Ecclesiastes 5:1

A study of Ecclesiastes Chapter 5 Verse 1 where the preacher tells us, "Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know they are doing evil." (NASB)
What does he mean by "guard our steps" and how do we do it? We discuss this in our latest podcast. 

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In today's episode of our podcast, we're going to be studying Ecclesiastes chapter 5. And I think we're just going to get through verse 1 in this particular podcast where the preacher, most scholars believe that Solomon is the preacher in Ecclesiastes. He wants to make sure that our attitude toward God is right. And so he tells us in verse 1 to guard our steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. The focus for me in this verse is to be guarding our steps. And while Solomon is telling us for sure that we need to guard our steps as we go to the house of God, as we go to our local churches, I believe that it's much more than that. First of all, guarding our steps certainly isn't a physical thing, it is a spiritual thing. Watch where you go, watch what you do. Are you getting caught up in the world and the things that it has to offer? Have worldly things usurped the lordship of Jesus Christ in your life? And frankly, this is a day-by-day effort that we must partake of, maybe even hour by hour. And so as we dig into this first verse of Ecclesiastes chapter 5, I want us to think about our lives and whether or not we really have pure hearts and clean hearts before we go to the Lord. And again, while Solomon is specifically telling us to look at our lives before we go into the house of God, I believe it easily expands and should expand into our whole life. For our God does not dwell in the temple the way he did in Old Testament times. He is with us, he is in us, his Holy Spirit dwells within us, and he is in our presence at all times. And so we need to make sure that when we go to him, whether it's in prayer or whatever it might be, actually worshiping him in song or listening to a pastor's message, it makes no difference. If we are going to want to be in his presence and give him the honor and the reverence and the glory and the magnificence that he deserves, we need to do this with clean and pure hearts. And so we're going to look at what that might mean for each of us as believers. And so let's dig in to Ecclesiastes chapter 5, verse 1. Verse 1 says, guard your, this is the NASB version, says, guard your hearts or guard your steps when you go into 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. The word fool or fools occurs a number of times, at least three in the first in the first few verses. So Solomon is going to be comparing the way we should be leading our lives. We might think when we read this, just going to church, which is part of it, but it's much more deep than that. And he is comparing that to one degree or another to those that don't know what they're doing. Solomon started out this book, the first three chapters or so, and he's telling us that life under the sun, it's short-lived, it's basically a waste of time. Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow you might die. And he's really giving a lot of woes about living on this earth. He looked here and there, but no matter where he looked, he found oppression, he found unfairness, he found a circle of endless living until the day that you died. And it all sounded pretty morbid. You know, when we remember those first three or four chapters in Ecclesiastes, it doesn't sound like life is too much fun. Yet, in those first four chapters, I think again, I'll remind us all it's an outstanding book, the whole book, but those chapters are outstanding to have a non-believer read because they're gonna say, yeah, this is my life. This really is all there is. There isn't any more than this, right? It's do whatever I want to do, whatever makes me happy. Uh I'm gonna do it because, after all, look at look at what even Solomon, the wisest man that ever walked the earth, says about life. But they got to keep reading the book, right? And that would be the goal of giving someone ecclesiastes to read that doesn't know uh the Lord God Almighty personally. Um, and so it does sound fairly mundane and morbid. Uh, and it is because we're interpreting life under the sun, meaning, you know, we're looking at what the world has to offer and not what God uh has to offer those that put their faith in him. And so we're looking at worldly living as opposed to heavenly living. And we'll talk about the fact that that should uh our our view of heaven, and we'll talk about being citizens of heaven, might not be tonight, but at least tonight or the next time we meet, and how that should definitely change not only our outlook, but our walk uh toward being more like the Lord Jesus Christ. Solomon continues to visit various places uh in his communities, right? He had visited, if we remember the first four chapters, he'd gone to the courtroom, he'd gone to the marketplace, he had gone to the workplace, he watched people's people on the roads, he watched people on highways, and he observed even the goings on in the very palace that he built. He did all those things. You know, it would be like you or me, think about this, it'd