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"He
Makes All Things Beautiful in His Time" November
2, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower The text I selected for preaching on that word "ready,"
on the subject of readiness, is from Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verses 10 and 11.
Instead of the version that you have in your pew Bibles, I'm going to be
reading from the Revised Standard (not the New Revised Standard, but the Revised
Standard Version). This is the more
familiar language that we have these two verses in. I have seen the business that God has given to
the sons of men to be busy with. He
has made everything beautiful in its time.
Also he has put eternity into man's mind, yet so that he cannot find out
what God has done from the beginning to the end. We want to think about the way that God has put eternity into our
hearts. We want to think about the
way that God makes all things beautiful in His time. And introducing that subject to us, I want to call your
attention to an article on the front page of this morning's Star Tribune.
If you subscribe to the Star Tribune, I invite you to be sure to
see this if you didn't see it already this morning.
One of the disciplines that I have for myself is to always look at
the newspaper on Sunday morning before I come to church, just to find out what
it is that we all have to be concerned about.
And generally what I'm looking for when I look at the paper on Sunday
morning, and when I fan through the opinion section, is current event-type
things. Well, fascinatingly, we
have a front-page article this morning on the book The Purpose Driven Life.
And the heading says "A pastor's simple question creates a movement:
Purpose of life? Millions
buy book." This is the book The
Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. We
have had two different classes on this book.
One, I think, ending this morning, actually, today.
And we may want to have additional classes where people buy the book The
Purpose Driven Life and then read through it. And I want to call our attention to the fact that it's not every
day that a book that a minister has written makes the newspaper!
And it's definitely not every day that one will make the front page of
the front section. But
nevertheless, this is a look at the interest that people have right now in this
book, representing an interest that people have in the question, "Does my
life have a purpose?" And this
is a fairly lengthy article looking at this book and asking people about it.
Here is what one Minnesota pastor commented.
He said (this is Rev. Fred Tuma of Oak Haven Church in Ham Lake),
"So many people think they are going to heaven, but they live their lives
for themselves. We're too used to
dividing life between sacred and secular," he said, "and this [the
book] shows how your whole life can be part of the worship of God." Well, that's pretty darn close to what I wanted to preach on this
morning, and so I'm very happy to commend to you this book.
Some of us have already read it. And
if you haven't yet, get your newspaper, read the article, and see if you don't
want to look at this. It's just
asking the question, "Do we have a purpose for being here?
Does life have a purpose?" And here's how Rick Warren begins. He's not too subtle! This
is the first sentence of chapter one: "It's
not about you." He says,
"It's not about you. The
purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, or peace
of mind, or even your happiness." And
then the readings go on and expand on that.
Now, this is an excellent, excellent book on the purpose for life,
although we do want to say it was written by a Baptist pastor and there are lots
of things that Baptists believe that Presbyterians would say, "Well, yes,
that's true, but you know what? There
are some deeper truths." And I
just want to call your attention to the fact that everything in here, I think,
is something that a Christian would affirm and could affirm, but Presbyterians
and some others will want to say, "But you know, there are some deeper
realities." As, for instance,
I'm looking over here at page 37 and Rick Warren says, "Your relationship
to God on earth will determine your relation to Him in eternity."
And you know what? I think that what I would want to say is, "No.
Actually, your relation to God in eternity is going to determine your
relation to God on earth." And
we want to understand that we love God because He first loved us.
Do you understand? It is not
the case that your love for God (or lack thereof) determines whether God is
going to love you or not. So it's
not that this is the absolute deepest way to look at these questions, but it's
obviously a very, very popular way
and an easily accessible way. Now,
I'm sort of belaboring that because what we're noting is people want to know,
"Is there a purpose to my life?" and people want to know if there is a
purpose to their life, what it is. And
for a book to come out and to say, "It's not about you.
