Everything Beautiful in Its Time: Joy and Vocation

Transcript (edited for readability).

Why is it that joy is so great that we want to stay with the moment of joy? On the other hand, why is joy so fleeting? At least that's our experience of it — it never lasts. You can never stay there. You've got to move on.

Now, the second council of enjoyment is another observation about life, the life that we live here under the sun. And it comes after the great poem on the times and seasons of life. You know — for everything, there is a time and a season. Okay, time for everything. Now keep that in mind, because joy has to do with timing. There are times and seasons for joy in our life under the sun.

Now, why has God constructed our life in this way? Let's have a look at what the preacher says, in chapter 3, 9 to 13. "What profit — what bonus — is therefore a worker in his work?" Notice, not from his work, but in his work. "I have seen the business that God has given to the children of Adam to be busy with. He's made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, so that no man can find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing as good for them as to rejoice and do what is good in his life. It is also a gift of God that any man should eat and drink and see what is good in his work."

Now, this is the second of four observations. What he's seen — the first thing that he's seen is that joy, the profit, the gain that we have from the work that we do under the sun is in our work. Now, the second one here — I've seen what's good in his work. So it's not just the joy, but what's good in work. The second of four observations. So, a simple question again — what's good in your ordinary everyday life on earth? The simple answer, which we've already had, is daily meals.

Second of four observations. This comes after the poem about times and seasons. The question is, what profit do we get in work rather than from work? Now, what's important here is the whole concept of times and seasons. Our human life is finite. We have a beginning, and we have an end. We're on a journey. And every stage of life is different. Every stage of life has a different purpose, every stage of life has a different blessing. And in each stage of life, God wants to lead us from lesser joys to greater joys.

So the secret of enjoyment is getting your timing right. Getting the timing right. You know how important timing is in so many things. Getting the timing right in your life. And particularly the timing right when it comes to work. God has set a schedule for joy, a schedule for enjoyment in our human life cycle, so that every time, every season, has its own joy, has its own blessing. God has constructed our human life and the work, and he gives us work to do at every stage of our life, and that includes in our retirement, because Christians never retire until they are retired permanently. Each stage of life, we are given something to do by God in our station and vocation. And God constructs this so that everything that we experience and do in this life is beautiful in its time.

Beauty and timing go together. So there's something beautiful about being a young child. There's something beautiful about being a teenager with all its agonies. There's something beautiful about dating and falling in love. Just imagine if you stayed there forever. I wouldn't — much as I enjoyed it, I wouldn't want to go back there. Thank you very much. There's something beautiful about being newly married, and the work you do as a newly married couple. And that changes when you have children, added responsibilities, and so on, at each stage of life, going on all the way to the end of life — even in our way of thinking, into retirement.

Now, God has constructed life in this way, that everything is beautiful in its time. But what's the reverse of that? It's not beautiful out of time. There's nothing worse than a middle-aged man imagining he's a young stud and trying in vain to put it into practice. There's nothing worse than mutton dressed as lamb. But everything is beautiful in its time, and outside its time, it ceases to be beauty. Its beauty is lost. The joy is lost. So beauty and joy go together.

Now, here we have something wonderful to say to our post-millennial generation, I think, and it'd be worth developing this if we had time, because we live in an ugly world, where people see little that's good. And we have something, as the people of God, to offer to these people — the order that God's constructed, the order for joy and enjoyment, the order which delivers something beautiful to us at each stage of our life, in each vocation, and each station.

Now, so — joys, there are times and seasons for every joy, everything is beautiful in its time. So there's something beautiful, and I'm discovering that in retirement. It's good having children. But it's even better to have grandchildren. If only we could skip the first to get to the second. You agree, don't you, Mark? Yes. No — when we experience something good in life, we want it to last forever. We want to cage the minute within its nets of gold. This is good, this is so good, let's just stop and stay here — at least for a while, if not forever. But really, we want it to be forever. We're like — yeah, we wanted to stay forever, and we get frustrated because we can't do that.

Ecclesiastes says that we can't see the big picture of life. I don't know if you ever thought about that. Despite our — you know, the way we imagine our lives — the only thing we can see is what's here now. I can't see what's in the past. I can remember what's in the past. I can't see what's in the future. I can try and work out what's there. And even if I could, I couldn't arrange my life in such a way that I could maximize my enjoyment and make sure that nothing bad ever happens to me.

