Ecclesiastes Lesson 4

Living it Up: the First Experiment – 2:1-11

This man, one of the great geniuses of all time, and this man has performed a series of experiments for us. As we’ve gone through the book so far we’ve discovered many things, but Solomon performs experiments to show the futility of living outside of the bottom circle. When you receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior God the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Him. This occurs to every person the moment you receive Christ. This has nothing to do with whether you join a church or are not a member of any church; it is a supernatural operation of God the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Christ and this never changes. However, we have the bottom circle, the old creation, and this is the world in which you live and there’s only one spot in this world that you have perfect happiness, where you’re fulfilling the will of God for your life and this is the bottom circle. Solomon is going to tell you what it’s like to get out of that bottom circle, wander around the toolies, because this is what Solomon did and finally he committed the sin unto death and died. Solomon was a very tragic case; he was a man who was probably more versatile than Leonardo DaVinci, he was a man that was a genius in many, many fields, not just in one but many, many fields, and yet this man experienced vanity and vanity and vanity and vanity.

Therefore in Ecclesiastes 2:1 he begins his experiments. This experiment is going to run through the end of chapter 2 but we’re going to divide it up so that we get the text correctly. We’re going to take verses 1-11 and this is the first part of his experiment with pleasure: Solomon’s experiment with pleasure. Verses 12-17 is his investigation of self-development; he’s going to say look, I’m a self-made man and I’m proud of it and then after he thinks for about five minutes he says huh, I wonder what that does for me. So he destroys the concept of the self-made man in verses 12-17.

Then in verses 18-23 Solomon discusses what’s going to happen when he makes out his will; he’s going to have a son who’s going to come along and be one of the greatest idiots of all time, Rehoboam. This fellow was going to come in and try to rule the throne, he’s a teenager, he does not inherit any of his father’s wisdom, he is one of the great jackasses of the nation Israel and as a result the nation experiences a civil war and almost is destroyed. So Solomon says look, I’ve got all these things that I’ve done and now I’ve got to will these to some guy and I don’t even know whether he’s got an ounce of sense in his mind. So this is the problem of family heritage and that’s destroyed.

Then finally in verses 24-26 Solomon gives you the conclusion based on this; in other words, if the fact you are a Christian and you want to live outside of the will of God then how can you find happiness. Well, he’s going to tell you how to find happiness when you’re disobedient to God and it’s very pathetic. This is one of the most horrible books to read in the Scripture. It is one of the most depressing books to read because what Solomon does is start, as you would if you were an unbeliever, or if you are a Christian out of fellowship, and he takes this to the logical conclusion and you get an opportunity to see what happens.

So in verse 1 he starts in and he says… this is a resolve to begin his experiment with pleasure, living it up. “I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove [test] thee with mirth; therefore enjoy pleasure; and, behold this also is vanity.” Now in verses 1-2 you have something that is going to recur again and again in this book and that is the idea of recapitulation and summary. The way the Hebrews wrote was that they would have a summary statement taking a couple of verses. They wrote very similar to journalists; if some of you are in journalism class and you’re taught to write a news story, you put all your eggs in the first few sentences to introduce the people to what happened, so you have summary and then you have recapitulation of details. That’s the way the Jews wrote and therefore in verses 1-2 you have a quick summary of his experiment and then verses 3 and following develop the details.

Verse 1, this is his resolve to begin his experiment. “I said in my heart” is the resolve, here’s volition going in action and he’s choosing at this point to begin to operate on a carnal basis. Of course he was operating on a carnal basis before but now he’s going to try to live it up and see what pleasure he can get out of being a lousy out-of-fellowship Christian. “I said in my heart, Go to now,” that means let’s get with it, “I will test thee,” and the Hebrew word for test means to test someone with the idea of seeing what they’re made out of. In other words, the point is that you put pressure on somebody to see which way they’re going to jump; you don’t know what they’re going to do. This is why, for example, the United States military has discovered in basic training that they love to put people under pressure and so they’ll have some fellow there, he’ll be mama’s little boy and then they usually pick some sergeant to come up and just chew him up one side and down the other, insult him for hours at a time, just deliberately antagonism him, insulting him, saying all sorts of things to him, because they want to see which way he’s going to jump. They’ve got to put the pressure on now, before he’s involved in a combat situation to find out what he’s going to do under pressure.

