In this final reflection on Ecclesiastes 12, the Teacher brings the entire book to its ultimate conclusion after wrestling with wisdom, pleasure, mortality, anxiety, and the fleeting nature of life. After exploring nearly every avenue for meaning, Ecclesiastes ends with a simple but profound truth: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of everyone.” The devotion explains that fearing God is not about terror but about reverence, awe, and recognizing God’s greatness and holiness. From that reverence flows obedience, which Jesus ultimately summarizes as loving God and loving neighbor. The reflection closes by emphasizing that, after all the searching and existential struggle in Ecclesiastes, the purpose of life is found not in wealth, success, or control, but in faithfully loving God and others.

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Well, good morning. It’s good to be with you on this Friday morning as we finish Ecclesiastes together. Today will be the final day of our Ecclesiastes study as we walk through chapter 12.

Then we’ll be off for a little while. Next week is going to be a bit of a crazy one for me. Monday and Tuesday I’ll still be in the office, and then Wednesday through Friday I’ll be at the Mississippi Annual Conference of the The United Methodist Church. Then June 7 will be my last Sunday preaching at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church.

After that, I’ll begin the process of moving to Starkville. Some things will go up before then, but our actual moving day will probably be later in the month. My first Sunday in Starkville will be July 5, and right now my goal is for Rooted to start back on July 6. I don’t want to promise that date, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

Everything will continue in the same places—Substack, Facebook, YouTube, podcasts, GroupMe, all of that. And honestly, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll pop up here and there over the next month with some reflections and thoughts. I’m not disappearing. As I keep telling people, I’m not dying—I’m just moving north.

So if you follow Rooted, I’ll still hopefully be a part of your life through the joy of technology.

Now let’s read Ecclesiastes 12 together:

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years draw near when you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them’; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain…

…before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.

Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity.

Besides being wise, the Teacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs. The Teacher sought to find pleasing words, and he wrote words of truth plainly.

The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings that are given by one shepherd.

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep His commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

“Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” That sounds like somebody who’s been in graduate school a very long time. I felt that verse deep in my soul.

But after examining everything—wisdom, pleasure, work, wealth, meaning, success, anxiety, mortality—the Teacher finally lands here:

“The end of the matter…fear God and keep His commandments, for that is the whole duty of everyone.”

That’s it. That’s the conclusion.

Fear God.

Now when Scripture talks about fearing God, we often misunderstand that because we hear the word “fear” and think terror. We think being afraid of snakes or storms or whatever scares us.

But biblical fear is closer to reverence, awe, and respect.

The fear of the Lord means understanding who God is and who we are. It means recognizing that God is God and we are not.

God is greater than us, wiser than us, holier than us. Scripture tells us His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. God is other. God is beyond us.

And yet, we know God because He has revealed Himself to us—through Scripture and most fully through Jesus Christ. Scripture tells us that Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God. So what we know of God, we know through Christ.

And because we fear God—because we recognize who He is—we keep His commandments.

And what are those commandments?

Jesus tells us plainly: love God and love neighbor.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus says all the Law and the Prophets hang on those two commands.

If you really think about it, all the commandments boil down to those things.

If you love God, you won’t worship idols. You won’t take His name in vain. You’ll honor Him.

If you love your neighbor, you won’t murder them, steal from them, betray them, or covet what belongs to them.

Everything ultimately distills down to love God and love neighbor.

That is the whole duty of everyone.

And honestly, after all the angst and frustration and searching in Ecclesiastes, I love that the Teacher ends there. After all the wrestling, he finally comes back to the thing that matters most.

Fear God. Keep His commandments. Love God. Love neighbor.

That’s it, y’all.

That’s the whole shooting match.

So let’s live that out.

And friends, it has truly been a joy to walk through Ecclesiastes with you. It has been a joy to serve St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church these past eleven years. I’m deeply thankful for this season, and I’m thankful for each of you.

I’m also thankful for Ricky James, who will follow behind me and do a phenomenal job.

And remember—we’re not going away. We’ll be back in about a month, just in a different context.

Love y’all. Thank you for walking through this with me, and we’ll see you soon.

Have a great weekend.

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 11, the Teacher continues offering wisdom sayings while wrestling with anxiety, uncertainty, and the temporary nature of life. Though Ecclesiastes often feels filled with angst and existential frustration, the chapter also points toward an important truth: life is fleeting, and recognizing that reality can bring wisdom and clarity. The devotion explores how human beings naturally worry about aging, death, and the uncertainties of the future, yet Scripture invites believers to hold those fears in perspective. While this life is beautiful and full of meaningful gifts, it is not ultimate. The worries consuming us now will eventually fade in light of eternity, and Christians can live with hope because there is something greater still to come in Christ.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Well, good morning. Good to be with you on this Thursday morning as we continue together in Ecclesiastes. Today we’re going to be in Ecclesiastes chapter 11. We’ll read all of chapter 11 today, and then tomorrow we’ll finish with chapter 12, which will bring our time together in Ecclesiastes to an end.

Ecclesiastes 11 continues a theme we’ve seen the last couple of days. I mentioned yesterday that this section almost reads like Proverbs to me. It feels very much like the book of Proverbs—these short sayings of wisdom. And that makes sense if the Teacher of Ecclesiastes is indeed Solomon. While Ecclesiastes never explicitly says Solomon wrote it, the connection certainly fits with the wisdom tradition we see in Proverbs.

So today we’ll read Ecclesiastes 11:1–10—more sayings of wisdom from the Teacher:

“Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will get it back. Divide your means seven ways, or even eight, for you do not know what disaster may happen on earth.

When clouds are full, they empty rain upon the earth; whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.

Whoever observes the wind will not sow, and whoever regards the clouds will not reap.

Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.

In the morning sow your seed, and at evening do not let your hands be idle, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

Light is sweet, and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun.

Even those who live many years should rejoice in them all, yet let them remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

Banish anxiety from your mind, and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity.”

I was talking to someone just yesterday, giving them advice about something I thought would genuinely help them, and I finally stopped and laughed and said, “Now listen, what I’m telling you to do is absolutely what you should do. It’s just not what I personally do.”

You know—do what I say, not what I do.

“Eat healthy and sleep well.”
Do I do that? Absolutely not.
But you should.

So I find it ironic that the Teacher says, “Banish anxiety from your mind.” Dude, all you’ve done for eleven chapters is be anxious. Ecclesiastes has been one long spiral of angst and worry and existential dread. I’ve joked several times that it reads like a ‘90s grunge album because it’s just full of anxiety and longing and frustration.

And yet here, near the end, he says, “Put away anxiety.”

But even then, he can’t quite let go of the darkness. Why should we put away anxiety? “Because youth and the dawn of life are vanity.” In other words: don’t worry about it, because you’re going to die anyway.

That really is one of the major themes of Ecclesiastes: we are all going to die.

As I’ve been decluttering my office and giving things away during this move, people keep joking, “Are you dying?” And I laugh and say, “Well…aren’t we all?”

That’s Ecclesiastes in a nutshell.

But I do think there’s wisdom in remembering that our lives are temporary. Psalm 90 says, “Teach us to number our days.” There’s wisdom in understanding that this life is not forever.

We live in an age that desperately tries to preserve youth. We dye the gray hair, fight aging, and pretend we’re not getting older. But aging is not failure. It’s part of being human. We grow old. We change. Eventually, we die.

And honestly, I think Ecclesiastes gives us permission to say out loud that sometimes that reality feels overwhelming.

Sometimes we feel anxious. Sometimes we feel insignificant. Sometimes we wonder if what we’re doing even matters.

The Bible doesn’t ignore those emotions. Neither do the Psalms. Neither does Ecclesiastes. Even Jesus prayed, “Take this cup from me.”

But here’s what I keep coming back to: understanding that life is temporary can also give us clarity.

That thing consuming your thoughts right now—that thing giving you anxiety and stealing your peace—how much will it matter in light of eternity?

Will it matter in a month? In five years? In fifty years? When we are standing with the Lord?

Probably not.

And that perspective can actually free us.

Now, I don’t want to diminish this life. I love this life. I love my wife and children. I love baseball games and concerts and good conversations. I love getting to preach the Gospel and tell people about Jesus. These things matter deeply to me.

But this life is not the end of the story.

There is something better coming.

There’s a great line from Switchfoot: “This flesh and blood is just a rental, and no one makes it out alive.”

That’s very Ecclesiastes, honestly.

And I think it echoes something profound: when we understand the temporary nature of this life, we begin to understand where our true home is.

The worries of this life, as real as they feel now, will pale in comparison to what awaits us in Christ.

So yes, keep an eternal perspective. Love this life. Cherish the people around you. Do good in the world. Enjoy the gifts God has given you.

But remember: this world is not the end.

There is something better coming.

Thanks for being with us today. Have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you tomorrow as we finish Ecclesiastes together.

In a few weeks, my family will be moving to Starkville, MS, as I’m appointed Senior Pastor of Starkville First United Methodist Church. That is only pertinent for this fact: Starkville is about 2 and a half hours away from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. And that matters because every year, Jason Isbell hosts a festival called Shoalsfest featuring all kinds of music. This year, Jason will be playing with his former band, the acclaimed southern rock band the Drive by Truckers, and they will be playing all the way through their classic album, Decoration Day.

I told my wife this very, very important information. Her response was, “Haven’t you seen him play like three times?” I said, “Yes, but not with Truckers, playing through Decoration Day!” She was unpersuaded.

Jason Isbell, for many of us middle-aged southern white guys, is our “guy.” I love many artists, primarily in the Americana genre, Turnpike Troubadours, Tyler Childers, Stugil Simpson (aka Johnny Blue Skies), and an amazing bluegrass band called Nickel Creek. But Isbell is my guy. He’s an amazing guitar player. Some of his solos are legendary. Great vocalist, with so much meaning in his voice. But, for my money, and for many others, he is among the greatest, if not the greatest, living songwriter. His songs are poetry. They tell stories. Theology. Meaning. He, to me, has explained the best of what it means to be a Southerner.

I truly found his music during COVID. I had heard of him before, but in that season, so many days, I would go outside, sit in my hammock, and just listen over and over to his lyrics. They were balm to my soul. They named things I couldn’t put my finger on. I truly fell in love with his music, especially his lyrics. I’ve seen at the Ryman in Nashville, in Jackson, MS, and in Baton Rouge with Turnpike. One of the highlights of my life was when he replied to one of my tweets. What a day!

So, I wanted to share with you my Top Ten favorite songs of his. A couple of things. This is totally subjective. And these are songs whose lyrics mean something special to me. I’m not even saying these are my favorite songs. These are the ones that mean something to me. Also, I feel really, really bad about this list. I started out with forty-four songs that I considered, going from his days in the Drive by Truckers to his new solo acoustic album. I widdled, widdled it down until I got to my top ten, with five honorable mentions. So, without further ado, here is my Top Ten, along with my favorite lyrics.

Honorable Mentions

Cover Me Up

Well, let’s just get this out of the way. I know. I know. I understand. I’m wrong. But, to me, Andy Stoddard, there is another love song of his that is just slightly better. Hey, I don’t feel good about this either.

Favorite Lyrics

Put your faith to the test when I tore off your dress
In Richmond on high
I sobered up, I swore off that stuff
Forever this time

White Beretta

Jason’s not afraid to sing about hard things. This one has a line about someone struggling with their faith that really resonated with me.

Favorite Lyrics

I was raised in the church
I was washed in the blood
and we all were saved before we even left home

If his love is unconditional
why do I feel so miserable
why are you digging your nails in the styrofoam

Songs She Sang in the Shower

A song about domestic abuse, from a female perspective. Maybe his most cutting line.

Favorite Lyrics

On a lark, on a whim
I said, "There's two kinds of men in this world and you're neither of them"
And his fist cut the smoke
I had an eighth of a second to wonder if he got the joke

Something More than Free

Coming from a family of blue-collar workers, I always find that this song reminds me of the lessons about work my dad taught me.

