The Tyranny of Time | Ecclesiastes 3:1-15

[Music] [Music] all right hey what's up mercy hill at all of our locations we're excited to be with you today or if you're online we're excited to have you hey guys before i dive into the sermon today i want to let you know that this coming weekend is going to be extremely exciting it is our first baptism services across all four of our locations for uh 2021 uh and so let me just say a couple things to a few different groups of people okay uh number one man some of you guys may have been coming around for a while now uh or maybe you've been online for a while or whatever it is and maybe the lord has done a great work in your life uh maybe you have become a believer hey others of you maybe you have been a believer for a long time but the reality is you know that you never took that first step of obedience when somebody becomes a christian really the first thing that we push them toward because this is what the bible tells us to do that we make disciples and we baptize them the first thing that we that we got to do is get you through the water okay the water the baptismal pool is not something that saves you there's no magic in it it is a symbol that god uses much like a wedding ring okay you wear a wedding ring it doesn't make you married but you wear it with joy because you want the world to know that you're married when somebody becomes a christian that's what baptism is you identify with the life death and resurrection of jesus christ if you need to be baptized and i want to call you to go online or text and get what you need so you can text or you can sign up online uh so that we can see you baptize on february 4th or 7th you can text baptize to 41411 or we have a big banner on our website where you can sign up there hey the other group real quick is that some of you guys uh maybe some of you guys that are online that have still been kind of kind of waiting and seeing and maybe you're starting to have those conversations about when is the right time to come back to church this next weekend would be great all right because you're going to have an opportunity to dive in and to see baptism that has really propelled the church for a couple thousand years i know that everybody can't do that okay i understand that there are people in our church i know many of your stories that it's like man we are taking care of mom or there's something going on with our health and we fully understand that we're going to do everything we can do and continue to do that to provide the best experience we can for those of you guys that have to be home but the reality is that many people are starting to have that conversation we're starting to see our numbers pick up and all of that hey if you're having that conversation anyway man let's come and experience baptism together when you're in the room and somebody's baptized believer you cannot stop thinking about the fact that man but for the grace of god man that was me i needed to go under the water and come back up there is something spiritual that happens in us uh and so man if you're kind of hanging out you're trying to see us at the right time or not i know not everybody's there but if that's you we would love to see in our services february 4th and 7th all right hey let's dive in we are going to be in ecclesiastes chapter 3 today and we are going to be tackling a passage that is very very familiar to us okay but even though it rings with familiarity i do wonder if we have really considered it okay because as we come to ecclesiastes chapter 3 today i realize this is one of those passages that many of us know we would know things in it even if you're not a believer it's popular in culture and yet i was thinking about this in my life and may i don't know if this is literally true or not because i've heard like 10 000 sermons in my life but i cannot remember ever hearing a sermon directly on this passage okay and so even though it's very familiar to us i'm not sure that we have considered it and i want to make sure that we consider it today hey today i want to talk to you guys about the tyranny of time all right i want to talk to you about the seasons i want to talk to you about this nagging oppressive thing that many of us distract ourselves from not thinking about or don't really know what to think about it or or whatever and it's that that little inkling that we all have that there is a certain amount of seconds and a little clock that's hanging over our head and it's counting down and you have less of them than you did when i started this sermon already you know it's a nagging kind of oppressive thing that whether you are a christian or whether you are totally someone who's like man i don't know uh maybe i don't even believe there's a god hey whether it's through god's sovereignty or atheistic determinism either way one thing we can agree on is there's a certain amount of seconds that are counting down what do we do with that what do we do with the reality that we have less time now than we did this morning uh isn't that something that kind of pushes us and nags us well it does uh and for many people it kind of pushes us into saying man i'm living on borrowed time so i better hurry you know i mean we frantically kind of realized like man time is running out time is running out many of us become a little rabbit uh in alice in wonderland that we're very late you know and we're and we're just hustling here and there hey others of us when we really begin to consider time it scares us enough and we're not sure what to think about it and we don't know what we're supposed to do with it but we know it's running out it leads us to want to just try to distract ourselves actually the book of ecclesiastes has a lot to say about that doesn't it man we can try to distract ourselves with possessions with work all the things that we've been talking about right we try to get away from