Ecclesiastes 5 (20)

Pray Psalm 25.4, 5.
Show me Your ways, O LORD;
Teach me Your paths.
Lead me in Your truth and teach me,
For You are the God of my salvation;
On You I wait all the day.

Read Ecclesiastes 5.2, 3.

Prepare.
1. Solomon is still thinking about when we are “before God”. What advice does he give us here? Why?

2. Who is the fool in the Presence of God?

Meditate.
God, Solomon wants us to understand, pays attention to our words, so we should too.

In Psalm 50, God confronts hypocrites in the midst of their worship, insisting that they have no right, whether in prayer or singing, to take His covenant on their lips. The reason? They live like fools, not like pious people.

In Isaiah 1 God rejects all the elaborate rituals and offerings of a sinful people. He insists that what they were offering, He hadn’t required of them. He was looking for something else.

Jesus also condemned those whose religion consisted primarily in empty, self-serving words (Matt. 6.1-8).

Solomon’s point in these verses is that our posture before God should be one more inclined to receive than to give. Not that we should not speak at all – whether to pray, sing, or give testimony. Certainly, we should. But the words we offer to God should be few, and such as are appropriate in God’s Presence, and not just those we might “dream up” to impress Him – or others. Verse 3 is difficult: just as many words come from a fool, so dreams – here probably in the sense of low-level prophecy, and in parallel with “fool” – come not from God, but from the busyness of the day.

The temptation in our day is to treat public worship as an opportunity for drawing attention to ourselves, either by our many words and catchy tunes, displays in worship, self-serving testimonies, or long-winded sermons. Solomon counsels quiet and humility as the proper posture in the house of God, rather than much talking and gesticulating.

In a day when, for many churches, public worship has taken on more the atmosphere of a noisy concert than of silence and humility, Solomon’s words provide an opportunity for us to reflect, both on what we are doing in worship, and what we should be doing to worship “under heaven”.

James’ counsel that we should be quick to hear and slow to speak especially applies in the Presence of God (Jms. 1.19, 20).

Reflect.
1. Why should we observe more silence in worship? How does silence help us in worshiping God?

2. How could you tell when a worship service had too many words?

3. In your own worship, in your private time with the Lord, how much listening and how much talking do you do? How might you improve the amount and quality of your listening?

Knowing, then, how widely the divine nature differs from our own, let us quietly remain within our proper limits. For it is both safer and more reverent to believe the majesty of God to be greater than we can understand, than, after circumscribing his glory by our misconceptions, to suppose there is nothing beyond our conception of it. Gregory of Nyssa (335-394), Answer to Eunomius’s Second Book

Help me to listen to You, Lord, not only when I’m in worship, but when…

Pray Psalm 25.1-7.
How will you wait on the Lord throughout the coming day? What do you expect to hear from Him?

Sing Psalm 25.1-7.
Psalm 25.1-7 (Festal Song: Revive Thy Work, O Lord)
I lift my soul to You; O Lord, in You I trust.
Let me not come to shame, nor let my foes o’er me exult.

All they who wait on You shall never come to shame;
Yet they to shame shall come who stand against Your holy Name.

Make me to know Your ways, teach me Your paths, O Lord!
My Savior, all day long I wait and seek You in Your Word.

Remember mercy, Lord, and steadfast love to me!
And all my sins before You let them not remembered be!

T. M. Moore

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Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. All psalms for singing adapted from The Ailbe Psalter. All quotations from Church Fathers from Ancient Christian Commentary Series, General Editor Thomas C. Oden (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006). All psalms for singing are from The Ailbe Psalter (available by clicking here).