Cornerstone Church - Atlanta, GA

God given resources are meant to be shared, not hoarded.

Everyone is a counselor, the issue is whether you'll be a good one or not. Christians have a responsibility to speak into situations with wisdom of God. The church grows to maturity as Christians embrace their responsibility to give advice, comfort, and correction.

If you fail to plan, you plan to pail. Sayings like that communicate the reality that looking to the future is the key to our success. And while that may be the case, the future is also the very thing that fuels our present anxiety. Anxiety can either cause you live for LATER (obsess over the future) or LOITER (ignore the future and just enjoy now). The future may be the key to our earthly success, but as the writer of Ecclesiastes reflects on two future certainties that we can't escape (Our death and our descendants), he challenges our perspective on the future and how we live in the present. He shows us why putting our hope for meaning in merely securing a better future on earth makes for a terrible way to live in the present.

Everyone of us goes through life with a nagging sense that something's missing. There's a feeling of emptiness that leads to attempts on our part to fill the emptiness. For those of us that consider ourselves good and moral, it's easy to think that our biggest battle is to stay away from immoral pleasures in favor of immoral pleasures. However, the author of Ecclesiastes seems to think different. Innocent pleasures, don't always make for innocent pursuits. Sometimes our pursuit of very innocent things, can distract us from our true purpose of finding our true pleasure in God. We have to remember that we have an eternal palette that will swallow up every earthy pleasure and still leave you as an empty person. We were never meant to fill up on earthly pleasures but something more. God's gift to us is that earthly pleasures are only to serve as signposts towards the real pleasure--Himself!

Knowledge is power. It's a statement that we're all too familiar with. We know how powerful knowledge can be because we know the pain that ignorance can cause. We've all known the regret that comes along with the statement, "if only I knew then what I know now." Lack of knowledge about certain things seems to be the source of pain and loss in many of our lives. Knowledge, seems like something that would make our lives better. Until we look at the book of Ecclesiastes. The Author of the book gives us interesting thoughts on knowledge. Knowledge may drive us to answers, but we often find that agony is sitting in the passenger seat. In a broken world, it seems like the more that you learn, the more you lament. Far from solving all of our problems, knowledge tends to create additional problems. How should we treat the pursuit of knowledge in a fallen world? Is there any place where this pursuit of knowledge won't ultimately let us down?

The garden of our ideal life is littered with disappointments. Nothing in the life that we have is disappointment proof--regardless of how hard we work to make it so. When it comes to the business of living, we find ourselves moving from asking "how do I accomplish my goals" to "why do I exist? what am I even working for?". As we start our series in Ecclesiastes we see that the author of the book found himself in the same place. His conclusion is a sobering one, but it's only the starting point.

When it comes to interacting with other people, our preferences can easily become our prejudices. It's easy to be drawn to people that are impressive and distance ourselves from people that are unimpressive. In James chapter 2, we are reminded that God doesn't play favorites and that is the best news that people like us could ever hear.

How Christ came into the world, reveals why Christ came into the world. His birth in a manger served as a megaphone to announce to the world the reason for His coming. And if we understand that, it will drastically change the way we look at the world around us.

In Jesus, we get the best picture of what God's intention was for creating humanity. Jesus shows what it truly means to be human.

Our attention to others shows our attitude towards their Creator.