Tied to the Treadmill of Life

Whatever God's assigned to you, whether it's teaching that class or writing that computer code or washing those dishes or mowing that lawn, the smallest things to the most significant things are equally designed by our sovereign God in His purposes that we can't even begin to fathom. So in the meantime, whatever your hand finds, do it with all your might to the glory of God.

Whatever you do, give it everything you've got. Is life just an endless loop of tasks, a treadmill that never stops? Solomon, in the book of Ecclesiastes asks this question from the heart, reflecting on how our days often feel repetitive and empty.

But as we examine his reflections, we uncover a deeper truth. Without God, life can feel like vanity upon vanity, just going through the motions. Today you'll be challenged to invite God into the detail of your days, every task. When you do, everything gains purpose and meaning. Join Stephen to explore how faith transforms the routines of life from a mere treadmill to a journey.

You might be a little discouraged with life. Like the little boy I read about recently, a pastor wrote in an article about a mother who was, who walked in on her five-year-old son. He was in his bedroom getting ready and he was crying. And she said, what's the matter? And he said, I can tie my shoes now all by myself.

She said, that's wonderful. You're growing up so big, but why are you crying? He said, because now I have to do this every day for the rest of my life. Poor kid, he's already feeling the pain of growing up. The tedium of life, responsibilities like tying your shoes, maybe picking up your toys while you're at it.

He's picked up on that sense that you get. And at five years of age, he's already a little disappointed in having one more thing to do. Is that all there is to life?

Is that it? Just an ever-growing list of tedious chores, responsibilities, repetitions. That kid's gonna grow up and he's gonna ask questions the human race has been asking.

They're harder questions. He'll find the words for them like, what do I do that really matters in life? Is there anything I'm doing that lasts? Am I condemned to simply repeat the cycle of duties and responsibilities all over again? Am I gonna be tied down to a treadmill called life? Five-year-olds aren't the only ones bothered with that idea.

15-year-olds are asking 35-year-olds, 50-year-olds, 85-year-olds the same. Does anything in life really have any meaning beyond the endless cycle or are we all like, you know, gerbils trapped in a cage on that little wheel and we're spinning and running and racing, getting nowhere? There's an old man who wrote the same questions down in his journal. God evidently wanted us to be exposed to his questions, his answers and learn from them. God included his journal in the record of Scripture.

It's called the book of Ecclesiastes. We've just begun our exposition through this book. Solomon is just beginning to ask some hard questions.

Sounds a lot like that five-year-old kid. So go there. You haven't already. We're at chapter one. We're gonna pick it up at verse two where we read vanity of vanities says the preacher. Vanity of vanity is all is vanity. Now anytime you find one word repeated five times in the same verse, you ought to notice it.

You might even want to circle it five times. The question is, what does vanity mean? And I gotta tell you that it took a long time, a lot of reading to discover this is one of the hardest words in the Hebrew Bible to translate, to get to the bottom of. I'm still, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty close here.

I think I'm ready. But it goes back to a little bit of a challenge for us as English readers. In the fourth century, a man by the name of Jerome translated the Hebrew Bible much of it into Latin using the word, you could pronounce it vanitas or vanitas. You can see the word vanity in it. It's just simply been transliterated vanity in English translations for centuries since. The problem is when the English reader hears the word vanity, we think of someone who is vain. We think of someone who is stuck on themselves, their opinion, their lives, everything about themselves, that they can't, they can't wait to post the next selfie.

They're so vain. That's the idea behind that famous song. You know the lyrics, you're so vain, I'll bet you think this sermon is about you.

I tweaked it a little bit to make it work in church. The truth is we better get to the right meaning of the word. He loves this word. Now if you look it up in your Hebrew lexicon, you discover the word primarily means vapor or breath.

Secondary meanings can refer to fruitlessness or transience. Solomon is gonna use a word that's actually elastic. He's gonna describe using this word futility and frustration and senselessness and desperation. So when you see the word vanity, you need to understand that its nuance is gonna be determined by the context.

