📊 Ecclesiastes 12:13 | Remember Your Creator

📧 In today’s email…

• Remember your Creator 🤔 

• A 2-sec reflection question ⌛️ 

• Tuesday Trivia 📊

 🧠 Memorize

_{see if you know what words go in the blanks}

The end of the ______; all has been _____.

Fear God and keep his ____________, for this is the whole duty __ ___.

Ecclesiastes 12:13

Remember Your Creator 🤔

Ecclesiastes isn’t exactly known for its cheerful tone.

The last chapter is no different.

First, a few reminders:

• Who: The audience is probably too comfortable with their current situation, perhaps meaning they don’t rely on God.

• How: Ecclesiastes pictures an individual journey to find meaning, but everything comes up short.

• Why: Ultimately, we must live as God wants us to live in order to find meaning.

Now let’s take a look at how the whole book wraps up in Ecclesiastes chapter 12.

The chapter opens with:

The Teacher asks us to remember God in the times before the “dire days.”

Here, youth isn’t so much about age, but about the time you have on earth before you die.

Ecclesiastes nudges us to consider two seemingly conflicting ideas:

• Our time on earth is short (we are finite)

• We were created for eternity (we’re destined for eternity)

The next six verses describe various sad circumstances that seem to describe a mini-apocalypse.

However, it’s not about the ultimate End of Time - it’s about the end of YOUR time on earth.

The book of Ecclesiastes brings up death a lot —

— We don’t know the number of days we have left, but we do know that number is getting smaller each morning…

So what do we do with the time we have?

That’s where our memory verse comes in.

We must live with eternity in mind. Our duty is to fear God - to hold him in sight and revere Him.

In its final chapter, the author emphasizes this:

Remember your Creator

Remember who made you.

Remember who you are ultimately accountable to.

And as people living after the resurrection..

Remember who pursued you, died for you, and rose for you.

We MUST remember our Creator and follow him while we still have breath in our lungs.

💡 We’ll dig deeper into the nitty-gritty of Ecclesiastes 12:13 throughout the rest of this week.

Apply & Respond: Accepting Our Duty 🏃‍♂️ 

If all you ever read was Proverbs, you might think life was pretty black and white.

Righteous people prosper and bad people are punished.

Hard work is rewarded and laziness is not.

But like Job, Ecclesiastes demonstrates that life in this broken world doesn’t always work like that!

Ecclesiastes minces no words: there are some hard things about life.

Hard work doesn’t always “pay off” like we want it to.

Being righteous isn’t a guarantee your life will work out great (just look at Jesus).

And death comes to everybody.

But as God’s people, our duty is not to seek pleasure and avoid pain like the rest of the world.

Our duty is to live:

• in relationship with our Creator

• obey His commands

• and live out of an overflow of His presence to be a lamp to the world

God’s commandments aren’t just nice suggestions.

They bring meaning.

They make life worth living.

And following them is our sacred duty.

Reflect 🤔 

What are ways you have chased after “meaningless” things to fulfill your life?

How can God satisfy those desires and longings of your heart and provide you with lasting meaning?

Reflect on these questions and pray for strength to follow God over the meaningless things of the world.

Throughout the rest of the week, we’ll talk about practical ways to fear God and follow his commandments. 👀 

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Trivia 📊 

Click one of the options below. Let’s see how you do..

In Ecclesiastes 3, the Teacher says that God “has also set _____ in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

Answer key ✅ 

The end of the matter; all has been heard.

Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.

Ecclesiastes 12:13