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Do you take your faith for granted? Or is it like a lot of married couples: We have been together for so long, we can complete sentences for each other. We can take one another for granted. And at some level that is a good thing. I can take it for granted that my wife will be faithful to me. I can take it for granted that she won't bust the budget. I don't have to check her credit card purchases. I only look at them to make sure that nobody is defrauding us with them. After 51 years of marriage, there aren't a lot of surprises, nor should there be.
At the same time, love calls on us to be attentive to one another and this is where we too often fall down. Sometimes we just don't listen when our mates talk to us. Sometimes we just go on doing whatever we’re doing and we pay attention with half our mind. Now, that isn't anything to become upset about, but it is wise to do something about it. We sometimes have to tell our loved one, I need you, right now. Please give me your undivided attention.
Now, I want to take a step forward from this and ask if we take our faith for granted in much the same way?
Born to Win's Daily Radio Broadcast and Weekly Sermon. A production of Christian Educational Ministries.
Do you take your faith for granted? Or is it like a lot of married couples: We have been together for so long, we can complete sentences for each other. We can take one another for granted. And at some level that is a good thing. I can take it for granted that my wife will be faithful to me. I can take it for granted that she won't bust the budget. I don't have to check her credit card purchases. I only look at them to make sure that nobody is defrauding us with them. After 51 years of marriage, there aren't a lot of surprises, nor should there be.
At the same time, love calls on us to be attentive to one another and this is where we too often fall down. Sometimes we just don't listen when our mates talk to us. Sometimes we just go on doing whatever we’re doing and we pay attention with half our mind. Now, that isn't anything to become upset about, but it is wise to do something about it. We sometimes have to tell our loved one, I need you, right now. Please give me your undivided attention.
Now, I want to take a step forward from this and ask if we take our faith for granted in much the same way?
Join us as we confront the false notion of escaping the consequences of wrongdoing, while we seek enlightenment from ancient wisdom to direct our paths. The episode walks us through the importance of having steadfast principles and goals and how these elements aid in making sound decisions. We touch upon the wisdom of Solomon and the profound warnings he left for those seeking to make sense of their actions when faced with moral dilemmas. Ultimately, our discussion leads us to emphasize the value of the Ten Commandments as pillars for structuring all of life's choices.
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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Well, what kind of a day do you have tomorrow? Are there some decisions coming up that have got you worried? Maybe 10 o'clock tomorrow morning you've got to make a decision about your job? You surely have some decisions coming up. Of course, some of life's toughest decisions come up with no warning at all. You don't know it's coming in at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning. All of a sudden, you're faced with something, a life-changing decision, and you've got to make your decision right now. Do you have any kind of a framework within which you make those decisions, or do you just do what feels good at the moment? Or shall we just pull out a coin and flip a coin and heads I win, tails I lose, and off we go into the sunset? Is that the way it works? I remember when I was a boy, that's the way I solved lots of very important questions like, did I really want a Hershey bar here or would a Baby Ruth be more in line with what I wanted? So I pulled a little coin out of my pocket, I flipped the coin, heads I took to Hershey's, tails I took to Baby Ruth. It was easy. Well, sort of easy. What really made it easy about it was that if I didn't get the one I wanted on the first flip of the coin, I could always go for two out of three. And I learned early on that that helped me understand what it was that I really wanted after all. But I'm afraid a lot of us make our decision on this kind of thing about what feels good at the moment or what will cause us the least amount of pain at the moment more likely. You know, everyone needs a framework in which they make their life decisions. And a framework for making decisions has two very important parts. I've already talked a great deal about goals. And if you don't know where you're going, you don't have a chance of getting there. And having some sort of a structure in your mind of life goals and objectives and things you're trying to get done really helps you when decision time comes. You can say, is this going to help me toward my goals or is this not going to help me toward my goals? And it makes the decision a lot easier. But that's not all you need. You also need for the decision-making process a sort or a set of moral and ethical standards a knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, some consistent guide to life that you follow, come what may. Now, there's a hazard built into life that you don't think about very often. And the hazard is this. When you do wrong, you usually get away with it. Right? Most people who commit crimes don't go to jail. In fact, relatively few of them do. And you and I can complain a great deal about that. But if we want to tell the truth, get up and look yourself in the mirror and say, okay, there you are. Don't you usually get away with it when you do wrong? Now, I know you don't really get away with it, but it surely seems as though you do. And then there's a perception that if no one ever finds out, then you really have gotten away with it. Because until somebody finds out, we think we have, we're not sure we have, but maybe someone will find out, and then it will come home to roost. Now, we're looking for wisdom here. We're wanting to understand life here. We're trying to make our lives work. And since we're looking for wisdom, we might check with the man who has the greatest gift of wisdom God ever gave to man. His name was Solomon. He was a king. And Solomon said this. It's a difficult sentence, so listen carefully. 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. That's a passage worth memorizing and remembering because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, and that is the way life works. There's all kinds of bad stuff that happens out there. And even when you do kind of get caught, and they put the cuffs on you and take you to jail, you call your lawyer, your lawyer gets you out on the street, and it may be a year, it may be two, who knows when, if ever, you'll actually do any time because of an evil work. And because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, so there's a connection between the act and the punishment, hey, there's no worry. Why should I worry? Why should I bereave my soul of something that I want? Why should I withhold from myself something I desire? I'll just steal it. And the chances are I'll get away with it. That's the way a lot of people live their lives. I think Solomon was right that in this world one of the great hazards of life is that we do wrong and we seem to get away with it. Now he went on to say, though a sinner do evil a hundred times and his days are prolonged, yet surely I know two things. One, it will be well with them that fear God. And two, it is not going to be well with the wicked and he's not really going to prolong his days. He's going to be like a shadow because he doesn't fear God. You know, I'll tell you the truth. I think a lot of Christians go astray because they don't pay enough attention to the Old Testament. They're not really that familiar with books like Ecclesiastes. And this passage I read is from Ecclesiastes 8, beginning in verse 11. And they don't have these concepts in their mind for wisdom's sake alone, to realize that here is something that God gave a man a gift of wisdom. The man wrote this down for us, and then here we go living our lives without the benefit of knowing what he said. We do things, and we get away with them, and we become emboldened. So it's imperative that we have some level of discipline somewhere in our lives. Now, when we were children, we were under a form of discipline. Your daddy probably told you, don't play in the street. Don't even go into the street. Okay, I got it, Dad. Don't play in the street. Don't run into the street. So when you were playing ball in the yard and all excited and carried away with the excitement of the game and the ball rolled over the curb and into the street, what did you do? Well, shucks, if you're like me, you ran after it. Little kids don't think things over. We don't sit and think about it. We don't stop at the curb automatically and say, now I want to be a good little boy. I'm not going into the street because dad said don't go there. I don't know about you, but I was impulsive. I didn't think about it. I was already out in the street, had the ball, and back over the curb, and the thought of my dad, what he said, had not even crossed my mind. Well, it hadn't crossed my mind the first time I did it. Now, when you ran out after it and grabbed it and brought it back, what happened to you? Probably nothing. And in the young mind, a point was made. The point was, hey, there's no real danger in the street. On the other hand, it is possible that your dad saw you run into the street. He happened to be looking up from his work in the flower beds and saw you go tearing out of the street, and he came wandering out and met you when you got back to the curb, grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, and disciplined you for it. Now, the next time something like this happened, you might have looked around for dad before you ran into the street. Because the message that has kind of subtly gotten home to all of us by the sequence of events is, it's not exactly the street that is the danger. Dad is. And so, gently insinuated into the young mind is the idea, if I don't get caught by Dad, I got away with it. There was no penalty. There was no punishment. Nothing, no chastisement. If Dad sees me, that's bad. If Dad doesn't see me, that's good. And I have to be somewhat careful because Dad's got eyes in the back of his head. Moms especially have eyes in the back of their head. And they have a way of knowing what we have done even when we don't know how in the world they ever knew it. So a lot of us got in the habit of doing what Dad said even when Dad was nowhere around. But generally, discipline prevails, and most of us survive our childhood impulsiveness. Watchful parents, neighbors, and police protect us during these vulnerable years. But it's surprising how, well, what shall we say, childish some of us are, even when we grow up and some of the old lessons we learned in childhood hang on to us. If nothing happened to me, we think, I got away with it. If nobody finds out, I got away with it. But the truth is, when you sin, when you do wrong, something does happen. I'll be back in a moment, and we'll talk about this.