Favorite Lyrics

And the day will come when I'll find a reason
And somebody proud to love a man like me
My back is numb, my hands are freezing
What I'm working for is something more than free

Lonely Love

This is a song that I love, but as a preacher, the title doesn’t sit well with me. But Isbell pushes you to feel some real things. Hearbreaking song.

Favorite Lyrics

Stop me if you've heard this one before:
A man walks into a bar and leaves before his ashes hit the floor
Stop me if I ever get that far
The sun's a desperate star that burns like every single one before

Now, we get to the action.

Number 10

King of Oklahoma

If you are unaware by now, he’s not exactly singing happy songs. This is about opioid addiction and the way that it destroys families and lives. It paints a realistic picture of what is happening all across the South and our rural areas.

Favorite Lyrics

She used to wake me up with coffee every morning
And I'd hear her homemade house shoes slide across the floor
She used to make me feel like the king of Oklahoma
But nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore

Number Nine

Elphant

Really upbeat, positive song about dying from cancer. It names the pain, hurt, and hopelessness you feel when you see someone you love dying a terrible death, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Favorite Lyrics

I've buried her a thousand times
Giving up my place in line
But I don't give a damn about that now
There's one thing that's real clear to me:
No one dies with dignity
We just try to ignore the elephant somehow
We just try to ignore the elephant somehow
We just try to ignore the elephant somehow

Number Eight

Speed Trap Town

For me, this song means so much. I drove into our county seat town, all the time, and it was a speed trap town. First ticket I ever got was on the way to church, Easthaven Baptist Church, in Brookhaven, MS, doing 44 in a 40. The pain of realizing your home is no longer your home hits all of us who leave home.

Favorite Lyrics

Well, it’s a Thursday night but theres a high school game
Sneak a bottle up the bleachers and forget my name
These 5A bastards run a shallow cross
It’s a boys last dream and a man’s first loss

And it never did occur to me to leave ‘til tonight
There’s no one left to ask if I’m alright
I’ll sleep until I’m straight enough to drive, then decide
If there’s anything that can’t be left behind

Number Seven

24 Frames

To me, this is his best theological song. So many times in my life, I have had my plans of what will happen in life, in church, in our family. I knew what I wanted to happen, and what I wanted everyone to see and understand. And it’s like God set it all on fire, to remind me that He is still God. Not me.

Favorite Lyrics

You thought God was an architect, now you know
He's something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built it's all for show, goes up in flames
In 24 frames

Number Six

If We Were Vampires

To me, this is THE love song. I love the way he sings about knowing that, as powerful as love is, even the love of this earth is temporary. As much as I love my wife with all that I am, at some point, one of us will be without the other. My joke is that she cannot die first. I have to. I cannot imagine my life without her, and with her, I would die soon, out of sheer loneliness. This song captures the depth of that love.

Favorite Lyrics

If we were vampires and death was a joke
We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke
Laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn't feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn't me who's left behind

Number Five

Decoration Day

Now this is the Southern Gothic story. This is straight out of Faulkner. It is a story of generational hate and feuds that, in the end, don’t just destroy the life of the person you hate, but also destroy your life as well. Unforgiveness kills us all. Hate is too heavy a burden to carry, as Dr. King taught us.

Favorite Lyrics

It’s Decoration Day
And I’ve a mind to go spit on his grave
If I was a Hill I’d have put him away
And I’d fight till the last Lawson’s last living day
I’d fight till the last Lawson’s last living day
I’d fight till the last Lawson’s last living day

Number Four

White Man’s World

The song that haunts me. I’ve lived these lyrics. I know that shame that comes from wishing you had courage when you were younger. That shame can mark you, if you allow and cause you to actually live out the courage of your convictions. Special bonus: this version also features Chris Thile from Nickel Creek on mandolin.

Favorite Lyrics

I'm a white man looking in a black man's eyes
Wishing I'd never been one of the guys
Who pretended not to hear another white man's joke
Oh, the times ain't forgotten

Number Three

Cast Iron Skillet

I love this song so much. It takes so many of those southern phrases we know (don’t walk where you can’t see your feet, etc) and tells stories about how lives and people change. The second lyric about a white woman who falls in love with an African American man and then is disowned, hits so hard - it’s hard to go through life without your daddy by your side.

Jason writes about race in such a very powerful and honest way that always speaks to me.

Favorite Lyrics

Jamie found a boyfriend
With smiling eyes and dark skin
And her daddy never spoke another word to her again

The old man at the Quickstop
Lying to the county cops
And laughing like his soul was without sin

How did he get so low?
Seems like just a week ago
She was sitting on your shoulders watching fireworks in the sky

He treats her like a queen
But you don’t know ‘cause you ain’t seen
It’s hard to go through life without your daddy by your side

Number Two

Children of Children

Ok, for me, this song, more so than anything else he has written, names the guilt and pain I’ve felt as a survivor of childhood tragedy. For so many years, I blamed myself for my mother’s murder. She died protecting me. If I had not been born, she would still be alive. I have felt these lyrics in my life. I have felt this pain. I know these words, and this song has helped me process my grief.

Favorite Lyrics

I was riding on my mother's hip
She was shorter than the corn
All the years I took from her
Just by being born.

Number One

Outfit

What every southern father has said to their son, or had their father say to them. This song perfectly captures how so many of us want our sons to live: with authenticity, working hard, loving hard, and being proud of themselves and their family. To me, and to many, this song nails what we would all want to be as Southern men.

And I actually quoted lyrics from this song, not on purpose, to my son when he started college. They just came out!

Favorite Lyrics

Don't call what you're wearing an outfit, don't ever say your car is broke
Don't sing with a fake British accent, don't act like your family's a joke
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle, call home on your sister's birthday
Don't tell them you're bigger than Jesus, don't give it away

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 9:17–10:20, the Teacher continues exploring the value and limitations of wisdom. While wisdom is portrayed as better than foolishness, stronger than weapons, and worthy of pursuit, it still cannot remove life’s uncertainty or guarantee control over the future. The devotion contrasts the Teacher’s growing cynicism with the Christian conviction that wisdom itself is not the ultimate goal—Jesus is. The reflection wrestles honestly with anxiety, uncertainty, and the human desire to control outcomes, ultimately suggesting that true wisdom is not found in mastering the future but in trusting that God is already present there. Even when life feels uncertain, believers can rest in the promise that wherever the future leads, God will meet them there.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

You can read today’s passage here.

Click here if you’d like to join our GroupMe and receive this each morning at 7:00 a.m. CST.

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Well, good morning. It’s good to be with you on this Wednesday morning. We are getting close to being finished with Ecclesiastes. We’re going to finish chapter 10 today, then tomorrow chapter 11, and finally chapter 12 on Friday. So we are almost at the end of this great season of angst that is Ecclesiastes, because the Teacher really does feel like the biblical representative of the ‘90s grunge movement, where everything is terrible and everything is awful.

And honestly, as someone who grew up listening to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, I get it. It resonates with me.

Today we’re actually going to back up into chapter 9. I mentioned yesterday that there was kind of a break in the rhythm of the chapter where it moved into a more poetic section. So we’re going to pick up in Ecclesiastes 9:17 and then read through all of chapter 10, because it really feels like one poetic movement.

“The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouting of a ruler among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one bungler destroys much good.

Dead flies make the perfumer’s ointment give off a foul odor; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and honor. The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of a fool to the left. Even when fools walk on the road, they lack sense and show to everyone that they are fools.

If the anger of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your post, for calmness will undo great offenses.

There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, as great an error as if it proceeded from the ruler: folly is set in many high places, and the rich sit in a low place. I have seen slaves on horseback and princes walking on foot like slaves.

Whoever digs a pit will fall into it, and whoever breaks through a wall will be bitten by a snake. Whoever quarries stones will be hurt by them, and whoever splits logs will be endangered by them.

If the iron is blunt and one does not whet the edge, then more strength must be exerted; but wisdom helps one succeed.

If the snake bites before it is charmed, there is no advantage in a charmer.

Words spoken by the wise bring them favor, but the lips of fools consume them. The words of their mouths begin in foolishness, and their talk ends in wicked madness, yet fools talk on and on. No one knows what is to happen, and who can tell anyone what the future holds?

The toil of fools wears them out, for they do not even know the way to town.

Alas for you, O land, when your king is a servant, and your princes feast in the morning! Happy are you, O land, when your king is a nobleman, and your princes feast at the proper time, for strength and not for drunkenness.

Through sloth the roof sinks in, and through indolence the house leaks.

Feasts are made for laughter, wine gladdens life, and money meets every need.

Do not curse the king, even in your thoughts, or curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may carry your voice, or some winged creature tell the matter.”

When I read that last line about the bird of the air carrying your voice, I immediately thought about The Lord of the Ringsand Saruman sending the birds out to spy on the Fellowship. My brain immediately went there: spies everywhere.

Obviously, the Teacher is speaking poetically here, but this whole section really felt a lot like Proverbs to me. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes almost function like bookends. Proverbs is deeply concerned with wisdom and the importance of wisdom, and Ecclesiastes, in its own way, still values wisdom.

The Teacher is not against wisdom. In fact, he repeatedly says wisdom is better than foolishness. “Wisdom is better than weapons of war.” “The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded.” “Wisdom helps one succeed.”

But the Teacher also believes wisdom is not the cure-all. Wisdom does not fix everything. Wisdom does not remove uncertainty. Wisdom cannot guarantee a pain-free life.

And that’s where we begin to see the tension.

At one point he says, “Feasts are made for laughter, wine gladdens life, and money meets every need.” Compare that with Jesus saying you cannot serve both God and wealth. You can see the Teacher struggling to make sense of the world and trying to locate meaning in things that ultimately cannot hold it.

I think one thing we can take from this passage is the call to seek wisdom. We should seek wisdom. We should seek understanding. We should seek maturity.

But we do not have to end up in the same place of cynicism.

Wisdom itself is not the point. For us as Christians, Jesus is the point.

That’s what I keep coming back to every time we read Ecclesiastes. No matter what the Teacher pursues—wisdom, money, pleasure, success—in the end, none of those things can ultimately bear the weight of meaning.

The Teacher keeps circling around the same hard truth: we cannot control the future.

“No one knows what is to happen, and who can tell anyone what the future holds?”

And honestly, I resonate with that. I don’t like uncertainty. I don’t like the unknown. I worry a lot about things I cannot control.

I’ve been working on that. I’ve got a good therapist helping me process some of my worrying, and I’m beginning to realize that a lot of my anxiety comes from believing that if I can just do everything right—say the right thing, make the right decision, manage everything perfectly—then everything will turn out okay.

But I can’t make everything okay. And neither can you.

Who can tell anyone what the future holds? We can’t. Only God can.

So maybe that’s where wisdom finally leads us—not to control, but to trust.

Maybe true wisdom is learning that while we do not know the future, we know the One who will meet us there.

God has met us in the past. God is with us in the present. And God will be with us in the future.

There’s a great line from Rich Mullins where he says, “I’m home anywhere if You are where I am.”

Maybe that’s wisdom.

Maybe wisdom is knowing that wherever we find ourselves—past, present, or future—God will meet us there.

So no, we do not know what tomorrow holds. But we know that whatever tomorrow holds, God will already be there.

Thanks for being with us today. We’ll pick up tomorrow with chapter 11, and then finish Ecclesiastes on Friday with chapter 12.

In Ecclesiastes 9, the Teacher points out that life is uncertain, death comes for everyone, and the things we often chase—success, power, recognition, possessions—cannot give lasting meaning. The Teacher’s repeated call to “eat, drink, and be merry” is understood not as a call to shallow living, but as an invitation to find meaning in community, shared meals, conversation, and time with the people we love. The heart of the message is that relationships, not achievements or possessions, are where lasting value is found, so we should intentionally prioritize the people who matter most to us.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

You can read today’s passage here.

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Good morning. It’s good to be with you on this Tuesday morning. I hope your week is off to a good start, and I hope you had a good Memorial Day yesterday. Things are rocking and rolling. My office continues to be a disaster zone. One day—well, pretty soon—it will not be a disaster zone, but that day is not today.