And he'll use it in a variety of contexts in his private journal. It's really a lot like the English language. We have a lot of words like that, right?

It takes the context to determine what we mean by it. We use the word love like that. You guys might say I love my wife. And you also might say I love football.

Hopefully it's not to the same level of commitment. You say I love mountain climbing or I love shopping. I love scrapbooking. I love reading.

I love coffee. Now I also want you to notice here at the outset that Solomon is putting a lot of emotion into this expression. He's stating it as a superlative and this is the highest degree possible. Notice it isn't just vanity. It's vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. So to the highest degree, life is vanity.

That's what he means to the highest degree. By the way, you've read other superlatives in your Bible reading. You've read holy of holies. That's a really, really, really holy place.

In fact, it is to the highest degree the holiest place. He is king of kings. That means he's really king. He is the highest king. There is none higher than him. He's the lord of lords. That is he is the highest lord of all other so-called lords.

There is no higher degree than his sovereign lordship. That's the idea. So Solomon in this opening line is essentially claiming that everything on earth, everything in life to the highest degree can be described as entirely meaningless, totally hopeless, absolutely futile. And that's his opening line.

Are we depressed yet? There's a workshop we can take, evidently coming up pretty soon. Lead Solomon next to deliver this question he should arrive at.

People are still asking it this day. To this day, verse 3, what does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? The word gain is a commercial term. It's a business word. It means profit.

You might write in the margin the word profit. It refers to something left over after you've invested all that toil. What do you have to show for it? That's what he's asking.

What do we have to show for all our hard work under the sun? Oh, there's a clue. Note that, under the sun. It's another favorite expression of Solomon's.

He's going to write under the sun 29 times in his private journal. In fact, Ecclesiastes is the only book in the Bible that uses that expression under the sun, and that's a clue. By the way, I mentioned in our last study, last Lord's Day, that Solomon eventually will take us, chapters later, to remember our creator God.

Okay? We'll get there. Because if we bring that into the first chapter, he's essentially saying without God, who reigns above the sun, who rides the clouds as chariots and determines the orbits of planets and stars he has personally named. Without that creator God, your perspective is stuck under the sun here and now. If that's all you get, if this is all that matters, that kind of perspective Solomon is going to show us is going to lead us to ultimate desperation and frustration and fear.

One popular journal not too long ago asked the question to its subscribers and got a lot of answers back, I'll just read one of them. Why are we here? Why are we here?

I'll just read you one by a taxi driver. He just kind of got right to the chase. He answered, we're here to just live and then die.

In the meantime, I do some fishing, take my girl out, pay taxes, do a little reading, then get ready to drop dead. He's a delightful man, I'm sure. He goes on to say life is a big fake.

It's a fake. The only cure, he says, for the world's illness is nuclear war. Wipe everything out and start over. I'd be afraid to get in this taxi, frankly. That's it. I'm just here on my way to death, dying.

In the meantime, I'm going to do a little fishing, pay a few taxes, take my girl out. Oh, he's telling you the truth about life under the sun. We just wouldn't be so blunt. To put it in more philosophical terminology that maybe is a little polite but just as despairing is Leo Tolstoy. He was an amazing author, wrote War and Peace, and that was considered, and to this day is acclaimed as one of the greatest works in the world of literature.

He's nominated numerous times for the Nobel Prize of Literature in the early 1900s. He writes in his later years, and I quote, the age of 50 brought me to the verge of suicide. A question without an answer to which one cannot live is this. What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live?

Why wish for anything or do anything? Is there any meaning in my life that death does not destroy? Is this all life is? I tie my shoes over and over and over again?

How am I going to get on that treadmill? Is it going to end in death? Is that it? Solomon and his best seller says it that way. What do we get? What do we profit? What do we really gain through this life of toil under the sun? Now his answer is nothing. We gain nothing. It's a rhetorical question. That's the answer.