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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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As I was saying, when you commit a sin, something does happen, even though you don't get caught, even though nobody knows but you, and even though nothing comes rolling down the mountainside on you right then. The best way I can help you understand this is when a framer comes in to build your house, You know, it's several stages. You pour the foundation. You get all your plumbing roughed in before that. And then the framers come in. They put up the studs that form the wall of your house. The chances are the framers will put the studs in the wall of your house 18 inches apart. That's sort of a standard for the old average American home. It takes a lot of studs to frame up a three-bedroom house. Now, if your builder happens to need a couple of studs at home while he's doing all this stuff and you're not around, he might just take one or two of them to his house and leave a couple of yours a little further apart. He'll put the sheetrock and the coverings on the walls and you will never know the difference. Now, when you commit a sin and nothing happens, it is like taking one stud out of one wall. No one will know that it's gone. The wall looks exactly the same, and there is no apparent difference in the house. But there's a problem. Because nothing happened, you are almost certain to do it again and again. And another stud is gone, and then another. You know, you could probably take out every other stud in the wall of your house, and no one would tell the difference. At least, they couldn't tell the difference as long as the wind is not blowing. But when the house comes under stress, the house can collapse around your ears. And you know, character in a man or a woman is a lot like the studs in the wall of a house. You can't see character very well. You know, a person comes before you, they're dressed, they've got their clothes on, they've got their hair cut, and they're wearing whatever style of glasses they may have, and you look at them and you get an image of this person standing before you, and that's really just about all you get. After a few minutes of conversation, you begin to develop a few more ideas about this person, but it's really hard to know what the character of this person is like. Now, Jesus said a lot the same thing about character, and he even used a similar analogy to the one that I've used here about what happens when you commit a sin and nothing happens to you. He said in Matthew 7, 21, Not everyone that says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Now, a lot of the conversation about preachers when they get up before you to tell you all about God and what you ought to do and how you live your life have to do with whether or not you're going to go to heaven or you're going to go to hell. And they talk about salvation from that perspective. Well, now here's Jesus who says, not everyone that says to me, Lord, Lord. In other words, just because you call him your Lord, you use the words, doesn't mean you're going to enter the kingdom of heaven. He goes on to say, it's not just the person that names my name, but he that does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Now, I don't believe in salvation by works. I believe we are saved by the grace of God through faith. But it's awfully hard to let Jesus' words slide by without taking notice of what he said here. What he said is the mere profession of faith in Christ with the lips is not good enough. Something has got to happen in the heart. And if something happens in the heart, it's going to be manifested in the way we live our lives. Just before this, he has made this lengthy statement about by their fruits you shall know them. He says a good tree brings forth good fruit. An evil tree brings forth corrupt fruit. He said it's just not possible for a corrupt tree to bring forth good fruit. And so you can actually tell by what a person is doing what kind of a person they really are. And so then he follows right on the heels of that and says, Not everybody that says, Lord, Lord, is going to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he that does the will of my Father, which is in heaven. So, the Father in heaven has a will. And only those who seek and do that will are going into the kingdom of heaven. It's what Jesus said. What can I tell you? Now, I'm not here to scare anyone. But if we're going to call ourselves Christian, if we're going to name the name of Jesus, don't you think we should really take seriously what that carpenter from Galilee had to say? Now he went on to say, Many are going to say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, haven't we prophesied in your name, and in your name have cast out devils, and in your name have done many wonderful works? And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you. Depart from me, ye that work iniquity. Now if I have the Lord straight here, he is saying that preachers like me are not immune from this judgment. He seems to be saying there are religious people who work iniquity, and he also says that that's not going to cut it. Then he goes on to make this analogy from a house. "'Therefore, whosoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken him to a wise man that built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house.' And it didn't fall because it was founded upon a rock. What's that? Well, it's a man who hears what Jesus says and does it, lives it. He has a framework for the character-making decisions of his life. And he will hurt himself before he will go contrary to that framework for his decisions. And he goes on to say, Everyone that hears these sayings of mine and does them not shall be likened to a foolish man which built his house upon the sand, and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon the house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. Now, you've probably heard this illustration before. But did you notice that the collapse of this house was deferred? As long as the weather was good, as long as the framework of this house was not stressed in any way, well, it served just fine. It would keep the sun off your head. It would keep the dew off of you during the night. But if a storm comes, if water rises, if the winds blow hard, the thing is going to be down around your ears. Now, if you think you can live the rest of your life without ever encountering a storm, maybe you can afford to cut some corners. But you and I both know you can't make it that way. But the truth is your life is going to face storms. The truth is you are going to have the winds blow it. The truth is things are going to go bad for you from time to time. And the question is, Do you have the strength of character to go through it? Are you going to collapse under the strain? So I ask about your decisions tomorrow. What's the framework in which those decisions will be made? Is the frame solid? Are you committed to it? Or do you take a support out of the thing every once in a while just when it suits you? What I'm asking you about is your character and the basis, the foundation upon which that character is built. Now, I can offer you ten heavy-duty studs to start with. In fact, these studs are so heavy we can call them pillars. They're the Ten Commandments. All of life's decisions can be built on this framework. But the instant you start making exceptions to any one of them, they are no longer the authority you are. It's true that when you break these commandments, it often seems that nothing happens. But in truth, something very important happens. You have removed a stud from the wall. You've removed a rib from your chest. You have made a break with your character. And pretty soon, you won't have any chest at all. James made an interesting statement in his epistle, 2nd chapter, verse 9. But if you have respect to persons, you commit sin and are convicted of the law as transgressors. For whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of it all. Now, I've heard people talk about that a long time as though, well, if I tell a lie, I am now a thief. I don't think that's exactly what James is saying. Listen further. For he that said, do not commit adultery, also said, do not kill. Now, if you commit no adultery, but if you kill, you will become a transgressor of the law. What's he saying? He is saying the authority that gave you the one is the authority that gave you the other. And when you decide, when you start picking and choosing commandments, when you start making exceptions to that authority, you will become the authority. Christ is no longer the authority. God is no longer the authority. And when you've done that... well, then you've lost your way.
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Stay with me. I'll be back in just a moment. 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.
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8.
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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 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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So James ends it by saying, So speak you and so do as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. The law of liberty. In other words, what we're dealing with now is a liberty to live our lives within the law. We're going to be judged by it, but it's our decision. We get to make the decision. We get to keep God's law, or we get to break it, whichever way we want to go, but you'd better live your life as somebody that's going to be judged by a set of standards that are higher than you are. Now, James does not mean to say that you are a killer when you have stolen. What he means to say is that when you have stolen, you have abandoned the law as a guide to life. You know, I don't think very many Christians really understand the law. They know the law can't save them. They know they're justified by faith. And yet at the same time, they know it's not right for a Christian to steal. They know it's wrong for a Christian to commit adultery or fornication. They know it's wrong to do these things. And yet, I think they have gotten lost in the technical arguments about some supposed conflict between law and grace. Can I give you a really simple explanation of that? The law exists to define right and wrong. Grace exists to redeem us from the wrong. Is that too hard? Law defines the difference between right and wrong. It tells us how a person ought to live his life. Well, we don't do very well at that. We pile up a whole heap of wrong that has to be dealt with. And through His grace, God redeems us from the wrong things that we have done. As a result of the confusion over this, I think a lot of Christians make life-changing decisions without the guidance of the law. The law is given to us to help us understand this way of doing things will help you. This way of doing things is going to bollocks things up. You're going to be really grievously sorry if you go down this road. I'm afraid many people think of sin in terms of penalties. instead of consequences. And there is a huge difference between these two concepts. Now, do you remember the earlier illustration about a child running into the street after his ball? Yeah, we got that. I remember that. Okay. When he comes back across the curb and dad grabs him by the scruff of the neck and turns him over his knee and paddles his behind, that's a penalty. If, on the other hand, the child runs across the curb and into the street and a cement truck turns him into jam on the pavement, this is consequences. The consequences of the violation of your dad's instructions is severe. The penalty, well, that's a learning thing. The immature Christian concerns himself primarily with the penalties of life. Will I get found out? Will I be embarrassed? Will I get in trouble with God? Will I be shown up? You know, when I grew up, I came to the curb of the street prepared to make my own decisions. The street had not changed. The traffic had not abated. It was still there. The cement truck, if it came along at the wrong time, would turn me into a rather larger pool of jam, but the result would be the same. And the law had not changed. The red and green lights were still there, and they meant don't cross when it's red, and when it's green, you can cross. Now, what had changed? Well, what had changed was me. I was able to deal with these things in terms of the consequences of stupid behavior, not merely the penalties. Before, I waited at the light holding my mother's hand. She watched the traffic, and she kept us safe. Now I watch the light for myself. Along the way, I learned that what my mom and dad told me was right, that it was good for me, and that it was safe. I did what was right because it was right, not just because someone told me to do it that way. And, you know, what was right and wrong had not changed. What had changed was I had come to a kind of human faith. I believed my mom and dad, and therefore I did what they said. Faith. Faith that they were right. Faith that they knew. I trusted them. It was an obedience of faith. It was no longer an obedience that depended on penalties and enforcement and somebody hitting me over the head or banging me on the backside because I did something wrong. Now Paul, writing to the Romans, made an interesting statement in this regard. He said now to him that is of the power to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began but is now made manifest And by the scriptures of the prophets, according to the commandment of the everlasting God, it is now made known to all nations for the obedience of faith. And in a way, that's what I've been talking about ever since this broadcast began today. I'm talking about the obedience of faith. What I'm trying to tell you is that somehow, in some way in your life, you need to come to learn to trust God. that when he tells you, don't lie, there's a good reason behind it, and you're not going to lie because you trust him. It's not a question of whether you can get away with it. It's not a question of whether you might not ever be found out. You're not going to lie because it's wrong. It's wrong because God told you it's wrong, and you trust him. That standard of conduct, which we call the law, It's based on the Ten Commandments, but there's much, much more to it than that. It has to do with the way we love our fellow man, and the way we love God, and the way we worship God. If we trust Him, we'll learn to do it His way and not ours. I commend to you the study of the Bible, all of it. Because in the study of the Bible, you're going to come to know God. And as you come to know God, you'll learn to trust Him. And out of that will grow an obedience of faith that will provide a framework for making your life work. 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 Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net.
Are you frequently paralyzed by indecision or enticed by the comfort of not making choices? This episode of Born to Win challenges you to reconsider the role that decision-making plays in achieving a fulfilling life. Ronald L. Dart presents the compelling argument that life is built upon a series of choices, both minor and major, and that avoiding decisions altogether may result in a life that is far from what we desire. The episode revisits the teachings from the parable of the talents, urging listeners to take the bold step of investing their resources and talents instead of burying them out of fear. Ronald draws parallels between spiritual principles and practical life choices, underscoring the divine encouragement to learn from our failures and the importance of risk-taking as a pathway to success. Through personal anecdotes and biblical wisdom, this discussion offers clear and impactful lessons for anyone seeking to navigate life's uncertainties wisely. Listeners are further encouraged to welcome constructive criticism and to be transparent about their failures, as these are crucial for growth. Discover why relying solely on divine intervention without personal responsibility can lead to spiritual complacency and how embracing an active role in decision-making can empower you to 'make life work.'
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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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What sort of decisions do you have coming up today? Do you know what you're going to do about them? Have you made any preparation for the decisions? Maybe called a friend and asked for some advice? Read a book on the subject? Maybe did a little research, pulled down an encyclopedia and looked up some things so that when you make the decision, you'll make a sensible one? Do you have a framework within which you make your decisions? By that I mean, do you have lifetime goals that you have written down somewhere or maybe put a needlepoint on the wall so that you can ask yourself when the time comes to make a decision, now how does this fit in with my lifetime goals? Is this in line with my career goals? Is this in line with what I really want to do with my life or am I just doing this because it feels good? Do you make your decisions within the framework of certain moral standards or ethical standards so that there's a framework of right and wrong in your decision-making process? Now, when I ask you how your life is working... your answer is going to depend very much on the decisions you've been making, because the decisions you make, shall I turn right or left at this corner, shall I take this job or shall I not, has everything to do with how your life is going to work today, tomorrow, next week, and some of the decisions you'll make today may well have an effect on the rest of your life. And you know, in a way, your answer to this question about how your life is working today may depend even more on the decisions you have not been making. Because among the things that make life work, the ability to make decisions and act on them ranks right up at the top of the list. Well, not the very top, but very near. Now, what keeps you from making decisions? Because we're friends, we can talk, right? You oftentimes will put off a decision or avoid a decision just like I do. Why do we do that? Well, one of the reasons we're afraid of being wrong. Sometimes we're afraid we don't have enough information. Sometimes we say, well, I think I'd like to get some advice. And, of course, if we're really honest with ourselves, we know that some of these things are excuses, right? that we just don't want to decide, because if we make the decision, then we're responsible. You know, I decided. It went wrong. It's my fault. And boy, I don't like that. There's an old song, remember, you may remember it well. It was, Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be. A lot of people live their life with a kind of fatalism, you know. It may be very comforting, but it's well-named. Fatalism can be fatal. Maybe you've seen some of the old war movies where this guy with all sorts of bravado doesn't bother getting down in the pits and the trenches or the foxholes because you say, oh, if the bullet's got your name written on it, it's going to get you anyway. So why bother keeping your head down? What is really stupid is to be killed by a bullet that doesn't have your name on it because you didn't keep your head down. But that's another thing. A wise old king said, a prudent man foresees the evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished. You know, it seems to me it may well be that there's a bullet somewhere that has my name written on it, or maybe there's a jaguar that has my name written on it that'll come plowing into the side of my car at an intersection some of these days. But it makes sense to me to keep my head up and look around and pay attention to life and hide myself if I see evil coming my way. Doesn't it make sense to you that stepping aside out of the way of evil, making a decision that will keep you from getting hurt when you can see the right way to go, isn't that better than just sort of drifting along, making no decisions? You know, a successful life is really composed of a series of small decisions, some right and some wrong. Now, wait a minute, wait, wait. I said a successful life includes decisions that are wrong, didn't I? Well, how can that be? Shouldn't you, if you're going to live a successful life, be making all the right decisions? Well, that'd be really nice if it worked out that way, but it doesn't. The truth is the most successful people you know are wrong a lot of the time. Now, how can a wrong decision contribute to a successful life? Well, that's easy. You make a mistake and you learn from it. You become stronger and more confident in your future decisions because you can say, been there, done that. And if you make the same mistake again, you can say, been there, done that, and I got the t-shirt now. I am not going there again. I'm through with that. But you know, there is one really bad decision that makes no real contribution and from which you learn next to nothing. It is the decision not to decide. I'll explain what I mean in just a moment after these words.