Today we’re continuing in Ecclesiastes. We’re looking at Ecclesiastes chapter 9, and we’re going to read through verse 16 today. Verses 17 and 18 actually lend themselves into chapter 10 based on the poetic pattern that follows, so we’ll stop at verse 16.

Once again, we see the Teacher struggling with what he sees in the world. There’s the story of the little city that was besieged and then saved by a poor wise man, but no one remembered the poor man. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise—but time and chance happen to them all. I think that’s an interesting thing to sit with: chance happens to all of us.

And so, once again, you see him wrestling with the uncertainty of life. He speaks of the certainty of death—madness is in their hearts while they live, and then they go to the dead. Death awaits all of us. He keeps trying to find meaning in the things of this world, which ultimately cannot produce meaning. Over and over again in Ecclesiastes, that’s what it comes down to: he’s trying to find meaning in something that cannot ultimately produce meaning.

And that, I think, is why he comes back to, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” Now, we can have a lot of criticism of that line, because it can sound frivolous. We can miss the things that matter if all we do is eat, drink, and be merry. But I do think there is something to be said for the notion behind it. When we are eating with the people we love, when we are drinking coffee and talking and visiting with those we love, we find some meaning there that we’re not going to find in other places. When we eat lunch with someone we care for, when we go to a party, a ball game, or a concert, when we go to church and are simply in community with one another—there is something meaningful there.

I think that’s why he keeps circling back to that concept. I do think he knows there is something beautiful in community. There’s something beautiful about being with people you love. There’s something beautiful about being with people who matter to you. And that’s what matters. The longer I live, the more I pastor, the more I love people, the more I walk with people, the more I truly understand that the relationships we have, the relationships we form, the relationships we live with—those are ultimately where meaning is found. Meaning is found in shared laughter and shared stories. Meaning is found in relationship.

So I don’t want to tritely say, “Eat, drink, and be merry,” because that can sound dismissive. But I would say this: spend time with those you love. Prioritize meals with those you love. Prioritize coffee meetings and conversations with those you love. Prioritize spending time with your spouse and your children. Prioritize the relationships in your life that are life-giving to you. Prioritize relationships with your colleagues, with your fellow church members, and, if you’re a pastor, with your fellow clergy.

Because we do spend time chasing vanity. We spend time chasing money and power and influence and all manner of stuff like that, and we find that those things are nothing but vanity. So maybe “eating, drinking, and being merry” is not, perhaps, the best motto for living our lives—but community is a good start. I would say prioritizing our relationships is a good start. Because death takes all our stuff. None of it will stand over your graveside when you’re gone. But your spouse will. Your children will. Your friends will. Your colleagues will. Those relationships will.

So as we think about life, and what matters, and our place in the world, and our priorities in the world, and what God has for us to do in the world, I do believe there are far worse things we could do than prioritize relationships. I do believe there are far worse things we can do than prioritize the people we love. I do believe there are far worse things we can do than making sure we are spending time with the people we love—the people that define us, the people that shape us.

So today, don’t isolate yourself. Don’t spend all your time alone. Text the people who mean the most to you. Tell them you love them. Tell them what they mean to you. Speak to them. Write a note. Make a phone call. Whatever it is, prioritize those relationships. And I promise you that when we do that, kind of like what the Teacher says, we will likely find something worthwhile.

So today, relationships matter, friends. That’s what matters. I hope we can lean into those relationships. Have a great rest of your day. See you tomorrow. Thanks.

Ecclesiastes 8:9–17 wrestles honestly with the unfairness and brokenness of life in a fallen world. While the Teacher becomes cynical as he sees evil rewarded and justice delayed, the message for Christians is different: we are called neither to deny injustice nor to surrender to it. Instead, we are called to resist evil, remain faithful, and hold on to hope because we belong to the God of resurrection. For believers, even the worst things—including death—are not the last things, because God is still at work and his final word is not despair, but hope.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Well, good morning. Good to be with you on this Wednesday. I hope you are well and having a good Memorial Day, no matter where this reflection finds you. If you are watching this on video, either through YouTube or Facebook, you can see that my office is a complete disaster zone. Books are down off my bookshelves, and if you look over to my right—probably your left—you can see boxes of books. So yes, my office is quite the place right now as we begin the process of boxing up, moving, and all those kinds of things.

Looking at the schedule, we are going to be able to finish Ecclesiastes this week. We will do the rest of chapter 8 today, and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we will do a chapter each day. So we will finish up Ecclesiastes on Friday. Then I will be taking off June. June will be a month to rest, pack, move, and begin the process of transitioning to Starkville. We will pick back up—I do not really know exactly when. It will be early July. I do not want to promise you a date because I am not sure, but it will be early to mid-July, based on how things progress once we get settled up there. But I will be coming back—I promise you that.

So today, let us read Ecclesiastes 8:10–17:

“Then I saw the wicked buried; they used to go in and out of the holy place, and they were praised in the city where they had done such things. This also is vanity. Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the human heart is fully set to do evil. Though sinners do evil a hundred times and prolong their lives, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they stand in fear before him. But it will not be well for the wicked, neither will they prolong their days like a shadow, because they do not stand in fear before God. There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat and drink and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun. When I applied my mind to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night do one’s eyes see sleep, then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out. Even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out.”

So we see the Teacher continuing to struggle with the brokenness and unjustness of the world. He says, in effect, “I have seen the wicked praised where they have done evil things. This is vanity. Sentence against evil is not executed speedily. The human heart is full of evil. Sinners prolong their lives, and the righteous die early.” But he also says that it will be well with those who fear God, because they stand in fear before him. It will not be well with the wicked, because they do not stand in fear before God.

So we see him struggling with the realities of living in a fallen world. He says that the human heart is fully set on evil, and he is wrestling with that. I think it is interesting that he is struggling with two realities at once. He is struggling with the reality that the world is fallen and imperfect, and he does not want it to be so. He wants it to be fair. He wants it to be righteous. He wants it to be as it should be—but it is not.

And I think that is an interesting dynamic for us to ponder ourselves. When we understand that we live in a fallen world—an imperfect world, a world where there is sin and injustice—our struggle is to understand that this is the reality we are going to face. The Teacher seems to have become overwhelmed by it and cynical because of it. Because of the unjustness of the world, he seems to have resigned himself to, “This is just the way it is.”

But I think where the Holy Spirit pushes us as Christians is this: to see the unjustness in the world and not be satisfied with it. Not to say, “Oh, that is good enough. That is fine. We live in a fallen world. We live in a sinful world. Things are terrible, and there is nothing we can do about it.” I do not think the Holy Spirit leaves us room to say, “Well, I am just fine with it.” We as Christians cannot get to the place where we see injustice, where we see evil, where we see things that are wrong, and simply resign ourselves to being okay with it. We are called to work against that which is evil and to work toward that which is right.

He says there is a vanity that takes place on earth: righteous people are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and wicked people are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. This too is vanity. So he says, in effect, “Just enjoy yourself then. Eat and drink and enjoy yourself, for this will go with you in your toil.” You can see him getting cynical at the unjustness of the world.

And remember, sometimes things in Scripture are there to warn us, because we will find ourselves in the same place. We will find ourselves cynical because of the world. We will find ourselves cynical because of injustice. We will find ourselves cynical because of all that is happening. And it would be very easy—very tempting—for us to just say, “Oh, whatever. Do what everyone does. Nothing matters. It is all vanity. Nothing matters.” We may feel like that, but we cannot, friends. We cannot give in to cynicism, and we cannot give in to hopelessness, because we serve a God who raised Christ from the dead.

We serve a God for whom death was not the final word. We serve a God who is not defeated by death, and so death does not have the final word. We cannot give up hope, because we understand that for us as Christians, the worst thing is not the last thing. The worst thing is not the last thing. Even death—the thing that we all fear, the thing that we all dread—is not the end, because we serve a God of resurrection.

So when you look at the world, when you look at things that are unjust, things that are not right, things that make you want to give up, it would be very easy for us to say, “I am done with it all.” It would be so easy. But the Holy Spirit will not let us. The Holy Spirit pushes us to keep going. The Holy Spirit pushes us to keep believing. The Holy Spirit pushes us to keep being faithful.

So do not give up. All we have to do is look around. All we have to do is watch the news. All we have to do is get on social media, and we can see all manner of wickedness, all manner of evil, and all manner of things that can take our joy and leave us cynical. But we cannot let that happen, because we are people of resurrection, and the Holy Spirit will not let us off that easily.

So the worst thing is not the last thing. God is always at work. Have hope in that. So today, no matter where you find yourself, no matter what is going on in your life, remember that God is not done. Do not give in to cynicism. God will be with us in all things.

I hope you have a great rest of your day, and we will see you bright and early tomorrow as we look at chapter 9. See you then.

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 8:1–9, the Teacher wrestles with the complicated relationship between wisdom, authority, and faithful living. While Scripture calls believers to respect and pray for governing authorities, the Bible also shows prophets confronting unjust leaders, reminding us that our ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ rather than any earthly power. Drawing from examples like Nathan confronting David and Augustine’s reflections in The City of God, the devotion explores the tension of living as citizens of both the “city of man” and the “City of God.” Christians are called to work for the good and flourishing of their communities, but politics, patriotism, or civic identity can never bear the full weight of the soul. Only Jesus can serve as the true foundation of meaning and identity, and faithful civic engagement should flow from that deeper allegiance to Christ.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Well, good morning. It’s good to be with you on this Friday morning. I hope you’re doing well today, and I hope you have good plans for the weekend.

We don’t really have much planned. At some point this weekend I plan to go—with whoever in my family wants to go with me—maybe Holly, maybe Holly and Thomas, maybe just Thomas and me—and watch the new Star Wars movie. I know you’re shocked I haven’t seen it yet, but Holly said she might want to go, so I figured I’d wait until the weekend.

But in a few days, if you want to know anything about the Mandalorian and Grogu, I will be the guy to ask, because I will have thought about it probably far too much. I’m excited, because who doesn’t like a Star Wars movie? That’s always a good time.

Really, though, the big thing this weekend is Sunday—Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. I love Pentecost. Wear your red to church Sunday as we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit. Easter and Christmas get most of the attention in the life of the Church, but Pentecost is the day the Spirit was given to us, the day the Church was truly born.

So I hope you can find time to worship this Sunday. And if you’re in the Madison or Metro Jackson area, we’d obviously love for you to worship with us here at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church.

Today we’re going to read Ecclesiastes 8:1–9:

“Who is like the wise man?
And who knows the interpretation of a thing?
Wisdom makes one’s face shine,
and the hardness of one’s countenance is changed.

Keep the king’s command because of your sacred oath.
Do not be terrified in his presence,
and do not delay when the matter is unpleasant,
for he does whatever he pleases.
For the word of the king is powerful,
and who can say to him, ‘What are you doing?’

Whoever obeys a command will meet no harm,
and the wise mind will know the time and the way.
For every matter has its time and way,
although the troubles of mortals lie heavy upon them.
Indeed, they do not know what is to be,
for who can tell them how it will be?

No one has power over the wind to restrain the wind,
or power over the day of death.
There is no discharge from battle,
nor does wickedness deliver those who practice it.

All this I observed, applying my mind to all that is done under the sun, while one person exercises authority over another to the other’s hurt.”

This passage is interesting because as I was reading it and preparing for this morning, my mind went in a couple of directions.

First, I thought about Romans 13, where Paul tells us to pray for authorities and obey governing leaders. If you’ve worshiped with me before, you know one thing I’ve always tried to do in ministry is pray for all leaders—local, state, and federal. I believe Scripture is clear that we are called to pray for secular authorities. Jesus says, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and Paul echoes that idea.

And here in Ecclesiastes, the Teacher says, “Keep the king’s command.” If this is Solomon—and many people think it is, even though Ecclesiastes never explicitly says so—then of course the king would emphasize obedience to the king.

But what’s interesting is that the Teacher also acknowledges that authority can sometimes harm people. “One person exercises authority over another to the other’s hurt.” So this becomes more complicated than simple obedience.

