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“God is in Heaven, but You are on Earth” – Ecclesiastes 5:1–7

 
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İçerik Harvest Community Church | Omaha, NE tarafından sağlanmıştır. Bölümler, grafikler ve podcast açıklamaları dahil tüm podcast içeriği doğrudan Harvest Community Church | Omaha, NE veya podcast platform ortağı tarafından yüklenir ve sağlanır. Birinin telif hakkıyla korunan çalışmanızı izniniz olmadan kullandığını düşünüyorsanız burada https://tr.player.fm/legal özetlenen süreci takip edebilirsiniz.

“God is in Heaven, but You are on Earth” – Ecclesiastes 5:1–7

Listen to the Sermon:

Hear now the word of the Lord from Ecclesiastes 5:1-7.

1 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. 2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? 7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.
Ecclesiastes 5:1-7, ESV

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever.

When I was in college I worked for two years as a page in the Nebraska legislature, which essentially meant that I was an errand boy. I would go to make photocopies, I would pass messages to the offices of the senators, I would get them food and drink as they wanted it and requested it. I’m even told back in the day before my time, this would involve pages going and placing bets on horse races for the senators. I don’t know if that was true or just a rumor, I certainly was never asked to do anything like that. Ye it was a lot of menial tasks; go do this, go do that.

Now what was interesting to me, among many other things of working there, was that in many contexts of my life both before and and afterwards it was a very different approach to those activities than I had to approach that particular job. Most of the time in life there’s sort of an unspoken understanding that the way to distinguish yourself, the way to do well in any activity, is by really working hard to excel as much as you can in what you do in your speech or in your action.

It was a very different kind of thing in the legislature. In the legislature no one cared in the least what I had to say about any of the bills that were going to be introduced. There were elected representatives there who were supposed to deal with that for me. To spout off my opinion would have been a fireable offense. So my words mattered not in the least in that context. Also, the work wasn’t particularly difficult. There are only so many ways that you can bring someone a cup of coffee. In that particular environment we were simply unworthy servants doing our duty.

Let me say that was one of the most interesting things I did in my life, because it was a joy to be a part of something bigger than I was. Even though I had the smallest role to play in fetching photocopies and glasses of water, I had a part to play in what was going on as the Nebraska state legislature was convening for the business in front of them.

Well in religion, in faith, even each week as we gather for worship, it’s very easy to fall into some of those unspoken understandings that I talked about that affect most of the contexts of our lives. It’s easy to think that here, when we gather together, the thing to do is to try to say the right words or to do the right things.

The preacher here is reminding us and trying to draw our attention back to what the rest of the scriptures say. Namely that when we come before the Lord, when we come into worship, you are not what is important, God is. When our attention is shifted away from me, myself, and I to the Lord, that’s when true worship can happen.

Our big idea today as we look at this particular text is do not take the name of the Lord in vain.

Now you probably recognize this is the third commandment, “you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.” A couple of things I want to say about that. This is the third commandment and we’re going to see that from this particular text. I do want to note that that word for vain, “don’t take the name of the Lord in vain”, is not quite the same word that the preacher is so often using in Ecclesiastes when he talks about, “vanity of vanities, all this vanity.” They’re different words, but they do have overlapping meanings which is why they’re translated into the same word in English.

So there’s two points to our sermon today.

1. Hear God
2. Fear God

Hear God

So let’s start with hear God. This passage is set up into these two sections, the section about emphasizing hearing God is in verses one through three. So look at what the preacher says.

1 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Ecclesiastes 5:1, ESV

Now the house of God refers to the temple. This phrase is used throughout the Old Testament to talk about the temple the house of God is the temple. Remember Solomon is the author of this book in Ecclesiastes, now I do want to say that’s somewhat debated, but that’s my view that Solomon wrote this. We should note that Solomon is never explicitly named in Ecclesiastes, but someone either wants us to think about Solomon or it is actually Solomon. So in either case thinking about the temple, in Solomon’s relationship to the temple, Solomon was the one who built the temple. He was the one who offered the prayer on the day when the temple was consecrated. He has a special front seat insight into the holiness of the temple.

How should we approach God when we go to worship him in the house of God? He says specifically that we should guard our steps. Now this word for guard is very important in the Old Testament, especially as we talk about approaching the holy places of God. This was one of the words that refers to a word that God used to command Adam in his task in the Garden of Eden.

On the one hand he was supposed to work or to cultivate the Garden of Eden. He was supposed to expand the borders of the Garden of Eden so that as he and Eve bore more children, who were going to bear the image of God like they did. As the borders of Eden would expand over the whole earth, it would be filled up with more image bearers, and then the glory of the Lord would fill the whole earth.

He was also supposed to guard it, to keep it, to protect the Garden of Eden, to protect the holiness of the Garden of Eden. God commanded him to do this, but then Adam failed, that was in Genesis 2:15 where that charge comes to guard the Garden of Eden. When Adam fails, when he sins, when he permits the serpent to enter into the Garden of Eden, when he doesn’t cast the serpent out, when he lets the serpent engage in this conversation to lead him and his wife astray into sin, well God has to expel Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. We read that two angels, true cherubim, God stationed them at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life. That’s that same word, they were to guard the way to the Tree of Life, they were to protect its holiness and its sanctity.

Later on when the tabernacle, the movable tent structure that was used for the temple in the days of Moses, we read that the Levites were encamped around the tabernacle. Their job, again, was to guard the tabernacle. If anyone who was not authorized to enter into that tabernacle tried to make a break to enter into the tabernacle, their instructions were clear, they were to put that outsider to death. In that case it’s a very serious thing to guard the holiness of the Lord. The preachers reminding us of this, don’t treat this as a light thing, as a vain insubstantial thing to come into the house of the Lord.

So, what then does this mean for us? How do we guard our steps? What are we supposed to do? Well he explains this in the next half of verse one, and it’s interesting the direction he takes. He says, “To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.”

What does it mean to guard your steps is to listen to God? Now this word for listen, Derek Kidnapper points out in his commentary, this means first of all you have got to pay attention to this. Sometimes this word is translated as hear. My children I know are hearing me sometimes but they’re not listening to me and you have to get their attention and make sure the sound isn’t just going over their heads, but they’re paying attention to what’s said. I’m the same way in my relationship with God, I hear him and don’t always listen. The preacher’s saying don’t do that, pay attention to God.