We quite unconsciously have a meta-narrative to our lives — a big biography that we construct, and then the purpose of that biography is to make sense of our lives, and see what's good in our lives, but also to be able to plan for the future, and our future enjoyment. What fascinates me is the way people my age, and a little bit younger, have fantasies about what they will do when they retire. And those fantasies are seldom realized. Some of you may be there and close to being there.

We can't see the big picture. We can't see what God has done from beginning to end, so that we can construct our lives to maximize our enjoyment, so that we can coordinate what we do with what God is doing and giving us, so that we can increase, enhance, our joy. However, there are two contradictory things — we have the desire to be able to see the big picture so that we can maximize our enjoyment. We're frustrated because we can't see the big picture, we can only see what's here and now. Yet, at the same time, the writer, the preacher, says God has put eternity in the hearts of men. God has put eternity in the hearts of men. What on earth does he mean by that?

He's put eternity in our hearts. Well, it means, on the most obvious level, that whenever we do something good, have something good, experience something good, enjoy something good, we want it forever. We say, this is, you know, heaven on earth, let's just stay here, let's just enjoy it here and now. But God has constructed life in such a way that we are, in a sense, dissatisfied with what we have, so that we always want more, and want what we have to last forever. So every joy that we have leads to a new joy, a new experience.

You see that in marriage, in a good marriage. The enjoyment of marriage that you have when you're courting — and that's part of marriage — is not the same as when you are married. The enjoyment of marriage with the first child is different from the second child, and all the way through — same marriage, and pray God, same partner, these days, of the opposite sex — but different joys. And yet when it's going good, we want to freeze the relationship, enjoy it, and stay there. We're like the rich fool in the parable of Jesus, who has these ample goods, and so he decides to retire. And he says, relax, eat, drink, and be merry. You stop journeying, you stop traveling, and you stay there.

But in that way, we set ourselves up for disappointment, and we frustrate God's plan to give us joy. We set ourselves up for disappointment because what God wants to do is always give you a new joy, something new, something different, to enhance your capacity for enjoyment, to lead you from lesser joys to greater joys. But most of all, every joy that God gives you here in this life, in the order of creation, is a foretaste of heaven, and its purpose is to whet your appetite for the future, and for heaven.

Now, what Ecclesiastes is proposing here turns the normal picture of life on its head. The normal picture of life that people have is that you have all the fun when you're young, and then it gets worse and worse and worse. So everything good you have at the beginning of life, and you end up losing it all. Now, that's what happens when we try and construct our own life. But if we fit in, if we are God-fearing and fit in with God's pattern, then it goes the opposite way — that the best is always still to come. Not immediately, but whatever good you've experienced is a foretaste of something better that's still to come, that lies ahead of you.

So the secret is to live in the moment. To live in the moment. You can't see the past, you can't see the future, but you can see and experience and enjoy today. So enjoy this conference. And if you feel like sleeping, enjoy that.

Okay, now, remember that Ecclesiastes had said that to the man who pleases God, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy. Wisdom — now, what's the wisdom that a wise person has who heeds this instruction? What's the wisdom? Is to do what? Yeah — to live in the moment. To enjoy your work, find joy in your work, and find joy in eating and drinking, having a meal, having some time together with your wife, or your kids, or whoever, and enjoying your sleep, and getting up the next day, and living there in that day. That's the mark — that's the mark of a wise person, to live not only in the station and vocation that God's given you, but in the time that God is giving you. You see, God gives each of us a different time, and we are to live in that time rather than some other time and place.

Yes? Let me just finish this and then I'll have it. Now, what's the knowledge that a wise person has? There are four things that God gives to a wise person. Number one — it's interesting he starts there — is rejoicing in your daily work. So God gives you daily work for daily joy, for daily rejoicing.

Secondly, God gives you something good to do. So it's not just doing work — you won't have joy, and you won't find joy in doing bad work, in working badly. You will only find joy if you give it your best shot, if you do something well. And the better you do it, the greater the joy. You know that, we all know that — the satisfaction that comes from doing something well. And it goes through the whole of life. The satisfaction that comes from preparing and eating a good meal, the satisfaction of building something.