be like you or me hopping in our cars, going downtown, getting out of the car, and then starting to walk around. We might go to a uh construction site and look to see what the construction workers are doing. Then we walk into uh the city hall or the county office building and we watch what's going on in there. And while we're doing these things, we are considering what's going on and making judgment calls. What are we really seeing? Not just, you know, maybe uh tax transactions, paper transactions, uh, you know, plumbers putting up paper, whatever, but what's going on morally? What do when we look at these people and say, what's life all about? This guy is gonna run a hundred feet of conduit today, and he's gonna leave and go home, and he's gonna come back tomorrow, he's gonna run another hundred feet, and he's gonna do that until he runs out of conduit. Really? That's the guy's life from eight to five. Um then maybe we travel right into a courthouse, a city or a county courthouse, and we drop in to see if justice is really taking place in the courthouse. Right? Because Solomon did that. He found that there wasn't justice taking place in the courthouse. Then we go to a church, not a church that we're used to going to, but we go to another church and we open the doors during a service, and uh we look to see how the people are worshiping God. You know, we can't tell their hearts, obviously, we can't look into their hearts like God does, but we might be able to get a feeling. Are they just going through the motions? Are there prayers being stated? Is somebody sound asleep? You know, is somebody mouthing the Lord's prayer, but you can see his or her heart really isn't into it. That's where we find the preacher Solomon now. That's where he's at. He decides to pay a visit to the temple. And again, even this this is a temple that he himself built. Okay? First Kings 6 and 2 Chronicles 3 through 5 tell us that Solomon built this stuff. It was a magnificent structure whose cons the very construction of this temple he supervised himself. He watched the worshipers coming and going, praising God, praying, sacrificing, and making vows. He noted that many of them were not all that sincere in their worship, and and and they left the sacred priest uh precinct, if you will, the temple itself, in worse spiritual condition than when they entered into it. What was their sin? They were robbing God of the reverence and honor that he and he alone deserves. Their acts of worship were insincere, lighthearted, off-handed, and maybe even hypocritical. Guard your steps, Solomon tells us. King James puts it this way: keep thy foot. Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. What does Solomon mean by uh watching or guarding your steps? As we dig into this, I want to I want us to remember this. Even though God's glorious presence doesn't dwell in our church buildings as it did in the temple in Jerusalem back in the time, uh Old Testament times, especially when the uh Israelites were occupying before Solomon messed up uh Israel as a whole, and then even after uh the the tribe of Judah. Uh even though God doesn't dwell in our churches in the same fashion as he did then, we still need to heed this warning. We need to heed, guard your steps. The worship of God is the highest ministry of the church. We worship God in many ways. It is the highest ministry of the church and must come from devoted hearts and yielded wills. For God's people, that's you and me, to participate in public worship, which is what we do when we go to church on Sundays or any other day of the week or here tonight, while harboring unconfessed sin may very well lead to God's rebuke and maybe even his judgment. We're obviously not talking about uh salvation here, but we are talking about the fact that God will chastise his sons and daughters when it's needed. And um as we will see, coming before God at any time must be done with a clean heart. We need to guard our stops. And one of those, one of the processes in guarding our stops is making sure when we approach God, we do so with a clean heart. When do we approach God? Obviously, we approach God at church in church, we approach God here, we approach God where else? Prayer, home, everywhere. Any anytime we are drawing him into our lives for any reason whatsoever, we are approaching him. We are asking him in a special way. We know he is uh omnipresent, we know he is everywhere. He is here tonight, and I was reminded three or four weeks ago, he's not passive. No matter where he is, and he is everywhere, and he never needs to pack a bag. He never needs to take any time to get anywhere. It's not like he's in on 63 Tuscany Lane. Oh, yeah, yeah, he's got to go over to China right now. It's gonna take him a second or two. He's there. He's there, he's everywhere. He is right here, and he's not passive. He is active in our presence, right? He works to filter out the things in our lives that draw us away from Christ and such that we'll be drawn closer to him. He works against evil, he works for good. He is an active person here in this home, in your home, in your workplace, on your computer, on the phone, in your truck, in your car, wherever it is. He is with you and he is active. And when we ask him to, in a