Life Is Hard — Don't Do It Alone

You need to let Jesus Christ be the third strand in your life, in your relationships, in your marriage, in your friendships because a cord of three strands is not easily broken. Let's pray together. [01:00:05] (23 seconds)  #ThreeStrandFaith

And while Solomon would say, you need a true friend, a brotherhood, a sisterhood, you need a close community of people to walk through life with. I want you to listen to this. He said this over and over. Two are better than one. There two are better than one for the labor. Two are better than one when they fall. Two are better than one when they, get cold. Two are better than one when there's a conflict. A cord of three strands is not easily broken. [00:58:44] (32 seconds)  #TwoAreBetterThanOne

I have used this passage at every wedding I have ever done. Every one of them. Because I really do believe it's got a great application for marriage. And what I say to them is two are better than one, but a cord of three strands is not easily broken. So who's that third strand? It's Jesus. It's real simple. I mean, you knew the answer was gonna be Jesus ultimately. But if you allow him to be the third cord, and he's talking about a rope that has it's woven together. One strand would snap pretty easy. Two is a little bit stronger, but a three strand rope, it's not easily broken. [00:59:16] (49 seconds)  #ChristCenteredMarriage

But but how does that work, this under the sun living, this living without any thought of eternity, how does that affect relationships with other people? And Solomon is going to really dig in on this and so we we're going to as well as we read through this passage. I can summarize this message very very succinctly in a single simple sentence. Here it is. Life is hard. Don't do it alone. [00:31:50] (30 seconds)  #DontDoLifeAlone

And here's the issue. The issue that is that for so many of us men, we have been led to believe that somehow it is heroic to be the stoic, to stand alone. We have somehow been led to believe that to be a man means you are to be self sufficient and independent. Let me explain this to you. God did not create you for independence. Independence is a great national concept. It is a horrible personal virtue. It is. You were not meant to be independent. [00:52:58] (50 seconds)  #BeyondIndependence

First of all, and primarily, you were meant to be dependent on God. But we were meant to be interdependent. I depend on you, you depend on me, we depend on each other in this life in the community of believers. You see, this is why God gave us the church. Romans chapter 12 verse five says, in the same way, we who are many are one body in Christ and individually we are members of one another. We are members of one another. [00:53:48] (39 seconds)  #OneBodyInChrist

It's also true in the ancient Near East when it comes to cold weather. Now they do have winter. We think of the ancient Aries as always hot in the desert, but they have winter. It snows sometimes in Jerusalem. But here's what they didn't have in Solomon's day. They had no way to know what we would call a norther was gonna blow through and the temperature is gonna drop forty, fifty degrees in a matter of hours. And when that happens, if you were a traveler and you were caught out in some sort of winter storm, if you were alone there would be no way to keep warm. But two could huddle together and keep warm. This isn't about romance. It's about survival. [00:51:14] (40 seconds)  #SurviveTogether

Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan. And in that story, there is a traveler, and he is traveling alone. And he is ambushed by a a bunch of burglars and thugs. They beat him up and leave him for dead because he was traveling alone. One gets ambushed. They get beaten up and robbed, but two possibly could resist those who would attack them. This is not some sort of ancient poem. This is not sentimentality. This is survival theology that he's giving us. [00:52:22] (37 seconds)  #DontTravelAlone

One of the most liberating things in life is when you allow God to break the satanic chains of isolation and his believing you are on your own. It's all up to you. You don't have a friend. You don't have a companion. But Solomon does something really interesting at the end of this section. I think it's really the point of the whole thing. It's tucked away kind of in the middle of the chapter. [00:58:09] (30 seconds)  #BreakIsolation

Our strategy is life groups and whether that's an on campus life group or an at home life group, that's our strategy. And I will tell you that if you'll get involved, it works. Those are the people that when you have a tragedy, they're gonna be there. Those are the people that when you have a victory, they're gonna celebrate with you, and that feels good. Those are the people that when you are struggling, they are come they're gonna come alongside you and hold you up. [00:56:05] (34 seconds)  #LifeGroupsWork