Well, Brian constructed a set of bookshelves, and he was so proud of those bookshelves that he had to send a photograph of them to me. He was proud of the result of his work, but it was quite obvious, and I could see that, that he enjoyed making those shelves. So the enjoyment is there in the work, and in doing what is good — doing good work. You won't find joy if you do shoddy work, second-rate work.

We had a lovely man come — middle-aged, or a bit beyond, early fifties, you know, still young, though — come and paint the outside of our house. Now, he was a contractor, and he was a lovely craftsman. He did it not to make money, or to get it over and done with as quickly as possible, but he was meticulous in repairing what needed to be repaired — cleaning the wood, putting in new gutterings, and all that kind of stuff. It was quite obvious that he took great pride in his work, and he enjoyed painting well. And he enjoyed it, and he was pleased that I enjoyed it, not just that I paid him for it.

Thirdly, knowledge is God's gift of daily food and daily drink. Notice — daily food, daily drink, not in the future, but here and now, and not gourmet meals and vintage wines, but your ordinary grub every day.

Lastly, God's gift of insight into what's good in his work. Now, that's probably the most subtle of all, to my mind. "It is also a gift of God that any man can eat and drink." Okay, that's a gift from God — it's not automatic. But also it's a gift from God to see what is good in his work. Very few people see, and therefore enjoy, what's good in their work. This applies, I find, most of all to pastors. Or it seems to, because when you get pastors together, what do we customarily do? Grumble — about all the problems we have in our work. And we don't see what a fantastic privilege it is to be a pastor, and how good it is to work not with wood or stone or with computers, but to work with the best medium of all — people. What's better than that? Working with people. How good can it get?

So the knowledge of a wise person is that God gives you insight into what's good in your work. And what's good in your work is not just good for yourself, but in many cases it's what's good for other people, and a cause for gratitude and joy.

Now, what I found most interesting about this guy who did the painting for me was, first of all, that he took such great pride in his work, and he was whistling to himself as he was working. He enjoyed his work — but what did he enjoy most of all? The fact that I enjoyed the work that he'd done. Because he said, "You're so different — most people don't recognize the difference between a shoddy job and a good job." And he thanked me at the end when I shook hands with him — "I'm so happy that you like what I did. Here's my card."

Yes? This is — right, let's just run with that for a moment. And Luther's very good on this, by the way. If you take heed of what I've said, what's the devil's basic tactic going to be for all human beings, in the order of creation? What's the tactic going to be? Take you out of the moment, and get you to work harder and harder for some future goal, sacrificing yourself and the people around you for future enjoyment — not just your enjoyment, but other people's future enjoyment — some future goal which then destroys the work you're doing. But most of all, the devil wants you to work harder and harder, so that you worry more and more, and you have more and more stress, in order to rob you of what? Joy.

So, my dear pastors — and look, this doesn't just apply to pastors, Luther would say it applies to parents and mothers most of all. It's not a glamorous job being a mother looking after children. And, you know, once a mother, you're always a mother, and it gets harder when your children leave you and seem to neglect you, and you've invested so much in them, and they don't seem to appreciate that. And you don't see the fruit of all your hard work, the effort you've invested in them. And what's the temptation — what does the devil get on your back to be, instead of being grateful that your children have turned out as well as they have? You feel bitter and resentful because your children neglect you, or because your husband doesn't appreciate you, or whatever. Yeah — this is going to be the devil's basic target.

The devil is a killjoy. Right? Let's put it quite plainly. And you can see it — how is the devil messing with the whole of the USA? Here's a radical overstatement — he wants to kill the joy of as many people as possible. He's a killjoy. Now, if the devil is a killjoy, what's the Holy Spirit? The joy-giver, the joy-bringer. He is the spirit of joy and enjoyment. Thanks for raising that — that'll save me doing that later. But just take note of that. There's an element here of spiritual warfare. You see, if it wasn't for sin, and if it wasn't for the accusation and confusion that the devil brings, what would life be like? It would be full of joy, pure joy. And we would pass from lesser joys to greater joys, without any being mixed with sorrow and disappointment and bitterness and resentment, and all the other things that taint our lives.

Yes? In a related moment — let's say a proper place that we're reminiscing, the psalm, the — and also the playing… Okay, that's part of it. But you don't look back in order to regret what you've lost. So what's the purpose of looking back and remembering? Have you noticed when people get together, families get together, and they tell stories — "Do you remember when…"? Why do we do that when we get together for family celebrations? It's a simple fact that usually when the best things happen, we're so busy and preoccupied that we don't enjoy them — we don't notice them, we don't appreciate them. And somehow, when we get together with other people, we can, as it were, have the joy in the present of what was given to us in the past. We can receive that joy here and now. But the focus is still where? In the present.