it others of us and this is where i think i fall when i get my eyes off of christ and off the kingdom what happens to me when i begin to have the wrong worldview about time and what i'm supposed to be doing with it and even though it's kind of running down that's that's something i can redeem instead of run from when i fall into that i end up just fretting about it okay so i'm one of these people that doesn't want anybody to know it's their birthday you know i you know what i'm talking about some people love their birthday or whatever i don't uh and it's not and i'm kind of being a little bit i mean it ain't like a huge deal but it's just like man every year since about i was like 19 or 20 years old when it's your birthday i don't know about you but i'm just kind of like man you know like another year uh is gone and i get very contemplative my kids um really play on this they love to mess with me about about getting older and all this kind of stuff and they don't realize how much psychological damage they're doing but they they really push me a lot i think i told you guys this one time you know a lot of times i wrestle with my boys and one time i was wrestling my older son and we do this thing where it's like man we're gonna try to do our most intimidating move okay and we're gonna do a little trash talking you know and so i tell him uh i you know i'm like i'm like hey p man you got the stinkiest feet in the whole house okay or something like that i can't remember it was something you know like that and i'm like i'm gonna take you down i said all right now you give give it back to me here now give me some intimidation he said you got no abs i said what he said you got no abs okay you gotta walk with a cane your knees hurt you were i'm gonna blast you back to the 1960s where you came from it's exactly what he said i was like man you're you're intimidating my soul okay you're crushing my soul very good job i told him very good do that on the playground no i'm just kidding uh you know and i was just i was thinking to myself uh like man the whole idea my point is the whole idea of getting older is something that we can fret about if we don't have the right perspective it's like man i'm losing time another hour another year uh is chalked off the board for me here's what i want you guys to see today without wisdom from beyond the sun the tyranny of time will rule us under the sun if we don't understand that there is something to play for way beyond the sun then we will be ruled realizing man every single minute of our life is a minute gone i thought about having a giant hourglass uh right here okay and just having the thing ticked down uh during the sermon and then i thought well you know people would think the sermon's gonna be an hour long which is not okay but then the other thing i thought was how depressing would this be that we're preaching the whole time and you can just see the sand dropping you know i think that many of us if we don't have the right perspective god's wisdom from beyond the sun that's sort of the way we wake up and think about life and the seasons of life only compound that it only maddens us further if there's no point if there's nothing big that god is doing with all this here's the big idea today times and seasons are gifts from god for his glory we cannot stop time the beat goes on it's marching on this ain't our world we're just living in it the seasons come and the seasons go but what we do with that knowledge is extremely revealing about the god that we trust or not okay so let's dive in here we go ecclesiastes chapter 3. let's just kind of motor through this whole thing we're going to talk a lot about the passage and i'll kind of wrap some things up toward the end really getting at this peak time idea and we'll be done all right for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven a time to be born and time to die a time to plant a time to pluck up what is planted a time to kill and a time to heal a time to break down and time to build a time to weep and a time to laugh a time to mourn and time to dance a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing a time to seek and a time to lose a time to keep and a time to cast away a time to tear and a time to sow a time to keep silence and a time to speak a time to love and a time to hate a time for war and a time for peace okay it turns out god wrote a pop song from the 1960s actually the birds picked up on this all right and maybe some of you guys have heard this before all right it's funny because in the 60s this song was not written then it was written a little bit earlier but it got really popular because the vietnam war and what people were trying to say is oh the meaning of this passage is that whatever we're going through there's always a turning of the page and it's kind of like actually that's not really what's being said here okay it's not this idea of whatever's bad will always get better or you could flip it you could say whatever's good will always get worse i mean the way you're looking at it that's not really the right way to look at it the way to look at it is this man the preacher in ecclesiastes 3 is pointedly showing us these are the ingredients of life this is a simple poem pointing to the realities of our life under the sun he's not saying good he's not saying bad he's just saying y'all that's life it is what it is if you go through these 14 opposites you pretty much cover life in the human up from the human perspective you know what time to born trying to be born a time to die a time to plant a time to pick uh you know what what they're kind of saying is this idea that i brought up in the intro hey you got to think about it there was a time that the clock started in your life and there is a time that it will run all the way out he says the time to kill and a time to heal a time to break a time to build up in a time to break down y'all