So Solomon is going to do the same thing, same concept here, except he’s going to use pleasure as the means and instrument of test. And he says now I’m going to put the pressure on, “I will test thee,” that means he’s going to test himself by applying pleasure and see if this gives him any satisfaction. The word “mirth” emphasizes outer expression of pleasure and the word “pleasure” itself is the Hebrew word towb, and towb just simply means good, it’s just the Hebrew adjective good, and it means good for the eyes or pleasurable. So therefore this emphasizes the inner aspect; so the outer and the inner aspect of pleasure are emphasized. “I will test thee with mirth,” and it’s not “therefore,” this is a command, “and so enjoy pleasure.” It’s not saying “therefore enjoy pleasure” it means I’m going to test thee with mirth and enjoy pleasure. So this sets the experiment up and to show you that this does not necessarily mean bad things that he’s going to do turn to Psalm 106:5.

Psalm 106:5, this is to show you that these two words do not connote… I’ve heard people go through Ecclesiastes and say what Solomon decided to do was go out on drugs and live it up, etc. That’s not what he’s talking about although it has application in that area. “That I may see the good of Thy chosen,” in other words, this is what the Psalmist is saying and he is looking at these people and he’s saying look, I want more, I want to “see the good of Your chosen.” Now “Your chosen” refers to the nation Israel, and what the Psalmist wants to do is see the good things and this is nothing bad, this is good. “…that I may rejoice in the gladness of Thy nation, that I may glory with Thine inheritance.” Now there you have your words being used and it is not a bad connotation. So please, as we go back to Ecclesiastes 2 don’t think of Solomon necessarily engaging in bad things. Solomon has a sin nature just like you do; we all have the sin nature and the sin nature has two outputs. One thing it puts out is personal sin and the other thing the sin nature puts out is human good. Nine times out of ten Christians think of oh, my sin nature, all it does is produce personal sin and they think of mental attitude sins or some overt activity and yet what they fail to realize is that you can be, as a Christian, living your life in the energy of the flesh, meaning you’re not filled with the Spirit, not following God’s will from the inside, and you’re just putting on a religious front and you’re self-righteous, etc. and doing all these things and yet it’s all human good. It might be giving money, it might be coming to church on Sunday, making the 11:00 o’clock show; it might be doing something else, all sorts of good things but the trouble with it is God rejects it. When Jesus Christ died on the cross He took your personal sin upon Himself and died for you and He also said when He went to the cross human good won’t cut it, so therefore I’m going to have to die for the human race in order that their sins might be atoned for. So therefore the cross takes personal sins upon the cross and rejects human good; human good is absolutely rejected in God’s sight, God has nothing to do with human good.

Therefore in verse 1 of Ecclesiastes 2 we have Solomon trying many things. Some of these are going to be a little off color and those of you who come from dainty backgrounds are going to be a little shocked at what Solomon does but don’t be shocked because this is what goes on. The Word of God is written as people live, so if we come across a few things that shock you just relax and get off this high-horse and accept the fact that Solomon is going to do these things, he’s going to live it up like any man would, and therefore it’s going to involve certain activities. So he’s going to go on now and he’s going to test these and see whether they give any pleasure.

Then he says in the last part of verse 1 as he summarizes the end of the experiment for you already before going into the details, he says look, “behold, even this is vanity.” And the word vanity has two connotations, as we have seen. I rather like the word “vapor,” it translates the word better, but the word vanity has the idea of no or very little substance, just like steam something that has very little substance and it’s there and it’s kind of not there, just shadowy. And therefore the second and derived meaning means it’s transitory. In other words, because it doesn’t have any solid substance it passes away soon. And he says that’s what it is; he’s not saying it’s bad, nothing here says it’s bad, he’s just saying it’s non-satisfying, just blah feeling.

Then in verse 2 he says, “I said of laughter, It is mad; and of mirth, What does it?” The word “laughter” means to go out and this is the party-line. In other words, evidently he decided we’ll have a party a day or something, and he had a great motto that he was going to have all the parties and he could hold the biggest blast in Jerusalem. Solomon had a personal expense account of twenty million a year and he could spend that money any way he wanted to, didn’t have to give it to the IRS because he was the IRS. He took it from everybody else so he didn’t have to worry about income tax or anything else, and he just used it and used to the hilt. So therefore as he decides to have his parties and he has laughter, this is his conclusion, “its madness” and the word “madness” is the same word used back in verse 17, “I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know knowledge, that they are madness and folly,” and the word “madness” means craziness. It comes from the Hebrew word halal, and it means to praise, hold up the hands in praise, and it also meant for idiots at a party that had a little too much and they’d go wandering around and this kind of thing, and that’s how the word got to mean crazy. It means that the people are hollering and whooping at some party, they just had a little too much and so they behaved this way and that’s what he says basically laughter is. This doesn’t mean that everybody that laughs is crazy; what he’s saying is that there’s no content to it, there’s nothing to satisfy, it’s just there and it passes away.