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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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You would be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't, at how many people think they have avoided something or sidestepped something by not making a decision. They think that they have put it off. The truth is that they made a decision not to decide, and in doing so, they made a decision to take whatever comes, to let time and chance rule their life. There's a parable where Jesus speaks to his disciples and tells them that the kingdom of heaven is like a man traveling into a far country. He called his servants together, and he delivered to them his goods. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to every man according to his several ability. And then he took his journey. Now, the parable in question is found in Matthew 25, and if you're looking for it, it starts in verse 14. The idea here is that a man's got three people that work for him. They are differently abled. That is, one is more able than another. They have abilities and talents. And so he gives them responsibilities, apparently money, in relation to their ability, and he takes his journey and goes away. Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same and made five more talents with him. Smart guy. Made decisions, put the money out there on the market, bought some stock, bought some property, resold some things, bought some goods and traded them off and made five other talents. Now, was there a chance he might have lost some money? Yeah, of course. I mean, it's possible one of the trades could have gone bad. He could have bought a load of vegetables that rotted on him before he could get them sold. Likewise, he that had received two, he went out and traded and gained other two. But he that had received one went and digged a hole in the ground and hid his Lord's money. Now, after a long time, the Lord of these servants comes and reckons with them. And so he that had received five talents came, and he brought the other five talents and said, Lord, you gave me five talents. Behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. I have doubled your money. The Lord said to him, Well, well done, you good and faithful servant. You've been faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. Enter into the joy of your Lord. Now, I identify with that. I've hired a man to take care of my stuff, and he does a good job with the small stuff I give him to take care of. I'm going to trust him with more, aren't you? You're going to want to take that guy who really does a good job for you and promote him and make him ruler over more things. He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, you delivered to me two talents. Look, I've gained two other beside them. He also had doubled his money. This is good. This is the way we like for things to work. We like to put an investment out there and come back and get double. His Lord said, Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many things. Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew you that you are a hard man, that you reap where you haven't even sown, and that you gather where you have not even strown. And I was afraid, and I went and I hid your talent in the earth. Lo, there you have what is yours. Well, I guess that's something. He didn't lose anything. He gave him a talent, he went away, he came back, and the one talent was still there. So how did the Lord feel about that? The fact that he got his own back, that there was no loss involved in the situation. Well, listen to his words. He said to the servant, you wicked and slothful, lazy lout. You knew that I reap where I don't sow. You say you knew I gather where I don't strode. You ought, therefore, to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my own coming I could have received my money with interest. Well, yeah, that's true, isn't it? This lazy lout of a servant did not even take into consideration the time value of money. I got a shock not too long ago. I was talking to a group of people about the time value of money, and I asked them, I asked the group, how many of you would rather have $100 today or $100 a year from now? Same $100. Absolute guarantee, you're going to have the $100 a year from now. There's not going to be any chance of you're not getting it. Don't worry about that. Would you rather have it today or would you rather have it a year from now? I don't remember the numbers and distribution, but probably out of a group of 20, there were five or six people that said they would rather have the money a year from now. Their reasons for it were kind of curious. They had to, well, I'd be afraid I might lose it. I might have something to do with it in a year from now. They kind of like to have something coming to them in the future and so on. But don't we all realize that $100 in the hand today is worth a lot more than $100 in the hand a year from now? For one thing, if you have $100 in the hand today, you can go down and buy a suit of clothes with that $100 and come out of the store wearing them. A year from now, that same suit of clothes you probably can't afford with $100 you're going to get a year from now because a year from now, $100 is only worth $90 in today's dollars, right? You know prices go up, and you know you can't buy as much a year from now with $100 as you can buy with $100 right now, right? We all know that. We got our lessons in inflation some time ago. We're kind of tending to forget them now, but we'll remember them again. The truth is that if you put the money in the bank... A year from now, you might have $103 or $104. It's not a lot more, but it's more because of the time value of money. So the Lord to the servant says, You ought to have put my money to the exchangers. Then at my coming, I could have received my own with usury. But what if he had lost it? What if he had gone out and taken this talent and bought 100 shares of stock, and the stock went bankrupt, and he came back and said, Lord, I invested your money, and I lost it. Well, listen to what happened to him as things did work out. He says, Take therefore the talent from him, and give it to him that has ten talents. For to every one that has shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even what he has. And cast you the unprofitable servant into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Well, tell me, how much worse off would he have been if he had bought a hundred shares of stock and lost the whole thing? Well, he lost everything anyway. There really was no risk involved for him then when it comes right down to it in going ahead and taking the most outrageous risks and trying to double or triple his Lord's money while he had it. He would not have been any worse off at all. Now, I can already hear someone saying, I don't think that's fair. I mean, after all, the guy only had one. Why are you taking it away and giving it to the guy with ten for he's got ten? I mean, after all, we look for fairness. Give it to the guy who only has the two. Well, now, wait a minute. You're looking at this from the wrong angle. Whose money is this anyway? Well, it's the Lord's money, right? It's the Lord who gave them the money to do these things with. Now, here you are. Let's say that you got an inheritance from your Aunt Jane, and you went out and you found yourself three financial advisors. And you split that money into thirds, and you gave some of it to each of these financial advisors out there. And at the end of a certain period of time, you go back to your financial advisors and see how they've invested your money. And one of them has tripled it, one of them has doubled it, and one of them hasn't done anything with it at all. Now, you're going to feel sorry for the poor guy who didn't do anything at all with your money? Well, I don't know about you, but I would take the account away from him. And I wouldn't give it to the guy who doubled my money. I'd give it to the guy who tripled my money, wouldn't you? When you look at it that way, you can understand the parable, I think, a whole lot better. That God puts things in our hands and God expects us to do things with the things he puts in our hands. By this man in the parable, if he had just stuck his neck out, He had a chance of success. By doing nothing, by risking nothing, he had no chance at all. You know what is really interesting about this passage? God gives us permission to take chances and make mistakes. And in the long run, we learn so much more by correcting mistakes than we do when we get it right the first time. It's funny, isn't it? But you know it's true. You make a mistake and learn from your mistake, you'll remember it a lot longer than you will if you hadn't made the mistake. But let me tell you who is really in trouble. It's the man who doesn't make mistakes. Actually, there are two people here. There is the man who thinks he can avoid mistakes by doing nothing. I'm not going to make any mistakes. And then there's the man who refuses to admit that a mistake was a mistake. You know, politicians are very funny people. I think in a way they're a mirror of all of us. They don't make mistakes, but a lot of mistakes are made around them. When have you ever watched television and seen a politician walk up in front of the camera, stand there, stare straight in the eye, and say, I'm sorry, I was wrong? Oh, no. They will come before the camera, and they will stand there sanctimoniously and say, mistakes were made. Now, you just try to get one of them to change that phrase from the passive voice to the active voice and say, folks, I'm sorry I screwed up. No, I'm sorry. You'll never get that out of them. Mistakes were made. Mistakes make themselves. Mistakes just happen. Mistakes drop on us out of trees. That's how mistakes get made. You know, politicians should really keep a sacrificial lamb on staff. Somebody they can fire and then tell the public, Bob did it and we fired him. Oh, that would be simple, wouldn't it? We just blame Bob, and we fired him, and he's gone. Then they can go hire another Bob. Bob knows going in that he's the sacrificial lamb, so he's not going to complain. There are plenty of Bobs around where that one came from, and so every time you make a big mistake as a politician, you just sacrifice another Bob. But seriously, what does all this have to do with you? Well, what do you do when you make a mistake? Swear off of decision-making? Do you own up to it and learn from it? Or do you deny that it was a mistake? Well, you know, it couldn't have been a mistake because I prayed about it. I mean, I'm special to God, and God wouldn't let me make a mistake. You know, this is going to sound funny to you, but it's odd how many people mess up their lives because they depend on God alone. Don't turn me off now. Wait and hear what I'm going to tell you. Because everybody knows we should depend on God. The problem is with a person who God has heard their prayer. God has intervened in their life. He may have done one or more miracles for them sometime in his life. And they seem to presume that because God loved them, and still does, and because he did a miracle for them, and still will, that His presence and blessing are now unconditional in their life. They assume that He will be with them no matter what kind of stupid thing they do. Well now, God may be with you true enough, but God will not be a partner to stupidity. And He will not bless you when you refuse to pay attention to what He tells you. I want to illustrate what I mean here.
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SPEAKER 03 :
So what do I mean when I say that God may be with you, but that He will not be a partner to stupidity? Or that He will not bless you when you refuse to pay attention to what He tells you? There was a man, his name was Saul. He was made king over Israel when he was really a nobody. God told him that when you were little in your own eyes, I exalted you to be king over Israel. God chose him. God gave him the kingdom. And then God gave him the Holy Spirit. It came upon him, and he even became a prophet. And God gave him every gift he needed to be the king, and God was on his side. He said, you're my man. I chose you. I'm with you. I'm for you. And then God gave Saul some instructions that Saul did not follow. And when he was corrected for not following them, he justified himself. Now, look, it seems to me, wouldn't you agree, that if God comes to you and says, you're wrong. that it's best just to take him at his word and say, you're right, I'm wrong. I think I'll accept your word for it. But Saul thought he knew better. He was the king. It's good to be the king. He could make decisions. Men carried out his orders. He was a man of destiny. What men of destiny seem to forget is that destinations can be changed. And to whatever extent that some of us little guys think we've got destinies or that, well, God's with me and I don't know if he's with you or not. You know, we forget the simple truth that the destination can be changed, that God can reject a man whom he has previously chosen. When we forget that simple truth, we are headed for trouble big time. It's true in every aspect of life. Just because your method has always worked, your product has always sold, does not mean it always will. So, when your life is working, don't assume that it always will. You know, I really don't think what I'm saying will have much effect on those of you who have already gone beyond being admonished in this type of thing. I'm telling you this because you will still listen. The most important critic you have is the one down inside of you. You need to nourish that critic. You need to feed him information to use in evaluating what you are doing. We call that critic a conscience. But a conscience is worthless if it has no standards, if it has no guide, if it has nothing to base decisions on. Read the Bible for correction. Read the Bible to see where you've gone astray. Read the Bible to see where you have made your mistakes. Learn from the mistakes and the successes of the great men and women of the book. And there's something else out there, too. You know, you have critics of your own. Maybe awfully close. Maybe your wife. Maybe your husband. Maybe your mother. Cherish your critics. Value their comments. Value their reactions. They are not always right, but only a fool will fail to listen. But above and beyond all that, when you are wrong, Own up to it. Don't blame someone else and don't make excuses. You don't learn from making excuses. You don't learn from blaming someone else. And when you don't learn, you don't grow. So what do you do? Well, you make a big confession of your mistakes to men. And you make a big confession of your sins to God. You don't get up in front of the camera and say, well, mistakes were made. You say, I made a mistake. It was mine. It was all mine. And I take responsibility. You know, when you make honest confession, it's all but over. When you cover it up, explain it away, justify it, minimize it, and deny it, it drags on and on, and you learn nothing. Look at the politicians. How many times is it going to take before they learn that they get into more trouble by trying to cover up what they've done than they would have ever gotten in by just owning up to what they had done? You know, going back to the parable of the talents I gave you earlier in this broadcast where I talked about the poor man who had the one talent, do you know what his biggest problem was? He was afraid. He said, Lord, I knew that you're a hard man, and I was afraid. There's an old saying that says, do not take counsel of your fears. In other words, don't take advice from your fears. Your fears are going to lead you astray every time. There's a great danger in taking that advice. The great danger is we have a way of bringing our fears to pass. I don't know what it is. I don't know how it works. I could never describe for you the mechanism by what it happens. But in the book of Proverbs, chapter 10, verse 24, Solomon says this, The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him, but the desire of the righteous shall be granted. There is something about fear that when we are taking advice from our fears and responding to our fears, we have a way of bringing the very thing we're afraid of to pass. So never take advice from your fears. You know, when so much of success in life depends on the decisions we make, it is really remarkable that we avoid thinking about them as much as we do. It is also surprising that we don't seek good advice more than we do. Maybe it's because there is so much advice out there and most of it comes from people who don't know what they're talking about. They know less about it in some cases than we do. There's an old saying, advice not asked for is advice not wanted. Well, yeah, and there's a reason for that. Because the advice we ask for usually is worthless. But you know, I'll bet you know people whose advice is valuable. I expect you know someone who has common sense and wisdom, that you know people whose advice has been sound before. You need advice? Ask them. There's another proverb, 20, verse 6, that says this, Counsel in the heart of a man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out. Yeah, sometimes you have to work at it to get the right advice from the right people, but it's worth it. Ask for all the advice you want, but never forget whose decision it is. If you have to live with the results, no one but you has a right to make the decision. The truth is, God can make even a bad decision work for your good, but if you don't decide at all, you're like the man who buried his talent in the ground. You know, decisive people win out in the long run. The people who refuse to decide are losers. God does not intend to spend eternity with a bunch of losers. 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 Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1 888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net.