special way, to come to us in prayer, you know, to be with us in prayer, we need to make sure we have clean hearts. That's why, going back to the navigators, right, they have an acronym for how to pray to God, and it's CATS, right? It's confession, adoration, thanksgiving, and supplication. The supplication comes last. Confess your sins first. And uh we'll get into a little bit more of that as we go on here. We must come before Him with a clean heart. That includes going to church. And while it's important that we allow the Holy Spirit to work in us to lead us to repentance and confession of our sins in order to approach God rightly, as we shall see, it's not as simple as just doing this a minute or two after we get out of the car before we open or have the doors open for us as we walk into church. It's not that simple. It's not that short-lived. It's not that little bit of time. It's part of it, but it's by far and away the one of the smallest parts of it. Is it necessary? You bet it's necessary. You're going in to publicly worship God. You and I need to make sure our hearts are clean. There's only one way to do it. That's to confess before Him the sins we don't want to think about, the sins that we have rationalized aren't that bad, that don't need confession, that don't need repentance. Those sins. Remember Psalm 66, you know, if I hide iniquity in my heart, God will not hear me. So sing all the praise songs you want, tears coming out of your eyes, weeping on your knees, bowing before God, with sin held in your heart consciously, he's not hearing you. That's what his word says. He's not hearing you. We need to clean ourselves up. But as we'll see, this isn't a once-a-week process before we go before God when we go to uh worship him in our churches. Guarding our steps, while those things are a necessary part of it. I believe that Solomon is stating more than this. I believe he's telling us that we must guard our steps at all times. And so we're going to discuss, we're just going to use two examples. We're going to discuss how you and I can and should do this again, not just on Sundays, but every day. And if we're really guarding our steps, we might be doing this, we should be doing it probably hourly. Hourly. And in some cases, even more than that. One of the things that I found in studying this passage is that Solomon, through the Holy Spirit, did use the word steps. Think about him, might have said, guard your heart, guard your mind, guard your spirit. And all those things will be incorporated into this. But the word of God says, guard your steps. And that's one of the reasons that I believe Solomon is telling us that this is not just simply a Sunday thing, but an everyday thing, an every hour thing. Guarding our steps in Ecclesiastes is like walking, except it is a spiritual thing and not a physical one. Each day we have hundreds, you know, each day we take thousands of steps. Each day we have hundreds of decisions we make. Sometimes it may even be more than hundreds of decisions. If we're up 16 hours in an average day and make one decision every five minutes, am I going to put cream in my coffee as a decision? It's not a big one, but my point is if we're up 16 hours a day, we make one decision every five minutes, we would have made 192 decisions in that day. And many of those decisions, not all, but many, have consequences to them when they are decisions of right and wrong. Let's just say that five decisions a day, a day have moral consequences to them. Will I allow myself to get angry or will I show self-control? Will I be ill-tempered or will I be patient? Will I be judgmental or will I show grace? Will I be censorious or will I lovingly give the benefit of the doubt? Will I gossip or will I keep what I know to myself? Will I lie or will honesty be the step that I take? Will I steal or will I be content with what the Lord has given me? Will I slander or will I lift someone up? Will I hate or will I love? Will I cause discord or will I be a peacemaker? Will I be a sour puss with a frown on my face or will I be joyful? Will I be harsh or will I be gentle? Those kinds of things. Just five a day. Just five of those decisions a day. You know, decisions like how am I gonna speak to my spouse? How am I gonna talk to my co-worker? Those kinds of decisions. If you just have five of those a day, and we have more, but I'm gonna keep this conservative, over the course of the year, that would be 1,800 critical right decisions over right versus wrong, over godliness versus worldliness that you and I will have made. And if you live or I live for 40 years as a believer, you and I will have made about 73 decisions as to whether or not we're going to walk the path, there's the steps thing again, right? Walk the path toward Jesus or walk the path toward the devil and this world. You see how each one of those decisions are like steps? Solomon tells us that our decisions are a big deal and that we must be on constant guard about the steps that we will take. And I say this, we're not going to get this tonight, but I say this later on in this message, in this teaching, and that's this that when we think of steps, whether it's in a day, um, I take before my knees crashed, I took probably between four and seven