Fear of God is the source of true happiness, as opposed to the fleeting and insubstantial nature of sensual pleasure.
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Our minister Robert Childs preached Sunday on the implications of Ecclesiastes 5:18-20, which reads:
“Then I realized that it is good and proper for a man to eat and drink, and to find satisfaction in his toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given him—for this is his lot. Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work—this is a gift of God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.”
Before continuing with the message of the sermon, let me invite everyone to visit us for Sunday morning services at 9:30 and for Bible study sessions on Wednesday evenings at 7:30. We are in Stamford, Connecticut, on Old Long Ridge Road, about four miles north of the Merritt Parkway, via Exit 34 (Long Ridge Road). Just follow the signs. You may wish in the meanwhile to visit our website at http://www.longridge.org/ , where you can download the full sermon.
You will also want to know that we are a Bible-based church, no longer affiliated with the UCC, which has drifted away from Christianity and into moral relativism and rationalization of too many non-Biblical doctrines.
Ecclesiastes is famous for what most readers take, on first reading, to be a gloomy view of life. It begins:
“"Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
These are the reflections, by general consensus, of an elderly King Solomon after many years of pursuing the sensual, earthly pleasures afforded by wealth and privilege. It is these, “under the sun,” to which he contrasts true wisdom “under the heavens.”
The message of Ecclesiastes is actually a very comforting, hopeful one, summarized in the sermon text quoted above. True happiness is available, as a gift of God, to all who fear Him and soften their hearts. This experiential nature of Judeo-Christianity leads each individual to want to deal fairly and civilly with his fellows and produces the “peace that passes all understanding.”
Six centuries later Plato and Aristotle were to make the same distinction between sensual pleasure and true happiness.
Too many people believe that, if only they had more money, they could become happy. If only they had more latitude for indulgence in sexual promiscuity, alcohol, and drugs, they could find real meaning in their lives.
These purely material surroundings of life are what socialism tells us are the only realities, the only factors that determine human nature and human social conduct in the class-based, mass structure of collectivized government. Personal consumption expenditures, fueled by welfare-state hand-outs, and libertine hedonism, are the only elements falling within the purview of liberalism, which denies and ridicules Judeo-Christian spirituality.
Disagreeing entirely, Plato and Aristotle noted that sensual pleasure is not under the control of the individual, who must rely on external factors to induce his sensations. Sensual pleasure is therefore distinctly inferior to the self-contained happiness of the human soul striving for moral understanding and moral goodness. This happiness of the soul is the most distinctly human quality, the one thing that sets humans apart from all other living creatures.
It is this happiness, a gift from our Creator, to which Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated phrase referred in the Declaration of Independence: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
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