Life seems perfect when everything is going as planned, but it is precisely during these moments that complacency can lead to mistakes. In this episode, we delve into the importance of remaining vigilant and accepting criticism even when times are good. Drawing lessons from historical figures and King Solomon's wisdom, we explore how power can cloud judgment and how staying open to correction can keep us grounded.
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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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So how is your day so far? Is everything about like you planned it? Nothing has come unstuck. The children have behaved well. Nothing has burned on the stove. Your boss gave you a raise today. Life is working just fine, right? Congratulations. I'm happy for you. In fact, I'm here to help you hold on to it. Because it's at times like these, times when everything is going your way, these are the times when mistakes are made that can bring the whole thing down around your ears. In fact, there is something inside a normal person that knows that. You know the feeling. Things have been working like gangbusters. Life is good. Everything is percolating along, and you turn to your best friend and say, something's wrong. Everything is going too well. Something's going to happen. We're just nervous about it all. King Solomon learned this the hard way. He learned that at the very height of success, Foolishness is apt to set in. In Ecclesiastes, the fourth chapter, about verse 13, he says this, Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king who will no more be admonished. Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king. And what makes this king foolish is the fact that he will no longer be admonished. Power does that, you know. I mean, who's going to go up to the king and tell him he's mistaken? Who's going to go up to the king and tell him, well, you're wrong again, you old guy. You've got to get yourself straightened out here. Who's going to tell the king that he's wrong? Well, this is one of the saddest things about life, that men of power... become foolish. What happens to them is they begin to think that they are above the law, that the laws that apply to ordinary folks like you and me don't apply to them. Now, I wouldn't want to pass judgment on anybody in the White House, government, the State House, administrations, or so forth, but you sure hear a lot of that from people these days of concern about people in government acting like they think the laws that apply to the rest of us don't apply to them. Of course, so many things and so many people in government these days came from law schools. They sometimes practiced law, sometimes didn't. But law and the study of the law and the practice of law has been their life. And because they are the lawyers, well, they can, by and large, handle the law. They can manipulate the law. And then they get into government. And they think, well, they're making laws for you and me. And they forget that they apply to them as well. They're in charge. They can execute their will. And they become foolish and sometimes stupid in the way they administer the law, or better yet, the way they ignore the law and get themselves in trouble. One of the reasons also, I think, why men of power get in trouble is because they develop this sense of destiny. They think that somehow God is with them or destiny is with them, that they are destined for greatness, and that therefore their folly cannot cause them to fall. Some years ago, I read a book by Barbara Tuchman entitled The March of Folly. And she made her way through numerous historical examples, the old Trojan horse example. She dealt with the way in which the king of England lost the United States in the war of 1776. She dealt with the Renaissance popes and how their folly over a long period of time through four successive popes led to the Protestant Reformation. And she analyzed them from the point of view of how their wrongheadedness, how their stubbornness, how their pride, their exaltation, their sense that they could do no wrong, I guess, led them to acts of folly and stupidity that caused the loss, in many cases, of a lot of lives and changed history. Let's put down for ourselves one more great principle, a principle that's important in making your life work. It is the acceptance of correction and admonition. Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king who will no more be admonished. The acceptance of correction, the ability to listen to and accept gratefully, criticism is one of the things that makes all the difference in the world in your life. In Proverbs, Solomon developed it a little further, and there are some important things said here that I think I'd like to tell you. In Proverbs 15 and verse 10, Solomon says this, Correction is grievous unto him that forsakes the way, and he that hates reproof shall die. Over the years, I've kind of noticed that there are people you deal with that if you're the boss and they work for you, you go to them and you decide, well, this fellow's not getting it right. Rather than just fire him out of hand, I'll go to him and explain what he's doing. I'll give him some correction. Now, correction is not a big deal. Correction simply means I come to you and I say, you're putting that together wrong. If you continue putting it together that way, it's going to come unstuck. So let me show you how to do it better. Now, a sensible person will sit back and say, yes, please show me what I'm doing. The fool will say, I know how to do it. Leave me alone. Now, it's, of course, possible that the person carrying out the task knows better than the person who's trying to explain it to him or correct him, but the fool is the one who refuses to even listen to the correction. He hates it. It's grievous. And the person that hates reproof that can't stand it when someone tells him he's wrong, shall die. Hell and destruction are before the Lord. How much more the hearts of the children of men. God can look down at the heart of man. He knows what's going on inside of us, and He Himself takes in hand to hand out correction to us from time to time. But in verse 12, Solomon concludes, A scorner loves not one that reproves him, neither will he go to the wise. It's in that last phrase, I think, that your salvation can come. The ability to go to the wise. Oh, sure, not everyone that takes a hand to give you advice is right. Oh, certainly not everyone that tells you you're wrong or offers you criticism deserves that much of a hearing. You don't necessarily have to follow everything that they tell you. The question though is, will you go to the wise? Will you take your hat in your hand, go to someone you know is wise and say, look, I've got a problem. Can you help me with this? And are you capable of really appreciating someone who cares enough about you to tell you when you're about to get hurt? I remember once on a visit to South Africa where I I was a stranger. I was not entirely familiar with the sensitivities of that country. It was my first visit down there, the first of many. And on that visit, I really didn't know my way around and made a couple of public speeches in which I said some things that were really not the best. I would have been much better off if I had not said them. The fellow who worked for me down there didn't tell me. didn't come to me, didn't say a word about those mistakes, and I did it again. I was rather angry with him when all was said and done because I really wanted and expected him to tell me where the mistakes were, to tell me where I might hurt someone, to tell me where someone might misunderstand something I was trying to say. I, at that time, had no trouble in appreciating someone who would tell me that I was wrong. Now, the word reproof, well, it goes along with rebuke, I guess, and we don't like to have somebody reprove us. It sounds like we're being scolded or put right. Well, I'll have to have you think about this a moment. It's a whole lot better to be reproved than to make a mistake that's going to hurt you for the rest of your life. Stay with me. I'll be back in just a moment.
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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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I used to teach a class in public speaking and a part of the training included student criticism. When the speech was over and the student sat down, I would turn to one of the other students in class and say, and now Bob will give us an evaluation of the speech we just heard. And then sometimes we would go on from there into a discussion of the principles of speech, the illustrations we could draw from the speech just given to help us learn how to be better speakers. Some of their criticism was pretty tough. In fact, they were far harder on one another than I ever was. In fact, sometimes I found myself in the role of patching up the bleeding wounds and healing up the scars and stitching up the cuts that they inflicted on one another. And so once in a while, justifiably, I suppose, there was some anger because of a stinging or unfair evaluation. But I remember one lecture I gave them early on in the year so they would understand what was happening to them. I said, your critics may not be right. They may even be fools, may be spectacularly wrong about what they say about your speech. But even then, they have given you something valuable. They have given you some intelligence. They have revealed to you how your speech affected them. If you've got a person in your audience that, for example, that did not understand what you were trying to say, became angry at what you were trying to say when they didn't need to be, it's good that someone in an evaluation of a speech will come back to you and tell you, I found your speech annoying and here is why I found it annoying. Now, he may be wrong, but he has given you something useful. And I try to teach them to respect their critics properly. to listen to what they had to say, take it and evaluate it, and then go on and do what they believed was right. Not to follow their critics, but to respect them. Now, you cannot become wiser by ignoring your critics. Now, to be sure, they may sometimes seem to deserve to be ignored, but you can't afford that. Look your critics in the eye, evaluate what they say, and then act on it or dismiss it. But don't dismiss it until you understand it. An awful lot of the criticism we get in life is inaccurate and unfair. Fair enough? Would you agree with that? I know certainly a lot of it that's come my way has been. However, even then, it is revealing. Now, if you try to please your critics, they will slowly drive you crazy. The objective of listening to criticism and of carefully evaluating criticism is not to please the critic. You really only have to please God and yourself when all is said and done, right? If you can just be sure that what you are doing does please yourself, that it does advance your goals, and listening to your critics, hearing what they have to say, weighing it in the balances, can help you know whether you're really accomplishing what you want or something different. Your critics are a valuable resource. Cherish them, but never assume you have to please them. One reason you should do this is that somewhere in the welter of criticism, there is truth. Somewhere out there among all the people who either don't like you or disagree with you or think you're full of it again, somewhere out there in this welter of people who are talking about you, talking to you, there is a wise, knowledgeable person who can help you. And if you don't listen to your critics, you don't evaluate your critics, you may never find that person who can help you. You know, in the course of living a life, you're a very lucky person if you have two or three people who care enough about you to tell you the truth, who care enough about you to take you in hand and say, try this, experiment with that. Are you really sure you want to do that or are you going to get yourself in trouble when you do it? King David, in one of his psalms, said something I thought was beautiful. He said, Let the righteous smite me. It shall be a kindness. Here I am. I'm a student. I'm trying to learn. I'm being mentored by a really good man. David says, Let him hit me. It's a kindness. When he smites me with correction, when he makes me see my mistakes, when I go home at night and I grit my teeth and I am shamed by the embarrassment of it all, I have learned something valuable from this man. Let the righteous smite me. It shall be a kindness. Let him reprove me. It shall be an excellent oil which shall not break my head. Oh, yeah, sometimes you think it's going to. Sometimes you think it's going to crush you. Sometimes you have to shed some tears. And oftentimes the realization of the truth of the criticism is what makes it really hurt. And that's why the tears really flow. But in the long run, it's a kindness. And it's a good quality oil which can lubricate life ahead. And the tears that we shed... under just criticism, under fair criticism, from a righteous, wise person, are really the lubrication of the rest of our life. Solomon said in Proverbs 27, really an interesting passage through here to help us understand what to do, how to respond to people. In Proverbs 27, in the very first verse, he says this, Don't boast yourself of tomorrow, for you don't know what a day may bring forth. It's the first volley, the opening shot, as it were, in a set of warnings about hubris, a set of warnings about getting cocky, because cockiness, self-assurance, being so sure of ourselves— is one of the things that puts the blinders on us and causes us to walk in harm's way and to get ourselves hurt. Don't boast yourself of tomorrow. You don't know what a day can bring forth. Then he says in verse 2, Let another man praise you and not your own mouth, a stranger and not your own lips. Boy, we're really doing great here, aren't we? Man, we're really making a great deal of progress. Everything is working wonderful. Well, maybe, but oftentimes when things are looking good is the prelude to disaster, and one of the reasons it's a prelude to disaster is because we stop asking ourselves the hard questions. We begin to praise ourselves and maybe sometimes even listen too much to the praise of other people, and we think, well, we've really got it by the tail. We've got it all right. Vanity and pride and cockiness lead to trouble for a very simple and a very logical reason. They begin to eat away at your judgment. When you get too pleased with yourself, when you're self-satisfied, and when you're no longer listening to other people's criticism of you and no longer weighing it and taking it seriously, you are beginning to lose your balance. You're beginning to lose your sense of judgment, and that judgment is the thing which helps you to make good decisions as opposed to bad decisions, helpful decisions as opposed to those that hurt and bring things to grief. When your judgment begins to erode, you start to make bad decisions, and then as things begin to go bad, you blame anything except your judgment. In other words, it can't be my mistake. It's bad luck. It's not my fault. It's government regulation. It's the government that's caused this to be here. And yet that government's been there all along, and other people are working under that same government, and other people are taking it into account and saying, I can't do that because the government's in the way, so I'll do something else. I'll find a way around it. The fool. just blames government rather than saying government's a reality. I've got to learn to deal with it. I'll make my way around it. Maybe it's not the government. Maybe it's my business partner. Maybe it's my wife. Maybe it's my friends. It's their fault. Well, it's anybody's fault but mine. The truth is that that cockiness, that self-assurance, That blindness that begins to set in corrodes your judgment, and as your judgment begins to go, you don't blame yourself. You blame others. Solomon continued in verse 5 to say, Open rebuke is better than secret love. Open rebuke is better than secret love. Can you appreciate someone who is able to look at you and say you're wrong openly more than you appreciate someone who sits there and says absolutely nothing and is your admirer and has admiration shining from their eyes? Solomon says the open rebuke is better. Now, why would that be? Well, because the sitting there and soaking up of the admiration of people who, it pays them to admire you. It doesn't put anything, any bread on the table, doesn't put any money in the bank, doesn't advance you towards success. But open rebuke when you're wrong. Somebody openly saying, don't do that, you're going to get hurt. What's that worth? Stay with me.
