SUNDAY - May 24, 2026 | The Grind: Ecclesiastes 7:14-29 - Don't be simplistic because life is weird

There is no such thing as being overly righteous. Righteousness is a state of being. It's not something that there's degrees to. Either you are righteous or you are unrighteous. That's it. It's like life. Either you are alive or you are dead. There's only two states. You can't be really alive or really dead. You're either alive or you're dead. That's righteousness. You either are righteous given to you and me as a free gift from Jesus Christ by simply putting our faith in him alone, or you're not righteous, that's it. [01:06:19] (38 seconds)  #RighteousByFaith

And you and I have the best ace up our sleeve. And it's this, we have faith in God. That God works all things together for good to those that love him and are called according to his purpose. That's the best thing. We have the sixth sense of faith. So maybe the greatest example of this is Moses. Born in probably the most adverse time in Israel's history. The pharaoh in charge is killing all the Hebrew babies, throwing them into the Nile River and drowning them. Bad times. [00:52:37] (41 seconds)  #FaithIsOurAce

We take the good gifts of God, and we turn them into gods, and then we demand that they make us happy. God, God made us good, upright, but then we scheme, and then we get snared, and then we get fettered, and we don't notice till it's too late. I think about Solomon. I bet you at this point in life, he's like, how did I get here with a thousand women that I don't even like anymore? How did I get here? It started with a little bit of compromise. The human heart becoming an auto factory. [01:24:13] (34 seconds)  #GuardAgainstIdols

Karma is stupid. Isn't that verse 15? I've seen really good people, really great people who perish in their goodness. And he says, I've seen really wicked people that get a long life and seem to be doing super super well. So this is Solomon is just saying, life is not the way that we think it is. There's not karma. Karma is this, what comes around, goes around. If you hurt people, you're gonna get hurt. [00:55:25] (33 seconds)  #LifeIsNotKarma

You look in the mirror. I see what you do. Where did I go wrong? Use scripture to look in the mirror of my heart. God, you're the only one that can make me upright. I know where I'm crooked. I know where I'm broken. Put me on the path everlasting. Put my feet on the straight and narrow. That's what we do. We do this, one of my favorite texts. We do second Corinthians three verse 18. And we all with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being the word there in the Greek is metamorphosized, like a caterpillar into a butterfly, a completely different organism, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the lord who is the spirit. [01:24:49] (56 seconds)  #BeTransformed

Moses' parents don't want that to happen to Moses. They don't know what to do. So they build this little ark. They put baby Moses into it, and they float him down the Nile. Talk about trusting God. That little boat floats down, and Pharaoh's daughter sees Moses. His name is literally drawn out. She draws him out of the Nile River, adopts him as her child, grabs Moses' mom and says, be the nanny and raise him for me. And Moses gets the best training ever so that eighty years later, he can become the guy that leads Israel into freedom. [00:53:19] (42 seconds)  #RaisedForPurpose

I just call this embrace life, all of it. Enjoy the good things that come to you, Solomon says, and learn, consider when adversity, when bad things happen to you. And the reason why? Solomon says, because we have no idea what it's gonna do in the future. You don't know what comes after that event, that good event or that bad event. Too often, we simplify life to this. Prosperity is good. Adversity is bad. But rarely does life work like that, actually. [00:47:53] (40 seconds)  #EmbraceAllOfLife

That's the god we serve. And by the way, there's no other way to live life. Right? When adversity comes, you can't just cancel it. You can't control it. You can't stop it. It's gonna come. So why not embrace it and trust, God, you're gonna use this for good in my life. Use it. So life isn't simple. It comes with the good and the bad. Embrace it because you don't know what it's doing in the future for you. [00:54:01] (28 seconds)  #TrustGodInAdversity

What did that just say? You will never earn your righteousness. There's no list, no works of the law. I don't care how good you are at it. I don't care. If you're overly righteous and you're working yourself into the ground, you will never be able to earn. You'll never do enough to be righteous. Never. Instead, we're justified by faith in Christ Jesus. That's the good news. Why do we always run back to karma then? [01:05:25] (32 seconds)  #JustifiedByFaith

Do not take to heart all the things that people say. That's an underliner. That's a highlighter. That's a circular. Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. Your heart knows that many times you yourself has cursed others. How good is that? All this I've tested by wisdom. I said, I will be wise, but it was far from me. I didn't get it. [01:07:40] (33 seconds)  #DontTakeItToHeart