I think Nathan and David are a good example of this tension. David commits grievous sin with Bathsheba and then arranges for her husband to be killed. Scripture is messy. You look across the whole Bible, and I’m not sure anyone falls quite as hard as David does there.

Nathan the prophet then confronts David and rebukes him. Over and over again in the Old Testament, the prophets challenge kings when they act unjustly or wickedly.

And that matters as we head into Memorial Day weekend. I think of the line:

“For patriot dream
that sees beyond the years,
thine alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears.”

And also:

“Who more than self their country loved,
and mercy more than life.”

I’m deeply thankful for our veterans, for those who have given the full measure of devotion to our country, and for those who continue to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of others.

I do think Scripture calls us to work for the good of the places where we live. In Jeremiah, the exiles are told to seek the welfare of the city, because in its welfare they will find their welfare too.

So yes, the Teacher says obey the king. We have duties as citizens. I have duties as a citizen of Mississippi and of the United States. But my primary allegiance is always to Jesus.

That’s where The City of God comes to mind. Augustine wrestled deeply with this tension almost 2,000 years ago. He talked about the challenge of dual citizenship: as Christians, we belong both to the City of God and the city of man.

We are called to work for the good of the earthly city, but our motivation for doing so comes from our citizenship in the City of God.

Because I follow Jesus, that shapes how I live in my community, how I serve my neighbors, and how I work for what Phil Vischer often calls “the flourishing of others.”

How do we fully live as citizens of this nation while also faithfully living as disciples of Christ? How do we love God and love neighbor through our civic engagement?

These are complicated questions, but they are good questions.

And I think one of the struggles we face is that we keep asking politics to bear the weight of our souls. Politics cannot support the weight of your soul. Your political party cannot become the load-bearing wall of your identity. Only Jesus can hold that place.

When Christ is the foundation, then our civic engagement flows from that foundation. We pray for leaders. We seek justice. We work for the good of our communities. We honor those who serve and sacrifice. We try to live faithfully and lovingly in the world around us.

But Jesus remains at the center.

So today, prayerfully consider this: how does your faith shape the way you live in your community? How does your faith shape your citizenship, your leadership, your service, and your love for neighbor?

If you’re looking for a classic book on these ideas, I’d encourage you to read The City of God. It’s not the easiest read in the world, but it’s still remarkably insightful almost two thousand years later.

Hey, thanks for being with us today. Have a great weekend, and we’ll pick back up Monday morning. See you then.

In this Thursday reflection on Ecclesiastes 7:15–29, the Teacher’s closing observation — God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes — frames the whole passage as a meditation on wisdom and its limits. The Teacher says it’s good to take hold of wisdom without letting go of the acknowledgment that you might be wrong, and the reflection develops that into a pastoral word about the relationship between conviction and humility. Drawing on Dr. Harold Bryson’s memorable line — show me a man who thinks he’s wrong — and the calculus principle that the right work built on a wrong assumption still produces the wrong answer, the reflection argues that humility isn’t weakness but a commitment to staying teachable. We should believe what we believe with conviction. But we should hold that conviction with enough openness to keep growing, keep learning, and keep giving the Spirit room to correct us. The Teacher keeps bumping into his own imperfection throughout Ecclesiastes, and that’s actually a healthy place to live — because if you don’t think you need to grow, you won’t.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Thursday. We’re going to finish out chapter 7 today, and I think — I think — we’re going to make it through Ecclesiastes by the end of May or early June if we keep pressing. Some of the last chapters are shorter, so we may combine a few toward the end. But we’re going to get there. Today, Ecclesiastes 7, verses 15 through 29:

“In my vain life I have seen everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evildoing. Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time? It is good that you should take hold of the one, without letting go of the other; for the one who fears God shall succeed with both.

Wisdom gives strength to the wise more than ten rulers that are in a city. Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning. Do not give heed to everything that people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you; your heart knows that many times you have yourself cursed others.

All this I have tested by wisdom; I said, ‘I will be wise,’ but it was far from me. That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out? I turned my mind to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the sum of things, and to know that wickedness is folly and that foolishness is madness. I found more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters; one who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. See, this is what I found, says the Teacher, adding one thing to another to find the sum, which my mind has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. See, this alone I found, that God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes.”

God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes. That line is a pretty good summary not just of this passage but of the whole book of Ecclesiastes in some ways. We come into this world made in the image of God, with a kind of built-in moral simplicity, and then we spend the rest of our lives complicating it.

There’s a lot in this passage, but I want to focus on something I keep coming back to — this idea of holding wisdom and humility together. The Teacher says it’s good to take hold of the one without letting go of the other. Pursue wisdom. Seek to understand. Test your thinking. But don’t let go of the understanding that you could be wrong.

One of my professors at Mississippi College — Dr. Harold Bryson, a preaching professor I’ve mentioned many times — said something that has stayed with me for decades: show me a man who thinks he’s wrong. Meaning, we all think we’re right. Every single one of us. And that’s not necessarily bad — you should believe what you believe with conviction. But do you hold that conviction with the humility to acknowledge you might have misread something, misunderstood a text, listened to the wrong mentor somewhere along the way?

I believe what I believe. I’ve tested my doctrine, I’ve prayed it through, I’ve run it past people I respect, I’m fairly confident it’s biblically grounded. I stand on it. But I also know it’s possible I got something wrong. Possible I’ve had faulty assumptions I’ve never questioned.

That actually came up in a conversation with one of my kids this weekend about school — which led somehow to my deep and abiding hatred of calculus. I’m 50 years old and once a week I still have the dream where it’s the last day of calculus and I haven’t been to a single class all semester and the final is today. I still have this dream. I hate calculus with every fiber of my being. But one thing calculus did teach me: if you have the wrong underlying assumption to a problem, you can work every step correctly and still get the wrong answer. All the math is right, but the foundational assumption is wrong, so the whole thing is off.

That’s true in life too. If our underlying assumptions are wrong — about God, about people, about how things work — we can be working very hard and still arriving at the wrong place. Which is why humility matters. Not as weakness, but as a commitment to keeping learning.

The Teacher says surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning. He keeps bumping into his own imperfection, his own weakness, the gap between what he hoped wisdom would give him and what it actually delivered. And I think that’s a healthy thing to keep bumping into. Because if you don’t think you need to grow, you won’t. If you don’t acknowledge the possibility of being wrong, the Spirit has nothing to work with.

The only two things I know for sure are that I love Jesus and I am loved by Jesus. Everything else — I hold with conviction, but I hold it with open hands. As I’ve said many times: the only thing I’m married to is Holly Stoddard. Outside of that, everything else is up for grabs.

So today — stand on what you believe. Have conviction. But hold it with humility. Test your thinking. Ask what you might be missing. Because God made human beings straightforward, but they have devised many schemes — and a little humility goes a long way toward keeping us honest.

Tomorrow we’ll pick up with chapter 8. Have a great day!

In this Wednesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 7:1–14, the Teacher’s seemingly morbid observations — that the house of mourning is better than the house of feasting, sorrow better than laughter — are rescued from mere pessimism and read as genuine wisdom about suffering and formation. The reflection is careful not to romanticize suffering or suggest we should seek it out; Christianity calls for life, not martyrdom. But suffering, when it comes, has a way of refining us, forming us, and pulling us closer to God in ways that easier seasons simply cannot. Drawing on Stephen Colbert’s striking observation — you grow to love the thing you wished had never happened — and the lived experience of painful rebukes from trusted mentors, the reflection makes the case that we learn our most important lessons not in the feasting but in the mourning. For those in a hard season: God has not left you, his rod and staff are with you, and Romans 8:28 is still true. For those in an easier season: hold onto what the hard times taught you, because those lessons are worth keeping.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

You can read today’s passage here.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Wednesday. If you’re watching through the usual channels — YouTube, Facebook, the Substack link — you’ll notice I’m recording from my computer today instead of my phone setup. The reason is simple: I need a very tight shot to avoid subjecting you to the complete and utter chaos that is my office right now. There are boxes everywhere. A friend commented on Facebook that his former pastor’s wife once said his office looked like a yard sale hit by a tornado. That’s where I am. If anyone wants to show up with a pair of matches, I’d welcome it. Hopefully by the end of the day there’ll be some order to this. Right now I’m not feeling it.

Today we’re in Ecclesiastes chapter 7, verses 1 through 14 — and our guy is really feeling his oats. Let’s read:

“A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for this is the end of everyone, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools; this also is vanity. Surely oppression makes the wise foolish, and a bribe corrupts the heart. Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; the patient in spirit are better than the proud in spirit. Do not be quick to anger, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools. Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ for it is not from wisdom that you ask this. Wisdom is as good as an inheritance, an advantage to those who see the sun. For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to the one who possesses it. Consider the work of God; who can make straight what he has made crooked? In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.”

Now — before you dismiss this as just more grunge-era brooding from the Teacher, I want to push back a little and say there’s genuine wisdom here, especially in verse 3: sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad.

Let me be clear: I am not saying suffering is good. I am not saying we should seek it out. My professor used to say Christianity doesn’t call for martyrdom — Christianity calls for life, and we can do more for Jesus living than dead. So no, we are not Christian masochists looking to suffer for the sake of it.

But here’s what I do think is true: suffering can refine us. It can form us. It can pull us closer to God in ways that easy seasons simply cannot.

There’s a line from an Everclear song — yes, we’re going there — from I Will Buy You a New Life, where he says: I hate those people who love to tell you money is the root of all that kills — they have never been poor, they have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas. I love that line, because it names something real: there are things you only know from the inside of difficulty. You can’t fully understand the valley of the shadow of death until you’ve walked through it. And it isn’t until you’re walking through it that you find out whether God’s rod and staff actually comfort you — and they do.

Stephen Colbert said something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: you grow to love the thing you wished had never happened. That’s a remarkable statement. Our suffering forms us. The grief, the loss, the hard seasons, the painful rebukes from people who cared enough to tell us the truth — all of it shapes us into who we are now. And who we are now is someone seeking to grow closer to Jesus, spending time in his word, wanting to be more faithful. That person was formed, at least in part, by the hard things.

It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. I’ve been rebuked by mentors I deeply respected, and it was not fun. Not one bit. But it was exactly what I needed, and I’m better for it. The house of feasting is fine — nobody’s turning down a good dinner. But we often learn the more important lessons in the house of mourning.

So if you’re in a difficult season right now — be encouraged. God has not left you. You are not alone. His rod and staff are with you, even if you can’t feel them yet. Pray, listen, learn, and trust that Romans 8:28 is still true: God can bring something good out of everything, even this.

And for those of us in an easier season right now — rejoice. But don’t forget what the hard times taught you. Those lessons are worth keeping.

Tomorrow we’ll pick up with more of chapter 7. Have a great day!

In this reflection on Ecclesiastes 6, the Teacher continues wrestling with the emptiness of life when meaning is sought in wealth, pleasure, work, or achievement. Though these things are not inherently bad, they cannot bear the full weight of the human soul or provide lasting peace and purpose. The passage serves as a warning against building our identity on temporary earthly things—whether money, politics, sports, approval, or success—because all eventually fail under the weight we place on them. Only Christ can serve as the true “load-bearing wall” for our souls, providing the lasting meaning and identity we were created to find.

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Well, good morning. It’s good to be with you on this Tuesday morning. I hope you are doing well as we begin our time together in Ecclesiastes. Today we’re going to be in Ecclesiastes chapter 6.

I hope you’ve had a great start to your week. Things are rocking and rolling around here. I look around my office and it’s full of boxes, so the excitement begins and continues.

Today we’re going to read all of chapter 6. Once again, the Teacher—you’re going to see it again—is struggling. This is another very “90s grunge emo” reflection. Our guy is still wrestling with life. You know, Ecclesiastes is a love song to us overthinkers. It really is. Those of us who overthink have probably felt a lot of what Ecclesiastes is telling us.

So let’s read chapter 6. It’s a short chapter, just twelve verses.