So that's very — Ecclesiastes doesn't talk about that aspect of joy, but if I was doing my own book, I would put a whole section into that — the importance of memory and remembering, and not remembering the bad things, but remembering the good things. Have you ever noticed that if you go into introspective mode and turn in on yourself, what do you keep on remembering? What does the devil keep on digging up and replaying and replaying? Bad things. Bad things, bad things. And the more you replay them, the worse they become, and the more it taints the whole of your life, instead of just little incidents — the whole of the past becomes bad. That happens when a marriage breaks down, okay? Let's say my spouse divorces me — I no longer remember the good in my marriage. When I look back, all I see is my marriage from A to Z is totally — and I try and move on from there.

It's important that we use God's promises to look to the future, rather than our fantasies. Yes, we plan for the future, and there is a joy in planning for the future. So there's a joy in deciding to have children and planning for a family, okay? And that's godly — but the importance of that is not just for the future enjoyment, but the joy is in the present, in planning for it.

Let me just give you a case in point — it's not so common now anymore that people get engaged to be married, but engagement is a very important part of the preparation of marriage, and the enjoyment of marriage. So you can enjoy certain things in prospect, in the present. So when you're engaged, you are enjoying the guy or the girl you're with already, now, in a way that's appropriate, and the joy is greater because of the prospect of marriage. If you weren't going to marry that person, the joy would be quite different.

Yes, Harold. When I look at Psalm 90, "teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom" — I think I'm about 21,700 days. Well, students, your 7,700 days. The baby I just saw leave here was 600 days. When you have that perspective, it tends to telescope things. If you relate that to joy, I mean —

Yes, and Psalm 90 connects that directly with joy. I don't know if you've ever looked at the verses that follow that in Psalm 90 — there we have, verse 12: "So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisdom." Notice, this is wisdom. Okay, what's wisdom? "Return, O Lord, how long? Have pity on us, on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning" — which morning? The morning of our lives, understood here — "with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days." So, number our days so that we may be wise, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days — and then you get an even more remarkable reversal: "Make us as glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, and for as many days as we have seen evil." So — satisfy us in the morning of our lives, so that all our life will be rejoicing, but then also do what? Make us glad, then, for as many days as you've afflicted us. So that goes retrospective.

By God's grace — what does God's grace do to our lives? It turns the negatives of our life into positives, so that what looks like a dismal life is a joy-filled life. Make us as glad for the whole extent that you have judged us, afflicted us for our sins. Now, I better leave that there, but it's interesting how this ties in here to this part.

Yes? Anything that has perspective along with when you observed it — when we look back, when you call it — it is. You actually also see the opposite. Well, you can ask someone about a vacation, right? You think they're completely miserable, but when you ask them about it, they say, "Oh, it was just the best thing." Well, which is partly true, because what people do, usually when they say it's a good vacation, is not that nothing bad happened, but they focus on the one outstanding good thing, which then overshadows all the aggravations.

Here's another interesting phenomenon that really interests me and puzzles me about life. If you think objectively, in any one single day of your life, how many things go right for you? Do you realize it's billions and billions and billions of things go right? Now, I have a bad day if two or three things go wrong. I don't know if you're like me — it's disastrous if four or five things go wrong. And in any one day, I don't remember the things that go right, I remember the things that go wrong. And the things that go wrong then overshadow and embitter and destroy the joy of all the things that have gone right — which, by the way, is one of the reasons why we as Christians need to have a discipline of giving thanks. Because giving thanks gets us to focus not on the negative experience that we have, but on the good gifts that God gives us.

Let's go on. Yeah, oh, yes, Richard — and welcome, personally, home — people are back, back, back, back, work. Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Okay, get rid of the "have to." This is not "have to," this is just "is." Okay. God gives you daily bread, daily work, for your enjoyment. He doesn't say, "Look, I'll give this to you if you promise that you will enjoy yourself." It's a gift — that's number one.

And the gift very often has to do with — and it is, in things like that, that this would be hardest to see. And interestingly, as far as I can see, Ecclesiastes, even though it says there's a time and season for everything — sickness, health, all that kind of thing — is part of life, there is a sense in which, even in the most irksome circumstances, for the wise person there are things to enjoy.