And of mirth, what does it do, it doesn’t do a thing, and the way we have this read in the Hebrew text it says “what is this that it does.” In other words, Solomon challenges the reader of Ecclesiastes, in verse 2 he says you show me one thing that this gives you, just show me one thing he said. You can go to all the parties you want to but that’s not going to sustain you; you may be tired of life, you may be bored, you may have been on the job 35 years and you want a break, so you want to go out and raise a little hell somewhere to relax yourself. So you go to this party and you have a good time. Well what is Solomon saying? What do you get out of it? You can have all the good times you want to but there’s nothing inside that sustains, there’s a lot of ha-ha on the outside but after the party is over you have a hangover. And that’s his point, there’s just nothing that you can take out of this thing. He’s talking about the spiritual death of man and there’s nothing you can do to fulfill it.

Now this goes back to a Bible principle that we should be clear on, the difference between the soul and the spirit of man. Those two are entirely different words, in the Hebrew, in the Greek, and in the way they are used consistently throughout the canon of Scripture. The word “soul” is derived from the spirit, Gen. 2:7 says “God breathed into” a physical body the human spirit, and so when you have spirit plus body you have the soul produced. Now look at the cause/effect there. What’s causing what? The spirit causes the soul to exist. What does that mean? It means you can’t take any activity of the soul and have it give you any life; there’s no life in the soul, the soul itself is living by the energy it received from the human spirit. Therefore you can’t jack yourself up, pull yourself up with your bootstraps, etc. by taking some activity of the soul and letting that stand for life and trying to get a charge out of it.

The human being is like this: we have the soul with its volition, the personal affections, the mentality and the bodily affections. We have these functions the soul performs. You can’t take one of these functions, say mentality, and you can sit down and hypnotize yourself to think of one thing for the next hour and a half, and it might be the left fluorescent bulb on the first light on the ceiling or something, but you’ve got yourself some little object that you’re going to look at for the next hour and a half. That’s not going to satisfy you. And you can take all these other, affections, personal affections, and you can go from one person to another and still never be satisfied because what is satisfying to you is what proceeds out of the human spirit. Now the unbeliever has the human spirit through channel one which we call the idea that the spirit is just giving him psuche life, or soul life and bios life or physical life but the human spirit is not giving him any spiritual life and so that person becomes a Christian.

When you become a Christian God the Holy Spirit indwells you. At that point when you receive Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior something happens. The technical word for this, used in the Scripture and by theologians is “regeneration.” At the point of regeneration, when you accept Christ as your Savior, God the Holy Spirit comes to indwell. He works something which is not particularly known but He does something inside the human spirit that now gives you satisfaction. Now he can fill your soul by coming across in what we call channel two and begin to influence these functions of the soul. So now as the Holy Spirit manipulates in your soul your volition you want to do the will of God; take your personal affections, your emotions, they’re not out of control, they’re organized, He doesn’t negate emotions but He puts them in the proper perspective so you can get involved in emotional situations and keep cool. And so that the thing that motivates you emotionally is the Lord Jesus Christ, you become occupied with spiritual things first and the other things second. In the mentality of your mind your mind begins to think in terms of the Word, you not only think in terms of Bible doctrine as far as the theory goes but you also think of ways to apply that doctrine in the classroom and wherever you are. That’s the Holy Spirit working in the mentality of the soul. This is what is supposed to happen to a person but Solomon is living in the energy of the flesh, therefore he has negative volition, his personal affections are all out of kilter, the mentality of his soul is disturbed, confused, he’s full of worry, his bodily affections are all out of control, etc. Here you have a man living in the energy of the flesh and this is why this experiment is going to fail.

So now we come to verse 3 and he tells you in verse 3 the mode in which he’s going to work, in other words he’s going to tell you how he’s going to conduct the experiment. Now we’re going to have to change the translation except for those of you who have a newer translation of the Bible. If you have an RSV (Revised Standard Version) and an ASV (American Standard Version) you will see that this has been corrected. But in verse 3 this is the sense of the original. “I sought in my heart to give myself unto wine,” literally it says “to lead along my flesh by means of wine.” This is instrument so you have “to lead along,” that’s your verb, and it’s used for an animal that’s drawing a cart, that’s the Hebrew word, “I decided to lead along my flesh by means of wine.”