SPEAKER 02 :
I'll be back in just a moment. 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.
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6.
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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 and tell us the call letters of this radio station. We're talking about what makes life work.
SPEAKER 03 :
Solomon says this, Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. Now, if you ask me to choose between a wound and a kiss, well, that's a hard decision, isn't it, when you think about it? But along comes Solomon and says, When a friend wounds you, it's usually for a purpose, and it's usually because you need it. And if you're not big enough to handle it, it could destroy your friendship. In the long run, it will destroy you. Because truthfully, the wound of a friend who's trying to help you is far better than the kiss of an enemy who's trying to take things from you. Solomon continues to say, The full soul loathes even a honeycomb. If you're full, it doesn't taste good. But to the hungry soul, every bitter thing is sweet. In the times of success... When life is really working good for you, you just don't feel like you need anything. And you're in very high danger, I would say. It's the hunger in us that drives us. It's because we're hungry that we work. It's hungry and hunger that causes us to press forward. He continues to say in verse 9, Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart. So does the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel. And you know it's true. Hearty counsel means the counsel that is strong, firm, good advice, steady, honest advice from a friend. You know, it is a sweet thing to be able to sit down with someone who is a good friend, a reliable friend, someone you know is wise, someone with experience, and someone who really cares for you and isn't just seeking his own way. It feels good to talk to someone like that. Then he says, your own friend and your father's friend don't forsake. Don't go to your brother's house in the day of your calamity, for it's better to go to a neighbor that's near than to a brother that's far off. Now, I think that scripture is fascinating. And there's a lesson in it, I think, that's very important. That little segment that says, go to your father's friend. You know what that means? It means here is a person who is a friend of your family and has helped your family before. I heard someone once say this, and I'll pass it on to you for what it's worth. He said, if you're ever in trouble and you need help, do not go to someone whom you have helped yourself. The fact that you have done all sorts of things for them, that in a way you would think that you have a lot of chips to call in. You have favors that you could ask back. You could go to them, and this person, because he is so grateful to you, will help you out of your present distress. He said, basically, don't go to someone like that. You're going to get hurt and you're going to be disappointed. Go to someone, this person who was advising me said, go to someone who has helped you before. And I thought, yes. Yeah, there's a sense in that because someone who has helped you before is someone who cares about you, knows about you, and has got a reputation. I mean, they've done it before. They'll do it again. And you have no such assurances from someone who ought to be grateful to you. I would say people who depend on the gratefulness of other people are going to get the disappointment that they deserve when they do so. And to young people who maybe have not had the chance to develop that many friends, the advice is go to your father's friend. Don't go to somebody who owes a favor to your father. Go to somebody who has been a friend to your family before and has done things for you and has helped you before. That's the direction from which you can find it coming back again. He says in verse 12, A prudent man foresees the evil and hides himself, and the simple pass on and are punished. I guess in a way, The vanity, the pride, the ego, the self-importance that comes upon great and successful people and that tends to creep up on lesser mortals like us when things are going well for us, that these things that come to us cause us to put the blinders on. We think we're okay. Everything has worked so well so far. Nothing can go wrong, surely. A prudent man, though, realizes that everything isn't going to be good forever. He foresees evil. How do you do that? How do you know that evil is coming? Well, I'll tell you one way you do it. You do it by listening to people, by paying attention to your critics. Yeah, the people who will tell you you're wrong when you are, the people who will come to you and correct you when you need it, the people who will show you a right way when you're pursuing a lesser way. Listen to those people. It's in talking to them that you can foresee the evil and hide yourself from danger. Are you afraid to make decisions? Relax. You're normal. But if you're so afraid that you can't make decisions, you need help. If you're utterly without fear in making decisions, you're sick. I have a message I delivered a few years ago that might help you. The title is Stick Your Neck Out. There's a time to hide in your shell like a turtle, but even a turtle knows he can't make much progress unless he sticks something outside of the shell. Drop me a line or give me a call. Write to Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas. Or call toll-free 1-888-242-5344. Or just remember 1-888-BIBLE-44 and ask for Stick Your Neck Out. But I'm a little off message here because what I'm talking about is a person who doesn't know enough to duck. I think what happens to some people is that they begin to depend for results on something other than wisdom and judgment and work. They depend on their luck, which has never failed them. They depend on their quickness of wit, not knowing that it's losing its edge because they've been right one time too often. It's funny. Just because you were right yesterday does not mean you're going to be right tomorrow. So I guess the message is, when your life is working, don't assume that it always will. You've got to keep on doing the things that you did before. You've got to keep doing the things that made it right. So until next time, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, stick your neck out.
SPEAKER 02 :
You were born to win. 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 Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
Or visit us at borntowin.net.
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.
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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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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.
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5.
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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 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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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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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 And visit us online at
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Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at born2win.net.
It never ceases to amaze me how far Man will go, what dangers he will face, in order to penetrate the unknown. To us, the Lewis and Clark expedition was just an early attempt to explore the northwest of our country. But when you really look at what those men did and the dangers they faced, you have to wonder what drives men to do this sort of thing.
They are only one example. The attempts by the Greeks and the Romans to discover the source of the Nile River, Christopher Columbus, and the settlers at Jamestown are just a few more. And if all that were not enough, we had to go the moon—and then go again—six times! And every time we went, the odds of coming back were not 100%.
What on earth drives men to go to such lengths to explore their world, and to take such appalling risks to do it? I don’t recall exactly the path of thought that led me back to the beginning of Man, but I ended up at Genesis 1:26…
In this episode, delve into the wisdom of Solomon to gain a deeper understanding of the seasons of life. Dart discusses fundamental concepts of timing and purpose, illustrating how these principles apply to modern life. Learn about the importance of letting go, the necessity of embracing present moments, and how these ancient teachings offer practical guidance for achieving tranquility and fulfillment in today’s bustling world.