“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy upon humankind: those to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that they lack nothing of all that they desire, yet God does not enable them to enjoy these things, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity; it is a grievous evil. A man may beget a hundred children and live many years, but however many are the days of his years, if he does not enjoy life’s good things or has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything, yet it finds rest rather than he. Even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good—do not all go to one place?

All human toil is for the mouth, and yet the appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage have the wise over fools? And what do the poor have who know how to conduct themselves before the living? Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of desire. This also is vanity and a chasing after the wind.”

Once again, our guy just can’t find happiness. He can’t find peace. He is trying to find meaning and purpose in so many things, and he’s discovering that those things are not equipped to give him happiness or peace.

To me, Ecclesiastes is full of evocative lines—lines that just do something to you when they’re said aloud. It’s very poetic and very emotional. “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of desire.” “This also is vanity and a chasing after the wind.” Those lines stick with you.

The Teacher is almost saying it’s better to desire something than to actually possess it, because once you possess it, who knows what’s going to happen? You’re going to die eventually, and who knows what happens to all the things you worked for after you’re gone? Then he says, “Do not all go to one place?” In other words, don’t we all die? The rich and the poor both die. The wise and the foolish both die. There’s an old joke: life has a 100% mortality rate. Nobody gets out alive.

It’s kind of become a running joke around the office as I’m cleaning out my office and giving things away. Somebody will ask, “Are you dying?” And I laugh and say, “Yeah, we all are.” From the moment we draw our first breath, we begin to die. That’s a very Ecclesiastes kind of thought, but it’s true. And you can see the Teacher wrestling with that reality throughout this book.

One thing I keep coming back to in Ecclesiastes is this: sometimes the Bible is a warning as much as it is counsel. I think Ecclesiastes is a warning for us about the foolishness of trying to build our lives on anything other than Jesus.

What I see over and over is the Teacher trying to place the weight of meaning on things that cannot support the weight of meaning. He’s trying to find life in things that simply cannot bear that load. Food, drink, work—none of these are necessarily bad things. But they cannot be the load-bearing wall for our souls.

The things of this earth cannot be the ultimate source of meaning. They cannot carry the full weight of our identity and purpose.

You’ve heard me say this before if you’ve heard me preach or teach: things cannot bear the weight of your soul. They just can’t.

The American political system cannot bear the weight of your soul. It will crumble under that weight. Sports cannot bear the weight of your soul. Now, those aren’t bad things. I think it’s good to be involved in the civic life of our country. I think sports and rooting interests can be wonderful things. But they cannot become ultimate things.

Only Jesus can bear the weight of meaning. Only our faith can be the load-bearing wall for our souls.

If you’re building a house and the load-bearing wall is not strong enough to support the structure, the house will collapse. That’s just physics. In the same way, if you try to place the weight of your identity, your meaning, and your purpose on something earthly that cannot support it, eventually it will crumble. And when it crumbles, it leaves us empty, angry, and dissatisfied.

That’s what I think we see happening over and over again with the Teacher in Ecclesiastes. He keeps asking things to do something they were never meant to do.

So I think the question for us is this: what are the things in your life that you are placing too much meaning into? What are the things you are allowing to define too much of who you are? They may not be bad things at all, but they cannot carry the weight of your soul.

The Teacher has tried it, and it failed him. It will fail us too.

So be careful. Don’t allow something other than Jesus to become the center of your life. Don’t allow something other than Christ to become the source of your identity and meaning. Because even a very good thing, if it takes the place that belongs only to Jesus, cannot support the weight.

Sometimes the most dangerous thing is not a bad thing, but a very good thing that slowly becomes an ultimate thing.

Today, make sure you have the right load-bearing wall for your soul. And that load-bearing wall is Christ and Christ alone. Jesus is the only one who can support the full weight of meaning.

Thanks for being with us today. Tomorrow we’ll continue in chapter 7, which is titled “A Disillusioned View of Life.” That certainly sounds on brand for our guy in Ecclesiastes.

Have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

In this Monday reflection on Ecclesiastes 5, the chapter’s three movements — reverence, humility, and contentment — are unpacked with practical pastoral honesty. The call to guard your words before God and take your vows seriously is a word about integrity: promises to God and to each other matter, and we shouldn’t make them lightly. The observation that oppression and injustice are everywhere is not meant to depress but to inoculate — don’t be surprised when the world is broken, because we were never promised otherwise, and being realistic about that keeps us from being crushed by it. And the Teacher’s recurring refrain — eat, drink, find enjoyment in your toil, for this is the gift of God — is finally named as a call to contentment and faithful presence in the present moment. We cannot control the future, and the anxiety about it can be paralyzing. But we can be faithful today, with the task in front of us, loving God and loving neighbor — and the reflection closes with a conviction: if we’re all doing that, somehow, through God’s grace, good is going to come of it. Hope is not fragile. It drags itself off the floor and goes another round.

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Good morning! Hope you had a great weekend. It’s a busy week — I’ve got the calendar on the wall in front of me, and we’ve got roughly three weeks left in the office here, with the last one mostly consumed by annual conference. So we’ve got work to do in Ecclesiastes. I think we’ll finish it, but we’re going to move. Today we’re reading all of chapter 5 — and I’ll say this: chapter 5 feels more like Proverbs to me than anything we’ve read so far. Practical, pointed wisdom. My Bible headings it under reverence, humility, and contentment, which is a pretty good summary. Verses 1 through 20:

“Guard your steps when you go to the house of God; to draw near to listen is better than the sacrifice offered by fools; for they do not know how to keep from doing evil. Never be rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be quick to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven, and you are upon earth; therefore let your words be few. For dreams come with many cares, and a fool’s voice with many words. When you make a vow to God, do not delay fulfilling it; for he has no pleasure in fools. Fulfill what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not fulfill it. Do not let your mouth lead you into sin.

If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and right, do not be amazed at the matter; for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them. But all things considered, this is an advantage for a land: a king for a plowed field.

The lover of money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth, with gain. This also is vanity. When goods increase, those who eat them increase; and what gain has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of laborers, whether they eat little or much; but the surfeit of the rich will not let them sleep.

There is a grievous evil that I have seen under the sun: riches were kept by their owners to their hurt, and those riches were lost in a bad venture; though they are parents of children, they have nothing in their hands. As they came from their mother’s womb, so they shall go again, naked as they came; they shall take nothing for their toil, which they may carry away with their hands. This also is a grievous evil: just as they came, so shall they go; and what gain do they have from toiling for the wind?

This is what I have seen to be good: it is fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of the life God gives us; for this is our lot. Likewise all to whom God gives wealth and possessions and whom he enables to enjoy them, and to accept their lot and find enjoyment in their toil — this is the gift of God. For they will scarcely brood over the days of their lives, because God keeps them occupied with the joy of their hearts.”

A few things worth sitting with here.

First — guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Draw near to listen. Be careful what you promise. Don’t rush into vows. It is better not to vow than to vow and not fulfill it. This matters. I think of our membership vows — to the church, to the annual conference, the vows we make at the altar. We should take these seriously. I don’t expect perfection in keeping them; I know I’m going to fall short. But I want to take them seriously, because promises to God and to each other are not casual things. Let your words be few. Wisdom.

Second — don’t be surprised when you see injustice and wickedness in the world. The Teacher says it plainly: don’t be amazed. We live in a world where people don’t act the way they should. We were never promised otherwise. That doesn’t mean we accept it or stop working to make it better — it means we’re not crushed by it, because we weren’t naive enough to expect perfection.

Third, and this is where the Teacher keeps returning throughout this book: eat, drink, find enjoyment in your toil. This is the gift of God. Contentment. Not wealth, not achievement, not legacy — just the gift of being alive and finding meaning in the work right in front of you today.

And here’s what I want to say about that, because I think it’s so needed right now. There is so much anxiety about the future. Get on social media or YouTube and you’ll find no shortage of people absolutely consumed by dread about what’s coming — and some of what they’re worried about may even be legitimate. I’m not offering some Pollyanna perspective where the future is perfect, because it isn’t. The present isn’t perfect either. But we cannot control the future. All we can do is be faithful with what God has put in front of us today.

And here’s what I genuinely believe: if you’re faithful with your task today, and I’m faithful with mine, and we’re all loving God and loving neighbor — somehow, through God’s grace, good is going to come of it. I have to believe that. All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. I can’t change the whole world today. But I can be faithful today. And you can be faithful today. And that is literally all that is asked of us.

There’s a quote I’m probably going to mangle, but it goes something like this: we tend to think of hope as something fragile and whisper-thin, but hope drags itself off the floor, spits out a tooth, gets its fists up, and goes another round. Hope is not easily defeated. Don’t give up on it.

Be faithful today. Love God, love your neighbor, work for good. God will take care of the rest. Have a great day — see you tomorrow!

In this Friday reflection on Ecclesiastes 4:9–16, we see the Teacher’s familiar refrain of vanity gives way to a genuinely hopeful word: two are better than one, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. The reflection unpacks Wesley’s concept of social holiness — often misunderstood as primarily about social action, when Wesley actually meant something more intimate: the communal accountability of the class meeting, where people who deeply loved each other held each other to faithfulness not out of judgment but out of care. Holiness, for Wesley, was never a solo project. And one of the genuinely destructive forces of modern life — even as we’re more “connected” than ever — is the loss of that deep, honest, prayer-soaked Christian friendship. The practical challenge is direct: who are your people? Who prays for you? Who do you call when your world falls apart? Who loves you enough to tell you the truth? Find those people, stay close to them, and give them permission to speak into your life — because we cannot do this thing alone.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Good morning, and happy Friday! Hope you’ve had a great week. We don’t have anything too big planned this weekend — tomorrow we have our Missions 5K here at Saint Matthew’s, and all the proceeds go toward our mission trip later this year in October. If you’re in the Jackson metro area and want to support a good cause, message me and I’ll get you the details. Sunday I’m preaching at Intersection, so that’ll be a good day too.

Today we’re picking up with the end of Ecclesiastes 4 — and like I said yesterday, some good news is coming. Let’s read verses 9 through 16:

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Better is a poor but wise youth than an old but foolish king who will no longer take advice. For the youth came out of prison to reign, even though born poor in the kingdom. I saw all the living who, moving about under the sun, follow that youth who replaced the king; there was no end to all the people whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a chasing after wind.”

The end does wind back to vanity and chasing after wind — because that’s where Ecclesiastes always lands for now. But that opening section about friendship and community is the good news I promised, and it’s worth sitting with.

Two are better than one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

John Wesley wrote and preached about what he called social holiness, and I think we sometimes misunderstand what he meant by that. We tend to hear “social” and think social action — serving the poor, advocating for the marginalized. And Wesley absolutely believed in that; he was constantly intervening on behalf of the broken and the oppressed in his society, and he saw that as a requirement of anyone genuinely pursuing holiness. But when he used the phrase social holiness, he was actually talking about something else. He was talking about community.

Wesley understood that Christians cannot be transformed by grace in isolation. Holiness, for Wesley, wasn’t something you achieved alone in your prayer closet. It was something that happened together, in community — specifically in what he called class meetings. Small groups. And here’s what’s important: Wesley’s class meetings weren’t primarily knowledge-based. They weren’t Bible studies designed to increase your theological information. They were accountability groups. Communities of people who loved each other deeply and were willing to ask the hard questions: how is it with your soul? Where have you struggled this week? Where did you fall short?

And the accountability wasn’t coming from a place of judgment. It was coming from a place of deep, genuine love. These were people who wanted you to be faithful, who celebrated your victories and mourned your failures, and who helped you get back up when you fell. That’s what Wesley meant by social holiness — and his famous line was: there is no holiness but social holiness. You cannot become holy alone.

I think one of the genuinely destructive things about the way we live now — and yes, I understand the irony of saying this on social media — is that we’ve traded deep Christian community for the illusion of connection. We’re more “connected” than any generation in history, and I wonder if we’ve never been more genuinely isolated.