Now what does this mean? He carefully tells you what it doesn’t mean, unless some of you get the wrong idea that he’s going to go out and get the rosy glow. The next phrase tells you no, that’s not true. “…yet acquainting my heart with wisdom.” Now what this means is a conjunction of contrast, he’s saying “but” and it’s a parenthesis literally, “but my heart,” that’s the mentality here, “but my heart was constantly in control.” Now what does he mean? He means that he used liquor but he never let the liquor use him. He used the wine to stimulate some of his bodily affections during the course of this experiment but he never submitted and became drunk. He used the wine as a tool, or as a device, but he never let it get the better of him and he’s going to emphasize this later on down in the text. “I sought in my heart to lead my flesh with wine, but my heart was always in control,” it’s a Hebrew participle, the Hebrew participle is a moving picture tense, it means continuously in charge. [RSV: “I explored with my mind how to stimulate my body with wine while my mind was guiding me wisely….”]

So he didn’t lose control, but why is he drugging himself? Because he wants pleasure in life and so the technique he’s going to use in this experiment is to take the faculties of the soul and lower their sensitivity by drugs, etc. so he removes the pain from his life. You see, he has pain, he experiences pain, mental pain, physical pain and so what he’s doing is drugging himself; he’s lowering the capacity of his soul faculties to operate by means of alcohol but not enough so he loses complete control, so he is drugging himself. And the reason he’s doing it is given in the next purpose clause, “to lay hold on folly,” now the word “folly” is retrospective, it wasn’t folly when he did this experiment, now he’s reporting back to you and he says this is what I laid hold of. But he didn’t deliberately go out to lay hold on folly; this is his retrospective report. “I laid hold on folly until,” now this indicates persistence, he is going to keep this experiment going and if you look at verses 4 and following you’ll see how long it took him to experiment, but he’s going to keep this experiment going and going and going until he arrives at a conclusion and the conclusion is that “I might see what was that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven all the days of their life.”

Now what’s his point? His point is that he’s going to drug himself, he’s going to lower the sensitivity of his soul, his bodily functions, until he can receive pleasure, until there’s something that he finds in life that’s going to give him satisfaction. That’s his point; he says I am going to continue this experiment, if it takes 15 years I’m going to continue this experiment until I find something that gives me pleasure. Now here’s where you can benefit as a believer; just think, Solomon has done it all for you. Now you don’t have to go out and try to get your kicks from some place because you can use the excuse, well Solomon tried it for me. You say well Solomon didn’t try this. Oh yes he did, just wait until we finish with chapter 12. If Solomon didn’t do what you’re thinking of just hold it and we’ll get there and you’ll see that Solomon tried it somewhere along the line. So you don’t have to, he saves you all the money, he saves you time and effort, you don’t have to sweat it because he’s already done it and he’s done it in a very far more complete way than you ever could. So Solomon has gone through the routine.

Then he says, he adds this little remark down here that you might not catch, he says “that they should do under heaven all the days of their life.” Except it doesn’t say that in the Hebrew; in the Hebrew it says “in the number of the days of their life,” in other words, Solomon looks on phase two, the time you receive Christ until the time you die or the rapture, whichever occurs first, this interval of time in your life that you live and is ultimately going to come to an end is made up a finite number of days, say X number of days you have left to live your life. You might try this sometime, figure out on the basis of longevity how many days you have left to live; it’s kind of a gruesome little number to arrive at but nevertheless you ought to know it. And that’s what Solomon is talking about; he doesn’t have infinity to live in this life, where there’s opportunities to change for or against God. When you die everything is settled, it doesn’t mean you’re going to die and dissolve but it does mean that your opportunity for decision is over.

So you have this finite number of days to live and you say during this time I want to find out what’s the best way to live. What’s the best way to live, that’s the objective of this experiment. Now, we have been proceeding along through these passages by taking a section of Ecclesiastes and then giving you a section from the New Testament to show you how a Christian should think, for this is wrong. This is wrong; this is human viewpoint so we’re going to go to Ephesians 5 for the New Testament answer to Solomon’s problem. Solomon is going to conduct his experiment with wine. In Ephesians 5:18 instruction is given to you as a believer, and it’s exactly opposite to the way Solomon operated. I want you to see this because this is going to show you something.

