Join us as we journey through the teachings of Solomon to uncover the wisdom embedded in ancient texts and to see how they apply to modern dilemmas. From the chaotic nature of a disorganized life to the hidden toll of habits like smoking or moral indiscretions, we examine the overlooked instruction manual that could guide us to a more fulfilling and balanced existence. It’s time to learn from others’ experiences and to seek guidance in our pursuit of happiness and purpose.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Does your life work? I mean, do you really have it all together? Do you have everything lined out and a nice, neat schedule that works for you every day and through the week? And you’ve got a calendar that things happen when they’re supposed to happen. And you’re working at the job you want. You’re really happy at that. And you’re living in a house you like. And your kids are – you’ve got the money saved up for college. Or at least you’re on track toward it. having it saved up for college, that life is clicking right along. I mean, it’s not as though there’s not a problem here or a problem there, but when the problems come up, you handle them and you move forward with dignity and with strength and with foresight and all that kind of stuff. Or is your life like your garage? You can keep it all together for a little while. a couple of days, but pretty soon, entropy begins to set in. It’s almost as though someone creeps into your garage at night, every night, and moves just a few things. Not everything, just a few things. The hammer is taken off the place where it normally resides, up on a little hook, And it’s left over on a shelf by the car. And the screwdriver that you normally have in a little slot not far from the hammer, it’s not there. It’s, well, where is the thing? I don’t know. I can look around the garage and I can’t find it. Now, this is descriptive of more or less what happens. And then tomorrow I will go to my garage and there will be a few more things that are out of place. And I find that unless I work at it pretty regularly, the whole thing moves gradually into a state of chaos. That is, everything now is where it was last laid down. It’s the devil. It must be the devil that creeps in there every night and does that. Now, life is a bit like that. But everyone knows that it’s not really the devil that creeps into your life every night and moves a few things around gradually until finally everything’s out of control, right? You can mess up your life very well on your own without any help from anybody. But when the time comes to clean up your spiritual garage, and you know there are those times, you know there are times when you’re going to go in there and you’re going to tackle certain things in your life and you’re going to try to put them right, right? Okay, where do we look for guidance? Is there an instruction book for this? You know, I generally speaking, when I get a new VCR, I don’t bother with the instruction book. I get the remote and all the stuff out and put a tape in it and away we go. And I still don’t know how the thing works. And I’m that way about new computer programs. I put them in the computer and I load them up and I learn by trial and error. And it sort of works. But when all else fails, I go to the manual, and I check the manual, and I say, okay, oh, that’s what I did wrong. Now, is there an instruction book for life, or do we just have to figure it all out for ourselves? I mean, is it something that when all else fails, we can look in the book and find out what we’ve done? Or is there a way? Well, the problem with figuring it out for ourselves is that too often the effect of the things we do is not directly related to what made it happen. Well, for example, if I go to bed one night at 1130 and get up at 530 the next morning, I may be a little bit draggy the next day, but I don’t necessarily come unstuck because I missed a night of sleep. So maybe I don’t need as much rest as I think I did. But if I go another night without it, or maybe two nights a week without it, there’s something changing in my body over time. The same thing is true about dietary habits. For example, you get a little overweight. One of the reasons why you get overweight is because the effects of your eating are delayed. You can binge today. You can have an extra chocolate sundae. You can have all kinds of things after your meals, desserts and fat things and so forth today. And you get up tomorrow and get on the scales and you may not notice any difference at all. In fact, the chances are you won’t. You got away with it. And so you do it again and again. Have you ever noticed that someone saves up all of our weight gains and dumps them on us all at once? I mean, you can indulge and indulge for about a week and nothing happens. And all at once you get on the scales and there are five pounds that are there that weren’t there before. You know, the frightening thing about this is that this principle is at work in all of life. It’s almost as though things were designed that way. We are allowed to let things slip a little on occasion without paying the price. The body heals. The mind forgets. The body works its way around an indiscretion, an overeating, an overdrinking. We have a headache the next day, but we recover. We don’t die from it. You know, there was a very wise man once who summarized the problem. His name is Solomon, and he had this to say. Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, Therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil. What did he say? He said this, that there is a sentence that should follow on the heels of an evil work. We do something really and truly rotten. We really ought to pay for it. But because we don’t pay for it speedily, then the hearts of the sons of men is just fully set in them to keep on doing whatever it is that they’ve done before because they haven’t paid for it yet. Solomon continued to say, and this is in Ecclesiastes verse 12, Though a sinner do evil a hundred times, and his days be prolonged, Yet surely I know that it will be well with them that fear God, who fear before him, but it will not be well with the wicked. And he’s not going to prolong his days, which are like a shadow, because he doesn’t fear God. Man, now there’s something to learn, folks, that just because you got away with it a hundred times does not really mean that you got away with it. I’m afraid most of us have got all wrong. He isn’t waiting around the corner with a club to hit us in the head every time we engage in some indiscretion. We would live our lives, I suppose, a lot better if he did. But I don’t know how much character we would have if he did. I mean, if he hits you every time, you’re going to quit doing it. That’s for sure. But when comes the point where you really do it because it’s you and not because you’re afraid you’re going to get hit? The problem is we don’t always see what works and what doesn’t work right off the bat. We can, after a lot of experience and much pain and many bruises, figure some of this out. But there are some things where the stakes are just too high. Take a child, for example. Why do you teach your children to stay out of the street? Why do you take them up to the curb and tell them, look right, look left, stop, now go, Why do you do this? Why do you teach them also that when they’re in the yard that they are not allowed to cross the sidewalk or the curb into the street just because the ball has run out there? They are to wait. Why do you do that? Well, it’s because you don’t want your kids to have any fun, right? That’s what they’re going to think as they start growing up. I mean, they’re teenagers. Oh, you just don’t ever want me to have any fun, Dad. Well, you know better than that. And it’d be nice if your children grew up knowing better than that. Why do you punish a child for running into the street when he has been told not to? Because he’s offended you? Made you mad? I can think of all the times when I was a kid when I would ask Dad, well, he would tell me to do this, and I would say, well, Dad, why? And he would say, because I said so. Oh, well, there are things we have to learn like that, and we have to do things because Dad said so, because they’re a little too complicated for us, but… But even so, it’s really not just because he said so. There was a reason why he said so. Now, if you’re one of these people who punished a child because he offended you by disobeying you, then you’re the one who needs the spanking. You discipline a child so he will learn good habits and won’t get himself killed. He may be able to run into the street a hundred times when you aren’t looking and get away with it. But the stakes are too high to learn from experience. On the 101st time into the street, an 18-wheeler could make jam out of the poor kid. And we’ll stand on the sideline and say, well, I’ll bet he’ll never do that again. He’s through running out in the street like we told him not to do, right? I guess he learned from that. Well, no, no, maybe you did. So here you are living your life. How can you tell that you are not repeatedly running out in front of things that can take your life away from you all at once, slowly, painfully? How do you know that? We’ll come back in just a moment and talk about that.
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Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
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So there you are out there living your life. How can you tell that you are not repeatedly running out in front of trucks? I mean, how can you know that there are not things you’re doing repeatedly in your life that aren’t going to someday take a toll, are going to hurt you, or maybe take your life away from you? They may kill you instantly, or maybe worse, kill you slowly and painfully. Well, a lot of you who may be listening to my voice may be smokers, for example. There was a time in this country when we didn’t necessarily know that smoking caused lung cancer. But, you know, I can remember a long time before that information became public that all of my relatives would refer to cigarettes as coffin nails. Well, I’ll drive another nail in my coffin, he’d say, as he tapped the cigarette out and tapped it on his thumbnail and stuck it in his mouth and lit it up and puffed a few smokes. I used to live with that all the time. I had plenty of, what do they call it now, secondhand smoke in my family. My father was a smoker. My mother was a smoker. My grandfather smoked. I mean, just about everybody around me smoked. And none of them really believed it was good for them, I will tell you that right now. But they didn’t die when they smoked. They knew they might die someday, but they had to do that anyway. But many of the people who developed that habit over many years and now face the truth of the matter that smoking causes lung cancer still have a great deal of time dealing with it now. And sooner or later, that very bad habit is very likely to take their life. and the people I’ve seen in the hospital dying of cancer, well, if you could tell me something now that I could do, something I could change in my life, some way to live my life that could ensure I wouldn’t have to go that way, oh, I’d want to do that, I think. The problem is that if it doesn’t hit us now, we’d have a hard time believing that it’s ever going to hit us at all. And then there’s this indiscriminate or promiscuous sex that’s so prevalent in our society today. You do it and nothing happens. You get away with it. You wake up the next morning with a little bit of guilt. Maybe you’re afraid the guy doesn’t respect you anymore. What is it that you feel the next morning after that? But you’re not sick. You don’t come down with anything. There was a time when people worried a lot about gonorrhea, but Penicillin took care of that. They worried a lot about syphilis, and there were some sort of cures for that. Nobody thinks much about syphilis anymore, but it’s still out there, and it’s still causing people to go insane and still taking lives. But, you know, it doesn’t happen immediately after you do it. I think with syphilis, it was a couple of weeks before the rash showed up, and then that went away, and then the phases of it or the problems that syphilis caused came on many, many years beyond. Men who had