probably in an agrarian setting this idea of kill and heal is maybe something even that is agrarian itself there's a time to build something up there's a time to realize that it can't be mended there's a time to build up there's a time to break there's a time to kill there's a time to heal i think i told you guys about when i was a kid we had a dog named gus we were out of town and the dog got in a bunch of rat poison okay really really bad really bad stuff for a dog and uh man the neighbors were really uh concerned and they they took him up to the vet and all that kind of stuff and they couldn't get a hold of us and so they called my grandfather my grandfather wasn't about to take a dog to the vet okay this is old school all right and he he gets up there and he looks around and he realizes how much money this is going to cost everybody and uh and he says y'all if he needs it i can fix that dog for 10 cents he was talking about a shotgun shell all right now there are people whose eyes was that big okay he took that dog and laid him in the back of old blue which was his truck took him home put him in the garage and fed him raw steak for a week dog has never you've never seen a bed i mean just up and about you know he was he was totally fine i guess it was his time to heal but if it wasn't it was going to go the other way i think actually that's sort of what he's kind of getting at here in an agrarian setting not a dog obviously but in an agrarian setting there's a time for killing there is a time for letting heal there's a time to build up there is a time to break down he says weep and laugh mourn and dance how many of us have been raised i think in our society with so much uh affluence for you know frivolity comfort we don't even know what it's like to weep we don't even know what it's like to mourn we don't even know what it's like man all we want to do is escape those things and yet the world is so broken there is a time for weeping and there is a time for mourning you know you think about it like this ecclesiastes 3 takes a genesis 3 view of creation what he's saying is the world is broken yes there will be a time in the next life when there is no more weeping we know that every tear will be wiped away that is not where we live right now where we live right now is that there is a time for weeping and mourning man the world is broken we lose people hey there are churches all around the country right now that were all kind of together in raleigh durham 10 years ago we've been sent out all over the country and you know what i bet you many churches are mentioning one name over the course of these last couple weeks a man named carl scott a businessman that died a couple of weeks ago in raleigh durham north carolina that had every bit the impact on people at the summit church in raleigh durham than any staff pastor ever did he was an encourager and he was a lover of god he was a lover of the church he was a businessman and you know what he passed away and many of us uh have been uh just me weeping and moaning over that especially at raleigh durham people who knew him more but all of us have been saddened over what has happened you know that is that that's a reality of a broken world man we see things in our life that are just terrible when family members make bad decisions we see things in the world violence abortion domestic abuse fatherlessness we see these things and it just breaks our absolute heart y'all we we we know that there's a broken world there's a time for weeping a time for mourning he says there's a time to cast stones and a time to gather that's probably an agrarian reference again there's times to move things away so you could plow a field have it in a wartime situation it's better to put stones in somebody else's field so they can't make food for themselves that's kind of maybe what's going on there verse five says a time to embrace at a time to refrain from embracing kovid okay don't tell anybody i'm preaching hugging at mercy hill okay there's a time to embrace there's a time to refrain he says there's a time to seek and a time to lose i think about this for myself i have that time every week when i lose my car keys and lunch box and all that stuff there's a time to keep a time to cast away verse seven he says this there's a time to sow and a time to tear what's that about sowing and tearing y'all this is grief in an ancient culture man that we would tear our clothes and grief and there comes a time when it's time not to not to be torn any longer and i don't know i can't go all the way into this but i've thought about this this week and i feel like maybe somebody either online or one of our locations or maybe here even today you need to hear this but yes there is a time to tear there's a time to get your feet back under you there's a time to start walking again there's a time to sew that thing back up there's always a time yes there was a time to tear but now there's a time to sew you know it says there's a time to keep you know there's a time to keep silent there's a time to speak i think just practically i think we can say this today y'all we need god's wisdom to know which is the right time by the way okay these are the ingredients of life i got that but without god's wisdom we will never know what is the right reaction in terms of what time most of these things are not bad and good as in of themselves right like you take something like laughter well you say well is laughter bad or good depends on the time i mean if you're laughing because it was a funny joke that's one thing if you're laughing because there's somebody in pain or poverty like many people do around the world then that's not the right thing right it's it's about sort of the time and that's what he says here about silence and speaking we need god's wisdom to know which is the right time i think about this and i've talked about this with our uh with our