Now, I've just come from seeing Dr. Norman Nagel this morning. He is celebrating his ninety-first birthday tomorrow. He has been crippled by a stroke for — well, how many years, I don't know. And yet he is never depressed. The experience of visiting him was one of pure and unalloyed joy. His joy in being with me, seeing me, conversing with me as much as he was able, transfigured him. And my joy in him.

Now, this is where what Ecclesiastes says about seeing what is good, discovering what's good, is very important. It's very easy to see what's good when you're courting or nearly married, okay? It's very easy to see what's good when you're in health. But how can you see what's good when you are sick? Now, the most obvious thing is that when you're sick, that's when you see most clearly the love of the people round about you, which most of the time is hidden from your eyes — you ignore it.

Another impression that I had from the nursing home where Norman is — and I'm just using that as an illustration — is the lovely people there, and the lovely surroundings. It's a beautiful place, and it's full of beautiful people, people who obviously enjoy their work, take pride in their work, and forgive people who have very little joy in their lives — at least that joy. And maybe that, in its own paradoxical way, is a foretaste of the joy of heaven, which is not in us, but is in God and in other people.

What's the joy — what I reckon is going to be the best thing when I get to heaven — is to see you all there. What's the best thing for me in coming over here every year, roughly? It's to see so many fantastic people again, to see Carol again. Okay — I can't say how much joy that gives me, to see David again, to see Howell again, to see Bev again — that experience.

The joy that God wants to give us is not obvious, and it's very often hidden under its opposite. If I can go way, way ahead — Hebrews says Jesus endured, despised the shame, enduring for the joy that was set before him, endured the shame, and is now sitting at the right hand of God. So Jesus, in his suffering and death, faced it not as a sad business, but as a joyful business. Sure, he was sad in Gethsemane, but he went joyfully to the cross.

Now, that's the last thing I'd say — the joy that you have at that part of your life is not so much joy in the past, and it's not so much joy in present things — this is where we come to the New Testament — but joy in the hope, the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. And that is ours already. Betsy said that one of the great joys that Norman has is to be able to have Holy Communion and participate in worship, not as a nostalgic thing, but as a foretaste of the feast to come. Hope. Yes, I hope Norman doesn't mind that I'm using him as an example.

Okay, let's go on. A third observation. There's one very, very important word here that I want to concentrate on. "So I have seen" — this is the third "I have seen." I've seen that there's nothing as good as that a man should rejoice in his deeds, his works. That's not new, but what's new is the "for" clause — "for that is his lot." Rejoice in his works, for that is his lot. Now this is the third of four observations. This is the last positive observation.

Deeds here means both what a person does and what is produced by his work. If I can illustrate — I'm a mad keen gardener, partly because I'm a pastor. I like gardening for two reasons. I just enjoy gardening — just doing all the gardening stuff, digging and weeding and planting and picking, and all that. So I enjoy doing gardening. But I also enjoy what the garden produces — the tomatoes and beans and strawberries, the fruit, and I've got a little orchard at the back. I just love that, I enjoy it. So I enjoy the gardening, and I enjoy what the gardening produces. That's my deeds, the work of my hands.

Now, the key picture here again — and it's not a concept — is the term "lot." "For that is his lot." Now, the original sense of "lot" comes from the first part of the Bible, the Pentateuch, where God allotted a portion of land — God allotted some of his land to every tribe, and within every tribe, every family, every clan had its lot, its allotment, and within every clan, every father's house, extended family, had its lot. Now, "lot" is that apportioned piece of land, God's land, that he gave to his people for their livelihood. So God gives them this piece of land. Now, the interesting thing is that you could exchange land within the family, but you couldn't exchange land outside the family. So this was fixed — every family had a lot, from God, a piece of land from God. And with the piece of land came all the agricultural produce that that land was able to produce.

Okay, now here, the preacher uses "lot" in a different sense, uses it metaphorically, for God's allotment of joys and rejoicing, by making provision for work and leisure. So, what is your lot? Okay, God gives you work to do — number one, that's your lot. God gives you what else? God gives you joy in and through your work. God gives you time to work, God gives you time of leisure. And everything else that's connected with this is your allotment from God. And most importantly, God gives you a lot — your span of life. So my lot is that I was born in 1942, and I will die at some date in the future. So I'm given an allotted span of life. So the allotted span of life, my allotted family, my allotted work, my allotted joy that comes to me with my work, and the allotted leisure that goes with it — do you get the basic picture? Okay?