thousand steps a day. Brian takes twelve, thirteen thousand steps a day in a retail store. Kevin and Michael may take the same or more, those types of things. At the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month or the year, the steps that we take in our lives are, even though they're only two and a half or three feet, at the end of the year, if you walk like 5,000 steps a day, you will have walked over 800 miles in that year. It's about 2.2 miles a day. Right? You really get somewhere, is my point. You would be able to look back from Columbia, South Carolina, and say on December 31st and say on January 1st, I started in Rochester. I've really got a path that my life speaks about. And that's what Solomon's talking about here, but it's a spiritual thing, not a physical thing. Let me read to you from Revelation chapter 17, six verses, uh, because I want to make my point going into this passage. Then one of the seven angels, this is Revelation 17, verses 1 through 6, then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, Come, I will show you the judgment of the great prostitute who is seated on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality, and with the wine of whose sexual immorality the dwellers on earth have become drunk. And he, that's the angel, carried me, John is the one writing this down, away into the sp away in the spirit into the wilderness. And I, this is John, saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was full of blasphemous names. And it had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet and adorned with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And on her forehead was written a name of mystery. Babylon the Great, mother of prostitutes and of earth's abominations. And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And when I saw her, I marveled greatly. Now, without getting into exactly who was the woman and the beast, and actually the angel will partially describe that later on in chapter 17, but that's not my point here. One thing I think we can all agree on when we read that passage is that John is seeing evil. Right? He's seeing evil. There's no way we can get away from that when we talk about those that are sexually immoral and like it so much they're drunk on sexual immorality. There's no way that uh we can see this as being anything but evil. She's holding a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her sexual immorality. And John saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. He is staring into evil. He is staring into the world and the prince of this world as well. That's what he's staring into. That's the world system that he's seeing. John is seeing evil things, things that the world holds dear, but are in exact opposition to the will and love of the Lamb of God. Again, every day there are two ways of life before us, multiple times in each day, that we have to choose which direction we're going in. Are we going to guard our steps? But before I go on, I want us to picture in our minds a lamb. Just picture in your mind a lamb. Not just any lamb, but the precious lamb of God. How sweet, how loving he is in your mind's eye. Actually, this is all truthful, but I'm doing this for a purpose. How he loves you. How he would never do anything to harm you. After all, he died for you because of his incredible love for you. He has a track record from eternity past as a builder, as a lifter up, as a protector, as one who can only tell what is true. And he and he alone knows how to love you unconditionally. And in this picture in our minds of this precious Lamb of God who loves us, he's calling us over to come near to him. And he's doing that because he knows that to be next to him will be the only way for us to remain safe and secure. And the next picture in your mind, I want you to imagine a beast and a whore. A beast and a whore. These figures, while actually quite ugly, stand before you and me in such a way that the whore looks beautiful and enticing and is offering you a world full of pleasures and supposed happiness. It may not be sexual, it may be monetary, it might be placing things of this world above Jesus and the things of heaven. It could be any of those things. But there she is with the beast. And that's what she's promising you. Pleasures, happiness. And she too is calling you to her and what she has to offer. But she has a track record, too. In her case, in her case, it is one of murder, lies, theft, and destruction. There you stand with a decision to make. You struggle with who you will run to. Think about the precious Lamb of God in your mind's eye. Think of the beast and the whore in your mind's eye. You have a decision to make. Deep, deep, deep down, as children of the living God, you know who you should run to. But there's this draw, this attraction, this enticement to go to the whore. Which way do we go? One way it deserves the land. The other way it deserves the beast. One way finds itself fellowshipping with the blood-bought Church of Jesus Christ, the Lamb's pure bride. The other makes a decision to fellowship, to come in contact with, to wrap our arms around the world and the beast's foul whore. That's really the picture when we're debating whether or not we're gonna follow Christ or