In this room right now, you are looking at one face and the back of everybody else's head. That's it. That is not the way you grow in community. You grow in community in circles where we're looking at one another, not in rows. Now, you can grow in worship and in knowledge and encouragement. Yes. But we grow in community in life groups in this church. That's that's the way we do it. [00:55:30] (35 seconds)  #FaceToFaceCommunity

When you are questioning, they're gonna patiently help you walk through it. Those are the people that you are going to walk through life with, and the truth is that you grow more as a disciple of Jesus in that kind of environment. It just happens. God works through that. And so if you are not a part of a life group, I wanna challenge you. I really wanna encourage you. I want to exhort you. That needs to be a part of who you are. [00:56:39] (38 seconds)  #GrowInCommunity

The applause of men, the approval of the crowd, the crowd patting you on the back and telling you how wonderful you are. Let me explain this to you if you are an athlete. It will fade someday. It all goes away. Andre Agassi was one of the best tennis players of his generation. In nineteen nineties, he won eight grand slam titles. Product endorsements came his way. Beautiful women came his way. He dated and eventually married beautiful women. [00:46:11] (36 seconds)  #CrowdApprovalFades

In his autobiography, Open, Andre Agassi told a startling truth. He said, I hate tennis. I hate tennis. And then he went on to tell why. Those stadiums that were filled and the crowds that roared when he won. Wimbledon or the US Open. Those crowds that cheered him disappeared so quickly, and he says, would go back to my hotel room, and I was alone and broken and empty. Let me tell you something. [00:46:47] (45 seconds)  #FameLeavesYouEmpty

Does he ever ask himself why am I accumulating all this? Why am I gathering all of this? There is a sense of selfishness in that. And then he says one other one other sort of negative thing. And if you're feeling uncomfortable like, then man, this is not building me up. It's not edifying. It's not meant to. Solomon is trying to make you really uncomfortable. And Solomon does a similar thing at the end of the passage. So I'm gonna skip some verses then I'll come back to them. [00:42:44] (29 seconds)  #QuestionYourAccumulation

In the middle part of the last century, there was a guy named Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes was a film producer. He was an aviation pioneer. He was an industrialist. He was one of the first people to ever become a billionaire, not not with an m, with a b, a billionaire, and that was huge money in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies. But he didn't have a wife, and he never had any children. Later in his life, just before he died in 1976, he became a recluse. [00:41:26] (36 seconds)  #RichAndReclusive

He got so afraid that he was gonna get a disease and die that he isolated himself. He owned three huge mansions and he wound up living the last three years of his life in a hotel room with the curtains drawn and only two he only allowed two people access to him. When he died, he left a fortune worth over $2,500,000,000 and no heir. There were over 50 wills produced claiming their share of the Howard Hughes inheritance. It took a court years to sort out who was gonna get that inheritance. [00:42:02] (42 seconds)  #FortuneWithoutHeirs

Who am I struggling for, he asked, and depriving myself of good things. This too is futile and a miserable task. He says, see this guy, he's working so hard. He's accumulating so much. He's gathering so much. And he doesn't have a son. He doesn't have a brother, he doesn't have an heir. When he dies, he's just gonna leave it all behind. Now, there is a moment in this passage, and I don't wanna be too technical with you, with the Hebrew, that there is an an an interpretive debate among Old Testament Hebrew scholars. [00:39:33] (39 seconds)  #StrugglingForWhat

But Solomon is saying to us that we live in such a culture that in our flesh always turns ambition to rivalry if you are not very careful and you don't surrender your ambition to the will of God. The third thing that he talks about is is this competition and and this accumulation. He looked at verse seven. He says, I saw futility under the sun. There is a person without a companion, without even a son or brother, and though there is no end to all his struggles, his eyes are not content with riches. [00:38:53] (41 seconds)  #AmbitionBecomesRivalry

You see, social media has created this environment where the prevailing mentality is, I don't just want to do well, I wanna do better than you. That's dangerous. It's not just that I have ambition. It's that I just wanna outshine you. I wanna be a little bit better than you. I want That's what he means by this sense of rivalry, jealousy, and envy. And social media just feeds that. I I don't wanna preach on social media every Sunday, but it's amazing how that it applies to passages like this. [00:36:54] (41 seconds)  #ComparisonDrivesRivalry