Also this idea of listening has to do with obeying. It’s not just to say, got it I heard you, message received and then to turn a different way and to disobey God. This idea of listening carries the idea of obeying what God has called us to.

Now at Harvest we talk a lot about the fact that when we are entering into worship, if you want to boil down what we’re doing here we’re having a dialogue with God. We’re having a conversation with God. He is the one who leads this conversation, he speaks to us from his word and our job as the gathered congregation is to respond back to him, speak back to him. God speaks to us and we speak back to him again and again and again. All of this is guided by God’s own word to us.

So, what it means to offer the sacrifice of fools? “To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools.” There’s a couple of thoughts on this. The first would be to offer sacrifices without faith. So if you’re familiar with the story of Cain in Genesis chapter four, think about how he offered sacrifices before the Lord but God did not accept them, because he didn’t offer those sacrifices by faith. God says if you do well, will you not be accepted? That’s one option.

Another option, and this is probably where I would lean, is to think that this sacrifice of fools refers to idol speaking people who are just running their mouths in worship. It stems from an idea of trying to please God by multiplying our words. Jesus talked about that, don’t be like the Gentiles and build up and layer upon yourself vain words. The Lord knows what you have to say before you even speak it, you don’t need to yammer on with this idol speaking. That would be the sacrifice of fools.

Now one of the reasons I think that’s probably the direction that he’s going is what he says in the very next verse in verse 2. He says,

2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. Ecclesiastes 5:2, ESV

This is sort of the follow-up. What is the sacrifice of fools? It’s to be hasty with your words before God. So when we come into this worship, this dialogue of worship, our side of the conversation isn’t open-ended, it is an open mic day at church for all of us to just vent whatever is on our mind. We’re in a very strictly regulated conversation, where God is guiding it from beginning to end. God gets the first word, God gets the last word. When God speaks we respond appropriately and therefore God is dominating this conversation.

It’s in that sense that we should be guarding our words. Why? Because God is in heaven and we are on earth, therefore let your words be few. The point is not that God is so distant that he doesn’t even hear you, why are you wasting your breath with all of those words. That’s not the point, the point is rather God is exalted in heaven and you are a fool if you come in and just vent whatever is on your mind. You must not approach God casually.

Again, why do people try to do this? Why do we try to multiply our words? It’s because some part of us thinks, according to the unspoken understanding in so many other contexts of our life, that we distinguish ourselves by speaking well or doing things well. So we want to sound impressive and wise and spiritual and so we multiply these words thinking it’s on that basis that God will be pleased. The preacher reminds us don’t do that. God is in heaven and you are on earth, therefore let your words be few.

Well then in this section, and we’ll see the same kind of pattern in the next section, the preacher closes with a parable, something for us to consider. He says,

3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
Ecclesiastes 5:3, ESV

What kind of dream is he talking about here? We just did a sermon series, if you were here for it, through the story of Joseph’s life and in Joseph’s life it was punctuated by several really important revelation giving dreams. In Genesis 37 Joseph has dreams where God is revealing Joseph’s fate, his future. Later on Joseph interprets the dreams of the cupbearer and the baker. Then later Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharaoh himself. These are all giving revelation about what is going to happen in the future.

Well that’s probably not the kind of dream that the preacher is telling us about. Here he’s talking about dreams in the sense of the unsubstantial fleeting dreams that we all have at night. Do you ever wake up with your heart pounding because you did something or forgot to do something? You wake up and think oh my goodness what’s going to happen and you realize even though your heart is troubled by all the business that’s been raised in that dream, it’s just a dream. It’s no big deal, it’s insubstantial, it’s fleeting, it doesn’t make a difference in real life, it was just a dream.

Well the preacher is saying in the same way that a dream multiplies your business, there’s much heat behind it, so also a fool multiplies or comes with many words. There’s a lot of heat to them, a lot of business to do with them, but at the end of the day it’s all vanity. Those words are insubstantial. We must come and worship to hear God.

So to summarize this first section, we come not to speak but to listen. Certainly we speak in response to God, but we’re not coming here on open mic morning at the church.

So why is listening so important? Well again we talked about this a couple of times in Ecclesiastes, the preacher doesn’t give us the solution to questions he raises that’s sort of tied up in a nice neat little bow for us. The preacher is more often clearing away error so that we can see with greater clarity what the rest of the Bible is telling us as a solution.

So why is listening so important? Well let me tell you two reasons why listening is so important that the rest of the Bible tells us about. The first reason is this, unless we come with a listening attentive ear to God we won’t give God what he wants in worship.

Tim Keller, a pastor in New York, he’s retired now, but he’s written a very good book on marriage. I’ve used it sometimes in my premarital counseling classes that I’ve done with people. Tim Keller gives a story of another theologian R.C. Sproul. He tells a story that R.C. Sproul relates where R.C. talks about his own marriage with his wife Vesta. So R.C. says that early on in their marriage he and Vesta really talked past each other, didn’t listen to each other, didn’t understand what each other wanted as gifts on their birthdays.

So R.C. wanted something that he wouldn’t buy for himself he was really hoping on the first birthday when they were married for golf clubs. That’d be a fun thing that he wouldn’t be able to justify in his own mind spending on himself. His practically oriented wife Vesta instead got him six beautiful white shirts. He had to hide his disappointment.

Well then when it was Vesta’s turn R.C. wanted to go all out and to show this is what you do on a birthday, you give someone something lavish. So he gave her this beautiful fur coat, when what she wanted was a new washer and dryer, something practical that she could use every day.

It’s not honoring to God when we don’t listen to him to give him what he wants in worship, when we try to order off the registry. What God has told us he wants in worship and to give him something that we really think he would like, that does not honor God, that dishonors him. Unless we listen we won’t give to God what he wants in worship.

The second reason is that unless we listen we will miss the free grace of the gospel that God promises us in his word. You may be familiar with the nursery rhyme that goes like this,
“I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks,
Each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits:
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were there going to St. Ives?”

It’s a riddle and if you listen very carefully to the riddle you know that the answer is very simple. The answer is one. As I was going to St. Ives. I met these people coming from St. Ives, this very strange group of people and animals and sacks, but only one was going to St. Ives. The answer is very simple if you’re listening, but if you’re not listening the answer becomes very difficult. You try to do all of the math and calculate seven times seven times seven, plus I guess this guy and the person who was going to St. Ives and all of that and you come up with I think 2,802. No I didn’t add that up, I looked it up on the internet, it’s too hard of a question for someone like me to answer.