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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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It was on a morning about a year ago. I had made myself a cup of coffee and walked out on the covered portion of my deck. The sky was low overcast and the light rain was falling. To tell you the truth, it was a really dismal morning, and I felt, well, to tell the truth, I felt depressed. Then I don't know why I did it. It's just one of those times that things come upon you. I said to myself, self, smile. So I smiled, and I realized that the coffee I had in my hand was dark and rich and fragrant. I love a good cup of coffee. The air outside was cool and sweet to smell, the trees seemed especially green, and the sound of the falling rain, without my even realizing it, was beginning to soothe my nerves. So here I was, standing in the middle of a work of art that appealed to all the senses, a work of art that was beautiful in all of its parts and touched my sense of smell, my taste, my touch, my sight, my hearing. I was watching an age-old process of nourishment and renewal. And all I could do was feel sorry for myself. Now, I'm going to tell you, that was a transforming moment for me. It was such a simple truth. I felt better. I even felt a little cheerful, perhaps a little mellow. And I felt some healing take place in the inner man. But the only thing that had changed was the way I looked at the morning. Nothing in the environment has changed. It was still overcast and drizzly. What had changed was inside of me, and the most important thing of all, it was under my control. I just decided to smile. I just decided to enjoy the morning. I just decided that this was a part of life, and it was an important part of life. You know, the only way you can have sunshine all the time is to live in the desert. To have green things, you've got to have rain. To have rain, you have to have clouds, and sometimes lightning, and sometimes thunder, and once in a while, a real storm. And, of course, then there's the snow which turns all of us into children again, or it ought to. There's a terrible burden that lays upon man. The world around him can be working perfectly. Everything can be in the right place. There is no immediate tragedy stalking him. Everything can be beautiful, and a man can still be absolutely miserable. This is the man who can stand on green grass in the middle of beautiful flowers and shrubbery and sweet air and curse the rain. There was a very wise man once, he was supernaturally wise, to whom God granted the wisdom to experience life and to understand life and to be able to deal with it. And thankfully, this man wrote down the things that he learned about what makes life works and what doesn't make life work. Much of what he wrote is in the book of Proverbs in your Bible. But less known, and just as important, is the book of Ecclesiastes. Here, he doesn't just sit down and give us a bunch of Proverbs, rather disjointed, a collection that sometimes, as you're reading through the book of Proverbs, you wonder, what in the world does this have to do with anything that came before it or anything that came after it? You don't find much context there. But Ecclesiastes is one whole context of the reflections of an intelligent, wise, experienced man. And if you want to understand how life works, Or maybe more important, how your life works and what you can do to make your life work for you instead of against you like it seems to do so much. Maybe, just maybe, there's something to learn from this. In the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, Solomon gives us one of the fundamental things to know about life. That there is a time for everything. To everything, says Solomon, there is a season. And a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. There's a time to plant and a time to pluck up what's planted. There's a time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. There's a time to weep and a time to laugh. There's a time to mourn and a 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. As I read through these things, I find such simple truths. I find, for example, the simple truth is that so much of what clutters up our lives, so much of what makes a mess, so much of what keeps it disorganized, so much of what causes us to want to tear our hair out from time to time is because we do not know when the time is to throw something away. It is so simple. You have it in your hand. And there's a trash can right over there. But some little niggling thing in the back of your mind says, I may want that someday. I may need it sometime. I may have a use for it somewhere along the line. And so you, instead of throwing it away, you save it. You keep it. And the longer you live, the more of that stuff you've got. And the more difficulty you have in finding places to keep your stuff. You have to build perhaps another closet or another storeroom or go rent some storage somewhere to keep all your stuff. And a lot of the stuff you've got, you could have thrown away and never known that it was gone. Now, I realize it's a simple matter of life to say, you know, one of the best keys of organization is to have a good wastebasket. That, however, also is a metaphor for the rest of your life. Of knowing when there are things in your life you really need to just throw away. Don't hang on to it. Don't try to keep it. Don't try to make something out of it. Don't think someday I'll need it and I'll tie something together with this piece of string. Just throw it away because there is a time to throw away and there is a time to keep. The analogy here is stones. Why would you gather stones together? Well, you go out and gather stones because you can make a border for a flower bed out of them. You go out and gather stones because with a little mortar you can build a wall for your garden or for your house. That's why you gather stones. In other words, you gather stones together when you've got something that you want to do with them. And the other part of this lesson is that just because you throw stones away today doesn't mean you can't find some stones tomorrow when you need them. So much of the stuff we hang on to, we can replace or we can get if we ever need it. And the chances are we never will. But the time to gather these things together is when you're going to use them, when you have a goal in mind, a goal. Did you notice that? Well, here I am back at goals again. It seems that in the process of discussing making life work, you can never get very far away from that concept. That if you don't know what you want, if you don't know where you're going, if you think maybe someday I'll be able to use this, well, all you're going to do is clutter up your life and waste your time. I could talk about every one of the things that are written here. There is a time to be born, and there's a time to die. And we do fight that time to die, don't we? We try to put it off as long as we can. We'll go through the tortures of the damned and the hell to be able to stay alive for another year. We'll endure medical treatments that would be deemed torture if they were done under any other circumstances at all, and yet we will go through it. To buy time. Three months. Six months. A year. And I don't say that to criticize anybody because if I were dying of cancer and I could buy a year's more time with a torturous treatment, I probably would do it like everybody else does. But for a little peace of mind, one does need to realize that there is a time to be born and there is a time to die. And when the time to die comes... Well, I pray that when my time to die comes, God will give me the grace to die well. Because so much of the time I think that we demean ourselves and we lose so much. Oh, I'm not advocating in this suicide or doctor-assisted suicide. What I'm simply saying is that when your time comes to go, that you grit your teeth, learn your lessons, develop the character that God gives you to develop through it, and go with grace, go with dignity, and go with style. There is a time to be born, and there is a time to die, and when the time to die comes, well, you might as well go. Stick around.
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I'll be back in a moment on a more cheerful note. What do you do when life has dealt you a bad hand? Where do you turn when everything seems to have turned against you? Write for a free CD of a message entitled Beyond Adversity. Learn what lies on the other side of adversity. 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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To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven. That's what Solomon said. There's a time for nearly every time. A time to be born, a time to die, a time to kill, a time to heal. a time to get, a time to lose, a time to keep, and a time to cast away. Oh, if we could learn that lesson, we'd be ahead of the game. A time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. And you know, if I were to find one thing that I think we could do or could learn that would make our lives work, at least work better, It is to know when it's time to shut up and when it's time to speak. Because we manage to get ourselves in trouble a great deal. I'd say on the average, if you're in doubt, you probably should keep your mouth shut. That seems the more sensible approach. But there's a time. There's a time when you do have to speak. There's a time when you have to stand up for things that are right. And there's a time when you really ought to keep your mouth shut and say nothing. Discerning the difference between those two simple principles is one of the most fundamental keys to making life work, knowing when to speak and when not to speak. I don't know. Sometimes I get in conversations with people, and it seems like there are people who want to talk all the time, and that all I get to do is say, oh, really? Oh, I'm so sorry. Really? But what if? That's about all sometimes that I find I even need in a conversation that just a raised eyebrow sometimes is good for another 10 minutes for some people in terms of response. They want some kind of response out of you. And if you give them anything at all, they will go on. And there are times in a conversation when I just yearn for someone to pause and take a deep breath and look at me and say, Ron, what do you think? Well, human relations are built very heavily on communication. And communication is a two-way process. I got you where I want you now. You can't talk to me. All you can do is listen to me, and I've got my chance now. So I hope you will stay with me for a little while. But the truth is that a conversation is a two-way thing. So feel free to drop me a letter or give me a phone call, and let's talk about this if I'm giving you a problem. But there is a time to speak and a time to keep silence. And one of the things you probably – I know I could. Why don't we work on this together? Let's consider the fact that the biggest lack maybe in our structure – is knowing when it's time to shut up and listen. There's also a time to love and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace. And there's a real job for people to know when it is time. To everything, to every purpose under the heaven, there is a season and there is a time. So our problem is not so much deciding what to do, Sometimes it's a question of deciding, is this the time to do it? Should I be doing this now, in this time, in this place, with this person, under these circumstances? So Solomon continues about man and asks, what profit does he have that works in that where which he labors? In other words, what am I getting out of my job? I have seen the travail which God has given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He has made everything beautiful in his time. Also he has set the world in their hearts so that man cannot find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end. He has made everything beautiful in his time. Now I will confess that there are times when the beauty is really hard to see. But on the other hand, if one understands that there is a time and a place for everything, and that even war to defeat evil can be justified, yes, I suppose there can even be beauty in battle. If the battle is for the Lord, if the battle is for justice, the battle is for truth, even beauty in war, although I don't know how to describe it. He also says here that God has set the world in man's heart so that no man can find out the work that God does from the beginning to the end. Now, I thought a long time about that. It suggests to us here that God has placed something in man that makes us look. that causes us to reach out and to try to grasp the world, the universe, everything that is around us, and yet he put it in there in such a way that none of us can find out the whole thing from the beginning to the end. So we will live in a little niche in time and place, and we will struggle to understand what took place from the beginning and what will happen at the end, but there's no way we can. We've built giant telescopes. We've even launched telescopes into space. And we look out through what they say is 15 billion years of time, although I don't think we see all the way out to that. And we think we see maybe even the very first parts of the beginning of the universe. But we don't know that. And we don't know what was before that. They tell us, well, there couldn't have been anything before that. Well, if there wasn't anything before that, then nothing could have come out of nothing. Well, at least that's the way we look at it. So man tries, and yet we cannot really grasp it. The truth is that we live in chaos. There may be order in this chaos in the sense that God knows what he is doing, but the whole process is far too complicated for us to be able to grasp it from one end of it to the other. Now, what does all that mean? Well, I'll tell you what I think it means. I think it means is that since you can't find out the work that God makes from the beginning to end, you had better handle the day you are living in. It's okay to look back and to look forward, but don't forget to stay in focus on your time and your place and what you're supposed to be doing right now. If you do, you'll get lost. And so, since you can't really know all this, Solomon puts it this way. He says, I know then that there's no good in pursuing all that. There's no good but for man to rejoice and to do good in his life. And also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all of his labor. It's the gift of God. So, folks, you might as well enjoy the day. Live the day. Take the beauty. Look at it. Now, none of this relieves you of the responsibility toward your fellow man, and none of it relieves you of anything. What it does, it tells you to live the moment. Enjoy your work. Enjoy your food. Enjoy your drink. Don't abuse it. Enjoy it. And he goes beyond to say, I know that. Whatsoever God does, it shall be forever. Nothing can be put to it, nor anything be taken from it. The message from Solomon is, God is sovereign. He can do what he wants to do. He can stop what he wants to stop. But he says the things that God does, because he is God, are forever. So people are fond of sometimes asking, well, why does God do that? Or why did God allow that? And then comes the answer. In this very verse, he says that God does all that. And God does it that men should fear before him. Okay, I have it. God is God. He can do what he wants to. And I really should fear before him. I don't have to be afraid of him. His purpose is good for me. What he aims for ultimately is to my good. But I am fearful of ignoring him or turning my back on him or going away from him. That which has been, Solomon said, is now. And that which is to be has already been. And God searches out that which is past. It's another way of saying there's nothing new under the sun. Oh, you may get a new gimmick, a new technology, a new machine. But the things that really count that have to do with the character of man and the way man interacts with man, there hasn't been a change in human nature in all the thousands of years of human history. And that's what he's talking about. That which has been is now. And that which is to be has already been. And moreover, I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that is the courts, and wickedness was there. And I saw the place of righteousness, the churches. And iniquity was there. Well, that's discouraging, isn't it? But it is the inevitable result of freedom. God has granted to man the freedom to do what he wants to do. He has at the same time revealed to man that there's a way to make your life work and there's a way to screw it up. And unfortunately, we have religiously chosen the wrong way, it seems, in our lives. But in this world, you have the place of judgment that has been corrupted and the place of righteousness where iniquity is found. Nothing's perfect. Nothing's perfect in this world. And you can pursue it if you wish. But it's going to be an exercise in futility. I said in my heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every purpose and for every work. 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.
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4.