You end up empty and frustrated and then it's over. He's not getting us to the answer yet. That's chapters later.

I'm just bringing that perspective back in here. What he's going to do is put our nose in the truth of this. He's going to load the bus up and he's going to take us on a field trip. He's going to say, I'm going to show you how small and futile and unimportant we are by looking around us at the world of nature.

Get on the bus. Notice verse 4. A generation goes and a generation comes, but have you noticed? The earth remains forever. In other words, Solomon is saying, have you noticed how the earth seems to remain as steady as ever? But we do nothing but come and go. Pay a little taxes, do a little fishing, I'm gone. And somebody else is going to come along and they're going to fish in that pond and they're going to pay a few taxes and they're gone. But the earth just seems to keep on rotating. It doesn't seem right. Essentially what he's saying is that we can't get out of the funeral procession. It's quite a procession.

Ever since the fall of man, in fact 158,904 people die on average every single day. That's at the rate of two per second. And guess what the earth does? It keeps revolving. It doesn't seem to be bothered. It stays in its orbit 24-7, 365 days a year. It doesn't seem to care that last year, last year, as it made just one revolution around the sun, 55 million people died.

And we made absolutely no impact on earth. In fact, there's something else here and I want to spend a few minutes on this. I ended up really studying this a lot longer than I probably should have.

But I think he's hinting at something else here. This terra firma, this earth, this dirt, this land stays. And people come and go. They come and they're gone. And the dirt remains, the earth remains as it has always been. Notice verse five.

The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. Do you affect that? Do you change that?

Do you make a dent in that? And I think he's also implying, and it's interesting as he uses the verb for hasten, literally it pants. It can't wait. It can't wait to get up in the morning.

It can't wait to be on its course, as if to imply by contrast, the older we get, the harder it gets to get up and get moving and get on our course. But not the sun. It rose this morning at 6.40 a.m. and it's going to set tonight at 7.41 p.m. Set your clock by it, steady, doesn't miss a beat. You and I have nothing to do with it, even though you can set your watch by it, seemingly unchanging in its course. It doesn't seem to be winding down.

We are. This is Solomon's point. I want you to see something else, Solomon says. Notice verse six. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north. Around and around goes the wind and on its circuits, the wind returns.

Do you have any influence over that? By the way, I think this is fascinating because before Solomon could ever observe global circulation of the atmosphere, before he could ever scientifically prove the existence of the great jet streams of earth which run in circles, that's exactly what he's writing here. Solomon, by the way, in this journal is fascinated with wind. It's going to mean several different things as we work our way through it. He observes that mankind really doesn't change the direction of it.

It's his main idea. It keeps on blowing. It keeps on circulating. He's going to refer to the wind, and he does in the Song of Solomon only one time in the Book of Proverbs six times, but in this particular journal, he's going to refer to the wind 14 times. As he sat on his rooftop in his palace, he must have just observed the effects of it and marveled at how great, how big, how massive, how powerful even the wind was and how little we are. You see, the earth keeps spinning. The sun keeps shining.

The wind keeps blowing. He says now look at the rivers. Verse 7, all the streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full.

That is, it can capacitate it. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. There again is the sense of cycle and repetition. The reference, by the way, to streams or rivers is a reference to winter streams. That is, they're taking their water to the sea.

In the next year, they're going to have an abundance, and they're going to do it all over again. By the way, the verbs in this paragraph, these participles communicate the idea of perpetual motion. It just keeps moving. The earth keeps abiding. The sun keeps rising.

The sun keeps setting. The wind keeps circling and blowing. The rivers keep on flowing.

Don't forget where Solomon started. Generations keep coming and generations keep going. People keep on dying. It's as if we're tied to a treadmill and we can't escape. We make so little difference.