staff because i've just been burdened by this for our church i've been burdened by this uh in my own life that i have got to have enough biblical character and backbone to realize that we live in an instant gratification culture the morass of unbiblical thinking that is facebook many times okay we live in that world and it can produce a ton of pressure on people to speak when right now i'm not ready doesn't matter you got to say something right now and believers we have got to have enough backbone and courage to realize wait a minute no proverbs 15 28 says a righteous man ponders what he's going to say before he says it that proverbs 15 23 says it's about a timely word that's wisdom that if you speak too soon you become what the proverb says a muddied spring no matter what the culture says no matter what the tide of the time is in terms of how fast we've got to be ones who we say wait a minute i want to speak but i want to speak at the right time you know that's what he's saying verse 8 tells us love and hate war and peace i know somebody is going to say man this is my first time experience with mercy hill what do you mean hey how could you say hate in the church yes christians hate things like child abuse okay yes there is a time for war and it just caused situation there is love there is hate there is war there is peace their point is i gotta move on from this y'all the point is that there is life there is ingredients here it is what it is this is our experience under the sun okay that's kind of what he's getting at now one of the things i want to say really practically before we get into the deeper part of this in verse 9 is this that one thing i think very practically that believers need and can learn from ecclesiastes chapter 3 is that life is defined by seasons not balance all right now here's what i mean by that balance is a myth and i've taught generations of church planters this now over the last over the last eight or nine years okay the thing is that we think about balance and we think about that being health y'all that is not health in our life health in our life is sprint rest sprint rest seasonality not balance you say exactly what you mean here's what i mean the college student in finals week i know some of you guys at clifton the high point man when finals come you ain't got no business trying to balance finals week with rest any more business and you got staying up all night studying during christmas break okay there is a season there is a sprint there is rest there are times when we work way more than 40 hours a week and that's healthy and fine so long as there are times when we don't work at all you know it's like man i run hard and then i take time and if i'm running hard and that becomes the season of my life now we're getting really unhealthy but it's not about this balance thing it's about go and stop go and stop sprint and rest i think about this with our family maybe some of you guys can identify with us my kids are old enough now where they're all playing sports they're all going different ways okay height of the spring high to the fall it's like every single night and every weekend somebody has something and the only way that we would survive it is realizing wait this season is a sprint and over the winter when we have three three months off or three and a half months off or whatever it is we're not going to fill up the calendar every single saturday you know in the summer we're not going to do every single camp that they can do every single day because why because we know how hard we spent in the fall we know how hard we're going to sprint in the spring it's not about balance it's about sprint and rest seasonality there is a time for everything in our life but i've gotta digress right we gotta get into a deeper deal here okay because let's finish the passage for today and i want to show you what he does with this again he has not said this is good or bad yet all right chapter three one through eight the famous song that we might know it's not good or bad he's saying it is that's life for the unbeliever and the believer under the sun this is what life is how do we interpret it now remember one of those bread crumbs i talked about last week man this is one of those deals where he's not man he's not playing the other side or anything like that hey he's getting into some truth here look at verse nine what gain has the worker from his toil i have seen the business that god has given to the children of man to be busy with he has made everything beautiful in its time and also he has put eternity into man's heart yet so that he cannot find out what god has done from the beginning to the end i perceive that there is nothing better for a man to be joyful and to do good as long as they live also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil this is god's gift to man i perceive that whatever god does endures forever nothing can be added to it nor anything taken away taken from it god is uh god has done it so that people fear him fear before him verse 15 that which is already has been and that which is to be already has been uh and god seeks what has been driven away now listen this is one of those times when i say this many times okay but i know that i know i know i've said it before this is one of those times where we could preach on this for four weeks straight okay just that we could break it down verse by verse the whole deal and i hope you guys are reading it i hope you guys are getting into it all right before today so that we keep moving on with the book i've got to make sure that i kind of hit what the main agenda is here because i can't just get bogged down in every single thing so here's the main agenda and it flows actually very logically which is not always the truth uh in wisdom literature but this is uh it is that way this time makes me excited okay look at what he says verse chapter three verse nine is