the knowledge of good and evil. So we just have to choose the good and reject the evil. So I am referring to when I say take risks, do things, have fun. Not referring to things like Friday night football, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, fornicating, becoming trans, joining a gang. I am not talking anything like that. I am talking about doing things that are good and right. I am referring to enjoyable activities and events out in the world most likely, that expand the horizons, expands one's skills or talents, expands one's imagination and creativity, and expand one's opportunities.

Notice in verses 9 and 10, especially verse 9, Solomon does not say, OK, young people, sit in your rooms all day, study your Bibles, pray, fast, and meditate, and if you are good little monks, I will let you take a walk outside for a few minutes, but then it is back to your room and your studying and your praying and your meditation. No, he does not say that. Instead, he says, be happy that you are young. Do things that will bring you good cheer. Go ahead, do something outside your comfort zone.

Now he expects that you are going to be instructed in his way because remember the two truths in tension here. You have to know how to be responsible before you can go out and start doing these cheerful things that will expand your horizons. So he wants you to go out and enjoy and do those things that responsible, mature people will do.

But they will not be available to do in certain times in the future. There are things that you need to do while you are young. That is what I am trying to say. You will probably not have the time to do such things when you get a little bit older because you will be working, you will be supporting a family, you will be tired when you come home from all that and you just will not have time to do all those things or it will be past time for you to, let us say, get in a good college for this or that, get in to a good trade school, or be an intern in something. Those things are better done in youth rather than when you are older.

But let us remember, he says, even while you are enjoying your youth—always remember, you will not only have to answer to your parents for what you decide to do, but you will have to explain to God why you acted so [word cut out] and stupidly and sinned, going beyond the bounds of His command here through Solomon to enjoy our youth. Remember those two truths in tension: God wants you to have the good, but He also wants you to be responsible.

So, Solomon's instruction assumes that parents have taught their children God's requirements, God's laws, and are willing to give their children the freedom and responsibility to live by them without constant parental oversight. Got that?

That instruction is part of God's instruction in the New Testament and part of His covenant with His people Israel. And so both physical Israel and spiritual Israel should be functioning under those same covenantal laws and rules. He said, yes, you have to parent them to give them the right instruction, but you have to incrementally give them a longer leash to learn responsibility. That is hard. You see your little pumpkins out there and you have taught them well, and you give them a decision and you just hope that they might make the right one.

Now, I do not think you should give your six year old the leash to make his decision about which college he is going to go to. That is just not good. He needs to wait till he is a little bit older and figures these things out. Or where he could ride his bike. A lot of people in these days do not want their kids out there at all, and we have these parents that put bumpers on their children or bubble wrap or whatever so that they do not get hurt at all and they do not learn a whole lot of responsibility. They are too coddled. They need to learn to take some risks and to do it within God's law.

I am only going to kind of cite these verses, but please write down Ephesians 6:1-4 and Colossians 3:20-21. These are the dual instructions from the apostle Paul about parenting. He tells the parents to bring up their children in the fear and the admonition of the Lord, and it also says in the next one, to fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath. And these are the two truths in tension again. The one is teach them God's way and teach them responsibility, and the second one is give them freedom to enjoy life. Because if you do not, you are going to provoke your children to dislike you and to feel trapped and imprisoned. So we have to do both. We have to teach them and then give them some freedom so that they could build the responsibility in themselves.

Let us go to Deuteronomy 6, verses 1 through 9. We will look at the Old Testament version of this, probably one of the sources that Paul used. Now, notice where this is. This is a big passage of scripture where the Shema is, and so it is major instruction to the people of Israel.

Deuteronomy 6:1-9 "Now this is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded you to teach, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God, to keep all His statutes and His judgments which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you—'a land flowing with milk and honey.' Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

Here he gives us a whole lot of instruction. He speaks both to all Israelites and then he speaks directly to parents among the Israelites. So we have to understand this is for all of His people, young and old, it does not matter where in their lives they are, this instruction applies to all people that have come under the covenant. And He specifically says that parents have a greater responsibility in these matters because they are the progenitors of a new generation and their job is to make sure that their children are also covenant-keeping Israelites as much as they possibly can.

And so He says, this is what you do. He lays out the parents' responsibilities to teach their children to be godly Israelites as they should be. So He tells them that they have to teach their children to keep the covenant and the commands of God themselves. This is the big thing. If you want your children to be, let us say, in the church, the chief way you can do this is to keep God's commandments, to fulfill the covenant yourself as a parent. Because those little eyes and that little brain are watching and judging everything. And if they see you as the parent being a hypocrite, telling them that they should do all these things and then you do not do it yourself or you only do it at church and live a completely different life at home, they are going to notice and they are going to say, this way of life is bogus. My mother, my father taught me these things, but they did not keep them. Why should I?