“And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.” Now let’s look at the drinking of wine for a moment. This is a present imperative negative command in the Greek, it means you are drinking wine, stop it; in other words, if the Greeks said you were involved in some activity and they said stop it they’d use present negative imperative. But if they said you might do this, don’t do it, they’d use an aorist. So we can tell from the tense form that the Ephesians were having a little time here and Paul says now look, you stop this, you’re involved in this activity, now cut it out, and this is what you are to do instead. “Be filled with the Spirit.”

Now let’s take some things on this verb “be filled.” First of all, you notice something peculiar about that verb? It’s passive voice, not active; it doesn’t say fill yourself with the Spirit of God. You’ll read some sweet little devotional that’ll say what you have to do brother is get more of the Spirit of God, and yet the Bible says forget it, you can’t get more of the Spirit of God; God the Holy Spirit indwells you from the point of salvation and you can’t get more of the Spirit, that’s nonsense, that’s malarkey, it’s never found in the Word of God; it’s a product of Christian authors who don’t know what they’re talking about. “Be filled” means, passive, you can’t do it, it’s got to be done to you, you are the agent that receives the action, that’s the first great lesson you learn about the filling of the Spirit is that you can’t do it yourself, it has to be done to you. That’s the passive voice.

Now it’s an imperative mood, and the imperative means every Christian should do this; this is not an option, this is not for the hyper spiritual crowd, the kind that’s going to float down the aisle and have a halo on their head, this is for every Christian. Every believer be filled with the Spirit. And it’s in the present tense which means continuously, so therefore we have a command it means “be continuously filled with the Spirit.” Therefore this is not some hyper ecstatic experience where your nervous system goes into twitching motions and you get knocked down on the floor and roll in the aisle and froth at the mouth and see lights and all the rest of. That is not what is meant by the filling of the Spirit. The filling of the Spirit is a continuous action in the Word of God.

Now what does the word “fill” mean? The word “fill” looks like this in the Greek, plaroo, and it means basically to fill up but it has connotations and it’s the connotations you want to grab hold of to realize what Paul means by the word plaroo here. If you go into the papyri that were written at the time of the New Testament you find an amazing use of the word plaroo. Instead of just fill up the word means to accomplish a work completely. And this is the way it is used when someone would pay off a debt, they’d say I have plaroo-ed the debt, I’ve paid it off completely, I’ve finished the work. When you gave a job for someone to do in that day and he’d say I have plaroo-ed the job, it means that he did the complete work. Now that lends a little different connotation. Some people have the idea that the filling of the Spirit is sort of glub, glub, glub, glub, you fill up something. That’s not what is meant by the filling of the Spirit. What the filling of the Spirit means is that God the Holy Spirit is to accomplish His work, complete work in you moment by moment by moment. That’s what the filling of the Spirit means.

Now notice what the contrast in the verse is; I’ve heard it again and again said that verse 18 is a contrast, “Be not drunk with wine, where is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.” And they say see, alcohol controls you and so similarly you want to let the Holy Spirit control you. Well there’s a grain of truth in that except it’s misapplied and some Christians get the idea that a Christian filled with the Spirit is someone who’s kind of floating around half crazy and has lost control of his facilities; he doesn’t think, he doesn’t feel, he just kind of is a zombie and that’s called filling of the Spirit. Now that is not filling of the Spirit, that’s not the point that Paul is trying to make. To prove it just look at the previous contrast in the previous verses. Do you see that in the previous verses? Look back at verse 14; what’s the contrast in verse 14?

Let’s get these contrasts down, “Awake thou that sleepest,” okay, here’s one contrast, wake/sleep. What’s the next contrast? “Arise from the dead [and Christ shall give thee light].” So you have life/death. Verse 15, “Walk circumspectly, not as fools” this means be wise/foolish. Verse 16, “Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” This means to be careful instead of being sloppy how you live your life. Verse 17, “Be not unwise but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” So you have understanding and this means a person who is stupid, doesn’t understand. Now you come to verse 18 and the contrast is made between drinking and the filling. Does that put it in a different light? The point is, the contrast is that when someone is drunk with wine they’ve lost control of their faculties, that’s the point. When the Holy Spirit fills them they have control of their faculties. God the Holy Spirit’s ministry in the soul of the believer is to liberate it for your use. You see, when a person is operating in the energy of the flesh these faculties are all in the dominion of the sin nature, called by many theologians the flesh or something. But they’re all under the dominion and your volition is trapped, you’d sort of like to do something but there’s this overpowering urge to yield to temptation. That’s flesh.

