In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the theme of acting amid uncertainties as highlighted in Ecclesiastes. The discussion centers on the powerful notion that faith means moving forward even when the outcome is unclear. Through David Hawking’s teachings, we learn that seizing opportunities today is crucial as tomorrow is not guaranteed. Moreover, the narrative explores personal testimonies of transformation, underscoring the impact of trusting in God’s plan despite life’s unpredictabilities.
today is the day of your opportunity. We always say, someday I’m going to do that. When I get my whole act straightened out, I’m going to do it. Wait a minute. Because of what we don’t know, that’s a motivating factor to respond to the opportunities that God gives to us now.
SPEAKER 02 :
This is Hope for Today. It’s a blessing to have you with us for this Friday edition of the broadcast. You do not control tomorrow. I don’t control tomorrow. We don’t control the wind. We don’t control the outcome of so much of what takes place in our lives. And yet Ecclesiastes says, Act anyway. Cast your bread. Sow your seed. Step forward. Not because you can see the result, but because you trust the God who does. Faith is not freezing until everything makes sense. It’s obedience in the face of what you don’t know. This is day two of What We Do Not Know, David’s message in Ecclesiastes chapter 11, and we’ll be back in the passage in just a moment. First, it’s time to share another listener letter. What a blessing this is. This note comes from Chris, and he leads off the letter by saying, I want you to know how much you have blessed my life.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s so awesome. Yeah, he says, I was raised Christian, inviting my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, into my heart at the age of 13, but not really taking it seriously. And then God showed him the error of his ways when he came and saw my dad. He goes, David Hawking was a huge part of bringing my brother, and i to a real and genuine passion for a renewed life of jesus wow and from the inside out god changed us and that’s amazing and when your dad hears these testimonies so often he says to god be the glory for what he has done amen he says the lord deserves all the glory and more because his son lives in us thank you chris so much for writing to us and folks if you have a note for us a testimony to share a prayer need get in touch and we’ll tell you just a bit later how to do that
SPEAKER 02 :
And here’s David with day two of What We Do Not Know from Ecclesiastes chapter 11, verses 1 through 10.
SPEAKER 03 :
The fact that I don’t know ought to motivate me to respond to the opportunities that God gives to me because I don’t know how God works. And I may try to talk, you know, confidently, and I may try to talk arrogantly about how I believe God’s going to work, but God can surprise us. I like to plan. I know the Bible teaches to plan. I like to plan ahead. I like to set long-range goals, and I like to set goals for this year, and I like to set goals for the week. And I like to plan, and I believe the Bible teaches that without that, plans don’t succeed, and we need to talk to people and counselors. But while I’m telling you all of that, I have discovered in my life that God frequently changes all of that. He blows our plans apart. Everything we dreamed, everything we thought was going to happen, everything we planned on a long-range basis, he just wipes it out. He does some things that are incredibly unusual and different and surprising. We don’t know how God works. And it’s not only because I don’t know how God works that I should respond to the opportunities he gives me, but secondly, because I don’t know what I do that God prospers. I don’t know which thing it is. This is very interesting. Verse 6. In the morning, sow your seed. And in the evening, or literally until the evening, do not withhold or literally let down your hand. That little withhold your hand is not talking about keeping something back that you ought to do. Let down the hand is a figure of speech in that grammar for discouragement. And isn’t that the way it often happens? Sure it is. He said, in the morning sow your seed, and until the evening, don’t get discouraged. Don’t let your hand down. Why? Because you do not know which will prosper, either this or that, whether in the morning or in the afternoon I plant it, or in this row of this field or in that row. I don’t know what method or what seeds I’ve used. I don’t know which will prosper, either this or that, or whether both alike will be good. God could prosper it all. I don’t know. So the point is, I’m being motivated here to respond to the opportunities God gives me. You got a day that you can sow, then do it. It’s not raining now. You say, but there are clouds in the sky. Don’t do nothing. Even though you see the ominous signs in the sky, even though you think there’s something terrible lying ahead, don’t stop. Use the opportunity you have. Do what you