Yes, there's a purpose to your life, but it's not about you fulfilling
your own wishes and desires" and it becomes phenomenally popular, a
best-seller, and being read all over the country and, I guess, even in foreign
lands as well. Well, it's awfully nice when something on the front page of the Star
Tribune is the perfect introduction to the text that you wanted to preach
on. And that's definitely the case
here because in this passage we learn that God has put eternity into our hearts,
into our minds. And what is meant
by that is a hunger after more than this life can satisfy--a hunger after things
eternal, a hunger after things that are permanent, eternally permanent, after
things that aren't just going to sort of rise up and have a day and sort of fade
away. And one of the things about
this book that the reporter very wisely comments on in the newspaper article is,
"Now, is this just a fad?" And
that's a good thing to ask. But,
actually, the desire to have a purpose for life (whether this book is a fad or
not)--that desire is not faddish because God made you and me, made all of us, so
that we can't help but accept that we are hungry for more than this life here
can satisfy. We are made by God so
that we are in time, in history, in the flow of events.
We are here this morning on a particular Sunday morning.
And yet, God made us so that our hearts can't help but be aware of an
eternal realm which is not wrapped up in a particular time (Sunday morning), a
particular place (Minnetonka, Minnesota), but is more than that.
And so when the Bible tells us that God has placed eternity in our
hearts, in our minds, it's telling us about something that
is . . . We would not want
to say, "Well, that's true for people who read the Bible.
I mean, that may have been true for the Jews originally and now the
Christians, but, you know, that's not true for other people."
No. We believe that we're
being told a truth about every single person.
That every single person who has ever lived needs to respond to this seen
world, but also needs to respond to the unseen world at the same time.
And what we have in Scripture is advice on how to keep both of those
together. Now, it's true: Christians
can sort of go one way or the other. We
as Christians can try to just sort of live our lives in the here and now and
just kind of be very busy about Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday,
and the things that sort of come along in the flow of time--just very much
attentive to cause and effect. And
I'd say if any group is in danger of getting locked into procedures like that,
it would be Presbyterians. I mean,
we've got our committee structures, and we've got our rule books, and so we are
very much in danger of just losing sight of the unseen because we know how our
Presbyterian bureaucracy is supposed to work.
The problem is--now, don't quote me on this one--but the problem is
Presbyterian bureaucracy cannot satisfy the human heart.
(Don't tell anyone I said that!) But
that's the problem. The problem is
serving on a Presbyterian committee may not give you the sense of meaning and
purpose for living that your heart can't help but be hungry for.
And if it does, it's because that committee allowed you to be attentive
to the unseen right along with the seen. But then, it is equally a danger for some Christians that they want
to sort of neglect the here and now and just let everything be having to do with
the eternal, and the unseen. There's
a saying that goes for people like that: "so
heavenly-minded that you're no earthly good."
Do you understand? What
Scripture invites us to do is see ourselves as created by God, temporal,
time-bound, as always having to be in a particular place and a particular time,
but also as having eternity in our hearts so that we relate to the seen world,
but we also have to relate ourselves somehow or other to the unseen. Now, in terms of world views, Western civilization has sort of gone
back and forth on this one. Through
the High Middle Ages, eternity was kind of everything and the here and now was
discounted, was not seen as very important, so that when Francis Bacon came
along and began to introduce the scientific method of gaining knowledge (and now
were talking about 450 years ago), one of his criticisms of the world view that
had been reigning was that people sat around and (you remember this one) people
sat around debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
And so to be so lost with eternal realities that you can't understand how
things happen in the here and now is a mistake.
And Western civilization began a shift.
It was OK for a while. For a
few hundred years we had the "how things happen" that science
discovers and that was a matter of concern.
But we hadn't lost sight of the question "why things happen." Because telling you how things happen is not the same
thing as telling you why things happen.
And there was a period where where fantastic progress was being made in
Western civilization and it was during that period where the "how"
question and the "why" question were equally important. Well, unfortunately, when we get to the twentieth century, the
century that we just left behind, the "how" question began to just
sort of crowd everything else out so that by the time we sort of come up to a
person like B. F. Skinner (remember?) who wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
His argument (and he was not alone in this)--twentieth century
psychologists, twentieth-century philosophers, thinkers in all sorts of fields
began to say, "The only thing that matters about you is the 'how' question.
And there is no answer to the 'why' question, and there is no reason even
to ask the 'why' question. Everything
about you can be explained in the here and now." So B. F. Skinner said, "There is no freedom to you as a
human person. There is no dignity
to you as a human person. All you
are is somebody who reacts to stimuli. A
stimulus comes along and you react to it." And if you tell B. F. Skinner what the stimulus is, he will
tell you exactly how the person will react.