So Ecclesiastes says, rejoicing in his deeds, for that is his lot. God gives him work to do, and God gives him joy in his work, and that is God's allotment, God's gift to him — and every other child of Adam. So, span of life, work, food, drink — but then also later on, Ecclesiastes includes your spouse in this. So, allotted span of life, allotted work, allotted leisure, allotted food, allotted drink, all that, but also your allotted wife. It doesn't mean that God said that you had to marry that person, but that the person you have is God's allotment to you, gift to you.

And because of this, then, the best life is the life of rejoicing in what we do every day. Notice the focus here is only active life. The ideal life is not the life of leisure. It's not the life you're going to lead finally, when you retire. It's not the life of a wealthy person who doesn't have to do any work because they have everything that they need. No — the joyful life is the life where you are busy and active doing good work, in your allotted station and vocation, and at each allotted time.

Now, this passage, by the way, and the next one we're going to look at, is the scriptural foundation for Luther's teaching on vocation. And Luther's teaching of station and vocation includes time and joy. So Luther says, each one of us has an allotted place within one of three orders — family, church, world. We have been given that allotted place, and we've been given allotted work in that allotted place, and we've been given an allotted time to do work in that place. That's very often neglected in modern Lutherans reading Luther's teaching on vocation — the importance of timing, the allotted time. But Ecclesiastes adds then, with that comes the allotted joy.

If you don't find joy in your marriage, you won't find it in a marriage with another person. If you don't find joy in your family, you won't find joy in another family. If you don't find joy in living in the USA, there's no point migrating to Australia, even though everything's perfect in Australia, in case you don't know. So God gives us different stations, gives us different tasks to do every day, and God gives us different tasks because he wants to give us different joys. So the task that God gives to Claire, my wife, is different to mine, because he wants to give different joys to both of us. And because we're living in marriage, therefore our joys are doubled.

Now, what would happen in a marriage if you both did the same thing and basically only had the same joys, the same blessings? How boring could you get? You've got to be different — that's where the joy is. There's a wonderful verse in a hymn that's not included in your new Lutheran Service Book — I think you'd call it the TLH — "Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken." It's a lovely hymn, which goes this way: "Take my soul, thy full salvation, rise o'er sin and fear and care, joy to find in every station, something still to do or bear. Think what Spirit dwells within thee, what a Father's smile is thine, what a Savior died to win thee — child of heaven, shouldst thou repine." Repine means being sad. Joy to find in every station, at every time, in every task.

Yes, please. So this matter of allotment might be summarized as, "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places." Yes, absolutely — and that's partly what that means. Because always, we human beings are envious. We don't see the good that we have, but we envy the good that other people have, and so distant fields are always greener, and the best gold further on. We're always chasing the end of the rainbow, looking elsewhere — whereas the biblical view is that God maps out a place for us, and the lines that he sets out for us, the boundaries, the fences, are in pleasant places. They are places for our enjoyment. Here and now. Okay. Stunned silence. Good.

Last one — our next one, the fourth summative observation. This is observation number four, and oh, I love this one. "Indeed, I myself have seen that it is good, that it is beautiful" — notice we're back to "beautiful" here again — "I myself have seen that it is good, that it is beautiful, pleasant, to eat and drink and rejoice, and see what is good in one's work, which one does under the sun, during the number of days of his life that God has given him, for that is his lot."

Now here you get a description of the lot. What's his lot? The number of days, the good and the work, seeing, experiencing the good, rejoicing, eating, drinking. This is good, this is beautiful. This is your lot in life.

It's also a gift from God. Now we come to a very profound observation. "It's also a gift from God, that any man whom God has given wealth and possessions has the power, or the capacity, to eat from them, and accept his lot, and rejoice in his work. For he will hardly remember or notice the days of his life." He won't be bored, because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

One of the most wealthy — and, when he was young, good-looking — men that's ever lived in North America in the last hundred years was Howard Hughes. A filthy rich man. And yet the most miserable coot that has ever set foot on your shores. Just Google his biography, and you'll see what a sad, pathetic figure. He had everything, but the one thing he lacked was the capacity to enjoy what he had. He had everything and enjoyed nothing.