If we don’t listen to God we totally miss the free grace of the gospel that he offers through Jesus Christ. This is simple and it’s good news that Christ has done everything and you don’t need to do anything. Christ has perfectly obeyed for you and he has perfectly suffered and died for everything that you have done wrong. Christ is your whole righteousness and your sole righteousness, the entirety of your righteousness, and your alone righteousness before Christ. You receive him as your righteousness, not by works but by faith.

I think about man-made religion when we just intuit and try to think about what we think God would want from us. The direction our minds go always makes the problem harder, always tries to calculate seven times seven times seven what do I need to do to please God? If we listen to what God says, he announces better news than we could ever imagine. That God has done everything required for salvation through sending his son into the world to die for us.

We must take care of how we approach God in worship. We must take care that we come to hear him, to pay attention to him, and to obey him, and to respond to him by faith. Especially because what he has to tell us in the gospel is better news than we could think or imagine. God is in heaven and he summons us into his presence. As our king we dare not yammer in his presence like fools. We must listen to him with reverence.

Fear God

It’s not only that we operate off of these unspoken cultural assumptions that we need to speak. Very often we are guided by a desire to do something big and extravagant to prove ourselves. That’s what the preacher talks about in the second section. Remember the second section is characterized by the command that we must fear God. So to get into this let’s read again verses four through six.

4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? Ecclesiastes 5:4-6, ESV

Now we have to ask this question, what’s a vow? He’s talking here about when in the Old Testament law there were some tithes that were commanded, every Old Testament Israelite worshiper was commanded to give several tithes each year. Beyond what was required Old Testament worshipers could make vows to go above and beyond what God had commanded them, they could offer these vows to the Lord. That’s especially noted for us in Deuteronomy 23:21-23

21 “If you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. 22 But if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin. 23 You shall be careful to do what has passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth.
Deuteronomy 23:21-23, ESV

Well again in Deuteronomy, Moses is telling us essentially the same thing as the preacher is saying here. If you say something you better be willing to pay it up and if you’re not why would you say it in the first place? That’s a good question? Why would we be tempted to let our mouths run ahead of us, to promise to do something big and extravagant? Well it’s based on that idea that if I can do something and prove myself that will impress you and that will impress God. That is a fundamentally foolish view of what God requires of us. God doesn’t want us to prove ourselves by what we say or about what we do in his sight. He calls us into his presence to respond to his word. However if we do let our mouth speak, we’d better be willing to pay up what God has called us to do.

Well again, like in the first section this section is concluded with a parable, something to think about. Again the preacher is talking about dreams. So verse seven here’s the parable,

7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.
Ecclesiastes 5:7, ESV

Think about how many dreams you have over the course of the night. Maybe you remember them, maybe you don’t remember them, but your mind is sort of always going through these dreams and running through all of these scenarios that are multiplying. Yet they’re all just like vapers. They’re vanity, they pass away. So is the one who lets his words increase and lets his mouth outrun what he’s actually capable of backing up and fulfilling. We can’t promise God by what we promise to do, that’s foolish. What we’re really getting at here from the preacher’s words is that it is doubly foolish to promise something extravagant that we can’t actually pay for.

The preacher concludes this with the final exhortation, and this is the summary of this whole passage of verses one through seven, he says, “but God is the one you must fear”. The Old Testament talks extensively about the fear of the Lord. When it talks about the fear of the Lord, that isn’t talking about a terror or a phobia we should have about God. As Benjamin Shaw points out, the fear of the Lord in the Old Testament refers to faith. We’re talking about faith. It’s not the multiplication of our words and promises before the Lord, but it’s responsive trust and obedience to God’s word and his promises to us.

The foundation of what it means to fear the Lord is to recognize that your standing before God has nothing to do with what you can say and nothing to do with what you can do to impress God. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, your standing with God is entirely dependent upon what Christ has done for you in your place. If it isn’t dependent upon you, well that moves you out of a dread or a terror where you are plagued by the sense of needing to justify yourself before God. Then it lets you stand before God in freedom.

You think about other contexts, you think about the context of a date. No one wants to go on a date with someone who is endlessly talking and bragging about himself or herself. Why? Well because what that means is the other person is so insecure or that they need to justify being on that date with you. No company wants to hire people who brag endlessly about their abilities. Why? Because again that says this person is trying to justify something or trying to hide something. I’ve been in job interviews where I didn’t speak from the beginning to the end of it, because the one I was interviewing talked the entire time and it didn’t make a good impression.

When we stand before the Lord we don’t have to try to justify ourselves. It’s interesting, as unworthy of a servant as I was in that Nebraska legislature, I had a unique privilege. I could walk wherever I wanted in the entire capital. Really I could certainly walk onto the floor of the legislature where things were in session. Is that because I was important? Absolutely not, I was an insignificant unworthy servant on the floor there. I was just there to get them their coffee and their photocopies. When I was brought in, I was accepted. My standing was dependent on the fact that I was brought in there as an official capacity and so because of that I didn’t have to justify my presence there, I could just go about my business.

Don’t be so vain that you probably think that worship is about you. Far better worship is not about you, it is about God. That is why we come into his presence, we must listen to him because this God not only calls you but he loves you and sent his son Jesus Christ to die for you. This is the wonderful news in the gospel.

Application

So how do we apply this?

1. Well the first application that we should get, following what the preacher is telling us, is that we must come to hear God’s words. In every other human man-made religion the main thing is what we say or what we do. Everything depends on our words or our performance. Christianity is fundamentally different because Christianity isn’t a human-made religion, it comes to us from God. It’s not about what we say, it’s not about what we do, but it’s about what God does and what he says about what he does. It’s about the facts of what God has done in history, that he created the world, the heavens and the earth, and everything in it.

Then not only is God our creator, but he’s the one who providentially upholds everything that happens, including that special area of his providential upholding of the world in the area of redemption. This is where God chose to send his only son into this world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, who was born in history, lived in history, died in history ,and was raised bodily from the dead in history, and who now is ascended to the right hand of the Father where he is reigning even today until he brings history to its completion and consummation at the end of time.

