Join us as we uncover the keys to a fulfilling life through the narratives of biblical figures. We discuss the consequences of envy and the importance of distinguishing between what is real and what is perceived. This episode highlights how family, friendships, and contentment are essential components of a well-lived life, offering practical advice for navigating the challenges we all face.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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So, how is your life working today? Do you have all your ducks in a row? Is everything humming right along with the things your projects are on schedule and you’re on schedule? Or do you have trouble keeping it all together like sometimes King Solomon did? In Ecclesiastes, the fourth chapter, this great man, this wise man, this supernaturally wise man, I guess he’d had a bad day because he said this. He said, So I returned, I looked back, and I considered all the oppressions that are done in the world. And I looked at the tears of all those who were oppressed, and they had no comforter. And I looked at the side of their oppressors, and on that side there was power, but the poor had no comforter. So I decided to praise the dead that are already dead. I felt better about the people who are already dead than the living who are still alive. In fact, Solomon said, I think the guy that’s really better off than all of them is he who has not yet been. He hasn’t even seen the evil work that’s done unto the Son. The man that’s not even yet been born is better off than all the rest of them combined. Now, it’s kind of hard to figure the wisest and most successful man who had ever lived in his age feeling so pessimistic about life, even depressed about life. But you know, I feel that if I’m going to understand what will make my life work, I’ve got to work my way around what this very wise man is saying. Because only a fool plunges on without listening to the words of those who have gone before. I want to know why he felt like he did. I want to know what he had stumbled over. I want to know where the pitfalls and the booby traps and the landmines are, don’t you? Well, he tells us a lot in this rather unusual book called Ecclesiastes in your Bible. And in the process of studying our way through it, a lot of very important things come to the surface. Now, what I’m saying is not to say that those who have gone before are always right. Sometimes the people who have gone down a path before us have been spectacularly wrong, but that’s worth knowing. But to assume that they were wrong without carefully considering the matter, well, that’s the assumption of a fool. Why, then, was this man so pessimistic? Well, that’s simple. He had looked at the real world, and he had not lied to himself about what he saw. He said, I looked at all this. And I considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun. Surely not. Surely there’s no one out there who is oppressing anyone else is there. And behold, the tears of people who are oppressed by others. And there’s nobody on their side. There’s no comforter. There’s nobody that’s giving these people any hope. And this is downright discouraging. It’s enough to make anyone pessimistic. He looked at the real world. He did not lie to himself about what he saw. Now, while I’m not giving you a set of numbered principles in these broadcasts, this is not the seven principles of this or the ten laws of that. Here’s one you might want to write down alongside the idea of setting goals that we’ve talked about before. Make up your mind to face what is really out there. What is really out there, not what they tell you it is or not what you wish it were or not what you hope it might be. Make up your mind to deal with what is really there. Make a distinction between what you wish were there and what is real. Now, I know this is obvious. I also know it is frightening. But you can’t hope to set anything right until you have recognized that it’s wrong. Now, you may not even be able to do it then, but you have no hope until you own up to what’s there. You own up to the reality. You own up to the wrong. Then maybe, just maybe, you can do something about it. Now, there was another man. This man was the father of King Solomon. And the Bible tells us that he was a man after God’s own heart. And one has to wonder, when you read his life, what it was that made God say that, because he was a sinner. He sinned mightily and frequently and often and made lots and lots of mistakes. And yet God loved him and says, now, this man, King David, is a man after my own heart. Now, let me tell you a story about King David. King David was a man of passions, desires, even lusts. And on one warm night he was on the roof of his palace and he looked across at the roof of another home and he saw a rather lovely woman there taking a bath. And he sent and had her come over and had an affair with her. And then when she got pregnant, had her husband killed. Now that’s not exemplary. Later, a prophet of God came to him, drew out a long parable that really was a parable about what David himself had done. And when David heard the parable, he said, well, that man ought to die for what he’s done. And at that point, the prophet said, you’re the man. You’re the one who has committed this great evil. David, when he came to himself, when he realized what he had done, sat down after it was all over, and wrote a psalm. It’s the 51st psalm in your Bible, and it’s worth a careful reading. It may be even worth taking it into your private place of prayer, getting on your knees, opening the book before God, and reading this psalm aloud and making the prayer your own. David said this, Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your lovingkindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies. Blot out my transgressions. Do away with them. Blot them out. Keep me from having to face this, would you please? Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. David couldn’t close his eyes and get away from it. He couldn’t go into the country and get away from it. He couldn’t go to the top of the palace and get away from it. All the memories would keep rolling back, and it was just there. He said, My sin is ever before me. I acknowledge my transgressions. Against you and you only have I sinned, and I’ve done this evil. I haven’t just made this mistake. I’ve done this evil in your sight. And you’re justified when you speak, and you’re clear in your judgment. I fully understand what you’re saying, and you are dead right in your judgment of me. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. And he goes on to say something rather interesting. He said, I was shaped in iniquity. In sin did my mother conceive me. Now, a lot of people become confused about this, but all this is is a colorful way of saying, this didn’t sneak up on me. I didn’t just make a mistake, and I’m really a great guy. You’ve got to know what kind of a good person I am, and I’m better than that. I wouldn’t do that normally. This is not David’s approach. He says, no, I’m a sinner. I’ve been a sinner. I mean, I was a sinner to start with. He just says there’s no excuse for what I have done. Then he says this. Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden parts you shall make me to know wisdom. Truth in the inward parts. There is no repentance without it. There is no straightening out of the past without it. There is no cleaning up of the life without truth in the inside of the man. If we can’t be honest with ourselves, if we can’t be truthful with ourselves about ourselves and what we have done and how we need to change and how we need to put our lives right, how can we ever hope to put things straight? But the truth is, truth in the inward parts, honesty, reality, and dealing with reality, well, it’s frightening. But it’s the only hope you have of putting things right that you’ve made wrong. So back to our principle. Make up your mind to face what is really there and make a distinction between what you wish were there and what is really there. And remember, you can’t hope to set anything right until you have recognized that it’s wrong. Simple, isn’t it? Stay with me. I’ll be right back.
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Join us online at borntowin.net. That’s borntowin.net. Read essays by Ronald Dart. Listen to Born to Win radio programs every day, past weekend Bible studies, plus recent sermons, as well as sermons from the CEM Vault. Drop us an email and visit our online store for CDs, DVDs, literature, and books. That’s borntowin.net.
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So here we sit in the midst of a conflicted, confusing world, a world that could easily drive a man crazy if he let it. If you’re going to stay sane in this world, you’ve got to remember what the truth is. Because the degree to which you are divorced from reality, that you don’t quite cozy up to what the reality and the real thing is, is a degree to which you’re, what shall we say, just a little bit crazy. And so here we are with the problem of lying to ourselves and lying to others and losing track of what reality is, and that’s the route to insanity. Solomon saw that and at least tried to warn us of it. He continued his musings in the fourth chapter, the verse 4, saying this, Again, I considered all the labor and every right work… that for this a man is envied of his neighbor, and this also is futility and grasping at wind. Now we are approaching another life principle. In the book of Proverbs, Solomon says it this way, A sound heart is the life of the flesh, but envy the rottenness of the bones. Now, Throughout Proverbs, and to a very large degree in Psalms as well, many of the things that are laid out are laid out in couplets, little parallel structures. They say exactly the same thing in different words, in two different parallel statements. In this case, we have an inverse parallelism. In other words, it’s said one way, then it is said the opposite. A sound heart is the life of the flesh, but envy is the rottenness of the bones. A sound heart is the opposite of envy. the life of the flesh opposite to rottenness of the bones. So a sound heart, then, is the opposite thing of envy. A man who is sound of heart, integrated, whole in heart, is not a person who sits around envying other people. But why would a man be envied for his labor? He said, I considered all the labor and every right work, and I said, for this a man is envied of his neighbor. This is stupid. Now, let me give you a very simple, mild illustration of the underlying principle on this. I was sitting around one evening chatting with a friend of mine, and we had music playing in the background, and there was a guitarist on the radio who was really spectacular. His ability to manage the strings in a guitar were something superb. And my friend said, boy, I wish I could play the guitar like that. I looked at him and I said, no, you don’t. And he looked at me like I thought I was crazy. I mean, after all, don’t I know what I want? How can you tell me that I don’t want or want something? And I asked him, I said, do you have any idea how much time and work he had to invest in that talent in order to be able to do that? He didn’t come out of the womb able to play the guitar like that. He didn’t just wake up one morning as a teenager and pick up a guitar and say, what’s this? And sit there and begin to play it. He had worked on the guitar, had played the guitar, studied