So here’s the question worth sitting with today: who are your people? Who in your life is praying for you right now? A good way to figure that out is to flip it around — who are you praying for? Who do you turn to when your world falls apart? Who gets the first text, the first phone call, when you need help or advice or someone to just sit with you in the grief? Who will celebrate with you in your victories and cry with you in your losses and love you enough to tell you the hard truth when you need to hear it?

If you don’t have that — find it. A small group, a Sunday school class, a choir, a service team, something. Because when we fall, we need someone to pick us up. And we are going to fall. We’re going to have moments of doubt and fear and failure and loss. We can’t do this thing alone.

Two are better than one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Wesley was right — there is no holiness apart from community. We need each other.

Have a great weekend! See you bright and early Monday morning.

In Ecclesiastes 3:16–4:8, the Teacher reaches perhaps his lowest point — wickedness in the place of justice, the tears of the oppressed with no one to comfort them, and the devastating conclusion that the never-born are better off than the living. The reflection uses this as an entry point into how to read Ecclesiastes responsibly: it is wisdom literature and poetry, not history, and building a theology out of isolated verses here would lead somewhere very dark very fast. But the deeper gift of this passage is that it gives us language for the times we genuinely feel this way — overwhelmed, cynical, unable to will ourselves to feel better. Toxic positivity doesn’t help anyone, and Scripture’s willingness to name the darkness honestly is one of its great gifts. The caution, though, is that we cannot stay there. Cynicism, left to take root, rots the soul. We cannot only tell the story of Good Friday — we have to tell Easter too. Name the darkness, give it to God, and then keep walking toward what is beautiful and true.

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Good morning! We’re pressing through Ecclesiastes today, and I do want to try to finish it before I take June off — so we may combine some sections toward the end to get there. Today we’re reading a long stretch: chapter 3, verse 16 through chapter 4, verse 8.

Before we read — a quick word about the writer. Most scholars think this is Solomon, based on the context and tone, though he never names himself. What I can tell you is that as someone who graduated in 1994 and spent a large portion of his teenage years riding the back roads of Pike and Lincoln counties with a cassette of Nevermind by Nirvana playing until it literally broke — and then moving on to Pearl Jam and Soundgarden — I recognize this voice. The author of Ecclesiastes would have fit in perfectly with the grunge movement. Cynical, heavy, asking all the hard questions, not satisfied with any of the answers. Flannel optional. Our guy is really feeling it today. Let’s read:

“Moreover I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there as well. I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for he has appointed a time for every matter and for every work. I said in my heart with regard to human beings that God is testing them to show that they are but animals. For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the human spirit goes upward and the spirit of animals goes downward to the earth? So I saw that there is nothing better than that all should enjoy their work, for that is their lot; who can bring them to see what will be after them?

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed — with no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power — with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from one person’s envy of another. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind. Fools fold their hands and consume their own flesh. Better is a handful with quiet than two handfuls with toil and a chasing after wind.

Again I saw vanity under the sun: the case of solitary individuals, without sons or brothers; yet there is no end to all their toil, and their eyes are never satisfied with riches. ‘For whom am I toiling,’ they ask, ‘and depriving myself of pleasure?’ This also is vanity and an unhappy business.”

Our guy needs to talk to somebody. I say that with full affection.

But I think passages like today’s — and honestly, all of Ecclesiastes — point to something really powerful about how we should approach Scripture. I had lunch with someone yesterday and I said: I take the Bible too seriously to take it all literally. What I mean by that is this: you have to understand the context of what you’re reading. What kind of literature is it? What is its purpose? Because if you just pull verses out of context, you can say some pretty alarming things. Take today’s passage — the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same, they all go to one place, all turn to dust. Or: better than both the living and the dead is the one who has never been born. If you built your theology on those verses in isolation, you’d end up somewhere very dark very fast.

But Ecclesiastes isn’t a history book like First or Second Kings. It’s wisdom literature. It’s poetry. It’s a book that speaks to the deep longings and pains of the human heart — and it doesn’t always offer tidy answers. It just names what it feels like to be alive and searching and not finding what you’re looking for.

And I want to say something directly: there are times when we all feel exactly the way the Teacher feels right now. You look at the world — wickedness in the place of justice, oppression everywhere, the tears of those who have no one to comfort them — and you think, what does any of it matter? I have an Eeyore mug somewhere over here, and sometimes Eeyore is my spirit animal. Life is hard. You can’t just will yourself to feel better. Toxic positivity — the pressure to always be happy, always be grateful, always look on the bright side — doesn’t actually help anyone.

Ecclesiastes gives us language for the dark places. And that’s a gift. The Psalms do the same thing — psalms of grief and anger and abandonment sit right next to psalms of praise and joy, because the human experience contains all of it. Being able to name what you’re feeling — to say God, I see injustice and I don’t understand it, I’m overwhelmed and I don’t have answers — that is not faithlessness. That’s honesty. And you can’t receive healing for what you won’t name.

But here’s where I have to be equally honest: we cannot stay there. We cannot only tell the story of Good Friday. We have to tell Easter too.

Cynicism, if we let it take up permanent residence in our souls, will rot us. It will drain us of joy and hope until there’s nothing left. The Teacher has lost his hope right now — lost it somewhere in the exhaustion of trying everything and finding nothing. And we understand that. But Philippians 4 says whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable — think on these things. James says every good and perfect gift comes from the Father above. The Psalms praise the glory and power of God. The Transfiguration shows us Jesus in his glory. The empty tomb tells us death doesn’t win.

We need Ecclesiastes. We need language for the dark. But we also need the resurrection. We need Easter.

So today — if you’re in a dark place, if the cynicism has crept in, if you look at the world and can’t make sense of it — name it. Give it to God. But don’t stay there. Keep walking toward what is beautiful and good, because there is beauty and good, even now. Even here.

Tomorrow our guy actually has some good news. Looking forward to it. Have a great day!

In this Wednesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:9–15, one phrase anchors everything: God has put a sense of past and future into their minds. We are wired to look backward and forward simultaneously — to remember, to plan, to worry, to dream — and that tension so often pulls us out of the only moment we actually inhabit: now. The Teacher keeps returning to the same simple refrain throughout his searching: eat, drink, take pleasure in your toil — it is God’s gift. The present moment is the gift. Social media has made this harder than it’s ever been, training us toward constant comparison and doom scrolling and dissatisfaction with wherever we are. But God meets us here, now, in the ordinary. More than half the church calendar is spent in Ordinary Time — not Advent or Easter, just regular days — because most of life is ordinary, and ordinary time is holy too. The call today is simple: don’t let the past or the future steal the gift of the present. Live fully in this moment, because this is where Jesus meets us.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Wednesday as we continue through Ecclesiastes. Yesterday we talked about the seasons of life — how everything has its time, and how God walks with us through all of it. Today we’re staying in chapter 3, reading verses 9 through 15:

“What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil. I know that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.”

I want to linger on one phrase: he has put a sense of past and future into their minds. That’s such a perceptive observation. Don’t we feel that? I just turned 50, and I’ve noticed what everybody warned me about — the older you get, the better you used to be. You find yourself telling the old stories more, enjoying the memories, wanting to understand where you came from. We have a genuine sense of the past wired into us. And at the same time, we’re always looking ahead — planning, dreaming, anxious about what’s coming. The future pulls at us just as much as the past does.

And so we end up living in this tension between the two — sometimes bound by what happened, sometimes paralyzed by what might happen — and we miss the moment we’re actually in.

I think that’s part of why the Teacher keeps returning to the same refrain throughout Ecclesiastes, even in the midst of all his searching: there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live. It is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in their toil. He keeps coming back to the present. Not the legacy, not the accumulation, not the grand achievement — just the gift of being alive and finding meaning in the work right in front of you, today.

And I think we’ve largely lost that. I say this with full awareness of the irony — many of you are watching this on social media — but social media has trained us to be deeply dissatisfied with the present moment. We scroll through what everyone else is doing, what they have, where they went, how their life looks compared to ours. And then there’s what they call doom scrolling — just scrolling and scrolling at night, not even looking for anything specific, just absorbing anxiety. The more you scroll, the more unsettled you get. We’ve been slowly trained out of the ability to just be here, now, and find God in it.

But here’s what the Teacher is pointing toward, and what I believe with everything in me: God meets us in the present moment. Not in the past we can’t change or the future we can’t control — here, now, in this exact moment. You have a chance today. Right now. To open Scripture and listen for God’s voice. To pray. To love somebody. To be the hands and feet of Jesus in whatever ordinary situation you find yourself in. To offer forgiveness or ask for it. To start over.

This is actually what the church calendar is getting at with what’s called Ordinary Time. If you observe the church year — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost — after Pentecost you enter a long stretch that some traditions call Ordinary Time, or Kingdom Tide, or just the Sundays after Pentecost. It takes up over half the church year. More than half. And I’ve always loved that, because isn’t that exactly what life is? Mostly ordinary time. Regular, routine, run-of-the-mill days that don’t feel particularly spiritual or significant. And the church says: this too is holy. This too is where God is at work.

So today — don’t neglect the gift of the day you’ve been given. We have the pull of the past and the push of the future, and both of them are real. But let’s not let them crowd out the one thing we actually have: this moment, this day, this chance to live faithfully and love well.

Live fully today. Tomorrow we’ll pick up with chapter 3, verse 16. Have a great day!

In this Tuesday reflection on Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 — the passage made famous by the Byrds’ Turn! Turn! Turn! — the full sweep of human experience is named honestly and without pretense: birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing, war and peace, love and hate. The wisdom literature, like the Psalms, is a gift precisely because it names what we actually feel and go through, and reminds us that we are never the first to walk through any of it. Read in the context of Ecclesiastes as a whole, the Teacher isn’t celebrating these seasons but cataloguing them — life is a steam train that keeps coming whether we’re ready or not, and so far nothing he’s tried has given it meaning. But the pastoral word is this: no season is permanent. If you’re in a time of weeping, a time of laughing is coming. If you’re in a time of breaking down, a time of building is coming. God walks with us through all of it. And the meaning we’re searching for — which the Teacher hasn’t found yet — will ultimately only be found not in the seasons themselves, but in Jesus Christ, whose presence makes us more than what any season can define.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Tuesday as we continue through Ecclesiastes. Today we’re in one of the most famous passages in the book — and depending on your age, one of the most famous passages in all of Scripture. For those of you who grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, these words are probably already singing themselves in your head. For the younger crowd, maybe not quite as much. Either way — Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1 through 8:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.”

Of course, the Byrds basically turned this passage into a song — Turn! Turn! Turn! — and just sang the words of Ecclesiastes 3 almost verbatim. If you grew up in that era, these verses and that melody are probably permanently woven together in your brain.

Now — what I want to do is read this passage both on its own terms and in context within the larger arc of Ecclesiastes, because I think both angles are worth sitting with.

First, on its own: one of the things I love about the wisdom literature is how honestly it names the full range of human experience. The Psalms do this beautifully too. There are psalms of encouragement and protection — Psalm 121, where God neither slumbers nor sleeps and won’t let your foot be moved. And then there are the imprecatory psalms, the raw ones, where the writer is calling down God’s judgment on his enemies. And psalms of grief and loss. Not every psalm speaks to you at every moment. But no matter what you’re going through, you can probably find a psalm that meets you there. That’s the gift of it.

Ecclesiastes 3 does something similar. Everything you will ever go through in life has a place in this list. Time to be born, time to die. Time to plant, time to uproot. Time to weep, time to laugh. Time to mourn, time to dance. Time for war, time for peace. The full sweep of human life is here — the joys and the griefs, the building up and the tearing down, the holding on and the letting go. And the passage is honest enough to include even the uncomfortable ones: a time to hate, a time for war. We don’t have to pretend those seasons don’t exist.

What this tells us is that we are not the first people to walk through whatever we’re walking through right now. What we’re experiencing in May of 2026 probably wasn’t what we were going through in May of 2025, and probably won’t be what we’re facing in May of 2027. Seasons change. Life moves. And no matter what season we’re in — God is with us in it. He hasn’t left us or forsaken us. That doesn’t make the hard seasons easy. It doesn’t mean we have it all figured out. But it does mean we’re not alone.