We need that story, those facts. We need to hear it from the Word, but we also need it from the Word because it’s there that God interprets those facts. It’s really not enough just to know that some man named Jesus lived and died, we have to know why that’s significant. We have to know that not only that he died, but that he died for our sins according to the scriptures, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15.

So what this means is that when we come to worship, we come not to perform before God. We come to listen to God. Yes this is a dialogue and we have our own speaking part, but God is the one who is guiding this conversation. He gets the first and last word. When we speak, we speak in response to what God has said.

So at the beginning of his service, what we heard from Psalm 95 was God declaring that he is our glorious creator, and we responded with songs of praise. When God tells us that we have sinned, especially in breaking the fifth commandment that we considered today, we respond in confession to God, confessing the ways in which we’ve fallen short. Then when God assures us that he forgives us by the promises of his word, because of Christ’s sacrifice, we respond by faith and thanksgiving. Then when God urges us, like a father, to bring our needs before him, we respond by prayer. As we consider God’s word in the sermon, as God teaches us his precepts, his statutes, his gospel from his word, we respond with repentance and faith and obedience.

God is in heaven but the Father and the Son have poured out their Holy Spirit from heaven to meet with us here in this place on the Lord’s day on earth. Therefore we must let our words be few. We must not come yammering on. We must come to hear the word of the Lord, to pay careful attention to God’s word, to believe his gospel promises, and to respond to God’s law with repentance into God’s gospel with faith. Then to obey God’s words from the gratitude of unworthy servants who’ve been reconciled to a holy God. This is what it means to worship in spirit and in truth. This is the worship that’s pleasing to the Lord.

2. The second application of this is to keep your vows. Most vows that we see in the Bible come in the Old Testament. The Israelites could vow to offer special sacrifices or someone like Hannah vowed to devote Samuel, her son, to the Lord all his life, in 1 Samuel 1:11.

We still make vows today, most prominently husbands and wives make vows in their marriages or officers in the church take vows to discharge their duties. Two weeks ago we had the ordination of a ruling elder and he took vows to discharge his duties faithfully.

Last week we saw another kind of vow, the vows of a covenant child taking her vows to become a communing member, to enter into the fullness of fellowship in the church. It’s those vows that I want to focus on. If you’re a communing member if you’ve taken these same vows. I want to remind you what the preacher says about vows, these are vows we have taken before the Lord. When you vow about God, do not delay in paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you owe.

In the consumeristic world we don’t always think about the significance of our vows, of our word. We sometimes look at these as formalities and therefore they can be dismissed at our pleasure and put aside at our convenience, or when we think that something better comes up. So I want to reflect with you the vows that we’ve taken as members of the church.

There are two vows about what we say or we confess before God and there are three vows about what we promise to do. These are not us lavishing our words before the Lord trying to gain his pleasure, these are what God commands us to do, what listening to the word of God would drive us toward.

The first vow is, do you acknowledge yourselves to be sinners in the sight of God, justly deserving his displeasure and without hope saving his sovereign mercy? Do you say that about yourself? Number two, do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the son of God and savior of sinners and do you receive and rest upon him alone for salvation as he has offered in the gospel? That must be something that you believe in your heart and that you confess with your mouth, as Paul writes in Romans 10. This is what God wants you to say, to confess that you’re a sinner and to confess that Jesus Christ is your only hope in this life and the next.

Then there are three vows about what we promise to do. The third vow is, do you now resolve in promise and humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit that you will endeavor to live to behave as becomes the followers of Christ? Number four, do you promise to support the church in its worship and work to the best of your ability? Number five do you submit yourselves to the government and discipline of the church and promise to study its purity and peace?

This is what God calls us to do. The Bible says if these are vows that we have made, keep your vows. Be serious about this, this is not something to lay aside at your pleasure when it’s convenient.

3. The third application is fear God. Hear God’s words, keep your vows and then fear God. Remember our big idea, I’ll circle back around to this, do not take the name of the Lord in vain. That does not only refer to curse words that you might say using God’s name, but the third commandment says that you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. A name in that context refers to more than just what we call God, it refers to everything surrounding God, everything that belongs to God and to his character and to his reputation.

Jesus teaches us part of what it means to keep this commandment in the Lord’s prayer, which we prayed earlier. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. To pray that, to pray that God’s name would be hallowed and kept holy, is a part of how we keep this.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism question number 54 fills out some of these requirements of what’s required in the third commandment. The catechism says this third commandment requires the holy and reverent use of God’s names, everything is called in scriptures, his titles, his attributes, his ordinances ,everything that he commands for us to do in worship, his word, and his works. When we approach these we must do this with absolute reference. Don’t come into the ordinance of God of worship casually, yammering on like a fool. God is in heaven and you are on earth, let your words be few.

The preacher reminds us that God is the one that you must fear. Again to fear God is the opposite of treating him as though he were a vanity, something that’s here and then just immediately passing away. To fear God is to treat him as though he is weighty, because he is the word for glory. The Hebrew word for glory really has the idea of heaviness or gravity or weightiness. We must give God the glory, the weightiness, due his name. That means again not to treat him as though he were light and insubstantial, like a dream that you have for a moment and then it fades from your memory. By recognizing that his value as infinitely weighty and infinitely valuable, again this is fear of the Lord. I think Benjamin Shaw has it right in his commentary when he says we’re talking about faith.

Now here’s why we should say this, here’s another way to look at this. Faith has three parts. It requires knowledge, we have to know something about God. It requires a sense, we have to think that knowledge about God is true, but even the demons have that much and they shudder. The third part that saving faith requires is trust that we know who God is and what he has said about who he is. We know that he sent his son Jesus to die for us and we don’t only agree that that’s true, we trust in that. We’re depending upon that with everything in us. We’re trusting that he is the almighty creator of heaven and earth. We’re trusting that he upholds creation providentially so that everything is being worked out by God for our good. We trust that he’s provided salvation for guilty sinners like you and me through the birth, life, death, and resurrection through his son Jesus Christ.

This means that when we come into worship we stop trying to justify ourselves by our words or our deeds and instead we are trusting Christ and him alone to justify us by faith. Don’t treat the gospel of Jesus Christ as a vain, light, insubstantial thing. Fear God, which is to say believe in Christ, trust in him, and entrust yourself to him. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that you would lead us to fear you. That we would come to Christ by faith and love him and entrust ourselves to him. That we would come not to multiply our performance of words and deeds before you, but that we would come on the sure foundation of Jesus Christ’s blood and righteousness. In his name we pray. Amen.