music. Probably not that long after the time he could walk, they probably put one of them in his hands. But certainly very early in life, this man began to study the guitar. And he studied it by the hour. And he practiced by the hour. People who are really great musicians, you have to understand, you go to work and spend eight hours a day at the factory floor or in the office with the keys of a computer. They spend eight hours a day at a musical instrument, practicing scales, running up and down the scales. The fingers of a guitarist are calloused from all the time that he spends working on the strings of his instrument. My friend hadn’t really, he knew it, but he hadn’t really thought about it when he made that statement. I wish I could play the guitar like that. The really great artists whom we envy have a great talent which they have refined with a lifetime of work and self-denial. And I will tell you frankly, I do not wish that I could play the guitar like Segovia. No, no. Because for me to play the guitar like Segovia, I would have had to have given my life to it. And I have other things I want to do. I have other places I’d like to be. And that’s just not the way I want to spend my life. For one thing, it’s hardly worth spending your life at that unless you have the talent to start with. And I can tell you quickly that I do not. But you see my point. We sit around idly wishing that we could do this or idly wishing we could do that. Boy, I wish I had that kind of voice. I wish I could sing like that. I wish I could play the piano like that. I wish I could play the guitar like that. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You don’t wish for that work. But what’s funny about it, we go back to Solomon’s statement, he says, I considered all the labor and every right work that for this a man is envied of his neighbor. This is vanity and a striving after wind. You know, giving up the wishing will enable my friend to really enjoy and admire the work of a great guitarist. He knows that he either cannot or will not ever achieve that. He knows that the amount of work that has gone into that is something to be really respected, admired, enjoyed. And I can tell you surely that to sit and to listen to the performance of a great artist on a great piece of work with a great composition is tremendously inspiring to see what can be done like that. You know, we usually envy people, not for their work, but for the results of their work. And when you acknowledge the work, the envy seems a little silly, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s a little worse than silly. It’s selfish, and it’s grasping to try to reach out for or to envy something that you really don’t deserve. You know, when a real estate agent receives the top sales award in a company… He or she has earned that by so many hours of hard work that it boggles the mind. Only a fool would envy the work. But you know that’s what we do when we envy the accomplishments of other people. So here is another important principle for you to write down in your list of things that make life work. Don’t envy those who accomplish great things. Admire them and go on to your own great things. So Solomon continues with yet another principle. He says in verse 5, the fool folds his hands together and eats his own flesh. Better is a handful with quietness than both the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit. Now, if your choice is the quiet life, why ruin it by eating your insides out with envy? Look at what he said. He said, the fool folds his hands together. This basically means he gets in his recliner, kicks back, folds his hands across his middle. And instead of being happy, he eats his insides out. That’s the modern expression. That’s the term we use in the vernacular for what Solomon says when he says he eats his own flesh. He consumes himself. So if you really want the quiet life, why ruin it? You really don’t need much. And Solomon has found that the pursuit of more and more and more is a pursuit of a handful of wind. If you want to work hard and achieve, then by all means go for it. But don’t confuse that with the quiet life. You can’t have it both ways. If you try to have it both ways, you will, to use Solomon’s words, eat your own flesh. You’ll eat your insides out. So now we’ve found ourselves back at goals again, don’t we? You have to decide what is it you want. If you want the quiet life, then learn to be content with what you have. If you want to achieve, to accomplish, make up your mind to go to work. And don’t sit around envying what other people have, unless you’re willing to do the work that other people have done to get what they have. I think the writer of Hebrews had this kind of in mind when he said this in chapter 13. In verse 5, he said this, Let your conversation or your conduct be without covetousness, and be content with such things as you have. For he says, that is, God says, I will never leave you nor forsake you, so that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do to me. Let your conversation, that is, your conduct, be without covetousness. Covetousness, the envying of possessions, the desiring of things which you have no right to, the desiring of things which other people have worked hard for without being willing to do the work, will eat you alive. Be content with such things as you have, or, if you want to, go to work and be prepared to do the 16 hours a day, six days a week, and drive yourself on into the night to get where you want to be. but there are no shortcuts to any of that. Now we have asked the question, what is it that makes life work? Solomon is ready to give us one of the most basic, the most important principles of all. I’ll come back to that in just a moment.