need to do today. Respond now is what the whole point of this is. Why? Because you don’t know. You don’t know how God works. And secondly, you don’t know what God may prosper. God may choose to prosper something in your life that you never even dreamed was the big thing. Sometimes we concentrate on certain gifts or abilities or talents or careers or occupations or something we’ve done for a long time, and we don’t know that there’s something else in our life that God is going to use in a great way. And I’ve seen that happen to many people, and so have you. I’ve seen some people through some great disasters and trials all of a sudden become mightily used of God in a way they never dreamed possible. How about Johnny Erickson Tata? If you don’t know about how God uses that dear woman, you need to know. God uses marvelous things in people through tragedies that they don’t even expect. I saw through a great tragedy, a woman with a severe nervous disorder, a great serious problem who said, there’s nothing I can do. She was in pain coming to church. She could hardly stand sitting there. She wanted to be faithful to the Lord, but she saw her life as nothing. And it was hurting her family and her husband and her kids, and she was doing nothing. But there’s something you can do, and God knows it. Today, she’s one of the best Christian writers I know. And I remember talking to her when she first started. She said, I could never do that. You don’t know. None of us do. We don’t know how God works and we don’t know what God may prosper. Number four, come to verse seven. Up until this point, the emphasis is on faith, trusting God, risking, believing God. Now we switch to joy. You see, what we don’t know also motivates us to remember that many days in our life will be difficult. Thus we should have joy in the ones that we have. It motivates us, what we don’t know, to remember that many days in our lives will be difficult. And that will remind us to do two things. Look please at verse 7 again, chapter 11. Truly the light is sweet. It’s pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun. You get up and it’s the sunshine and it’s a beautiful day. Have you ever noticed how that affects our feelings? It affects our feelings greatly, especially if you live in a culture where it rains all the time. You know, out here in Southern California, sometimes we get up and say, yeah, the sun’s up again. How boring. You know, why doesn’t it change? But the Lord always throws in a few little calamities every now and then to make us realize how wonderful it is. But he rains on the just as well as the unjust. While I was in Chicago recently, the cab driver that I had, I was so excited about the sun being out in Chicago. It was just a wonderful day. Beautiful. And he said, no, it isn’t. He’s directly contradicting me. I said, well, what’s wrong with it? He says, do you know what happens when the sun comes out? Little kids get on their tricycles. Older kids get on their bikes. And older guys who should know better are on their motorcycles. And everybody thinks they can drive their car. And they all get out on the road. And they cause we taxi cab drivers a lot of trouble. I hate sun. I love rain. Give me the storm and the blizzard. I mean, he’s going on and on. You know, it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? But what I don’t know motivates me also to remember that there are some days coming that can be difficult. And this reminds me to do two things. One, it reminds me to enjoy the time that I do have. Verse 7 and 8, truly the light is sweet, it’s pleasant for the eyes to behold the sun. But if a man lives many years and rejoices in them all. I like that because the next statement says, remember some of them aren’t going to be so great. rejoices in not simply the ones that aren’t the difficult ones, he rejoices in them all. You see, the fact that I don’t know what’s going to happen motivates me to remember that some days are difficult, but that should not stop me from enjoying life and rejoicing in them all. God has a plan. God has a purpose. Whether it’s category bad or good for me, it reminds me to enjoy the time I have. And secondly, it reminds me to evaluate the future carefully. Because he says at the end of verse 8, Let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. All that is coming is vanity. It doesn’t have any substance and meaning. It’s not the real you. Your real identity is not wrapped up in whether it’s going to rain today or sun shining or whether the doctor is going to tell you something you don’t want to hear. That’s not you. You are a child of God. You are born of the Spirit of God. You have a future that’s glorious and you will one day be in heaven forever. Enjoy all that God has given you. And remember, evaluate the future carefully. There are days of darkness that will come, days that are difficult. They’re going to be there in our lives. And the Bible says there are going to be many of them. Should that cause us to lose our joy? What a sad thing that it does. It often does because we fail to evaluate the future carefully and in the light of where we’re going and who we really are. What I don’t know does motivate me. And number five, come to verse nine. What I don’t know also motivates me to rejoice while I can, but with a sense of accountability to God. And there’s the underlining theme of Ecclesiastes. Verse 9, Rejoice, O young man, to all you who are young, young at heart as well as young in age. Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. God’s not against that, never has been. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment. See, the great tragedy is that we’re trying to enjoy life without a sense of accountability to God. God is going to bring us into judgment for everything that we have done. He wants you to rejoice, but as Walter Kaiser says in his little commentary on Ecclesiastes, he says, verse 9 is no carte blanche or open season in which anything goes. That’s not what it’s saying. It says rejoice in your heart. Be excited with what God has given you. That’s great. No matter whether it’s good or bad, all the days of your life, that’s wonderful. Rejoice. But just remember one thing. God is going to bring you into judgment for all that you have done. That’s why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge. And that’s why the only thing that checks our lives, that keeps us from having, quote, wrong kinds of fun, the only thing that really checks us is our accountability to God. Hey, listen, our accountability to parents only lasts so long. And as long as we’re not under their authority anymore and we’re independent, we can do what we want to. And that’s why many kids decide to break all the standards of their parents once they get to a certain age. And they’re accountable before God also, just like the parents. No, the only one check in our life, you see, is our accountability to God. It’s to fear the Lord. It’s to understand that all things are naked and open unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to deal. Oh, God’s not going to try to make you morbid and sad. Exactly the opposite. God wants us to live with joy and enjoyment. But there’s some things in life that will rip that joy right out of your heart. That will give you a temporary sense of pleasure, but it will rob you of the deep joy and zest for life that God really wants you to have. So you see, what I don’t know motivates me to rejoice while I can, but always with a sense of accountability to God. One last thing that I’m motivated to do by what I don’t know. According to verse 10, what I don’t know also motivates me to remove anything in my life that would hinder my joy and my walk with the Lord. Because of what I don’t know. It motivates me to remove anything in my life that would hinder my joy and my walk with the Lord. And he names two things in particular. We could add to the list, but there are two things that he gives us here. Verse 10. Therefore, in the light of what I’ve told you about what you don’t know. Therefore, remove one sorrow from your heart and to put away evil from your flesh for childhood and youth are vanity. They aren’t a part of the substance and heart of what God is doing in your life. They’re temporary. They’re meaningless in the sense of what’s going to happen in the future. It’s temporary, transitory. Therefore, remove sorrow and put away evil. Now, what’s he talking about? Number one, he’s talking about an area that’s so sensitive that once I start bringing it up, it’ll bring a lot of stuff out of your heart. But it’s so important to learn. And that is, he’s including in what we ought to get out of our lives, the matter of emotional disappointments. I don’t know how to say it any kinder. Emotional disappointments. Our lives are filled with emotional disappointments that are robbing us of our joy in the Lord. And you know it and I know it. You can look back on something that you always dreamed would happen and it didn’t. Illness, physical infirmity, can often cause this emotional disappointment to where your heart is constantly asking, why me, Lord, and why did this happen? Remove sorrow out of your heart. Some translations say vexation here. The Hebrew has the idea of bitterness and anger and resentment. The kind of bitterness in our heart because we’ve been emotionally disappointed. Some friend has failed you. Something you don’t get along with. Someone in your family. Some things happened in the past or happening right now to you that has emotionally disappointed you. And God says, get it out of your life because what you don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know. We don’t know why God allowed that thing to come into our lives in the first place. And we don’t see the positive good in it. We’ve only seen the negative. We don’t know why some people have said the things they said to us or why God wanted us to hear them. But we all of a sudden get bent out of shape. We wear our hearts on our sleeves and we’re emotionally disappointed. And we’ve lost our joy in the