follow our flesh. Those are the two ends to the means. We're gonna walk. We're gonna take steps to go in one of those two directions. Yes, there's spiritual steps, but nevertheless, we're gonna make those steps. But think about this: the next time you or I are debating, do we take the path of righteousness or the path that our flesh desires to take? Will it be the precious lamb or it will be, or will it be the world, the beast, and the foul whore that we run to? I suggest that if that's how we look uh at the at the at God and his enemy that he's already defeated at the cross, but will finally defeat him when he creates a new heaven and a new earth, that it might make the decision to go in the path of righteousness a little bit more easy. Which one of us, which one of us would run from the light and into the darkness of a prostitute's room? One way pleases God through obedience, the other looks at God, who he is, what he's done, and says, it's not enough. Not for this decision, you're not enough. I'm going to go my own way, even though it's against what you have told me to do, even though I know you have told me these things. Out of your love for me, I am turning my face away from you and going my own way, right, smack, dab into the face of a whore. For the believer, one way leads to blessing. The other to chastisement. And don't forget that although our sins have been forgiven, they have been purchased on the cross, there may still very well be consequences for our sinfulness while we are here on earth. Give you some examples, right? Just a couple. Adultery. True believers would still be forgiven, but marriages and families can be ruined, lives broken, and left in despair. Fornication. STDs can be a result of this type of sin. Some of these diseases will stay with the person for the rest of their lives. This type of behavior may lead to a pregnancy. And in the course of trying to either hide what you've done or hating the outcome of what you've done, the life of a baby, one created in the image of God, is murdered. That happens, by the way, in the United States every 34 seconds. Theft, you get caught. Maybe you lose your job, you lose your reputation, you lose your standing in the community or in the church. Lying and gossip both can ruin your own life and respect from others and may very well harm or wreck the other person. There's only one reason for gossip, and that is pride. When we gossip about somebody else, what we're really doing is saying I am better than that person. See? See, look what he did. Look what she did. I'm not like that. It's pride. It's filthy and it's disgusting. And none, no child of God should ever be caught in gossip. And if we are, if we slip because the tongue is impossible to control, we need to ask for forgiveness and repent of it immediately and ask the Holy Spirit to give us the strength to never do that stuff again. Lying. There's only one reason for lying, really. You and I are not trusting God that should we tell the truth, no matter how hard it might be, that He won't take care of the consequences. No, he will. And again, there may be repercussions in this life for what we've done that's wrong. We lied, and now we got to fess up to it and that, and there may be some repercussions, but it is the right thing to do. And if we're in that position of whether or not we're gonna run to the lamb or run to the whore, we need to run to the lamb and trust because he loves us so much he died for us. He is our protector, he is our safe, our shield. We run to him and say, I've got to lay this at you because this is good, this is so hard to do. I'm gonna trust that you'll help me through this. There might be anger, there might be hatred, there might be all sorts of repercussions to telling the truth that somebody doesn't want to hear or that you didn't want anybody to know about, and now you feel the Spirit of God telling you you've got to do it. But we lie. It's too easy to get away with this. It's too easy not to have to uh let anybody know that I did this or did that. And so we lie. It's breaking one of the Ten Commandments and it's running to the whore. We need to be convinced that it's better to live for the lamb than for the beast. It is better to live with the pure bride, which we are part of, than it is with the nasty prostitute. It's better to live for eternal things rather than for the temporary things. It's better to please God rather than to anger him. So again, what does it mean to guard our steps? In short, Solomon is telling us to examine our lives at all times before we step in our local churches, before we step into our car, before we step out of our homes, before we step into work, while we're stepping at work, while we're doing whatever the day calls us to do. Guard our steps. Guarding our steps, we must direct our lives to be worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Lamb who was slain. In Philippians 1.27, the first part of this, Paul tells us, only let your manner of life. Manner of life? It's every part of it. It's who you are. It's your character, it's your very essence, it's your very being, right? Paul says, only let who you are, the life you lead, the manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ. And in order to walk worthy of the gospel, one of the many things that we must do, which by the way will indeed help us immensely, is to consider that our citizenship is in heaven. And I'll touch on this tonight and finish it the next time we meet. If we look at the same verse in Philippians that was 127, and we look at it in the New Living Translation, this is how it reads Above all, above all, where's it on the list? Top. It's on the top of the list. Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the good news about Christ. We need to pay attention to the phrase conducting yourselves. We're back to the steps that we take. Conducting yourselves, the way we do so must be in a manner worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And one of those ways that we walk worthy of the gospel is by making the aim and focus of our daily lives to reflect our citizenship in heaven. You see, we think only the major decisions are the important ones. They're not. People make a decision as to whether or not you're joyful or a grump, not by any one particular decision, but how they see you on a regular basis. People make a decision about that person's a liar, not because they told one lie, but because they tell lie after lie after lie, maybe small lies, right? No difference in God's eyes, but you know, from a human perspective, you know, those little things that we think don't make any difference, right? But they look at our daily steps. What's our speech like? Do we gossip? Do we tear other people down? Are we moaners and grumblers? Are we stiff-necked toward those that don't love us? You know, it may not be any one incident that causes anyone to think of us that way. Look, we all have impressions of one another. You all have an impression of me. And it doesn't just come from every other Monday night for those that know me better and see me more often. You make a decision on who I am by my daily life, the manner of living. And obviously, I'm far from far from perfect, and I need forgiveness and repentance, perhaps and probably more than anybody else in this room. But that's how we all come up with our opinions of everyone else in this room, and everyone else that we work with and that we worship with in church. Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the good news about Christ. And again, one of these ways that we do this is by remembering where our true citizenship is. And this would have resonated, Paul's writing to the Philippians, this would have resonated with the Philippian church. Check this out. The Bible is so cool. Philippi had earned the distinction of a Roman colony. When Rome was in power, it established many colonies outside of the city in order to protect outside of the city of Rome in order to protect Rome from invasions. After years of faithful service, these colonies established by Rome eventually became Roman colonies with all the rights and privileges of Rome itself. These colonies took great pride in their citizenship of Rome. They spoke the Latin language. They wore Roman clothes, and their magistrates bore Roman titles. It didn't matter how far the colony was from Rome, geographically speaking, they lived as Romans. We see something of how important Roman citizenship was when we read Acts chapter 22. Remember, Paul was in Jerusalem, and his presence in the temple caused this great uproar. And therefore he was taken into custody by Roman guards. And as they were about to flog him, he said, Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen? When the soldiers heard this, they were shocked, and no one would flog him or question him. Great privileges and esteem came with being a citizen of Rome. Therefore, when Paul used the word conduct in Philippians 1.27, as we read in the New Living Translation, it would have challenged the Philippians to whom he was preaching and speaking, as they were reminded of their greatly esteemed Roman citizenship. Paul was reminding them, and this word of God tonight is reminding you and me that their and our heavenly citizenship is greater than Rome's, then. It's greater than being a citizen of the United States, and it comes with far more greater privileges. As citizens of heaven, it's incumbent upon us to change the way we think. Romans 2.12 says this. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world. How are we doing? Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world. What's the pattern of this world? It's anti-God, it's anti-Christ, it's anti-His Word, it's anti-truth in any one of those forms. Don't conform any longer to the pattern of this world. If the word of God described you or me and any of those things that, you know, we're being uh curmudgeons instead of joyful, any of those things that I mentioned earlier in this message, don't do that anymore. And you and I can't fix that in and of ourselves. It's impossible because the flesh is still alive. Our fleshly spirit is still alive. And it is at war with the Holy Spirit of God who entered into us and stays with us from the moment of our salvation until we go to be with our precious Savior. He's the one that will give us the strength, the power, and the guidance to be able to do what's right, to be able to not conforming any longer to the pattern of this world. But not only don't conform