a mirror of chapter one verse three what did he say what gain has the worker from his toil do you guys remember that over the last three weeks in chapter one where i keep saying that i keep saying like hey remember we get up in the morning uh we you know we eat breakfast we go to work we plan kids stuff we think about a vacation with friends or whatever it is you know we go exercise we do a hobby whatever it is and the point is of the book of ecclesiastes what are we gaining from all of this toil like what is the point we clean the room it gets dirty again we clean the room it gets dirty again just like on the bumper video okay what is the point that was how he framed up chapter one verse three and now we see it again right here chapter three verse nine wait a minute what is the point what do we gain from all of this toil we do all of these things we're in motion all the time time marches on and what do we gain and here's the answer okay if you've got a copy of scripture i don't know some of you guys might be new we already flashed this on the screen but if you're home you could slow this down okay hey if you're in one of our services and you've got a copy of scripture go through this with me as i go through it because i've got to be able to just kind of hit it all right what is the point you don't have to go to chapter 12. he tells you what the point is why is life like this verse 1 through 8 14 opposites the whole human spectrum why what is the point here's what he says verse 11 because god is doing something beautiful verse 13 because god is making uh giving gifts to humanity for us to enjoy verse 14 because god is doing something that will endure forever verse 14 because he is working that the people in the world may fear before him and verse 15 because nothing will be lost listen and everything that is driven away he is seeking all right so the idea here is and this is listen this is very very important okay because many people might be watching this online some of you guys might be finding your ways into our campuses uh and you're really kind of searching you're like man i'm not a christian okay i'm not even sure there's a god i'm just trying to figure out this whole thing this is one of those passages where you see the divergence as clear as day okay if you are on the man i don't think there's a god and i don't think there's a purpose then here's what happens when you look through the 14 opposites when you look through the 14 opposites this is what you end up seeing without god seasons and time become a tyrannical clock that constantly constantly reminds you that there is no purpose if there is no god you know what happens in spring it gives way to summer which gives way to fall which gives way to winter and then you know what happens it just gives way to spring again if there is no god you're born and then you die and then somebody else is born and then they die if you if there is no god whatever season you're in is just going to give way to the next season which is just going to give way to the next season which is just going to give way to the next season if there is no god i think the right of ecclesiastes would try to get us to see and try to point it out there is no god then what henry ford said about history is absolutely right where he says what is history it's one thing after another it's one thing after another after another after another if there is no god and purpose then when you begin to read chapter three one through eight it begins as a beautiful poem and it ends in tyranny it ends in an oppressive clock that right now is counting down the seconds of your life from nothing to nothing and we're living in the blip in between but if there is something else here that we could be awakened to today what i want to argue with you if you're not a believer all right and if you're coming around if you're hanging out and you're like man i'm interested in this do you know why you're interested do you know why when i begin to say there's a clock it's running out from nothing to nothing something in your soul goes man i don't know what the truth is but i don't feel like that's it i don't feel like i live as if i'm from nothing to nothing do you want to know why because of this passage ecclesiastes 3 11 he has put eternity into man's heart eternity is in your heart there is something different that is about humans there is something different about us we see beauty we see significance we think about the future we think about our life after this one francis schaefer called it the mannishness of humanity there is something unique about you from being a human and it's not just that you're smart it's that you're awake it's that you're alive it's that you can understand that i'm thinking about deep things like what comes next no animal ever every single animal it is this way because you are the crown jewel of creation you are genesis 1 28 the image of god there is something in consciousness with you and with me that makes us wake up to the realities of what could be next see for the rest of creation for everything in animal life you know what history is it's one thing after another until it's gone that's it but you and i are not satisfied with that answer we want something bigger we think our lives count for something in eternity it's like that you know it's like the gladiator quote if you guys remember that movie what you do in this life echoes in eternity that is a myth if there is no god but every one of us pines for that we all want to think man this is not just one season giving way to another giving way to another for no reason and you know what i would say i would actually agree with c.s lewis on this you know what a duck wakes up in the world and and and he he sees that there is water it corresponds to what he desires he wakes up in the world and he's like man i'm supposed to swim well you know what there's a thing called water