Lord and our walk with God. Why? Because we’ve forgotten that we don’t know a thing. Why, we think we’re so smart? We understand what’s happening? Are you kidding? You don’t know why people say to you what they say. Half the time, folks wish they never said what they said. And some folks aren’t able to even phrase it in a way to really… They want to be encouraging, but it comes out wrong. And I can think of a lot of humorous things along this line, but I think I’ll just pass it. Because you know and I know that many times you want to really show love to somebody, you want to say something great, and you mess it up. You mess it up. You just don’t do it right. That’s a lovely suit you’ve got on, but why’d you buy it? It’s a dumb question. Why’d I ask that? Why didn’t I just end it? Period. You know, there are a lot of times you say things you wish you hadn’t said and they’re interpreted the wrong way. But you know, it’s amazing. We see people and we make, you know, conclusions. We draw conclusions. And a lot of us get so hurt inside. And sometimes we don’t recover. I’m thinking of a dear lady now that’s in severe depression. My, how I pray she’ll come out of it. all because of some bad things said to her by another friend. That’s why we need to be careful what we say. But on the other hand, what does this text say? Get it out of your life. Why go on living with all of this hurt? Get it out. Talk to somebody. Do something. But get it out of your life. Why live that way? We ought to live with the joy of the Lord. You see, those emotional disappointments, those bitternesses, that criticism, those attitudes… those feelings we have when we’re told things that we don’t like, man, they can hurt us. They can really hurt us. And you simply don’t know why it’s happening. You don’t know why God’s allowing all these things. And there needs to be a certain basic humility about us all that falls before God and said, God, I don’t know. I just thank you that you’re in charge. And you want my good and you want my blessing. The second thing is also crucial. It not only involves emotional disappointments, but notice also in verse 10, it involves moral defilement. Moral defilement. Put away evil from your flesh. One is the heart, the inner man. The other is the outer man, the body, the flesh. Put it away. Moral defilement. There are more spiritually depressed believers because of moral defilement than you can shake a stick at. the subtle insinuation of the enemy that somehow a momentary pleasure in this area will relieve the tension of our hearts or give us the strokes and encouragement that others have not, the constant temptations that are paraded before our eyes everywhere we turn, television, movies, magazines, you name it, and we think it will not hurt us? Boy, how foolish we are. We must be free from all of those injuries to our inner man and our outer man that so quickly cripple us from having the joy that God wanted us to have. This demands action. It demands decision. Doing something about what I don’t know, as strange as it sounds, because usually it’s what I do know, then I will act. But God’s saying it’s because of what you don’t know, I want you to act. And Solomon here is exhorting us like he hasn’t been through the entire book. All of a sudden exhorting us, get it out of your life. Because we’re robbing ourselves of what God really has for us. It’s decision time. It always has been. It’s never changed. When God brings before you and before me something that needs to be done, it’s time to do it. Why? Because I don’t know about tomorrow. I don’t know even how God’s going to work in this situation. I don’t know what He’s going to do. But it’s time to act. It’s time to decide. It’s always been that way.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s David Hawking, and this is Hope for Today. David will be back in just a moment or so to close us with a word of prayer, a very special time with the Lord. So do stay with us.
SPEAKER 01 :
First, Matt and I have something very special for you. Matt, let’s talk about it. The Old Testament Message Series Sermon Notes Outlines is our special. It’s a bundle package this month.
SPEAKER 02 :
This is a pack of David Hawking’s sermon notes and outlines for each message in the 39 series he has taught over the years in the Old Testament. This is for everyone, including the serious Bible student. The very structure, plan, outline, and notes your dad used to preach each message, they’re all included.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, and I love these because the notes are already written down for you. Now, you can add some of your own, of course, but the essential and crucial points are all there for you.
SPEAKER 02 :
And what a tremendous tool for reviewing any Old Testament series we feature on radio or that you might watch in our website media center or that you might purchase. Order the Old Testament Message Series Sermon Notes Bundle. Sermon notes and outlines for all 39 Old Testament teaching series by David Hawking.