The post “God is in Heaven, but You are on Earth” – Ecclesiastes 5:1–7 appeared first on Harvest Community Church | Omaha, NE.

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“God is in Heaven, but You are on Earth” – Ecclesiastes 5:1–7

Listen to the Sermon:

Hear now the word of the Lord from Ecclesiastes 5:1-7.

1 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. 2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. 3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? 7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.
Ecclesiastes 5:1-7, ESV

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever.

When I was in college I worked for two years as a page in the Nebraska legislature, which essentially meant that I was an errand boy. I would go to make photocopies, I would pass messages to the offices of the senators, I would get them food and drink as they wanted it and requested it. I’m even told back in the day before my time, this would involve pages going and placing bets on horse races for the senators. I don’t know if that was true or just a rumor, I certainly was never asked to do anything like that. Ye it was a lot of menial tasks; go do this, go do that.

Now what was interesting to me, among many other things of working there, was that in many contexts of my life both before and and afterwards it was a very different approach to those activities than I had to approach that particular job. Most of the time in life there’s sort of an unspoken understanding that the way to distinguish yourself, the way to do well in any activity, is by really working hard to excel as much as you can in what you do in your speech or in your action.

It was a very different kind of thing in the legislature. In the legislature no one cared in the least what I had to say about any of the bills that were going to be introduced. There were elected representatives there who were supposed to deal with that for me. To spout off my opinion would have been a fireable offense. So my words mattered not in the least in that context. Also, the work wasn’t particularly difficult. There are only so many ways that you can bring someone a cup of coffee. In that particular environment we were simply unworthy servants doing our duty.

Let me say that was one of the most interesting things I did in my life, because it was a joy to be a part of something bigger than I was. Even though I had the smallest role to play in fetching photocopies and glasses of water, I had a part to play in what was going on as the Nebraska state legislature was convening for the business in front of them.

Well in religion, in faith, even each week as we gather for worship, it’s very easy to fall into some of those unspoken understandings that I talked about that affect most of the contexts of our lives. It’s easy to think that here, when we gather together, the thing to do is to try to say the right words or to do the right things.

The preacher here is reminding us and trying to draw our attention back to what the rest of the scriptures say. Namely that when we come before the Lord, when we come into worship, you are not what is important, God is. When our attention is shifted away from me, myself, and I to the Lord, that’s when true worship can happen.

Our big idea today as we look at this particular text is do not take the name of the Lord in vain.

Now you probably recognize this is the third commandment, “you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.” A couple of things I want to say about that. This is the third commandment and we’re going to see that from this particular text. I do want to note that that word for vain, “don’t take the name of the Lord in vain”, is not quite the same word that the preacher is so often using in Ecclesiastes when he talks about, “vanity of vanities, all this vanity.” They’re different words, but they do have overlapping meanings which is why they’re translated into the same word in English.

So there’s two points to our sermon today.

1. Hear God
2. Fear God

Hear God

So let’s start with hear God. This passage is set up into these two sections, the section about emphasizing hearing God is in verses one through three. So look at what the preacher says.

1 Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Ecclesiastes 5:1, ESV

Now the house of God refers to the temple. This phrase is used throughout the Old Testament to talk about the temple the house of God is the temple. Remember Solomon is the author of this book in Ecclesiastes, now I do want to say that’s somewhat debated, but that’s my view that Solomon wrote this. We should note that Solomon is never explicitly named in Ecclesiastes, but someone either wants us to think about Solomon or it is actually Solomon. So in either case thinking about the temple, in Solomon’s relationship to the temple, Solomon was the one who built the temple. He was the one who offered the prayer on the day when the temple was consecrated. He has a special front seat insight into the holiness of the temple.

How should we approach God when we go to worship him in the house of God? He says specifically that we should guard our steps. Now this word for guard is very important in the Old Testament, especially as we talk about approaching the holy places of God. This was one of the words that refers to a word that God used to command Adam in his task in the Garden of Eden.

On the one hand he was supposed to work or to cultivate the Garden of Eden. He was supposed to expand the borders of the Garden of Eden so that as he and Eve bore more children, who were going to bear the image of God like they did. As the borders of Eden would expand over the whole earth, it would be filled up with more image bearers, and then the glory of the Lord would fill the whole earth.

He was also supposed to guard it, to keep it, to protect the Garden of Eden, to protect the holiness of the Garden of Eden. God commanded him to do this, but then Adam failed, that was in Genesis 2:15 where that charge comes to guard the Garden of Eden. When Adam fails, when he sins, when he permits the serpent to enter into the Garden of Eden, when he doesn’t cast the serpent out, when he lets the serpent engage in this conversation to lead him and his wife astray into sin, well God has to expel Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. We read that two angels, true cherubim, God stationed them at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life. That’s that same word, they were to guard the way to the Tree of Life, they were to protect its holiness and its sanctity.

Later on when the tabernacle, the movable tent structure that was used for the temple in the days of Moses, we read that the Levites were encamped around the tabernacle. Their job, again, was to guard the tabernacle. If anyone who was not authorized to enter into that tabernacle tried to make a break to enter into the tabernacle, their instructions were clear, they were to put that outsider to death. In that case it’s a very serious thing to guard the holiness of the Lord. The preachers reminding us of this, don’t treat this as a light thing, as a vain insubstantial thing to come into the house of the Lord.

So, what then does this mean for us? How do we guard our steps? What are we supposed to do? Well he explains this in the next half of verse one, and it’s interesting the direction he takes. He says, “To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.”

What does it mean to guard your steps is to listen to God? Now this word for listen, Derek Kidnapper points out in his commentary, this means first of all you have got to pay attention to this. Sometimes this word is translated as hear. My children I know are hearing me sometimes but they’re not listening to me and you have to get their attention and make sure the sound isn’t just going over their heads, but they’re paying attention to what’s said. I’m the same way in my relationship with God, I hear him and don’t always listen. The preacher’s saying don’t do that, pay attention to God.

Also this idea of listening has to do with obeying. It’s not just to say, got it I heard you, message received and then to turn a different way and to disobey God. This idea of listening carries the idea of obeying what God has called us to.