After all the toil, we have so little we could all profit. Remember, beloved, Solomon is writing from the perspective of someone stuck in their perspective under the sun. He's telling the truth about the tedium of a life down here if your perspective never gets liberated by the gospel of Jesus Christ. For Jesus, what did he do? He entered this fallen world. He got on the treadmill of humanity. He toiled under the sun. He got splinters in his carpenter fingers and calluses in his hands. He grew weary and hungry and thirsty.

His schedule was governed by sunrise and sunset, but he entered. He joined this race so that he could redeem us from a broken life that is bound up in and focused only on life under the sun. He said, there's more than that. By the way, in the meantime, he also shows us the value of work and integrity and excellence and how even the smallest acts of kindness, like giving a cup of cold water to somebody in need, can bring out the glory of his character and his kindness and his grace.

Here's the issue. At the very outset, he's setting it for us as we kind of gather it all together. Without God, life is pointless. With God, life has purpose. Without God, life is a series of accidents. With God, life is a series of appointments.

You are here for such a time as this. Even the drudgery and the tedium of those chores can be given to him as an offering of praise for assigning you. You do those assignments wanting to bring him glory. In fact, listen to what Paul says to the Corinthian believers. He says, therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable. That is, stay the course where you've been assigned, always abounding in the work of the Lord.

You know what that means? That means always keeping at the work assigned you by the Lord, knowing that in the Lord, your labor is not in what? Vain. It isn't empty.

It isn't futile. Life under the sun can seem like vanity of vanities, brief, meaningless, and futile. Let me tell you when you give your life to Jesus Christ, who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, in fact, Jesus, God the Son will prove it, for he will stand in that boat and he will say to the wind and he will say to the waves, hush, literally, hush, be still. Suddenly, our perspective goes above the sun. He's going to say, there's nothing new here.

Oh, really? You come to him and you become a new creature. You're heading toward a new earth and a new heaven because of this new covenant and a new spirit and a new heart.

Don't stay stuck. Your perspective is an indication of your trust in the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. So that repetition of life you're in, those cycles of life, that toil of life, whatever God's assigned to you, whether it's tying your shoes all by yourself or teaching that class or fixing that machine or writing that computer code or washing those dishes or mowing that lawn, the smallest things to the most significant things are equally designed by our sovereign God in His purposes that we can't even begin to fathom. So in the meantime, give everything you've got to whatever God has given you. Whatever your hand finds, do it with all your might to the glory of God. Whatever you do, give it everything you've got because it has been given to you by God.

Let me say one more thing. Think of it this way. For us then who are believers in Christ and we belong to the one who is above the sun and controls everything below and beyond, life has a sacred purpose so you take your vanity of vanities. What is it that's troubling you?

What seems tedious, repetitive, futile? Do it to the glory of God and when you do it that way, you are taking your vanity of vanities and you are moving it into the holy of holies. It becomes in the presence of God and to the surrender of your Lord.

Over here without Him, it's just vanity of vanities. When I surrender to Him, I move it over into the holy of holies. Without God, you're running in circles. With God, you've entered a race. It isn't just a cycle. It's linear because ultimately you're not a prisoner to that treadmill. You're on a pilgrimage that is ultimately taking you home.

That was Steven Davey and this is Wisdom for the Heart. Today's message is called, Tied to the Treadmill of Life. Solomon's reflections remind us that without God, we're left running in circles, stuck in a routine. But with God, we're running a race with purpose.

Every act becomes an assignment, whether it's tying your shoes or leading a team. So, embrace each day as an opportunity to live in God's presence, to bring meaning to your work and life and to ultimately finish well. Before we leave you today, I want you to know that we've taken this lesson and turned it into a booklet. The booklet has the same title, Tied to the Treadmill of Life. If you'd like information on how you can get a copy, call us today at 866-48-BIBLE.

We'd love to hear from you. That number again is 866-48-BIBLE. You'll also find it on our website, wisdomonline.org. Look for it there. Join us tomorrow for our next Bible message, right here on Wisdom for the heart.