that's how it works in creation if all of a sudden humans wake up and they say man i'm finding in me a desire that does not correspond with this world the only logical conclusion c.s lewis said is that you are probably made for another world and every one of us as humans we long for eternal significance we long for what we do to matter all right this world is more than just a clock that is ticking down only to be renewed again and again and again something in us knows that the bible says it's eternity in our hearts but think about this remember i said the divergence okay so if you're not a believer i want you to try to peak at the other side and christian i want you to think about this for just a minute with god there is beauty in every season even in tragedy we understand that god is working toward a glorious conclusion that we can't see i mean when we think about this passage it's like man we see the seasons changing and yet we trust what did it say it said i think in verse 13. man i can't i can't see everything that he's doing right i can't see it all but what i can't understand is that god is doing something that is glorious and grand all right he is doing something that is is beyond what i could ever try to even comprehend that something even in the seasonality of life there is something in him that is trustworthy and true there's something he sees that i can't see i think about this because man i listen to audible books i don't know any of you guys listen to audible books all right any of you guys the campuses listen i think uh man it's a life-changing habit for me okay i've got a book on all the time and so i'm always and and here's what i do every time man anytime i book you know anytime i get another book in the books you know any time i've got one done it's like i feel like i feel like i've accomplished something you know and i feel like i've got a little sliver of the world that i didn't have before right i feel like i got like that much more not i got that much more insight on the world and i start on another one and then i just man i look at a passage like this and i'm like man god don't need to learn nothing there is not one thing that he needs to learn in all of the universe man he sees in ways that we do not see there is a god who is working in ways that we can't see man when we begin to lean in when we begin to trust all of a sudden all of those seasons it's not a tyrannical oppression a reminder of meaninglessness now all of a sudden they are part of an everyday experience that is shot through with glory and this is because of the gospel y'all there's a god who is working for us what did it say in verse 14 and 15. there's a god who is working what he does will last forever that's verse 14 god who seeks what has been driven away that's verse 15 church do you understand what that is today y'all that is god establishing his kingdom by seeking the lost man he is endure he is grabbing and gathering he is seeking us man he is doing something with us that will last forever in sin we lost eternity with god but that echo in our hearts remains it points us to him and he loves us he sent jesus christ for us i mean think about this jesus is outside of time comes into time jesus stepped into time so that we could step into eternity jesus came in and bore the cross to take the penalty for our sin in order that in his resurrection we could be granted the newness of life and that newness of life while we are constrained with time right now one day we'll give way to a timeless eternity there's no clock winding down and we will live with him in perfection and beauty forever and ever man these seasons that we go through now he is doing something grand with them it is the exact opposite of meaninglessness and that is what the preacher is telling us today what i want to tell you by way of application is this y'all trust god in every season all right for those who have yet to place faith in jesus christ let me talk to you for a minute i'll talk to you a few times in this series yo you can't think about giving all the seasons of your life to god before you've given the first season of your life to god all right the first season of your that that idea of an initial decision initial faith it's called saving faith jesus died for your sin and he resurrected to give you life trusting him is as simple as putting your faith in that truth man that he loves you enough to pay the penalty for your sin and now he gives you the opportunity to walk with him in the newness of life in his resurrection all right i want you to think about this with me for a moment all right especially if you're not a believer and if you're not a believer and you're really wrestling with this i'm going to press you a little bit today because we're talking about some serious stuff man the clock is running out the time is ticking away eternity is in every person's heart but not every person has already stepped into a heavenly eternity now you are eternal that's what the bible teaches your consciousness and soul you you will live on forever not all of us will live in heaven and that's what i want to wake you up to today there is a timeless reality that is coming man we live in the constructs of time and there are genesis 3 they are broken and one day those constraints are going to be shattered and we're going to live for all eternity the song some of you guys remember this the song when i was growing up when the role is called up yonder somebody all remember that and time will be no more it's the reality today time will be no more whether you're in heaven or hell i'll just say it plainly the choice is yours today all right live a life that is shot through every day with the glory of god every single season in laughter and weeping when we see birth and death in this world times of war and peace we have an opportunity to respond in every season for god's glory every moment every second