It is a very important thing. This is the main lesson that He is trying to drive home. He demands that Israelite parents not only teach with their voices, but with every action at home and abroad, in work and in play. And that is saying negatively that no activity, no word, no thought is exempt from God's way of life. As parents, I have to ask, I want you to think about this, how are you doing? Are we modeling godliness thoroughly and not hypocritically?

So that is a primary responsibility of a parent. Teach the child from the cradle. Do not wait until they are 4 or 5 or 8 or [word cut off]. That is not going to work. Herbert Armstrong used to say, "Get to your children early, before Satan does." Because Satan is going to start working on them pretty much immediately. He is going to use what resources he has to work on their human nature. So you have to teach your children right from wrong from Scripture. You have to teach them self-discipline. You have to teach them to trust you and to respond immediately and obediently to your instruction. And then you are also responsible for allowing them incremental opportunities to make decisions for themselves. Very minor ones at first, and then increasingly more challenging ones as they begin to mature. You can always intervene if they make a major mistake.

But use wisdom in doing even that. Because God is our ultimate parent and how often does God intervene before we make mistakes? He usually makes us face plant in the mud. It is something to consider because we often learn best from made mistakes, not avoided mistakes. So when we make the mistakes, hopefully they are minor, we learn more. We learn the right way to go because we experienced the wrong way to go. But the parent is always there to mitigate the effect of it, enough so that they do not have any kind of lasting harm.

So such lessons teach children to think properly for themselves. That is the big thing. They are thinking for themselves. God's way becomes their way of life, not mom and dad's way. They begin to put it into their own character and they are not just relying on mom and dad's character and skating by on their coattails. This process that God has set up instills godly principles in them and they are no longer exterior things, but interior things. They come from inside because they have been inculcated in them through their training. It becomes a matter of heart and mind, not one of outside compulsion from the parents or from the law, even.

I mean, is not this what God is doing with us in the New Covenant? In the Old Covenant, He gave them a law and said, live by this. But in the New Covenant, He says He is writing it on their hearts and their minds so that it is their own character. This is why we can say that in the Kingdom of God we will no longer need the law of God. Why? Because it will be in us. It will be the way we live. That is not to say it will not exist, but we will not need it because we are living it. We will not need the outside compulsion to tell us what way to go. It will be in us. We will model it all the time, and that is what we are learning to do. If you want to see that it is found in II Corinthians 3, read that.

Let us just quickly go over Ecclesiastes 11:10 because that is just a kind of a wrap up.

Ecclesiastes 11:10 [Solomon writes] Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, and put away evil from your flesh, for childhood and youth are vanity.

And so in verse 9, he put it positively. Enjoy your youth and know that God will hold you accountable. And then here he puts it negatively. A paraphrase of what he says is: remove grief or stress from your heart, and banish evil from your body, for youth and vitality pass like a wisp of smoke in a windstorm.

We only have a few years of youth. We need to make good use of them and top on the list from a negative point of view is removing grief, meaning the things that bug us and bother us because they are ultimate source is sin, those fears and things that we have. And he also says, banish evil from our body. Those are those youthful lusts and urges, I might put it, youthful drives that will lead to sin. He said that is the time, in youth it is time to set up good habits so that you are not bothered by these type of sins in the future.

So, youth, he says here, in the way he words things, is a time for positive maturation which one accomplishes by removing negative thoughts and emotions and fleshly evils. In other words, youth is the best time to learn self-control, which is, in many respects, a primary sign of maturity. You are not flitting here and doing this and doing that and they are totally worthless. You are actually setting a goal for yourself and you are living like a mature person, even as a youth.

And he finishes what he says with something akin to take advantage of this critical period in your life because it will rush by in an instant, and soon you will be an adult and facing a lot more responsibilities. So while you are young make the the most of your life. Take the time to learn to do good. Also take the time to do new things and to expand your horizons because your youth is going to flash by and then you will not have time to do these very basic foundational things that you need to do.

Next time we will continue to consider Solomon's advice about the profitable use of one's youth or if you are not so youthful anymore, your years of youth are well behind you, the profitable use of the present before we get any older and our health becomes a liability.

RTR/aws/drm





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