a small case of it as young men, had a rash, a few symptoms that went away, wound up going absolutely stark staring crazy in their late life because of this bug that had gotten into their brain and eaten away parts of it, I guess. And then, the ultimate booby trap. A virus, not that easily caught, but you can. It’s an infectious virus. Imagine an infectious virus that takes five to ten years to start manifesting symptoms. Oh, well, you can pass the virus on without having any symptoms. And for five years, you could be infecting this person and that person and another person if you had promiscuous sex like that or were having it with someone who had that virus. And for five years they can go on infecting all sorts of people and never know. There’s no truck that runs over you the first time you walk out in the street. You walk out in the street, catch the ball, go back in the yard, nothing terrible happens to you, and so you do it again and the next time. And sooner or later that lottery of life can catch up with you. And it seems like in the area of promiscuous sex, sooner or later that lottery of life will catch up with you. It’s hard to think about that and say, well, why didn’t somebody warn us about it? Why didn’t God warn us? Yeah, God knew about that. Why didn’t God warn us about that? Well, he did actually, didn’t he? Isn’t there a commandment that says, thou shalt not commit adultery? And doesn’t the Bible roundly prohibit and forbid fornication and promiscuous sexual conduct? Doesn’t it actually say that homosexual activity is a sin? Well, yeah, in fact it does. You know, if everybody on earth obeyed God in this one matter, there would be no AIDS, there would be no syphilis, there would be no gonorrhea, no STDs. Because whatever bugs there are, whatever viruses or bacteria or whatever it may be, can be passed back and forth between a man and his wife all their lives, and not that much is going to go on. It’s when we start encountering strange people that terrible things can begin to happen. But you see, the problem is that everyone seems to think that God says we should not commit fornication because he doesn’t want us to have any fun. Sounds just like a teenager, don’t we? In truth, God told us that because he didn’t want us to fall down and hurt ourselves. Now, why am I telling you all this? Why am I going through this rather uncomfortable story? Well, because there is a way of making your life work, and there is a way of keeping it in a mess, and you can know the difference between the two. You weren’t born knowing the difference. You didn’t come into this world knowing the difference. It wasn’t hot-wired or hard-wired, rather, into your mind. You have to learn it. And the truth is there are ways of living your life that make it work better, and there are ways of living your life that cause it to come unstuck. If I can tell you what makes the difference, are you interested? Now, I will tell you right up front that I am no smarter than you are. But I know someone who is. He made man. He gave us a body and a mind. And he is not entirely finished with us yet. He still has unfinished business with every one of us. I’m talking about God, of course. And he has left us with a book, an instruction book, if you will. And the difference of which I speak… between a way of life that works and a way of life that doesn’t work, is revealed in the pages of that book. The book was not easily written. Men had to go through certain experiences and they had to write down their testimony for us. One such man was King Solomon. King Solomon was miraculously wise. Now, by that I mean when he became king and he wanted to be a good king, he was worried about his kingdom and what would happen to him and to his people. He prayed to God, and God told him, look, you ask me for anything you want. You ask it in the heavens above, the earth beneath. I’ll give you whatever you want. And Solomon didn’t stupidly ask for something for himself. I guess in a way he asked for something for himself because I think he was a little bit afraid of failing. What he asked for was a gift of wisdom. And so God miraculously bestowed upon him a wisdom that no one before him had ever experienced and no one after him ever would. So having come to that great wisdom, and wisdom, you know, is a lot more than knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to synthesize knowledge. It’s the ability to put knowledge together out of experience and life and to be able to arrive at decisions based upon your knowledge that are good and right and produce results and that, yeah, that make life work. So Solomon set out to develop – what shall we say? He set out to develop a field of experience for himself. He lived life to the full. He had power. He had money. He had everything he needed. So he tried everything under the sun. He tried entertainment for a while. He tried entertainment and food and beverages and adult beverages and saw, well, no, that doesn’t work either. He pursued some projects then. He built great works, orchards, vineyards, farms. He engaged in animal husbandry and really developed great estates and projects and buildings. And after a while, he sat down to think over all the stuff that he had done, and he wrote a book about it. The book is Ecclesiastes. We talked about it in an earlier broadcast. In Ecclesiastes 2, verse 11, he sort of begins to summarize some of these feelings that he had after going through all the things that he had done. He said, Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought. I looked at all the labor I had labored to do. And behold, it was all empty and a striving after wind, and there was no profit under the sun. Huh. In other words, all of his work that he did, all the projects, was as empty for him and as futile for him as the entertainment and the pursuit of fun and drink and food. And I turned myself, he said, to behold wisdom. and madness, and folly. For what’s the man going to do that comes after the king? Well, all you’re going to do is what’s already been done. In a moment, I’ll tell you how that wisdom excels folly as far as light excels darkness. Stay with me. I’ll be back in just a moment.