that's what god wants for you and that's what you were created for all right man maybe you've been watching us you never stepped a foot on our building that's what you were created for and i pray that you'll give your life to him and you know what we're gonna do actually we're gonna do this i'm gonna ask everybody all of our campuses about about your head just for a minute i'm not quite done but let's just do this hey for some of you at our locations today maybe some college students maybe some of you guys that are here in this room right now all right man is god drawing you today is the reality of a timeless eternity believers be praying right now is there is the reality of that is this something that's drawn in your heart today man this is how you say a simple gospel prayer and enter the kingdom of god and you say it just like this you say god i know that in my sin i deserve eternal death but jesus christ paid the penalty for my sin on the cross and in his resurrection he gives me the opportunity to walk in the newness of life would you repeat that after me in your heart i know that i sin jesus took my sin he stood in my place in his resurrection we have the opportunity to to walk in the newness of life would you say god i want that i believe that and i want to trust you as the lord of my life amen you guys can look up at me if anybody prayed that prayer at one of our locations or online or in this room right now today listen the thing is man it's time for you to take the next step you have become a believer today all right man the angels in heaven are shouting for you today if this is the first time all right that you have come into his presence in this way listen whether you did this now or you've done it before if you've never been baptized i want to say this to you again man text that number call you know call call whatever you got to do man call us talk to us after the service get online whatever you got to do we want to get you signed up for baptism at one of our campuses today and believers i'll say this and then i'll be done hey we are put on earth to fear god we are put on earth to live everyday live shot through with glory we glorify god with everything in our life hey what season are you in right now and are you responding in the right way you're living under the sun but you have the wisdom for beyond the sun are you responding to life under the sun with the wisdom of god i listen if you're if you're a small group leader today listen up many of you might have already seen this okay shifting up groups across the whole church for one week all right the whole church all right i want every single group to do this this week man i want you to come together and you and group leaders all figure out the best format for y'all i know we've got groups doing all kinds of things with virtual and men are meeting and women oh man man you guys are so uh intuitive and and man you got the entrepreneurial thing going i love it whatever you got to do but this is the idea okay the idea is that we would go into our groups this week and what we would say is hey i've thought about these 14 opposites and i've identified with a season of life that i feel like we're in and maybe maybe it don't maybe it's something different than actually exactly is right there but that's kind of the idea okay that every family unit would come into group or single person will come into a group or if you break up in men and women or however you do it you all figure that out but you would come and you would just for three or four minutes everybody in the group would have come ready and you come and you share and you say hey this is the season that we're in and allow the group to speak man allow the group to put their hands on you if that's what's needed or allow the group to at least pray over you man let's let's share with each other this is the season i'm in i want to respond in this season to the glory of god maybe some of you are mourning and weeping man we can respond with hope maybe some of you are laughing today because man there's something awesome and adoption has been completed a new job came through in the clutch maybe maybe you got over coving maybe you had it we're worried and got through it maybe there's something that's awesome and it's a time of laughing hey are you laughing so much that people are invited into that and they are contagiously seeing something about god and his character uh in your life man maybe there's just a time right now where there's a breakup that's going on maybe maybe you thought it was heading one way it's heading another way hey can you think about leveraging singleness in a way that you may not be able to do again man in terms of just being able as paul said to be free as he was for a season what i don't know what it is okay but whatever the season is that you are in man can we bring that to group this week and can we say this is the season i'm in you guys pray for me to respond the right way let's pray father we come before you there's a heavy passage today there's a lot in it got a lot of things that are going on lord i just pray the meaning would get through lord i pray that overarching idea time is what it is and it's marching on father but there's a great divergence for people in our church those that are just hanging around and those now that are living life for your glory father i pray that we would see many come from death to life this weekend and god i pray that we would see them baptized next weekend in our church services in christ then we pray amen

Channel: Mercy Hill Church

Views: 738

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: jesus, mercy hill, mercy hill church, andrew hopper, greensboro, high point, triad, expository preaching, andrew hopper greensboro, church, sermon, satisfied, ecclesiastes, pointless

Id: EHZozdTZg2s

Length: 37min 21sec (2241 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021