Now, this is a summary here of the first three passages — in the first sentence, about the limited time for life here on earth. Your life, my life, is finite — there's a beginning and an end. I'm 74 years old. That means my life is nearly over by any normal standards. And the finite life means that my time to experience joy is limited. Also, my life is finite because God keeps me moving on, so that I get to experience everything good. Can you just imagine what it would be like, living in a place with a perfect climate, in a perfect place, and just staying there forever? We human beings would be bored stiff. Okay?

Now, here we have further teaching about our lot in life, and further teaching about our enjoyment of life. Now, what's important here is that God gives, as well as the gifts that he gives us — which is my lifespan, my work, my food, my drink, all those kinds of things, and the joy in all these — he gives three crucial additional abilities. All those are of no use to me unless I have these three things, in addition to money and property that I get from my work.

The first thing is that God gives me an appetite — the capacity, the power, to eat from them. So, simply speaking, the appetite for food, which is bigger than just food, because, you know, people who have loss of appetite have loss of — what do you call it, Bev? — lots of effect. No — if you lose your appetite for food, you lose your enjoyment of life. So enjoyment of food is correlated with general enjoyment. And so a person who loses the appetite for food, that's one of the signs, for any doctor, that something's going wrong.

So there's the appetite for food — see, for example, the loss of appetite with depression and ill health. This is depicted in the next chapter quite graphically: "There is an evil that I've seen under the sun, and it weighs heavily upon mankind — a person to whom God gives wealth and possessions and honor and status, so that he never lacks anything for his life, from all that he desires, but God has not given him the capacity to eat them, to enjoy them."

So, a simple gift that we overlook, and yet it's remarkable — a good appetite. You know from experience that when you do hard work, this physical work, even the most ordinary meal tastes good. The appetite's enhanced. If you've been fasting for a while, the first meal that you have is just scrumptious.

When I was in university — that's college — I used to sew bags shut, wheat and barley bags and wheat bags — this was before bulk handling of grain — hard, backbreaking work, but it paid well. I mean, it paid well for those times, because nobody wanted to do it, because it was such hard yakka. But I loved it, because I'd been head-tripping all year studying, just finished exams, and I could go purely into physical mode, and I'd throw myself into it and try to get as many bags done as I could during the day, out in the hot sun. Now, I've never enjoyed cold water, a drink of cold water, quite so much as then. I'm a bit of a connoisseur of good wine, as some of you may know, but then cold water on those hot days after hard work was just the best. Appetite for it. Appetite and enjoyment go together. You won't enjoy food unless you have an appetite for food, and one of God's curses — curses of sin — is the loss of appetite.

Second, the gift of God is the acceptance of your lot. The acceptance of — the Hebrew is actually that you take it. Here's your gift. The picture is God gives it to you, says, okay, here it is, have it — what do you have to do? Take it up, receive it. So accepting a lot is not negative — "Oh, I suppose I have to put up with it. Oh, what a terrible woman I've married. Oh, what a rotten job being a pastor. Oh, I've got these terrible kids and grandchildren, they just drive me crazy. Huh, no, I suppose I'd better tolerate them." No — accepting the lot means receiving it with joy, accepting your allotted life, however long or short it is, accepting your allotted food, drink, accepting your spouse, and being content in your station and vocation.

What was it last Sunday — I'm losing track of time, it was Sunday — Paul says, "Godliness with contentment is great gain." He was thinking of this passage.

And the greatest gift of all is the capacity to rejoice, the capacity to enjoy your work. And then, best of all, if you have those three capacities, what will be the result for you? Well, you'll be so engrossed in doing whatever you're given to do, here and now, that you won't notice the passing of time. Claire knows very well that sometimes I get so absorbed in my work that I miss lunch, and it's halfway through the afternoon before I have lunch. Why? Because I've lost track of time. Have you noticed that? The more you enjoy what you're doing, the more you no longer notice the passing of time — it's as if what you're doing brings you to another time, another place, into eternity — being so engrossed that you don't notice the passing of time. And it means that it doesn't matter how long or short your life is, you have great joy in your life, and you're never bored. So there is such a thing as ecstasy in work, work which takes you out of yourself so that you're utterly and totally absorbed in it. That is the best kind of work. That's a foretaste of eternity.