There is no freedom of choice. All
we have is--you know, we have pigeons we can train in little cages and we have
human beings that we can train. There's
no more freedom in you than there is in a trained pigeon. Now, the amazing thing is that after years and years of that
philosophy, suddenly, you know, people are saying, "You know what?
I'm sorry, but, I mean, I think that my life is more than just
pigeon-responding. I think there's
got to be more. I feel like there
has to be more. I look inside
myself and I feel like I think that there is a dignity to me (or there might be
if I could just sort of figure out my purpose)."
Well, it's fascinating trying to let "how" answer all of
everybody's questions. How things happen that we can test scientifically and then
report the results. You know, that
has sort of fallen away and we've got good responses now to the new day that we
live in where people are asking about the eternal.
We've got New Age spirituality now where people are responding in other
ways. And so there are some bad
responses to the present moment, but what we're seeing is people, yes, indeed,
have had eternity in their hearts and are asking about purpose. Now, our text tells us something else. It says: He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also put eternity into man's minds, yet so that he cannot find out
what God has done from the beginning to the end. We're hungry for eternity, and yet we can't see everything that we
would need to see if we were strictly and exclusively eternal beings.
Therefore we have to turn around and we have to trust that things are
going to get taken care of by somebody who can see the future, can see the sweep
of everything from the beginning to the end.
I can't look back, and you can't, and see how the world was created and
everything that's happened and look forward and see where the world is headed.
But because I have eternity in my heart, I can ponder it and I can get a
little nervous about it. And if you
are a worrier, that does say something really good about you!
It says that, "No, it is not the case that all you ever do is
respond to stimuli because you can worry about stimuli that hasn't even happened
yet, can't you? You can worry about
stimuli that will never happen! So
we are more than simply responders to stimuli.
But if we don't have a trust that there is a Higher Power that
oversees this entire thing, worry is going to have the last word in our lives.
But the Bible here telling us that we have eternity in our hearts also
says, "And you know what? God
has made everything beautiful in its time.
God has a timetable with things. God
brings the right things into our lives at the right time.
God has the whole world in His hands.
God is in control." And
we love because He first loved us. We
don't have to earn a place at His side. We
don't have to do right to get Him to love us.
No. He loves us already and
wants to bring blessings into us at the right time.
Now, it is the case that blessings can be sort of falling all
around you and all around me and we might be missing them.
It is the case that blessings come our way and we don't get it.
We don't see it. We're not
encouraged enough by God's goodness because we're not even looking for it. I used to have a coffeepot (don't have this one any more . .
.). A coffeepot with a timer on it,
do you know what I mean? You get
the water in there, you get the grounds in there, filter paper and the grounds,
and then you set the alarm on the coffeemaker, and then the coffeemaker is going
to make coffee for you. It's going
to start before you wake up so you wake up and--ah . . . gosh . . . you don't
have to find the coffee beans too early in the morning, right?
It's already there. Well, one night I forgot to put the carafe under the little drip
place. Guess where the coffee went.
It went all over the kitchen floor!
(And, no, I didn't drink it!) The
coffee went all over the kitchen floor. Now,
you know what. You go, "You
make that mistake one time and you never make it again."
No. Finally I had to give
away that coffeemaker because I kept forgetting, late at night, to put the
coffee urn under the little drip place and the coffee kept going down--down the
counter, down the cabinets, and all over the kitchen floor.
You know, there are things that are going to come to your life and, if
you're ready to receive them, they're going to fully affect you.
If you're not ready to receive them, then something of that is not going
to make the impact on you that God really intends.
And I want to encourage you to explore this idea that there is a
purpose to your life. I want to
encourage you to explore the idea that, no, life is more than just the
here-and-now sequences of cause and effect.
And as you do, I want to encourage you to think, "And you know what?
The Hand that is in charge of all this is a benevolent Hand.
The Father that is in charge of all this is a loving Father."
And that loving Father is always blessing us.
The question is: Are we going to be there and are we going to receive it?
We should receive it because He does do all things and make all things
beautiful in its own time. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we love you. We thank you and praise you, Lord, for being a wonderful God.
Lord, we ask that as blessings come our way, Lord, that you would give us
eyes to see and ears to hear. And
it's in the strong name of Jesus that we pray.
Amen. Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota [Transcribed from an audiotape of the
worship service on November 2, 2003.] |
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