If you want to develop the quality of persistence, you first have to appreciate the value of persistence. Second, you have to begin regardless of how you feel. Remember how Solomon described the sluggard? “The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion in the road! A lion is in the open square!’” (Proverbs 26:13).
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Thomas Edison once said, “Most of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to success before they gave up.” Edison was talking about the quality of persistence. You may think people are successful in life because of their family connections, inherited wealth, talent, or good luck.
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Why do bad things happen to good people? Solomon realized the bad things in life are not necessarily bad–it is all a matter of perspective. Yesterday we saw four “bad” things in Ecclesiastes 7 that Solomon said are actually good; today we are going to look at three more.
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God has a divine plan for everything in life. But it is only when we are in a right relationship with God that we can really trust His plan. That is the second point Solomon made in Ecclesiastes 3. He said a right relationship with God is the key to trusting His plan. Look at verse 11: “He has made everything appropriate in its time.”
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A lot of Christians today have an extreme idea about work. Some absolutely hate their jobs. Look at what Solomon said in verse 18: “I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me.”
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In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon started with his conclusion–that life under the sun is meaningless. To illustrate that point, he then gave a poem about the endless cycles we see around us, starting in verse 4 with the endless cycle of life. Solomon wrote, “A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.”
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A winning church is characterized by worship, instruction, and nourishment. That is the kind of church God uses to pour His power into our lives. And a final ingredient of a church that generates God’s power is sharing the gospel.
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What does genuine worship look like? Yesterday, we saw two characteristics of genuine worship: it is centered on God, not on us, and it is corporate, not just individual. Now let’s look at one final characteristic: genuine worship is active, not passive.
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To really appreciate God’s Word and make it a priority in your life, you have to believe it is true. How do we know the Bible is God’s letter to us? For one thing, we know from what the Bible says about itself. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul wrote, “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.”
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What does it mean to be “filled with the Holy Spirit”? In the New Testament, this phrase is used in two distinct ways. Sometimes “filled with the Spirit” describes the baptism with the Holy Spirit–that initial experience at the time of salvation when the Holy Spirit indwells us, changes us, and connects us to the body of Christ.
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