As I am writing this, I am a few hours from loading up my children in the car to join Jerry in Georgia for the funeral of his mother. It is times like these that make life and the end of that life become more real and make you think about what to do with that life. We have seen this thought in Ecclesiastes over and over again: what do we do with this life that we have been given?

Earlier this week, as I was walking and waiting for word on my mother-in-law, I was listening to a speech about Augustine, or St. Augustine as he is often known. Two things struck me about how Augustine viewed and verbalized his beliefs. The first one is found in the opening to his letters of Confessions.

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you—we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. Yet these humans, due part of your creation as they are, still do long to praise you. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you. Grant me to know and understand, Lord.

So often when we hear this work quoted we skip right into what he is confessing and miss the reason he is confessing. There are many things we could look at in this opening, but time and space do not permit it. However, let’s summarize a few things: we are here because God created us; we are limited to our time on this earth; we are sinful, yet we long to praise God. Then on the flip side he describes the Lord: He is great, powerful, worthy of praise, and so forth. But I think the last few lines are so important. Augustine recognizes that God is the one that “arouses us” to praise Him, so we can have joy, and we will never be at rest until we find our place in Him.

The second is Augustine’s view that we place our affections, devotions, and attention to things we find lovely. “Do we love anything but the beautiful?”(Book 4) This is only one example of this teaching, but for our time and purposes it serves us well.

As I think about what life was like for my mother-in-law, I think about how she did, in fact, devote her life to what she found beautiful. For one, she had enough books to fill her own bookstore. No doubt when you walked in her home you could see her love for books, for it was on display everywhere. In her mind, books were a lovely part of her life.

However, Augustine says that his sin wasn’t always in what he found lovely, but that his sin was in his seeking pleasure and truth in places that were not God.

I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them.

For it was my sin, that not in Him, but in His creatures—myself and others—I sought for pleasures, sublimities, truths, and so fell headlong into sorrows, confusions, errors.

What does this have to do with our passage today?

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. Ecclesiastes 5:10

That sounds like exactly what Augustine was alluding to. The love of money will not satisfy. This world will not satisfy. Why? Because we weren’t created to love things, but rather, we were created to love and honor and worship and be in relationship with the Lord.

When we spend our life seeking satisfaction outside of the Lord and His will and ways, we will always wind up lacking. The things that our life is filled with must be partnered with an understanding of how God has blessed us with those things. We praise Him and thank Him for the gifts that He gives, but we also seek Him. For in Him and Him alone do we find the purpose of why we were created to be in a relationship with Him. That’s why Augustine writes and asks the Lord to “grant him to know and understand.”

Our passage this week says, “Here is what I have seen to be good: it is appropriate to eat, drink,and experience good in all the labor one does under the sun during the few days of his life God has given him, because that is his reward” (verse 18). The preacher recognized that this life is good. There is reward, but this is given by God. When we leave God out or think we have accomplished these things without Him, we only find an unrest in our souls.

As we think about the teachings of Ecclesiastes and what we will take with us from them, I hope, if nothing else, we understand that God has given us good things to enjoy. He has blessed us with knowledge of Him. We can know Him and draw close to Him in all circumstances. We confess our faulty ways of seeking satisfaction outside of Him, and we ask that He draws us back to Himself. In closing this little writing, I want to urge you to think on these words of Augustine, especially as they relate to the teachings of the Preacher, and pause, using his quote below as a prayer prompt for yourself.

True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in you, O God, who are the Truth, you, my God, my true Light, to whom I look for salvation.