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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 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
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I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are animals. Now, I don't like that. For God to tell me that I'm an animal that's going to manifest to me that I'm an animal does not make me comfortable. For I would like to think that I'm more than that. I want to think of myself as immortal. In fact, during most of my early years on this planet, I thought I was. At least I lived that way. I thought nothing's ever going to happen to me. Life's going to work for me. Death will never come to me. Something about us when we're 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, that we'll try anything. That's why they like fighter pilots to be so young. They still think they can't die. And they'll try it. But the fact is, he said, I want God to make known to man that man is an animal. For that which befalls the sons of men befalls beasts. Even one thing befalls them both. As the one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath. So that a man has no preeminence above a beast. For all is vanity. All go to one place. All are dust. And all turn to dust again. And you know, I guess it's true. For when people die, if we didn't embalm their bodies, they would rot away like roadkill. And we go to a lot of trouble. We take our loved ones to the funeral home. They embalm the body. They lay them out in a casket. And we take them out to the cemetery and we put them in the ground. But they're dead. The breath is all gone, and we even at the funeral will say, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and we think, well, we started out as dust, and now he's going to go back to dust again. Well, when my faithful old German short-haired pointer died, she was a good old dog. She was my friend. She'd been faithful to me for something like 14 years. I couldn't throw the old girl out into a ditch. So I had the vet call up a fellow who put her in a box and took her out to a pet cemetery and buried her in the ground, and there she is. And she's over there, her bones, her dust, in the pet cemetery. And one of these days, they're going to lay me out in one of these cemeteries nearby here, and I'm going to be down there in the dirt just like she is. And Solomon says, you really need to think about that. You think you're better than your dog, but you're both headed in exactly the same direction. Now, I know that makes us all a little uncomfortable. We like to think that although our bodies are going to go back to the dust, perhaps that's what Solomon is talking about, that our soul will not, that our soul goes to heaven, or God forbid, it goes to hell, And it happens immediately when we die because the soul can't die, and we're going to go on and on and on. And it's not a question of whether we live. It's just a question of where we are in heaven with a beatific vision or looking in God's face, dining on milk and honey, or whether we're in hell dancing around from one hot brick to another or upside down in a steam hole or whatever it is that Satan and his demons can dream up for us. But Solomon seems to be saying something rather different. He said, when you're dead, you're dead. And that's that. And you die like the animal dies. Now Solomon isn't closing out the idea of a resurrection. What he is talking about is the way things will be if there is no resurrection. And he said, who knows that the spirit of a man goes upward and the spirit of a beast goes downward in the earth? Who says that? Because when it comes to good old-fashioned death, it's not like that. Man dies, the beast dies, and we go to our respective graveyards and we wait. We wait for life. I guess the poor old dog waits for nothing. Although I've had people ask me, you know, will I see my faithful hound dog in the resurrection? And I have to tell them that, well, I'm sorry, the Bible really doesn't say anything about that. But I suppose in the resurrection, when you're like God and when you're in his presence and with all the holy angels round about and so forth, that if at that point in time you still want old spot to be with you, maybe God will let you. I don't know whether you will think that's important when that time comes. But God made us the way we are and surely understands the love we have for those little critters, and that love is very real. But Solomon said, I perceive that there is nothing better that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that's his portion. For who's going to bring him to see what shall be after him? Folks, life is here. It's now. You're living it now. And what Solomon is saying is, you know, you'd better do what you can to make it work because it isn't going to go on forever. And when it's over, it's over. Now, he's talking about human physical life. He's not allowing for your Redeemer. He's not allowing for a Savior. He's not allowing for the resurrection from the dead. What Solomon is talking about is making this life work and what's important in this life and what's not important in this life. And he says the fact is that you're going to die like the dog dies. You have so many years on this planet. There is a time to be born, there is a time to die, and you're not going to be able to get beyond that border of your life. You have no more hope of that than the sea has of getting beyond her borders. And so, you really need, as you work to make this life work, as you plan to make it work, as you set your goals, you need to have your head up. And you do need to be looking ahead, for there is something out there. There is a resurrection to come. There is a new kind of life. And God doesn't intend to spend eternity with a bunch of losers. You, my friend, were born.
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Born to Win. 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 Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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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.
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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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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.
SPEAKER 02 :
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.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stay in touch with the new Born to Win with Ronald L. Dart app. This app has all of your favorite Ronald L. Dart radio messages, sermons, articles, and it even has a digital Bible. Simply search on the iOS or Android app store to download it for free today.
In this episode, we delve into an enlightening tale of a man wandering the desert granted three wishes by a genie, exploring the theme of wisdom vs. folly. Through this metaphor, we journey into the life of King Solomon, a king whose wisdom was unparalleled, and whose reign was marked by profound decisions and introspections. How did Solomon, when faced with the mysterious and all-powerful question from God—'What do you want?'—respond in a way that would define his reign and legacy? Join us as we explore the heart of Solomon's request for wisdom over wealth, reflecting on how fear, responsibility, and an innate desire for wisdom steered his decisions. His story becomes a lens through which we examine our personal goals and the ever-present pursuit of success and satisfaction. The episode also covers the importance of understanding what you truly want in life, with insights on aligning personal aspirations with life's transient nature. We reflect on the teachings of Ecclesiastes, pushing us to reconsider our approach to goals, ambitions, and understanding the essence of a worthwhile existence.
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The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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Once upon a time, there was a man who was lost in the desert. He'd been out there about three days. He'd gone up one sand dune and down the other, and there was no relief in sight. And finally, parched with thirst, he collapses down the side of one sand dune, and he sees buried in the sand ahead of him, half buried, a bottle with a cork in it. He can't believe that there's water or something to drink out here in the desert, but he crawls over to the bottle, pulls it out of the sand, and pulls the cork out of the bottle. Ah, but there's no water that comes out, just smoke. But slowly the smoke begins to form itself into a shape. And what should he see but, behold, a genie. And the genie says, Oh, thank you, Master. I have been in that bottle for hundreds of years, and you have released me. As a reward, I want to give you three wishes. Whatever your heart's desire, whatever you want, it is yours. Just say the word. And he thought for a moment, and he considered the terrible, aching, parched thirst. And he said, I want one cold beer. Now, there was no explosion, no poof, no noise like you normally think of in all the stories about genies. But suddenly, where there had been nothing, now there was a mahogany bar, a brass rail, the genie standing behind it dressed as a bartender, and on top of the bar, A tall, frosty glass of beer. So he steps up to the bar, takes the glass in his hand, drinks it down in one long draft, and then with a sigh coming up from the bottom of his feet says, Oh, that was good. And as he stood there, the genie says, Master, you have two more wishes, and I don't have very much time. Please tell me what else you want. And he said, Well, I'll tell you. I'll have two more, just like that one. Now this is just a joke. It's a joke about the folly. that leads a man with three wishes to ask for three beers. Why didn't he ask to be taken out of the desert? Why not a seaside resort with plenty of money to buy his own hotel at the seaside resort and maybe a wish left over at the end of it for something just a little extra special? Why didn't he do that? He didn't do it because he was a fool. I suspect this old myth of the genie and the three wishes traces all the way back to something like what happened to King Solomon. King Solomon was the son of King David of Israel. He succeeded his father after a very, very long reign, popular reign. He was a young man succeeding a very old man who had been wildly popular, wildly loved among the people of Israel, respected in spite of all of his mistakes and his faults because he was a man of God. He was a man who was energetic and who did things, and even his mistakes he did in a very, very big way. So here comes King Solomon as a very young man and feeling very insecure, I suspect, about what was going to happen to him as king, trying to walk in the footsteps of King David. But he was a man who loved God. He worshipped God. He went through all the ceremonies, and he did them in larger numbers and sacrificed more animals than anybody ever before him, I think, had ever done. Well, there came a point in time when God, who looked upon Solomon, David's son, and said, I really love this guy. I love David. This is David's son. How could I not love him? And he loves me. And finally, one night, the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream. And he said to Solomon, Ask what I shall give you. What do you want? God actually in this dream gave Solomon carte blanche. You want it? I'll give it to you. Well, Solomon was kind of overwhelmed by that. And he said, O Lord my God. I'm just a little child. I don't know how to go in or come out. And your servant is in the midst of your people, which you have chosen a great people that cannot be numbered or counted for multitude. And here I am. I don't know how to go out the door in the morning, and I barely know how to find my way back in at night, and I'm supposed to govern this people? He then asked this. He said, He was in awe, frankly, of the size of the nation, of what his father had built and all of the things that had been done there. And he was very humble about himself and very realistic about what he thought he could do and what he could not do. And so he didn't ask for a lot for himself. What he really asked for was right in the, it was his heart at the moment. He really wanted to succeed as the king of Israel. And it says the speech pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this thing. And God said to him, Because you have asked this, and you have not asked for yourself long life, you didn't ask for riches for yourself, you didn't ask for the life of your enemies, but you have asked for yourself understanding to discern judgment and to understand government. Behold, I've done what you asked. I have given you a wise and an understanding heart. so that there was none like you before you, and after you there won't be anyone like you. And I have also, in addition to what you asked for, now first of all, this man had his goals straight to start with. And the goal arose from a deep and a profound need, and in a way, this is not unusual, I must add, his desire arose from fear. He was afraid of failure. The fact is that any worthwhile goal carries with it the risk of failure. If you can't fail, if you can't miss, well, what's the value in that goal? So he didn't have much choice. He was the king. He couldn't decide not to be the king. And being the king, he was frightened by the level of responsibility. And his fear drove him, paradoxically, to ask for the thing that he needed the most. the ability, the wisdom, the knowledge, and the wisdom and understanding to govern these people. That's what he asked for. Now, God said, because you asked for this, I have done according to your words. I've given you this. There's not going to be anybody like you. And I have also given you what you did not ask for, riches and honor, so there will not be among the kings around anybody like you all your days. And if you will walk in my ways to keep my statutes and my commandments as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your days. So you're going to have wisdom and understanding. You're also going to have wealth and honor. And if you'll just obey me and walk according to my commandments, you're going to have a long and a happy life. Now there are some really profound lessons in this statement. You know, you can think a lot about the goals and the things you want in life. What do you want? Well, I want a new house. What do you want? I'd like to have a Mercedes-Benz. What do you want? No, no, not a Mercedes. I want one of the fancy BMWs. I want – and the list of our wants can go on and on. But the truth is that the road to happiness, the road to success, the road to winning is in the goal of doing something worthwhile – out of which the other things followed. He asked for the right thing. He had the right goal. He said, I want to be able to govern these people effectively. God says, so be it. And out of that will flow the other things in your life that you would like to have. And if you'll obey me, if you'll keep my laws, my commandments, my statutes, my judgments, I'll see to it that you live a long time. Now, how does this apply to you? Stick around.
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I'll tell you when we come back. You were not born to lose. God has no intention of spending eternity with a loser. You can know what God is doing and why. Drop us a letter or give us a call, and we will send you a free CD introducing the series called Making Life Work. Our address is borntowin.com. Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44.