Now at Harvest we talk a lot about the fact that when we are entering into worship, if you want to boil down what we’re doing here we’re having a dialogue with God. We’re having a conversation with God. He is the one who leads this conversation, he speaks to us from his word and our job as the gathered congregation is to respond back to him, speak back to him. God speaks to us and we speak back to him again and again and again. All of this is guided by God’s own word to us.

So, what it means to offer the sacrifice of fools? “To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools.” There’s a couple of thoughts on this. The first would be to offer sacrifices without faith. So if you’re familiar with the story of Cain in Genesis chapter four, think about how he offered sacrifices before the Lord but God did not accept them, because he didn’t offer those sacrifices by faith. God says if you do well, will you not be accepted? That’s one option.

Another option, and this is probably where I would lean, is to think that this sacrifice of fools refers to idol speaking people who are just running their mouths in worship. It stems from an idea of trying to please God by multiplying our words. Jesus talked about that, don’t be like the Gentiles and build up and layer upon yourself vain words. The Lord knows what you have to say before you even speak it, you don’t need to yammer on with this idol speaking. That would be the sacrifice of fools.

Now one of the reasons I think that’s probably the direction that he’s going is what he says in the very next verse in verse 2. He says,

2 Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. Ecclesiastes 5:2, ESV

This is sort of the follow-up. What is the sacrifice of fools? It’s to be hasty with your words before God. So when we come into this worship, this dialogue of worship, our side of the conversation isn’t open-ended, it is an open mic day at church for all of us to just vent whatever is on our mind. We’re in a very strictly regulated conversation, where God is guiding it from beginning to end. God gets the first word, God gets the last word. When God speaks we respond appropriately and therefore God is dominating this conversation.

It’s in that sense that we should be guarding our words. Why? Because God is in heaven and we are on earth, therefore let your words be few. The point is not that God is so distant that he doesn’t even hear you, why are you wasting your breath with all of those words. That’s not the point, the point is rather God is exalted in heaven and you are a fool if you come in and just vent whatever is on your mind. You must not approach God casually.

Again, why do people try to do this? Why do we try to multiply our words? It’s because some part of us thinks, according to the unspoken understanding in so many other contexts of our life, that we distinguish ourselves by speaking well or doing things well. So we want to sound impressive and wise and spiritual and so we multiply these words thinking it’s on that basis that God will be pleased. The preacher reminds us don’t do that. God is in heaven and you are on earth, therefore let your words be few.

Well then in this section, and we’ll see the same kind of pattern in the next section, the preacher closes with a parable, something for us to consider. He says,

3 For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
Ecclesiastes 5:3, ESV

What kind of dream is he talking about here? We just did a sermon series, if you were here for it, through the story of Joseph’s life and in Joseph’s life it was punctuated by several really important revelation giving dreams. In Genesis 37 Joseph has dreams where God is revealing Joseph’s fate, his future. Later on Joseph interprets the dreams of the cupbearer and the baker. Then later Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharaoh himself. These are all giving revelation about what is going to happen in the future.

Well that’s probably not the kind of dream that the preacher is telling us about. Here he’s talking about dreams in the sense of the unsubstantial fleeting dreams that we all have at night. Do you ever wake up with your heart pounding because you did something or forgot to do something? You wake up and think oh my goodness what’s going to happen and you realize even though your heart is troubled by all the business that’s been raised in that dream, it’s just a dream. It’s no big deal, it’s insubstantial, it’s fleeting, it doesn’t make a difference in real life, it was just a dream.

Well the preacher is saying in the same way that a dream multiplies your business, there’s much heat behind it, so also a fool multiplies or comes with many words. There’s a lot of heat to them, a lot of business to do with them, but at the end of the day it’s all vanity. Those words are insubstantial. We must come and worship to hear God.

So to summarize this first section, we come not to speak but to listen. Certainly we speak in response to God, but we’re not coming here on open mic morning at the church.

So why is listening so important? Well again we talked about this a couple of times in Ecclesiastes, the preacher doesn’t give us the solution to questions he raises that’s sort of tied up in a nice neat little bow for us. The preacher is more often clearing away error so that we can see with greater clarity what the rest of the Bible is telling us as a solution.

So why is listening so important? Well let me tell you two reasons why listening is so important that the rest of the Bible tells us about. The first reason is this, unless we come with a listening attentive ear to God we won’t give God what he wants in worship.

Tim Keller, a pastor in New York, he’s retired now, but he’s written a very good book on marriage. I’ve used it sometimes in my premarital counseling classes that I’ve done with people. Tim Keller gives a story of another theologian R.C. Sproul. He tells a story that R.C. Sproul relates where R.C. talks about his own marriage with his wife Vesta. So R.C. says that early on in their marriage he and Vesta really talked past each other, didn’t listen to each other, didn’t understand what each other wanted as gifts on their birthdays.

So R.C. wanted something that he wouldn’t buy for himself he was really hoping on the first birthday when they were married for golf clubs. That’d be a fun thing that he wouldn’t be able to justify in his own mind spending on himself. His practically oriented wife Vesta instead got him six beautiful white shirts. He had to hide his disappointment.

Well then when it was Vesta’s turn R.C. wanted to go all out and to show this is what you do on a birthday, you give someone something lavish. So he gave her this beautiful fur coat, when what she wanted was a new washer and dryer, something practical that she could use every day.

It’s not honoring to God when we don’t listen to him to give him what he wants in worship, when we try to order off the registry. What God has told us he wants in worship and to give him something that we really think he would like, that does not honor God, that dishonors him. Unless we listen we won’t give to God what he wants in worship.

The second reason is that unless we listen we will miss the free grace of the gospel that God promises us in his word. You may be familiar with the nursery rhyme that goes like this,
“I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks,
Each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits:
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were there going to St. Ives?”

It’s a riddle and if you listen very carefully to the riddle you know that the answer is very simple. The answer is one. As I was going to St. Ives. I met these people coming from St. Ives, this very strange group of people and animals and sacks, but only one was going to St. Ives. The answer is very simple if you’re listening, but if you’re not listening the answer becomes very difficult. You try to do all of the math and calculate seven times seven times seven, plus I guess this guy and the person who was going to St. Ives and all of that and you come up with I think 2,802. No I didn’t add that up, I looked it up on the internet, it’s too hard of a question for someone like me to answer.