Now what happens? When God the Holy Spirit comes in He frees the faculties of your soul from sin so now you are truly a free person, and this is what redemption means moment by moment as the Holy Spirit works His work in you you have power once again to exercise your volition for God; you have a mind free to think divine viewpoint, that’s the concept of the filling of the Spirit and it’s not drugging yourself.

Conclusion on the filling of the Spirit: how do you get the filling of the Holy Spirit, what do you have to do? The Bible gives us certain commands; going back to this circle again here is the time you receive Christ. When you receive Jesus Christ God the Holy Spirit puts you in union with Him; there you are, that’s your legal position, it never changes, can’t change, God the Father has decreed it and therefore you can never lose it. Now the bottom circle is where the will of God for you is right now. Some of you are new Christians and so for you the will of God is very small because He hasn’t worked in your life and you’re not aware of His leading yet. Some of you have been Christians many, many years and the will of God for you is a big, big circle; the area here grows as you mature. You are either in the circle or out of the circle at any given moment; therefore, suppose you’re out of the circle.

What do you do to get back in the circle? The Bible tells us in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins,” plural, “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” You do not have to ask God to forgive your sins. Many Christians pray this prayer and I’ve heard it and done it myself but it’s really wrong: oh God forgive me my many sins. Now you don’t have to pray that prayer because what does 1 John 1:9 tell you? “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive,” in other words, He’s already told you the ground of forgiveness is simply acknowledging responsibility for those sins. That’s how you get back in the bottom circle. You get back in the bottom circle by personally telling the Lord, in your own way, in your own vernacular, Lord, I realized that I dropped the ball here, it is my responsibility and I take responsibility. This is why so many Christians are living carnal lives today because our society is against the idea of individual responsibility. Do you realize that Bible Christianity puts the blame on you personally, individually, you can’t blame it on your environment, you can’t blame it on God, you can’t blame it on your mother, it’s your fault. So therefore if you will acknowledge personal responsibility for this and deal with your personal responsibility God will do the rest, and you can’t forgive yourself for your own sins but God can. And not only that, but that verse has a wonderful promise at the end of it, it says not only does He forgive you the sins that you confess, but that He “cleanses you from all,” ALL “unrighteousness,” even the ones that you don’t even know of He cleanses you of those too. So that’s a fantastic verse of grace.

All right, you’re operating in this bottom circle and all of a sudden, bang, here comes temptation; don’t confess temptation. Some believers think they have to confess temptation. You don’t confess temptation, that’s not a sin, but you meet the temptation. How do you meet the temptation? The Bible gives verses, many in Romans 6, where it says, “Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” And you are appropriating one of the things Jesus Christ has given you is death, you are identified with Him in His death and so it’s like God erected a brick wall around here and everything outside, the power of death is kept from you. In other words, the temptation, although it may be present in your mentality does not have power over you unless you by your own volition let it happen. If you are in status quo carnality because your own volition yielded and the filling of the Holy Spirit tells you you didn’t have to, God has provided the total free resources but you deliberately… deliberately yielded to the temptation and Romans 6:11-13 give the moment by moment promise that you can continually claim. Every time a temptation hits, “Father, I thank You that You have given me freedom in Jesus Christ and that I am dead to this and this has no power over me.” And that is moment by moment you appropriate by faith the Christian life.

Conclusion: here’s Solomon back in the book of Ecclesiastes; he wants happiness, that’s his goal in life, but Solomon has already decided with his volition I’m not going to get happiness God’s way, I’m going to get it outside of the bottom circle so I’m going to live out here some place. So in Ecclesiastes he’s out here and the only way he can find happiness, even a little bit, is to drug himself partially, to go out on the town, get his wine, women and song and have a blast. And he does, but at the end he says you know something, strange thing about this, after it’s all done there are no more kicks, it just lasts as long as I’m involved in the situation. But you, if you are a believer you have something far more wonderful than Solomon because right now you can say “Father, I want your will for my life, and I want it right now, and I realize that in grace You’ve provided for my cleansing so I can have personal union with you right now.” Legally you are in union you never change, experientially you can now be in union with the Father and experience the inner peace, the joy and the power that comes from the filling of the Spirit. The choice is strictly up to you. It’s a personal individual decision before God that you must face. With our heads bowed.