Now, in the context of Ecclesiastes — and this is important — the Teacher isn’t celebrating these seasons. He’s cataloguing them. He has spent the whole book so far trying one thing after another in search of meaning: wisdom, pleasure, great works, accumulation. And everything has come up empty. Vanity, chasing after wind. And now he’s essentially saying: life is going to happen. All of this is going to happen. Birth and death and love and hate and everything in between — it’s all coming whether you want it to or not. There is nothing you can do to stop the steam train of life.

And I think the honest word for us is this: we can pretend we don’t feel the emotions in this list. We can try to stay above it all, keep a stiff upper lip, never admit to the grief or the anger or the exhaustion. But the Teacher just names them plainly. These things are real. We feel them. And the question isn’t whether we’ll experience these seasons — we will. The question is what we do with them.

What I find deeply comforting here is that no season is permanent. If you’re in a time of weeping, there will come a time to laugh. If you’re in a time of breaking down, there will come a time to build up. If you’re in a time of silence, there will come a time to speak. If you’re in a time of mourning, there will come a time to dance. Life changes. The only constant is change. And God walks with us through all of it.

The Teacher will keep searching for meaning throughout this book — and we’ll keep watching him come up empty — until we finally arrive at the only answer that holds: meaning is found not in the circumstances of life, not in any of the seasons themselves, but in Jesus Christ. When our identity is rooted in him, the seasons no longer have the final word.

So today, whatever season you’re in — keep walking. Keep being faithful. There will come another time, another season, another moment of grace. To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. May you find God’s grace in yours today.

See you tomorrow!

In this Monday reflection on Ecclesiastes 2:12–26, Solomon’s existential spiral — the wise and the fools both die and are forgotten, and whoever comes after me might waste everything I built — is met with a gentle diagnosis: delusions of grandeur, and the worrier’s tendency to catastrophize. But buried in the despair is a landing worth holding onto: there is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil, for this is from the hand of God. The reflection pushes back against the cultural pressure to live a life of spiritual drama and cinematic significance — the cage match with the devil, the extraordinary calling, the remarkable testimony. Most of us are just going through life as moms and dads, coworkers and neighbors, doing the same things in the same patterns week after week. And that is not failure. That is faithfulness. The call isn’t to be great — it’s to find meaning in the toil of this ordinary moment: a smile, an open door, a word of encouragement, a kindness nobody will notice or remember. In those small things, done faithfully, something beautiful can be found.

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Good morning! Hope you had a great weekend — we did. Looking forward to a good week. Today we’re picking up in Ecclesiastes, chapter 2, verses 12 through 26:

“So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly; for what can the one do who comes after the king? Only what has already been done. Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness. The wise have eyes in their head, but fools walk in darkness. Yet I perceived that the same fate befalls all of them. Then I said to myself, ‘What happens to the fool will happen to me also; why then have I been so very wise?’ And I said to myself that this also is vanity. For there is no enduring remembrance of the wise or of fools, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How can the wise die just like fools? So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me — and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.

There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the sinner he gives the work of gathering and heaping, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind.”

I am a Gen X kid. I grew up on grunge — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden. Not exactly a cheerful collection of music. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve drifted back to my roots and landed on red dirt country — Jason Isbell, Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, that crowd. Isbell is my favorite. I’ve got a poster of his on the wall right now. My favorite Isbell shirt has people weeping at a party — tears streaming down their faces — and it says The Captives: Jason Isbell Party Music. There’s a Weezer song that says all my favorite songs are sad. I feel that.

I say all of this because the Teacher would have loved that kind of music. Solomon, if he were alive today, would be driving some beat-up Ford truck down the back roads of Lincoln County in flannel, blasting Candlebox, screaming out the window: no one gets me. That’s our guy right now. He is not in a great place.

But let’s look at what he actually says, because there’s something worth holding onto here. He acknowledges that wisdom is better than folly — the wise have eyes in their heads, fools walk in darkness. That’s real. But then he says: they both die. The wise die just like fools. Neither one gets remembered. And then he spirals into worrying about whoever comes after him — what if they’re foolish? What if they take everything I built and waste it? I toiled and struggled and someone else gets to enjoy it without having worked for it. Days full of pain. Work is vexation. Even at night the mind doesn’t rest.

And then — and this is where he lands — there is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil. This also is from the hand of God.

I want to gently diagnose Solomon with a mild case of delusions of grandeur. He’s catastrophizing, honestly. And I say that as a fellow worrier — I’m working on it myself. But there’s real wisdom buried in where he finally arrives: eat, drink, find enjoyment in your toil. Not greatness. Not legacy. Not a monument that lasts forever. Just faithful presence in the work in front of you, received as a gift from the hand of God.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: we want our lives to be spiritual cosplay. We want the Wrestlemania cage match with the devil, the dramatic testimony, the extraordinary calling. And when our lives turn out to be mostly routine — going to work, taking the kids to practice, doing the same things on the same days in the same patterns — we can feel like we’re failing somehow. Like real faith should look more cinematic than this.

But it’s not about being great. It’s about being faithful. We’re not all going to be Mother Teresa. We’re not all going to sell everything and move to Calcutta. Most of us are going to be moms and dads, grandparents, coworkers, bosses, neighbors — just going through life. And that is enough. That is exactly where God has placed us, and it is enough.

You’ve got a Monday ahead of you. It may be full of to-dos you don’t want to do, and you may push half of them to Tuesday. That’s fine. But somewhere in the middle of this ordinary day — can you offer a smile? Hold a door? Let somebody over in traffic? Not respond to the thing on social media that really made you angry? Serve somebody in some small way that nobody will notice or remember?

That’s it. That’s faithfulness. And in those small moments, if we’re paying attention, we will find something beautiful.

Tomorrow we move into chapter 3 — one of the most famous passages in all of Ecclesiastes, and honestly one of the best-known in all of Scripture. To everything there is a season. Join us then. Have a great day

In this Friday reflection on Ecclesiastes 2:1–11 — offered on Mother’s Day weekend, with a pastoral acknowledgment that the day lands differently for everyone — the Teacher’s second experiment in the search for meaning is examined: pleasure. Having tried wisdom and found it vexing, Solomon goes the other direction entirely, becoming history’s most extravagant hedonist — houses, vineyards, gardens, silver, gold, concubines, everything his eyes desired, nothing withheld. And the verdict is the same: vanity, a chasing after wind, nothing to be gained. The reflection connects this to a very contemporary reality: we live in an age of unprecedented access and instant gratification, and we may be among the most meaning-starved generations in history. Having everything you want doesn’t fill the hole — it proves the hole is still there. The mind is fallen, and so are our desires. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it satisfies. A life worth living cannot be built on getting what you want, and Solomon is learning that the hard way so we don’t have to.

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Good morning! Hope you’re doing well on this Friday. And happy Mother’s Day weekend. If your mom is still living, I hope you get the chance to call her, see her, tell her what she means to you. If your mom is gone — mine is — Mother’s Day carries a different weight. You just find yourself missing her, especially on a day like this. For those of us in that place, I think the best we can do is stop and give thanks to God for what our mothers taught us and how they loved us. I’ll touch on this Sunday.

I’ve always said Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are the two hardest Sundays to preach. Because I genuinely don’t know what you’re carrying when you walk through the door. I can’t project my experience onto yours. Some of you have beautiful relationships with your mothers. Some of you have complicated ones. Some of you carry deep grief. And some of you would give anything to be a mother and aren’t able to, for whatever reason — and that deserves to be acknowledged too. So wherever you find yourself today: if something about this day brings you joy, stop and thank God for it. If something about it brings sadness, stop and ask God to soothe it. I’m praying for all of you.

Now — Ecclesiastes chapter 2, verses 1 through 11. Yesterday the Teacher tried wisdom and found it vexing and miserable. Today, he goes the other direction entirely. He decides to try pleasure:

“I said to myself, ‘Come now, I will make a test of pleasure; enjoy yourself.’ But again, this also was vanity. I said of laughter, ‘It is mad,’ and of pleasure, ‘What use is it?’ I searched with my mind how to cheer my body with wine — my mind still guiding me with wisdom — and how to lay hold on folly, until I might see what was good for mortals to do under heaven during the few days of their life. I made great works; I built houses and planted vineyards for myself; I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees. I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees. I bought male and female slaves, and had slaves who were born in my house; I also had great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and of the provinces; I got singers, both men and women, and delights of the flesh, and many concubines. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem; also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them; I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

Yesterday he tried the life of the mind. Today he tries the life of the senses. If wisdom left him vexed, maybe pleasure will fill the gap. So he goes full hedonist — if it feels good, do it. Each man doing what is right in his own eyes, like the book of Judges. He builds, plants, gathers, acquires. Houses, vineyards, gardens, pools, servants, silver, gold, singers, concubines. Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure.

I always think of Coleridge when I read this section — In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.That’s the Teacher right here. Building his pleasure dome. Taking everything his eyes wanted. Denying himself nothing.

And then: all was vanity and a chasing after wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun.

I was listening to a book this week — The Barn by Mike Thompson — and he tells the story of someone from the Delta who was driven to succeed because of the sacrifices their parents made. They went out into the world and accomplished everything — career, houses, money, status, all of it. And then sat down at the end of it and thought: was this all it was for? That’s Solomon. I’ve denied myself no pleasure. I’m completely miserable.

And I think that’s the word for the moment we’re living in. We have access to more than any generation in human history. You can get almost anything you want, quickly, easily, with a few taps on your phone. There has never been more available to us. And I’m not sure we’ve ever been more unhappy, more adrift, more without meaning.

Yesterday we talked about how the fallen mind can’t think its way to truth. Today the same thing applies to desire. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because you want something doesn’t mean getting it will satisfy you. We live in an age of instant gratification, and we are proving Solomon’s point in real time — you can have everything you want and still come up completely empty.

Living for yourself, for your wants and your stuff and your pleasure, will give you moments of laughter. Moments of enjoyment. But it will not give you meaning. It cannot. There is nothing to be gained under the sun — not from that road.

So be careful. I have to be careful too. Self-indulgence is seductive precisely because it offers so much and delivers so little. A life worth living cannot be built on getting what you want. We’re going to keep watching the Teacher learn this the hard way — and hopefully we can learn from him without having to repeat all his experiments ourselves.

Have a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend. We’ll pick back up Monday with chapter 2, verse 12. See you then!

In this Thursday reflection on Ecclesiastes 1:12–18 — appropriately falling on the National Day of Prayer — the Teacher’s surprising conclusion that wisdom itself is vanity is unpacked honestly and personally. On the surface it seems to contradict Proverbs and the Psalms, which celebrate wisdom as a gift worth seeking. But Solomon’s point isn’t that wisdom is bad — it’s that wisdom alone, pursued as a source of meaning, leaves you empty and vexed. The reflection gets personal: those of us who lean analytical and distrust emotion can fall into the trap of thinking the mind is somehow exempt from the Fall. It isn’t. Both heart and mind are equally in need of Jesus. And in a world drowning in information — where something happens anywhere on earth and we know about it in seconds — there’s a real and contemporary application: more knowledge does not equal more peace. What is crooked cannot be made straight by analysis alone. Sometimes the best way out of the quagmire is simply to do what you know is true — love your neighbor, serve somebody, pray — rather than waiting for enough information to finally make sense of everything.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Good morning! Hope you’re having a great Thursday. Today is the National Day of Prayer, and I’d encourage you no matter where you find yourself to take some time to pray. If your church or community has a prayer service today, take advantage of it. If you’re in the Madison area, we’d love for you to join Saint Matthew’s and other local churches at City Hall at noon for our community prayer service. Our world needs the prayers, and — as my seminary professor Dr. Bryant always liked to say when someone told him they were praying for him — you need the practice. So pray today. Pray for our nation, our leaders, our community, our world.

