VIEW FROM THE MANSE 2.0

 

         We are moved in. We still have work to do at the old house and we have not closed on the sale yet, but we have been sleeping in the manse for a little over a week and the family is adjusting to life in the village wonderfully. I want to thank the more than dozen of you who showed up with willing hands, trailers, and truck beds to help us relocate. It was a remarkable amount of work that got done in about 4 hours. We could not have done it without you.

          If everything goes as planned, we will conclude our series in Ecclesiastes this Sunday. I have really enjoyed this series. Over the last 9 sermons, here are the main questions or lessons we’ve wrestled with:

      1. If you only have one life, how should you spend it?

      2. In a broken world, are some options still better than others?

      3. Time is in God’s hands, stop fighting it.

      4. In a world of trouble, don’t toil alone.

      5. When you go to church; listen more, speak less.

      6. God has given limits to wisdom in order to lead us to Christ.

      7. Don’t worry, find happiness from God’s hand in God’s world.

      8. The world is God’s; take a shot.

      9. Today is the day to start living wisely.

          Did any of these lessons stand out to you? Did any of them surprise you? I found that a book more than 2,000 years old still had remarkable resonance with our world. I can’t get over how honest the Preacher of Ecclesiastes is about the trouble of life ‘under the sun', and yet, how certain he is that there is joy to be found in this gift of life. The books that were the most help to me in study were David Gibson’s, Living Life Backwards, and Zack Eswine’s, Recovering Eden: The Gospel According to Ecclesiastes. If you want to spend more time in Ecclesiastes on your own, I would heartily recommend either of these.

          In the coming weeks we will walk through 1 John together. This short little letter is simple, straightforward, and full of gold. Of 1 John, John Stott wrote,

"John evidently loves the people committed to his care. They are his 'dear children,' his 'dear friends.' He longs to protect them from both error and evil and to see them firmly established in faith, love and holiness. He has no new doctrine for them. On the contrary, he appeals to them to remember what they already know, have and are. He warns them against deviating from this and urges them to remain loyal to it. Whenever innovators trouble the church, and ridicule whatever is old or traditional, we need to hear and heed John's exhortation, to continue in what we have learned and received, and to let it continue in us.”

          I trust that our time spent together in this book as we approach Advent will prepare us for reflecting on the coming of Christ.

                                                              Bryan Fitzgerald, Pastor

                                                         (bryan@argylepresbyterian.org)

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