SPEAKER 01 :
And the special price? Just $75. You know, the sermon notes help you capture the lessons, applications, and encouragement from Old Testament studies in a comprehensive but concise format. And if you’re listening to David teach, they are an outstanding aid to help you follow along. And again, the sermon outlines and notes bundle for all of my dad’s 39 Old Testament teaching series is just $75.
SPEAKER 02 :
And again, listeners tell us these are so helpful in following along as your dad teaches. It’s God’s word. Enhancing understanding, saving what you’ve learned, and sharing it with others. Amen. To get your copy of this study bundle, call 800-75-BIBLE. That’s in the U.S. In Canada, call 888-75-BIBLE. And Bible by the numbers 24253. You can also order directly on our website. In fact, you can order and download. You’ll have it in just a few minutes, davidhawking.org. And while you’re on the website, take a moment to explore the other Bible study resources we have for you there to help you grow deeper in God’s Word. And just before David returns, we want to take a moment here to say thank you. This broadcast continues because friends like you believe clear, verse-by-verse Bible teaching still matters. We’re not trying to impress. We’re not trying to entertain. We are staying committed to opening the Bible and teaching it faithfully. And that’s made possible through prayers and financial support from listening friends like you. If this ministry has been a blessing to you, would you prayerfully consider standing with us? A one-time gift or a regular monthly partnership helps us keep these programs on the air and online. You can send a gift by mail if you like. In the United States, write to Hope for Today, Box 3927, Tustin, California, 92781. In Canada, write to Hope for Today, Box 15011, RPO Seven Oaks, Abbotsford, B.C., V2S 8P1. By phone, call us at 875-BIBLE. In the U.S., we love speaking with our listening family. Or in Canada, call 888-75-BIBLE. You can also give securely on our website, davidhawking.org. That’s davidhawking.org. And we’re grateful for your partnership with us in ministry. Well, as promised, here’s David to take us before the Lord.
SPEAKER 03 :
Father in heaven, you know how much we need you. Our minds get so confused with the circumstances of life, the things that we go through and the problems we encounter, frustrations we feel. Lord, it almost seems like a paradox that you would motivate us on the basis of what we don’t know, as we’re always tempted to prove to others and to ourselves that we know what we’re talking about. God, I thank you for speaking to our hearts from your word. I know I speak for all of us who know you. We really want your joy. We want to serve you. We want to have the kind of faith that can cast our bread on the waters and know that after many days we’ll find it. We want the kind of love and enthusiasm in our hearts that will be so generous we’ll give to seven and even to eight if we can. And not being worried about what tragedies may lie in the future. Lord, we want to be people who will serve you and put our hand to the plow even though we see ominous clouds in the sky. We sometimes look at society and wonder, what can one person do? But God, because of who you are and because of what we don’t know, we’re going to do what we can and get excited about it. I thank you, Lord, that you want us to live life with joy. And so many times we’ve been hurt inside and our joy is gone. So many times we’ve filled our lives with so much sin that it’s impossible for the joy of the Spirit to be manifested through us. And some of us need to decide right now to make a full commitment to Jesus Christ. We’ve been putting it off. God, help us now. Some of us need to get right with our friends, need to confess our sin, need to seek forgiveness. There’s so many decisions. So many needs, but God, we pray that what you’ve laid in our hearts, we might decide to do now. Because we don’t know. The secret things belong to God. God, we thank you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
SPEAKER 02 :
Amen. And we want you to know that prayer does not end when this broadcast ends. If you need someone to pray with you, to encourage you, or to help you take the next step in your walk with Christ… We’re here. Now, if you’re a believer and you know that you need refreshing, you need to return to your first love for Jesus, we have something special for you as well. Go to our website, davidhawking.org, and get a free download right there on the homepage. It’s titled Revival Now. This is written by our good friend Richard A. Bennett, and it will be so encouraging to you in renewing or refreshing your relationship with the Lord. Remember, these resources are free. On our next broadcast, we go to the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, for a message titled, What We’ve Learned. See what we’ve learned next time on Hope for Today.