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The core, the really core point about making your life work is figuring out what you want. I started to say it's the hard part about it, but it isn't so hard. It's just something we don't do. We never get around to thinking about it and maybe taking a cup of coffee and going sitting down somewhere and staring off into space and saying, what do I really want? What do I want to do the rest of this day? What do I want to do tomorrow? Where do I want to be a year from now? Where do I want to be 20 years from now? We just sort of go through life. We never sit down and think about it. Now, for Solomon, it was not so very hard to decide. He faced a frightening challenge for a young man. But he did know what he wanted. And I think he realized somehow intuitively that from where he sat, there was no way to get the good life. unless he went through this thing of being king and of being very good at what he needed to do, and he knew he just, frankly, didn't have it. So his objective was to meet the challenges of being a new young king, following in the footsteps of a truly great and a much-loved king. One should never make the mistake, though, of assuming that because you know what you want today, that you will be just as clear-headed about what you want tomorrow. Solomon is a good example of that because here was a point in time when he was scared to death. He was afraid, and he knew what he had to have, and so he set his goal with that in mind. But you know, when the fear passes, when you've achieved a certain level of success, the vision is there, you know what you want, and you've made some pretty good progress along to it, and the fear is gone, it's awfully easy to forget what you were doing. and to forget why you were doing it. And Solomon, with the passage of time and the accumulation of power and wealth, got a little confused about what he wanted. Now, fortunately for us, he wrote a book, and there's a lot that you and I can learn about that book or from that book about ourselves. The book is the Book of Ecclesiastes, and there are times I've sat down and read it a few times. I remember once I was on a train going from London up to Birmingham in England, and I had a long train trip, and I rolled out the Book of Ecclesiastes, and I read it, and by the time I got very far down the line, I was depressed. It was a cloudy day and kind of gloomy outside, and I got through Ecclesiastes, and I thought, what's the use? And yet, that was a pretty superficial reading on my part, because when I went back and I read it again, and I thought about what Solomon was saying here, I could see the enormous value in grappling with this along with the man who was the wisest of kings. a man whose wisdom was far surpassing that of anyone else, and a man who cherished wisdom, a man who put wisdom on a pedestal and said, this is the important thing wisdom is. Get wisdom. And so it's important, I think, to learn the lessons that this man learned because, frankly, if you can't learn from great teachers, then you're going to have to go out and learn it yourself. And all that learning is a hard process. It hurts to fall down. It hurts to skin your knees and your elbows, and it hurts to go through these things. And really, there are a lot of things like this we don't have to go through if we can just learn from the teacher. And so in Ecclesiastes, Solomon says this. These are the words of the teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, saith the teacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit does a man have of all his work that he takes unto the sun? One generation passes away, another generation comes, and the earth goes on. The sun also arises, and the sun goes down, and it hurries around and comes back up where it was. The wind goes toward the south, it turns around to the north, it whirls about continually, but it always goes back according to its circuits. All the rivers run down to the sea, and the sea isn't full. To the place from whence the rivers came, they go back there again. All things, he says, are full of labor. Man cannot utter it. I mean, you can't even describe the kind of labor that it is. The eye is not satisfied with seeing. The ear is not satisfied with hearing. The thing which has been, that's what's going to be. And that which is done is that which shall be done. And there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new. Nah, it's already been of old time. There was before us. Solomon is basically saying, Everything, folks, down here goes around in circles. There doesn't seem to be a destination. There is no arrival. I mean, you can work and work and slave and sweat, and you think you've arrived at your destination, only to find that, no, there's something beyond that. No, there's another hill to climb. No, there's another sand dune to get across. And no, there's no oasis in sight yet. The wind goes around in circles and it winds up right where it was before. The rivers all run down to the sea. Water is evaporated from the sea. It rains up on the mountaintops and comes down the rivers again. It just goes round and round and round and around. Depressing, isn't it? That's how I felt when I read it on the train that day. And understanding that all this stuff just goes round and round. He said in verse 11, there is no remembrance of the former things. Neither shall there be any remembrance of the things that are to come with those that shall come afterward. What does he mean? He says everybody's going to forget what you've done. You'll work your fool head off. You'll build an edifice. You'll accomplish all this stuff. And you're going to die and be gone. And people will say, who? Who is he? What did he do? I, the teacher, continues Solomon, was king over Israel and Jerusalem. I was a big man. And I gave my heart to seek and to search out my wisdom concerning everything that's done under heaven. This, by the way, this sore travail has God given to the sons of man to keep ourselves busy. to find out all the things that are done under heaven. Now, I've seen all the works that are done under the sun, he said. I've looked at it all, and behold, it's all vanity and a vexation of spirit, or it's all futility and a striving after wind. You pursue it. You grasp for it. You reach out. Ah, there it is. I've got it. And you grab the bottle, and you pull the cork out, and all that comes out is smoke. That which is crooked, said Solomon, cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. Now, you know, I believe that it is in man. It's written into our genes, into our genetic code. We are inveterate problem solvers. We see a jigsaw puzzle. We've got to stop and see if we can put a piece in it. We see a crossword puzzle. We've got to look at it and say, let's see what's 41 down and what's 41 across, and we try to solve the puzzle. It is in us to solve puzzles. We are made to see problems and to try to find solution to them. But by the time you get to be an old man, if you're like Solomon and if you're like just about anybody else, By the time you get to be an old man, you realize that, yes, in my lifetime I have encountered problems and I have solved them. But in truth, when I look at the world, I look at the total supply of problems out there to be solved. I look at all the frustrations, difficulties, headaches, and what have you. I can't tell any difference. I can't tell that all my problem solving has really reduced the number of problems out there yet to be solved. In fact, I know in my own case that oftentimes it seems like the more I learn, the more I see that there is to be learned and so that the far horizon of learning, instead of getting closer, seems to get further away as I learn more. That which is crooked cannot be made straight. You'll spend your lifetime trying to make it straight. We love to try to imagine that we can suddenly find somehow the great unifying principle, that we can somehow find the great key to truth, that we can somehow find the way that if we can just put the key in this lock and just turn this key, all of a sudden the whole world will be our oyster. It will open up before us and everything will be wonderful and fine. I'm sorry. It doesn't work that way. It won't happen. There is no key. That which is crooked cannot be made straight. That which is wanting cannot be numbered. And whenever you get through all the things that you have laid out for yourself to do, you will not really be able to look ahead and say, well, I have reduced the number of problems that there were to be solved. Are you frustrated yet? Are you getting discouraged yet? Are we having fun yet, as the old saying goes? Do you understand? Now, here's what Solomon, I think, is trying to tell us. All you can do is to take care of the things of a day in a day. You've got today to tackle. You've got whatever time of day it is for you. As you hear this, you've got the rest of the day left in which to get a few things done. Someone said this. He said, "...a successful life is measured in a series of successful days." You can have exalted goals. I hope you do. You can have lofty ideals. I really hope you do. I hope that you have them written down someplace. I hope you have them in needlepoint on the wall in a frame so you can go by them every day and say, this is what I'm supposed to be doing with my life. But you should salt your goals with realism every day, and you should consider what of your goals you can accomplish in this day. Solomon had more to say on this, but I'll be back with that in just a moment.
SPEAKER 02 :
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. 2. 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. So King Solomon struggles with this idea.
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He said in verse 16, I communed with my own heart. That's a poetic way of saying I sat down and I thought about this. And I said, look at me. I am come to great estate. I have gotten more wisdom than anybody who has ever been before me in this town. In fact, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge, and I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I decided as long as I'm finding out about this thing, I ought to go down to the comedy club and see what these guys have got to say. I go to the house of laughter and watch these guys make fools of themselves. And I perceive that this also is a striving after wind. I mean, you get a laugh, and a laugh is a good thing. But after it's all over and you've had a couple of drinks and laughed at the comic and laughed at his wife and laughed at his dad and laughed at whoever it is he wants you to laugh at and you go home, you still feel kind of empty. And he then says this, In much wisdom is much grief, and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow. Now, it's hard to argue with that because as you know more about the world, You know more about the hurt. You know more about the frustrations. And the result of it is a feeling of sorrow that can settle on you like a blanket. And in much wisdom is much grief because, you know, it is to the wise man that we carry our griefs and carry our problems. And people, because of his wisdom, kept bringing stuff to Solomon all the time. And so all he heard was grief. You know, it's a funny thing. In an organization, the higher it is you get up the pyramid, the more all the easy problems are all solved by somebody else. It's nothing but the tough problems. It's nothing but the heartbreaking, grievous problems that ever make it to you when you get up there. Are you sure you want to be there? Maybe you'd like to have a little more simple operation. Well, Solomon went back to the comedy club. He said, I said in my heart, go to now. I'll prove you with mirth, and I'll enjoy pleasure. But behold, this also is emptiness. I said of laughter, it's mad. I said of mirth, what does it accomplish? Now, I tried in my heart to give myself unto wine. He said, I know what I'll do. These jokes aren't very funny. I'll have something to drink and see if I can get a little bit more out of it that way. Or maybe, as some today would do, they'll try drugs. Because I haven't made it this way, maybe drugs will open up my mind, and maybe it will expand me so I can do some great thing. I saw it in my heart, he said, to give myself to wine, but I wanted to keep my wisdom with me all the way through this. I tried to lay hold on folly. I really tried to grasp the stupidity of men and understand why it was that way. Why do people do such stupid and hurtful things? I did this so I could see what was good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life. Well, there wasn't much in that either. I made me some great works then, since I couldn't make the rest of that work. I'll make great works. I built houses. I planted vineyards. I made gardens and orchards. I planted trees in them of all fruits. I became a great landscape architect. I got the stuff everywhere. I made pools of water so that I'd have plenty to water with the wood that brought forth the trees. I wanted it all. And I didn't want to have to do too much work myself, so he says, I got me servants and maidens. I had servants born in my house. I had great possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem before me. So I got herds. I've got herefords and jerseys and different kinds of cattle all over the place out here. Nobody had it like me. Oh, and I gathered silver and gold. I had all kinds of silver on my table. I had goldware on my table. I ate off of gold plates. I had the peculiar treasure of kings in the provinces. I had all the unique little works of arts that a person could ever desire. I had all of it. And I had entertainers. I had men singers and women singers and the delights of sons of men, like musical instruments of all sorts. So I was great. And I increased more than anybody that was there before me in my town. But all through this, my wisdom remained with me. I went further. Anything my eyes desired, I did not keep from them. I wanted it. I had it. I withheld not my heart from any joy, for my heart rejoiced in my labor. In fact, I did enjoy my labor. In fact, that's what I got out of it, he says. Then I looked at them. I looked on all the works that my hands had made. I looked on the labor I had labored to do, and behold, everything was just emptiness and a striving after a handful of wind, and there was no profit under the sun. Solomon can be a little discouraging, you know, but his point has to be considered. You have got to think about what it is this man has said. Because here is something very important to know. It is easy to forget your goals and objectives. It's easy to forget why you are doing what you are doing. Write them down. Put them on the wall where they will catch your eye. Get someone to do it for you in needlepoint. Get your computer to print it out on something. Take it down to a print shop. Have it put up on a piece of paper. Have it burned into wood that your goal in life is this. And hang it up on the wall where you actually see it every time you walk by it. Oh, I know. After a while, you won't even notice that it's there anymore. But it's still your goal. If it ever changes, if you ever wake up someday and realize that's not my goal anymore, take it down, figure out what your goal is, write it down again, and put it back up. Because when you lose sight of where you are going and what you're doing it for, you wind up going down through this long, frustrating road that Solomon went. Well, I'll try this to see if it will make me happy. Well, that didn't work. I'll go try entertainment. Entertainment didn't work. I'll go try the arts. Arts didn't work. Maybe I'll try wine, women, and song. Solomon said, I've already been there. It doesn't work either. The truth is, if you don't write your goals down someplace, they will be as elusive as smoke They'll be here today, gone tomorrow, and you'll do like everyone else you know just about does. You'll do what feels good today. You'll take care of the urgent today. You will not take care of the important things. You will take care of the noisy things, the pushy things, the things that intrude into your life, and the truly important things will never get done at all. And so Solomon says, Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, all the labor I had labored to do, and it was all just vanity and a striving after win, and there was no profit. And I turned to behold wisdom and madness and folly, for what is the man going to do that comes after the king? Well, you're only going to do what's already been done. And I saw that wisdom excels folly as far as light excels darkness. Ah, yes. So whatever else there is that's going on, all the foolishness, all the mirth, all the laughter, all the chasing after women or whatever it is that you think you're going to do that's going to make you happy. This man who did it all and says you can't do anything beyond what I've done said, there's nothing out there, fellow. Wisdom is the thing. Get wisdom. In the next program, I want to talk about how you get wisdom.
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Until then, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, you were born to win. at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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Eternity is a very long time. They tell us the universe is 15 billion years old, give or take 3 or 4 billion years, but 15 billion years is not eternity. Eternity is longer than that because 15 billion years, or even 30 billion years, implies that there was a point where it all started, and the astronomers tell us there was a point where it all started. Eternity didn’t start. Eternity was before that.
You know, I can get my mind a little bit around the idea of time not ending—of there never going to be an end to things. God will last forever and ever and ever. But I have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that there was no start, no beginning, that He always has been.
What do you suppose it’s all about? Surely God didn’t just start all this and walk away, and leave it to run down. What are we, some sort of cosmic ant farm? As members of this earthly ant farm, we have vested interests in knowing what’s going on here. Because if we can discern the purpose of God, if we can discern that there is a purpose, then there is one who has purposed, and we have answered the question of his existence, and gone on to something a lot more important than that.