to that pattern any longer, which in and of itself we can't do by ourselves, but that's the command. This isn't a suggestion, but be transformed. You and I can't transform ourselves. Can't do it. Can't do it. But be transformed how? By the renewing of your mind. How is that done? This is how we renew our mind. This is what will tell us what's right and what's wrong. And we need to be in this book, day in and day out, whenever possible. I know circumstances arise that sometimes doesn't make it possible, but when the time is there, we need to set that side, that time aside, so that we can have a renewing of our minds. Because if we don't stay in this word, and at one time we were robust in our faith and we were gung-ho toward living righteously for the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, we leave this word, it doesn't take long before this stuff takes over. And the next thing you know, we are rationalizing sins in our lives like it makes no difference. I'm forgiven. I'm still going to heaven. And in the meantime, what are we doing? We're conforming to the pattern of this world against the holy lamb of God. We're running to the whore. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. And I'm gonna stop with this final paragraph because I think it's important. We've talked about transformed. And you know, Paul says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And the verb transformed is the same verb used of Jesus' transfiguration. All right, and the transfiguration was was a uh uh a time when those that were on that mount saw Jesus in his glorious state as he will appear in the age to come. They saw it before that ever took place. And in union with Christ, that's you and me, we too are being transformed into his likeness with an ever-increasing glory. That's 2 Corinthians 3.18. You know, by nature we have a depraved mind, right? A lot of verses I use Romans 1.28. By grace, this mind has been changed. Okay, 2 Corinthians 5, 17 and 18, right? Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, what are they? New creation. The old is what? Gone. The new is what? Come. We've been transformed. And by the way, that transformation is the responsibility of the Holy Spirit. We sang to him this evening, because he does make all things new. He made each one in this room that's a born again child of God new. Jesus paid the price for our sins without the cross and his blood. Doomed to an eternity in hell. He's the one that saved us. But who transformed us? The Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit. When He came into us, why do you think all of a sudden, after being saved, you like this, it's not always like this, but you like this decide I'm not gonna sleep around anymore. I'm not gonna get drunk anymore. I'm not gonna do drugs anymore. I'm not gonna steal anymore. I'm not gonna lie anymore. I'm gonna go out and buy a Bible. I'm gonna go to church. I'm gonna try and draw others to Christ. Who does that in you and in me? It's the Holy Spirit does that. Praise God that he sends us his Holy Spirit and that he doesn't come and go like he did in Old Testament times. Post-cross, on this side of the cross, he comes and stays in all of his children. We have an incredible, glorious God. We owe him everything. We owe him everything. And you know, in that song that we sung about Jesus? This needs to be our prayer. Because in the bridge, she sings, talking about Jesus, all we have. And think about it this way: if I lost everything else, would Jesus be enough? All we need. Is he all we need? Or do we need? Now we obviously we obviously live on this planet. We need money to pay bills and that sort of stuff. But if that becomes, if the if the retirement account or the savings account or whatever it might be, the number of cars in the driveway, the size of the house, if that becomes an end all with the gifts that God has given us, then Jesus is not all we need. We need the next car, we need the bigger home, we need the next raise. And how about all we want? We have work to do. We have work to do. We need to have our minds, we need to, we need to be transformed. We have to leave the pattern of this world. The cares of this world should not be our cares. They shouldn't be. I'm not talking about caring about loved ones and things of that nature. I'm not talking about caring about the lost. I'm talking about, I'm done, Susie. I'm talking about the the cares of what this world system has to offer. That's what the world goes after. That should not be us. And if we find ourselves in that condition or in that position, any one of us in that, that we need to assess our lives and look to the word and look to God and say, Lord, if I'm off track and it looks like I am, bring me back. Change me. Change me to be more like Jesus. Thank you for listening to our latest broadcast on the book of Ecclesiastes. Tonight we studied chapter five and got through one verse. And may the study of God's Word, along with your meditation upon it, lead us to desire Him more, draw closer to Him, be more like Him, to become more and more sanctified by the Holy Spirit of God to be more like our precious Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Until next time, may our Lord richly bless you and yourself.