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For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled Making Life Work No. 3. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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So Solomon looked at all he’d done, thought about it a great deal, and decided he’d let us know what it was all about. There was some good news out of it. He did say that there was no point in committing suicide at this point. I mean, there is something that is better than something else. He said, I did see that wisdom excels folly. As far as light excels darkness. But the things, the play toys, the pretties, the fun things we do, he said it’s all emptiness and it’s a striving after win. And when it’s all said and done, you’ve got nothing to show for it. Well, surely I’ve got my BMW, don’t I? Well, you have it, but what do you have? According to Solomon, you’re going to find when all is said and done that most of that stuff is a waste of time. Oh, sure, you’ve got to have a car. Sure, you have to have a place to live. But all the fancy things that we think are so important to us, the time is going to come when they’re not going to amount to hello beans. But he said, I did see this, that wisdom excels folly as far as light excels darkness. Wisdom is better. Why? Well, he said, the wise man’s eyes are in his head. He can see what he’s doing, but the fool walks around in darkness. There was a problem, though. Solomon went on to say, and I myself perceived darkness. that one event happens to them all. That was what bothered him, that out at the end of all this thing, whether he was smart, whether he was stupid, whether he was wise, whether he was a fool, he was going to die. So I said in my heart, Solomon continued, as it happens to the fool, so it happens even to me. So what’s the point in being more wise? So, I said in my heart, well, this also is vanity. There’s no remembrance of the wise man more than the fool forever, seeing that that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how does the wise man die? Well, unfortunately, he dies just like the fool. When you’re walking through the cancer ward and they’re all there wheezing out their last gasps and the wife is trying to talk the doctor into giving him more morphine so he doesn’t hurt quite so bad, How smart he used to be doesn’t really matter very much. As the one dies, so dies the other. Therefore, he said, I hated life. I guess there was a time when Solomon actually became a candidate for suicide. He said, I hated life because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous to me, for everything is emptiness and it’s a grasping for a handful of wind. Yea, I hated all my labor I had taken under the sun because I was going to leave it to the man that should be after me. And who knows whether he’s going to be a wise man or a fool. Yet he’s going to have rule over all my labor wherein I have labored and wherein I have showed myself wise under the sun. this also is empty. So I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labor which I took unto the Son. You know, that’s a funny way he puts that. He says, I went about to cause my heart. He didn’t say I just fell into this. It’s almost as though, and I have to confess that I understand how this works a little bit, it’s almost as though you decide you’re just going to feel sorry for yourself. You know, he says, I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the labor I took unto the Son. For there is a man whose labor is in wisdom and in knowledge and in equity. And yet to a man that has not labored therein shall he leave it for his portion. This also is vanity and a great evil. For what does a man have of his labor and of the vexation of his heart wherein he has labored under the sun? For all his days are sorrows and his travail is grief, and his heart doesn’t take any rest at night. You know, what’s it all worth? You know, you work like a dog all day long and you go to bed at night and you can’t sleep because you’re worried about what you’re going to do the next day. You know, somewhere along the line, when we do get up after one of those nights and we stand and stare at ourselves in the mirror the next morning, we really ought to ask ourselves, what am I doing this for? What’s my goal? What’s at the other end of this? For in fact, a great deal of the things that we make goals in our lives are going to be just as empty and just as dead, just as fruitless, just as frustrating as the life of Solomon. But you know, at any given point in time, you can decide to stop and take a look at that and consider there might be something better for you to do. The man says all his days are sorrows, his work is grief to him, and his heart doesn’t take any rest in the night. Oh, this is just emptiness. There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and should make his soul enjoy good in his labor. Now this, he said, I saw that that was from the hand of God. Well, now, that’s interesting. In other words, he’s not saying, of course, that the spiritual life or the godly life is not worth living. That’s not the point. What he’s saying is that all of this striving after more is fruitless. It’s better for you to be able to eat and drink and make yourself enjoy your job. That, he said, was from the hand of God. For who can eat? Or who else can hasten thereunto more than I? For God gives to a man that is good in his sight wisdom and knowledge and joy and But to the sinner, he gives travail and to gather and to heap up so he can give it to somebody else, to the man that is good before God. This is just emptiness. It’s a waste of time. It’s a pursuing of wind. You know, there’s no reason why you and I should have to repeat the experience of Solomon, why we should have to go through that frustration ourselves. The important thing is we know that God has in store for us that we should eat and we should drink and we should enjoy our work and that we should know him and his way of life. We’ll talk more. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, you were born to win.
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The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to You may call us at 888-BIBLE-44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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