Today we’re finishing out chapter 1 of Ecclesiastes, reading verses 12 through 18. Yesterday we set the stage — Ecclesiastes is the story of the Teacher trying to find meaning in everything and coming up empty. Over and over throughout this book we’re going to see a pattern: I tried this, and it was vanity. I tried that, and it was vanity. Today, the Teacher tries wisdom:

“I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.”

Now, if you know your Bible, this should raise a flag — because this seems to contradict a lot of what we see in Proverbs and in places like Psalm 119, where wisdom is presented as something to aspire to, a gift from God, something worth seeking with everything you have. And here Solomon — because most scholars believe this is Solomon, and it certainly fits what we know of his life — is saying: I did the wisdom thing. I pursued knowledge. I surpassed everyone. And it left me miserable.

C.S. Lewis has a line — I’m probably paraphrasing — something like education without faith only makes a wiser devil.And I’ll be honest with you: this is something I’ve wrestled with personally. I love books. There are no innocent quotes I can make here — if you asked me how many books are enough, my honest answer would be one more. I actually bought a book this week because I’ve been listening to the audiobook and it’s so good I need to be able to highlight it. Holly may or may not know about that. Anyway.

I tend to fall on the analytical side. I tend to trust intellect and be a little suspicious of emotion — because emotion can be manipulated, emotion can be fallible, emotion can be manufactured. So I’d rather just think things through clearly, right?

But here’s what I’ve had to confront: your mind is just as fallen as your heart. The intellect is no less in need of the Holy Spirit than the emotions. They’re both imperfect. They’re both equally in need of Jesus. And sometimes — if we’re not careful — those of us who distrust emotion end up trusting our minds too much, as though the mind is somehow exempt from the Fall. It’s not. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow. Solomon found this out the hard way.

And I think there’s a very contemporary application here. Our minds were not built to handle the volume of information being thrown at us right now — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from every direction. Back in, say, the ‘80s, you got the evening news and maybe a newspaper that was a couple days behind. Now something happens anywhere in the world and you know about it in two seconds. And we’re drowning in it. More knowledge, more information, more analysis, more opinion — and more vexation, more sorrow, more anxiety.

What is crooked cannot be made straight. What is lacking cannot be counted. There are things we cannot fix, things we cannot know, problems we cannot solve no matter how much information we have. And sometimes the best way out of the quagmire of the mind is to just do what we know is true. I can’t solve every problem in the world. But I can love my neighbor. I can work on forgiving my enemy. I can open the hymnal with my kids and sing. I can pray — which is exactly what today is for. I can seek to make a difference in the small corner of the world I actually inhabit.

As the great theologian Bob Dylan once said — go serve somebody. And I think if we do that, we’ll find our way forward more reliably than if we just keep consuming more information and hoping that eventually the right analysis will make everything make sense.

So today, on this National Day of Prayer — pray. And then go love somebody. We’ll pick up with chapter 2 tomorrow. Have a great day!

In this Wednesday reflection that opens a new series in Ecclesiastes, the shift from the New Testament epistles to Old Testament wisdom literature is grounded in a simple observation: we are always searching for meaning, and most of the things we search in come up empty. The Teacher — almost certainly Solomon — opens with one of Scripture’s most sobering refrains: vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Generations rise and fall, the wind circles, the sea never fills, and most of us will be forgotten within a few generations. Rather than finding that depressing, the reflection finds it liberating: there is nothing new under the sun, which means we are not alone in our struggles. The same search for meaning, the same temptations, the same sense of emptiness in earthly things — people have faced all of it before us. Solomon had everything the world could offer and still found himself asking whether any of it meant anything. The answer Ecclesiastes is building toward, and the answer the reflection points to now, is that meaning cannot come from accomplishments, stuff, status, or even the people we love most. Only Jesus can be the source of meaning that holds — and when he is, everything else finds its proper place.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Wednesday as we start something new. We finished Jude — and those little New Testament epistles we’ve been working through — so today we’re shifting to the Old Testament. Specifically, we’re heading into the wisdom literature, and we’re going to start with Ecclesiastes.

Just a quick orientation if you’re not as familiar with how the Bible is organized. After the Torah — the five books of Moses — you have the histories, then the wisdom literature, then the major and minor prophets. In the New Testament you have the Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, the general epistles we’ve just finished, and then Revelation. The wisdom literature in the Old Testament includes Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes. These books are meant to be read somewhat poetically — almost metaphorically — rather than as straight history or law.

Psalms is the hymnal of the Jewish people — the songs they sang on the way to the temple, the poetry that marked their daily lives. I’d encourage you to read the Psalms often; they’re a gift. Proverbs is practical wisdom about how to live. Song of Solomon is a poem of love. Job is a profound meditation on suffering. And Ecclesiastes is a meditation on meaning — on the search for purpose and identity in life.

And honestly, I think Ecclesiastes might be one of the most relevant books in the Bible for where we are right now. Because we are always searching for meaning, aren’t we? In our work, our hobbies, our kids, our status, our homes, our accomplishments. And most of the time — if we’re honest — those things don’t ultimately give us what we’re looking for. That’s the story of Ecclesiastes. The Teacher searches everywhere for meaning and keeps coming up empty. Let’s read chapter 1, verses 1 through 11:

“The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to its place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round 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 continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has already been, in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.”

Well. Upbeat stuff. Very cheery opening. The Teacher is not easing us in gently.

Vanity of vanities — all is vanity. Meaningless. Empty. And then that haunting observation: the people of long ago are not remembered, nor will those yet to come be remembered by those who follow them. Most of us will be forgotten. I tell people — think about it honestly. We’ll be grieved by our children, maybe our grandchildren, possibly our great-grandchildren if we’re very blessed. But five generations from now? We’re just a line on an ancestry register. The wind blows, the streams run to a sea that never fills, the sun rises and sets and does it all again. Nothing new under the sun.

And I actually find that phrase freeing rather than depressing. Because it means we are not alone in what we’re facing. The struggles we have — the search for meaning, the temptations, the feeling of being lost in the noise — none of it is new. We talked all through First, Second, and Third John about Gnosticism and disembodied thinking and the pull of culture away from Jesus. Different era, same problem. Nothing new under the sun. You’re not the first person to battle what you’re battling. You’re not the first person to struggle to find meaning. People have walked this road before you, and there is wisdom to be learned from those who’ve gone before.

Most scholars believe the Teacher is Solomon, though he doesn’t name himself directly. It just fits — if you know Solomon’s story, you know this is a man who had everything. Wisdom, wealth, power, pleasure, accomplishment, status. He had it all. And now he sits at the end of looking at all of it and asks: did any of it actually mean anything? Did any of it fill the hole?

And here’s where Ecclesiastes is going to take us over these next few days: meaning will not come from accomplishments, from stuff, from the praise of other people. It just won’t. I like my stuff — my phone, my computer, I enjoy my things. But they can’t be my source of meaning. I love my children with everything in me. I love Holly with every fiber of my being. But they cannot define my identity or give me my purpose. Only Jesus can do that. And when Jesus is the source of our meaning, everything else — the good things, the hard things, all of it — falls into its proper place.

So Solomon opens with vanity of vanities, all is vanity — and if we try to find our meaning in the stuff of this world, we’ll be joining that chorus. Let’s find our meaning in Jesus. Because that’s worth finding.

Tomorrow we’ll pick up with chapter 1, verse 12. See you then!

In this Tuesday reflection that closes out Jude, the letter’s final movement is from warning to mercy. Jude tells his readers to remember what the apostles predicted — scoffers will come, driven by their own desires, causing division — but then pivots immediately to the posture of the faithful: build yourselves up in faith, pray in the Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love, and look forward to the mercy of Christ that leads to eternal life. And then, critically, show that mercy to others — the wavering, the wandering, even those caught in sin. The reflection weaves in two personal life verses — Romans 8:28, which doesn’t say all things are good but that God brings good from everything, and Romans 2:4, which says it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance — to make the central point: we are not saved by our goodness, but by God’s mercy. And since mercy is God’s very nature, and we are being made into his image, mercy should increasingly be ours too. The world is full of people who need to know they are loved. That is our call.

Join us for our daily reflections with Andy. In 10 short minutes, he’ll dig a little deeper into Scripture and help you better understand God’s Word.

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Good morning! Great to be with you on this Tuesday as we wrap up Jude together. Today we finish the letter — verses 17 through 25. Then tomorrow we’re making a pretty significant shift. After all this time in the New Testament epistles, we’re heading into the wisdom literature and starting with Ecclesiastes. Should be quite the change of pace. Also, a scheduling note: I’ll be doing Rooted through the end of May, then taking June off for the transition to Starkville — last Sunday at Saint Matthew’s, a few weeks to breathe, and then getting on the ground up there. I’ll be back in July, and my plan is to keep Rooted going from Starkville. We’re not done yet — but I wanted you to know what’s coming.

Let’s read:

“But you, beloved, must remember the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; for they said to you, ‘In the last time there will be scoffers, indulging their own ungodly lusts.’ It is these worldly people, devoid of the Spirit, who are causing divisions. But you, beloved, build yourselves up on your most holy faith; pray in the Holy Spirit; keep yourselves in the love of God; look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on some who are wavering; save others by snatching them out of the fire; and have mercy on still others with fear, hating even the tunic defiled by their bodies.

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.”

Let me start at the end and work backward, because that closing benediction deserves a moment.

Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing — to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

Most of us have heard a version of that at the end of a church service. I was talking with Mary Beth, our youth pastor, about her benediction for the baccalaureate service Sunday, and it made me think about how every pastor tends to develop their own. Mine has been the same for essentially my entire ministry — the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit be with you each now and forevermore.That’s actually a biblical quotation — I couldn’t tell you the reference off the top of my head, but it’s in Scripture — and I heard it every Sunday from Brother Bill Poole, the preacher of my childhood. It just lodged in my heart, and now every Sunday as I walk down the aisle with the acolytes, that’s what comes out. It’s just in me.

Jude’s closing benediction is a beautiful one too — a blessing and a prayer woven together. A prayer that God would keep us from falling and help us stand before his glory without blemish. A praise that all glory and majesty and power and authority belong to him, before all time and forever. If you’ve ever heard that one in church, now you know where it comes from.

Now, back to verses 17 through 23. Jude’s final word of warning mirrors everything he’s said throughout the letter: remember what the apostles told you. There will be scoffers. There will be people devoid of the Spirit, driven by their own desires, causing division. Don’t be surprised when they show up. You were warned.

But then notice where Jude lands: build yourselves up on your most holy faith, pray in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, and look forward to the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And then — show mercy. Have mercy on those who are wavering. Snatch others from the fire. Show mercy with fear to still others, hating the sin while reaching for the person.

Mercy. That’s where it ends. And I think that’s exactly right.

Someone asked me at Bible study recently what my favorite verse in Scripture is. I always joke that my favorite verse is whatever I’m currently reading, and people always call me on it. But I really do have two life verses. One is Romans 8:28 — all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. I love that verse because it doesn’t say all things are good — there’s plenty in life that isn’t good, plenty of real brokenness. But it says God can bring good from everything. That’s a different and much more honest claim, and I find it deeply sustaining.

The other is Romans 2:4 — do you not know that it is the kindness of God that leads you to repentance? It’s God’s mercy that draws us. It’s God’s mercy that saves us. It’s God’s mercy that restores us and gives us life. We are not saved by our own goodness, our own strength, our own virtue. We are saved by his mercy. That is what leads to eternal life. That’s it.

And here’s the natural consequence: since God has shown us mercy, we are to show mercy to others. The goal of our faith is to be made more like Jesus — and if God’s very nature is mercy, and we are being made into his image, then mercy should increasingly be our nature too. There’s a world full of people right now who need to know they are loved. Who need to know there is a God who is for them and a church that cares about them. That is our call, our purpose, our mission.

So as you go about your day today, ask yourself: where can I show mercy? Who needs grace from me right now? Be the merciful one in whatever situation you find yourself in. Because that is what the world is hungry for, and that is what we have been given to give.

May God keep us from falling and help us stand. To him be all the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Tomorrow we start Ecclesiastes — quite a different direction, but a great one. Have a wonderful day!