Oh, yeah. Your back is killing you? You know who else's back killed them? Who was ripped apart with a cat of nine tails 39 times on his back? Who was dead in a grave for three days for you? If someone does that to you, how do you feel in that moment? Edified? Do you feel loved? Or do you wanna harm someone? It's kinda like that, like, don't be that guy. I think that's part of what it's saying. Don't be a nitpicker. [01:00:00] (31 seconds)  #SkipTheNitpicking

Now Elisha could have corrected him. Hey. Listen. Genesis chapter one, God creates everything. All the dirt's his. It doesn't matter what dirt you're on. But Elisha doesn't do that to this new believer. You know what he does? Go ahead and take it. Not gonna hurt anything? Go ahead and take it. God knows your heart. God knows where you're at. Don't worry about that. You're a new guy that just met Yahweh. He healed you. I'm fine with that. [01:02:43] (24 seconds)  #GiveGraceToNewBelievers

Like, can you get a tattoo? You can't get a tattoo. You can't drink caffeine. Women can't wear pants. Like, just down the line of, are you kidding? You start nitpicking. You know what a nit actually is? It's a lice egg. It's like a freakish monkey picking out nits and eating them. Don't be that guy. That to me would be the overly righteous, just, are you kidding? Stop it. Don't do this to people. [01:01:07] (26 seconds)  #BeyondTrivialRules

So there's gonna be some incident that's gonna happen to you when you leave here, and someone's gonna cut you off. They're gonna pull right in front of you, speed off. You're gonna get stopped behind a red light. What do you do in that moment? Don't say it and don't show me. Here's the right response. Me too. I've cut people off. I pulled in front of people. I've done exactly what that person did to me right there. [01:10:25] (30 seconds)  #RespondWithMeToo

Ultimately, Solomon, in a way, is looking down the tunnel of time about something. And he's saying, there there's this kind of religion of karma and and righteousness. That you earn your righteousness. Most of us believe that we earn our rightness by things that we do not do and things that we do do. Most of us have that kind of karma righteousness in our hearts. That we that's what we do. That if I do this stuff, God's gonna give me the goods. [01:03:17] (28 seconds)  #DefaultToKarmaMindset

You wanna be cured of karma? Go walk Doernbecher's Children's Hospital in Portland. I have. Look at these little bodies going through things that are horrendous. You'll get cured really quick. But we all have in our head this tuned little radar that scales everybody. And when something happens to somebody, we have this scale saying, yeah, they earned it. They deserve that. They got what was coming to them. We all have it. [00:56:42] (30 seconds)  #CompassionOverKarma

But stop for a second. We live it. If something bad happens to someone that we believe is wicked, what do we think in our heart? That dude had it coming, man. You play with fire, you get burned. Those are our karma statements. But if karma is true, I have a list of people it's missed. Just watch the news. You're like, how is that guy getting away with that? Year after year after year after year. [00:56:10] (32 seconds)  #KarmaDoesntExplainEverything

There's gonna be time you're gonna hear half truths about yourself, things that are gossipies, things that are slandering. Guess what? Yeah, I probably spread those same kind of things. I probably spoke about things I didn't know enough about. Me too. You wanna save your soul from the autoimmune disease of hurt feelings. Me too. Me too. Like, one of my favorite stories of Jesus and his 12 disciples is found in Matthew 26. [01:10:54] (28 seconds)  #OwnYourGossip

I think there is a way that we can live out our faith that's really annoying. So I'll give you an example. I call them the super spiritualizer. So let's say after this service, you're out in the lobby, you're enjoying a snack, and you're talking to somebody, you're like, man, I pulled something in my back three days ago. My back's been killing me. And they answer you like this. Oh, yeah. Your back is killing you? You know who else's back killed them? [00:59:33] (33 seconds)  #StopSuperSpiritualizing

Jesus wants to have this meal with him. He's really excited about it. They're eating the meal. I'm sure it's happy and joyful and all that kind of stuff. Then all of sudden, there's this somber moment where Jesus says, listen, one of you, 12 disciples, one of you is going to betray me. What did the disciples do in that moment? Did they all point at Judas? Gotta be him, man. That dude is sketchy. I'm sure it's him. Nope. [01:11:22] (28 seconds)  #ExamineYourHeart