If we don’t listen to God we totally miss the free grace of the gospel that he offers through Jesus Christ. This is simple and it’s good news that Christ has done everything and you don’t need to do anything. Christ has perfectly obeyed for you and he has perfectly suffered and died for everything that you have done wrong. Christ is your whole righteousness and your sole righteousness, the entirety of your righteousness, and your alone righteousness before Christ. You receive him as your righteousness, not by works but by faith.

I think about man-made religion when we just intuit and try to think about what we think God would want from us. The direction our minds go always makes the problem harder, always tries to calculate seven times seven times seven what do I need to do to please God? If we listen to what God says, he announces better news than we could ever imagine. That God has done everything required for salvation through sending his son into the world to die for us.

We must take care of how we approach God in worship. We must take care that we come to hear him, to pay attention to him, and to obey him, and to respond to him by faith. Especially because what he has to tell us in the gospel is better news than we could think or imagine. God is in heaven and he summons us into his presence. As our king we dare not yammer in his presence like fools. We must listen to him with reverence.

Fear God

It’s not only that we operate off of these unspoken cultural assumptions that we need to speak. Very often we are guided by a desire to do something big and extravagant to prove ourselves. That’s what the preacher talks about in the second section. Remember the second section is characterized by the command that we must fear God. So to get into this let’s read again verses four through six.

4 When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. 5 It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. 6 Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? Ecclesiastes 5:4-6, ESV

Now we have to ask this question, what’s a vow? He’s talking here about when in the Old Testament law there were some tithes that were commanded, every Old Testament Israelite worshiper was commanded to give several tithes each year. Beyond what was required Old Testament worshipers could make vows to go above and beyond what God had commanded them, they could offer these vows to the Lord. That’s especially noted for us in Deuteronomy 23:21-23

21 “If you make a vow to the Lord your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin. 22 But if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin. 23 You shall be careful to do what has passed your lips, for you have voluntarily vowed to the Lord your God what you have promised with your mouth.
Deuteronomy 23:21-23, ESV

Well again in Deuteronomy, Moses is telling us essentially the same thing as the preacher is saying here. If you say something you better be willing to pay it up and if you’re not why would you say it in the first place? That’s a good question? Why would we be tempted to let our mouths run ahead of us, to promise to do something big and extravagant? Well it’s based on that idea that if I can do something and prove myself that will impress you and that will impress God. That is a fundamentally foolish view of what God requires of us. God doesn’t want us to prove ourselves by what we say or about what we do in his sight. He calls us into his presence to respond to his word. However if we do let our mouth speak, we’d better be willing to pay up what God has called us to do.

Well again, like in the first section this section is concluded with a parable, something to think about. Again the preacher is talking about dreams. So verse seven here’s the parable,

7 For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.
Ecclesiastes 5:7, ESV

Think about how many dreams you have over the course of the night. Maybe you remember them, maybe you don’t remember them, but your mind is sort of always going through these dreams and running through all of these scenarios that are multiplying. Yet they’re all just like vapers. They’re vanity, they pass away. So is the one who lets his words increase and lets his mouth outrun what he’s actually capable of backing up and fulfilling. We can’t promise God by what we promise to do, that’s foolish. What we’re really getting at here from the preacher’s words is that it is doubly foolish to promise something extravagant that we can’t actually pay for.

The preacher concludes this with the final exhortation, and this is the summary of this whole passage of verses one through seven, he says, “but God is the one you must fear”. The Old Testament talks extensively about the fear of the Lord. When it talks about the fear of the Lord, that isn’t talking about a terror or a phobia we should have about God. As Benjamin Shaw points out, the fear of the Lord in the Old Testament refers to faith. We’re talking about faith. It’s not the multiplication of our words and promises before the Lord, but it’s responsive trust and obedience to God’s word and his promises to us.

The foundation of what it means to fear the Lord is to recognize that your standing before God has nothing to do with what you can say and nothing to do with what you can do to impress God. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, your standing with God is entirely dependent upon what Christ has done for you in your place. If it isn’t dependent upon you, well that moves you out of a dread or a terror where you are plagued by the sense of needing to justify yourself before God. Then it lets you stand before God in freedom.

You think about other contexts, you think about the context of a date. No one wants to go on a date with someone who is endlessly talking and bragging about himself or herself. Why? Well because what that means is the other person is so insecure or that they need to justify being on that date with you. No company wants to hire people who brag endlessly about their abilities. Why? Because again that says this person is trying to justify something or trying to hide something. I’ve been in job interviews where I didn’t speak from the beginning to the end of it, because the one I was interviewing talked the entire time and it didn’t make a good impression.

When we stand before the Lord we don’t have to try to justify ourselves. It’s interesting, as unworthy of a servant as I was in that Nebraska legislature, I had a unique privilege. I could walk wherever I wanted in the entire capital. Really I could certainly walk onto the floor of the legislature where things were in session. Is that because I was important? Absolutely not, I was an insignificant unworthy servant on the floor there. I was just there to get them their coffee and their photocopies. When I was brought in, I was accepted. My standing was dependent on the fact that I was brought in there as an official capacity and so because of that I didn’t have to justify my presence there, I could just go about my business.

Don’t be so vain that you probably think that worship is about you. Far better worship is not about you, it is about God. That is why we come into his presence, we must listen to him because this God not only calls you but he loves you and sent his son Jesus Christ to die for you. This is the wonderful news in the gospel.

Application

So how do we apply this?

1. Well the first application that we should get, following what the preacher is telling us, is that we must come to hear God’s words. In every other human man-made religion the main thing is what we say or what we do. Everything depends on our words or our performance. Christianity is fundamentally different because Christianity isn’t a human-made religion, it comes to us from God. It’s not about what we say, it’s not about what we do, but it’s about what God does and what he says about what he does. It’s about the facts of what God has done in history, that he created the world, the heavens and the earth, and everything in it.

Then not only is God our creator, but he’s the one who providentially upholds everything that happens, including that special area of his providential upholding of the world in the area of redemption. This is where God chose to send his only son into this world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, who was born in history, lived in history, died in history ,and was raised bodily from the dead in history, and who now is ascended to the right hand of the Father where he is reigning even today until he brings history to its completion and consummation at the end of time.

We need that story, those facts. We need to hear it from the Word, but we also need it from the Word because it’s there that God interprets those facts. It’s really not enough just to know that some man named Jesus lived and died, we have to know why that’s significant. We have to know that not only that he died, but that he died for our sins according to the scriptures, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15.