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So, says Solomon, I returned, and I saw all this futility under the sun, and this bothered me. There is one alone, and there is not a second. Yea, he has neither child nor brother. Yet there’s no end of his labor. His eye isn’t satisfied with riches, and neither does he say, What am I working for? For whom am I labor? For whom am I bereaving my soul of good? I’m doing without all sorts of things, and who am I doing this for? This is also futility. Yea, it’s a sore labor.” Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. They actually, you know, it’s what I guess they nowadays call synergy. The fact is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. By yourself, you can do X amount of work. By myself, I can do Y amount of work. But when we’re together, we do much more than just X plus Y. The two of us together can accomplish more. He says two are better than one because they have a better reward for their labor as a result of working together. So you’ve got this problem. You’ve got this poor sap out here who’s working himself to death, and yet there’s nobody it’s for except himself, and he’s not really enjoying it. He’s actually bereaving his soul of good rather than achieving good, and he’s not doing it for anybody. Now he says two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him that is alone when he falls, for he does not have another to help him up. You know, it got to be a little bit of a joke some time ago about the television commercial that said, Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. But I felt so sorry for those people, and I thought how good it was that they had this little mechanical device that would call someone for them, and so they would not be left entirely alone, and they could get help if they fell. But there are so many old people out there who are alone. And it’s not good to be alone. Solomon said again, If two lie together, then they have heat. But how can a person get warm by himself? Well, I guess you can get a down comforter and a down sleeping bag and turn up the heat. But that’s not what Solomon is talking about. He goes on to say, And if one prevails against him… Two can withstand, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Take yourself a piece of string that you can break, and then take two more pieces like it and braid them together and see how you can do. You’ll find that they get very strong all of a sudden. And so Solomon’s principle that he lays out here for us is, Don’t let yourself be alone. Don’t leave yourself alone. There is power in family. There is power in friendship. There is reward in family and in friendship. You know, as a minister, I have often met with people who are down and out. After all, it is the business of Christian people to play the good Samaritan. It’s the business of churches to be a friend to those who have no family and who have no friends. And sometimes when I’ve been dealing with a fellow whose life has come completely unstuck, who doesn’t have the money, can’t even find a place to stay, can’t get clothes decent to get a job, has no place to take a shower to get rid of the smell, and I’ve thought, what would it be like to be down and out and have no one to turn to? I have a wife who is a tower of strength. I have a sister who would take me in off the streets if I was down and out. She would help me in any way she could. I have friends who would go looking for me if they lost track and didn’t know where I was. They would rescue me from wherever I had gone. I have friends who care about me. But what would life be like if I had no one? Of course, most of the people who find themselves in that awful situation are sick. And it’s the work of Christian people to, in the words of the old hymn, rescue the perishing. But for right now, let’s talk about you. How long has it been since you called or wrote to your sister, your brother, your mother, your father? What have you done today to cement and develop your friendships? When was the last time you made a new friend? You know, we’re talking about the principles of making life work in this series of broadcasts, and can there be anything more important? than family and friends and having a life that works? For what’s the point of wealth and possessions when you’re alone and when there’s no one there that you can share with? It’s this curious thing about human beings. We are made, we are created to share. We’re created to take what we have, share it with other people. And I’ve thought of how many times in the trips that I’ve enjoyed and the beautiful places that I have seen, how much I enjoy turning to my wife and saying, isn’t that beautiful? And I think, would I even care to go if I didn’t have someone that I could share it with? And so Solomon said, I returned and I saw a great vanity under the sun that there is one alone and there’s nobody with him. He doesn’t have child or brother. There is no end of his work. His eye isn’t satisfied with his riches. And he never says, well, for whom am I laboring and bereaving my soul of good? What am I doing this for? It’s emptiness. It’s a sore travail. Because two are really better than one. They have a good reward for their labor. They produce more. And if they fall, they can help one another up. but feel sorry for the guy who’s alone when he falls and doesn’t have someone else to help him. The principle of family, staying close to your family, working on your friendships, the power of family and friends is one of the greatest principles of making life work. In the next broadcast in this series, we’ll go on with another great principle in making your life work. Solomon will tell us I really need to hear from you. From time to time, we have to make some hard decisions as to which of our radio stations we keep and which of them we have to let go. If you write or call, we know you’re listening. So protect your station. Our phone number is 1-888-BIBLE44. So until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, you were born to win.
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