So what this means is that when we come to worship, we come not to perform before God. We come to listen to God. Yes this is a dialogue and we have our own speaking part, but God is the one who is guiding this conversation. He gets the first and last word. When we speak, we speak in response to what God has said.

So at the beginning of his service, what we heard from Psalm 95 was God declaring that he is our glorious creator, and we responded with songs of praise. When God tells us that we have sinned, especially in breaking the fifth commandment that we considered today, we respond in confession to God, confessing the ways in which we’ve fallen short. Then when God assures us that he forgives us by the promises of his word, because of Christ’s sacrifice, we respond by faith and thanksgiving. Then when God urges us, like a father, to bring our needs before him, we respond by prayer. As we consider God’s word in the sermon, as God teaches us his precepts, his statutes, his gospel from his word, we respond with repentance and faith and obedience.

God is in heaven but the Father and the Son have poured out their Holy Spirit from heaven to meet with us here in this place on the Lord’s day on earth. Therefore we must let our words be few. We must not come yammering on. We must come to hear the word of the Lord, to pay careful attention to God’s word, to believe his gospel promises, and to respond to God’s law with repentance into God’s gospel with faith. Then to obey God’s words from the gratitude of unworthy servants who’ve been reconciled to a holy God. This is what it means to worship in spirit and in truth. This is the worship that’s pleasing to the Lord.

2. The second application of this is to keep your vows. Most vows that we see in the Bible come in the Old Testament. The Israelites could vow to offer special sacrifices or someone like Hannah vowed to devote Samuel, her son, to the Lord all his life, in 1 Samuel 1:11.

We still make vows today, most prominently husbands and wives make vows in their marriages or officers in the church take vows to discharge their duties. Two weeks ago we had the ordination of a ruling elder and he took vows to discharge his duties faithfully.

Last week we saw another kind of vow, the vows of a covenant child taking her vows to become a communing member, to enter into the fullness of fellowship in the church. It’s those vows that I want to focus on. If you’re a communing member if you’ve taken these same vows. I want to remind you what the preacher says about vows, these are vows we have taken before the Lord. When you vow about God, do not delay in paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you owe.

In the consumeristic world we don’t always think about the significance of our vows, of our word. We sometimes look at these as formalities and therefore they can be dismissed at our pleasure and put aside at our convenience, or when we think that something better comes up. So I want to reflect with you the vows that we’ve taken as members of the church.

There are two vows about what we say or we confess before God and there are three vows about what we promise to do. These are not us lavishing our words before the Lord trying to gain his pleasure, these are what God commands us to do, what listening to the word of God would drive us toward.

The first vow is, do you acknowledge yourselves to be sinners in the sight of God, justly deserving his displeasure and without hope saving his sovereign mercy? Do you say that about yourself? Number two, do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the son of God and savior of sinners and do you receive and rest upon him alone for salvation as he has offered in the gospel? That must be something that you believe in your heart and that you confess with your mouth, as Paul writes in Romans 10. This is what God wants you to say, to confess that you’re a sinner and to confess that Jesus Christ is your only hope in this life and the next.

Then there are three vows about what we promise to do. The third vow is, do you now resolve in promise and humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit that you will endeavor to live to behave as becomes the followers of Christ? Number four, do you promise to support the church in its worship and work to the best of your ability? Number five do you submit yourselves to the government and discipline of the church and promise to study its purity and peace?

This is what God calls us to do. The Bible says if these are vows that we have made, keep your vows. Be serious about this, this is not something to lay aside at your pleasure when it’s convenient.

3. The third application is fear God. Hear God’s words, keep your vows and then fear God. Remember our big idea, I’ll circle back around to this, do not take the name of the Lord in vain. That does not only refer to curse words that you might say using God’s name, but the third commandment says that you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. A name in that context refers to more than just what we call God, it refers to everything surrounding God, everything that belongs to God and to his character and to his reputation.

Jesus teaches us part of what it means to keep this commandment in the Lord’s prayer, which we prayed earlier. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. To pray that, to pray that God’s name would be hallowed and kept holy, is a part of how we keep this.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism question number 54 fills out some of these requirements of what’s required in the third commandment. The catechism says this third commandment requires the holy and reverent use of God’s names, everything is called in scriptures, his titles, his attributes, his ordinances ,everything that he commands for us to do in worship, his word, and his works. When we approach these we must do this with absolute reference. Don’t come into the ordinance of God of worship casually, yammering on like a fool. God is in heaven and you are on earth, let your words be few.

The preacher reminds us that God is the one that you must fear. Again to fear God is the opposite of treating him as though he were a vanity, something that’s here and then just immediately passing away. To fear God is to treat him as though he is weighty, because he is the word for glory. The Hebrew word for glory really has the idea of heaviness or gravity or weightiness. We must give God the glory, the weightiness, due his name. That means again not to treat him as though he were light and insubstantial, like a dream that you have for a moment and then it fades from your memory. By recognizing that his value as infinitely weighty and infinitely valuable, again this is fear of the Lord. I think Benjamin Shaw has it right in his commentary when he says we’re talking about faith.

Now here’s why we should say this, here’s another way to look at this. Faith has three parts. It requires knowledge, we have to know something about God. It requires a sense, we have to think that knowledge about God is true, but even the demons have that much and they shudder. The third part that saving faith requires is trust that we know who God is and what he has said about who he is. We know that he sent his son Jesus to die for us and we don’t only agree that that’s true, we trust in that. We’re depending upon that with everything in us. We’re trusting that he is the almighty creator of heaven and earth. We’re trusting that he upholds creation providentially so that everything is being worked out by God for our good. We trust that he’s provided salvation for guilty sinners like you and me through the birth, life, death, and resurrection through his son Jesus Christ.

This means that when we come into worship we stop trying to justify ourselves by our words or our deeds and instead we are trusting Christ and him alone to justify us by faith. Don’t treat the gospel of Jesus Christ as a vain, light, insubstantial thing. Fear God, which is to say believe in Christ, trust in him, and entrust yourself to him. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that you would lead us to fear you. That we would come to Christ by faith and love him and entrust ourselves to him. That we would come not to multiply our performance of words and deeds before you, but that we would come on the sure foundation of Jesus Christ’s blood and righteousness. In his name we pray. Amen.

The post “God is in Heaven, but You are on Earth” – Ecclesiastes 5:1–7 appeared first on Harvest Community Church | Omaha, NE.

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