In Ecclesiastes, Solomon bemoans the futility of man’s attempts to “make progress”” during his days under the sun. Whatever “progress” I may attain in my life, for my generation, will eventually be undone. A new discovery or significant contribution will be forgotten over time or replaced by a newer one. That’s not to say that God does not intend for mankind to make progress. Quite the opposite, He has commanded us to progress–to subdue the earth and multiply in it.

Therefore the pursuit of progress is wired into the species. But God has ordained, by virtue of short life, physical boundaries, limited opportunities, and general decay, that my contribution to His overall plan be almost completely obscured.

God governs progress in the world. Individuals cannot see God’s work under the sun. I find comfort in the hidden joys God works into my futile days. He encourages me to seek joy, goodness and contentment in all His benevolent gifts. Enjoying simple pleasures keeps me from striving and being vexed in futile pursuits of progress and striving for meaning. This truth has a counterintuitive effect on my soul because rather than inclining me toward hopelessness in my pursuits, instead it preserves a good and healthy work ethic. I can focus on simply doing good work without trying to figure out how the unique edges that give shape to the tiny puzzle piece of my life fit in with the whole. God knows what He is doing under the sun, but I do not, and will not see it while I toil here.

But Ecclesiastes is limited in scope to my days and my toil under the sun. It starts with the cradle and ends with the grave. There is just enough mention of eternity to keep me sober and conscious that God will bring His righteous judgment to bear on all that I do.

Ecclesiastes is indeed an excellent tonic against my worldly ambitions, arrogance, and presumptuous independence. But the perspective of Ecclesiastes is incomplete with regard to God’s ultimate purposes. There may be nothing new under the sun, but God has brought about something new under heaven. The new covenant in Christ’s blood makes all things new. The mystery of Christ crucified was and is hidden from eyes that merely consider earthly things. The redeemed life has a new shape–it’s no longer a short segment defined by beginning and end points. The redeemed soul has a starting point in the first birth, but due to rebirth in Christ, it has no end point at the grave. No, the shape of new life is a ray, a line with a starting point, inclined upward toward Christ with no end point. It continues toward eternity.

So what of the pursuit of progress, ambition, and striving in the new life? To strive, press, strain and push for progress and attainment under the sun leads primarily to futility and vexation. To strive, press, strain and push forward for progress in faith for growth in heavenly riches, for deeper communion with God is not futile at all–rather I am exhorted to it and enticed by the promise of eternal rewards. Here is where God intends for the ambitious impulse within me to find free expression. Run as to win, fight not without aim, strive Christward and progress in faith! To press hard on the earth from cradle to grave is mostly futile and often vexing. To press hard on the upward trajectory along the unending ray which moves forward toward eternity with no endpoint is right and good and glorifying to God.

Run my soul–but not as though the world depended on it. Run because the soul it intended to run to Christ for the progress of faith, the joy of the soul, and the glory of God. Amen.

I’m an American – home of the free, land of liberty, fight for your rights – American. And I was born a New England Yankee – live free or die, don’t tread on me, toss the tea overboard – Yankee. I grew up in Connecticut and settled in Rhode Island where Roger Williams established the state on the foundation of religious freedom. Today, on top of the Rhode Island state house stands the “independent man.” He grips his spear shining in golden splendor, as he exalts the virtues of freedom and independence. He reminds all Rhode Islanders that our forebears fought and died for freedom. We Americans love our independence. Every 4th of July we celebrate how we won it through revolution. Throughout our history America has stood tall and fought for the superior virtue of freedom and independence at home and throughout the world – and we continue to fight for it to this day.

I love independence because I am an American. The word itself sounds good to my ears. It evokes the marching melodies of whistle, fife and drum. This paper, however, is a document of personal repentance regarding independence and its close cousin, self-reliance. While raw pride is a condition common to all men, in my life the roots of pride grew into the tree-trunk of arrogance, and its braches bear the fruit of independent self-reliance. More precisely, this fruit is most often in the form of ambitious invention and vain innovation.

Repenting of ambitious invention and vain innovation is tricky, which is one reason I am writing this out. It’s tricky because while sinful pride is easy to find, and arrogance is equally easily discovered, improper independence, ambitious invention and vain innovation are more easily camouflaged. It’s also tricky because while pride and arrogance must always to be fought and killed, there are proper, righteous and God-honoring ways to be independent, inventive and innovative.

I am American and because I am by nature, culture and personal appetite more arrogant and self-reliant than most, my ability to divide between self-ambition and godly aspiration is compromised. My sensibilities and inclinations are permissive toward pride and I tend to regard my love of independence in the most favorable light. Therefore I have set out to trace some of these edges in writing, and I publish them both to repentant publicly and so that my brothers and sisters in Christ may help me wage war against pride. While the fruit of pride may often be camouflaged to me, others may see it more clearly.

If independence, invention and innovation are unlike raw pride and arrogance in that they are not inherently sinful, it is helpful to differentiate exactly how they can be properly pursued. As for independence, I think it is normal and right for governments to defend and protect their territorial sovereignty and self-determination. I believe that our American form of government is a very good form of government, and many of its foundations rest on God designed principals for the establishment of justice, law, peace, security, and the common good. However, the values of freedom, liberty, and independence that may underlay government are not fitting for the individual pursuit of Christian faith. The same principals that can make for a God-honoring form of government can also become destructive if imbibed as personal virtues.

The New Testament uses the most non-independent language when it describes my relationship to the Lord. The softest of such language describes me as a servant of Christ. Being called a servant doesn’t jibe real well with my Yankee ideals. If I have trouble being called a servant, I have even more trouble being called a bondservant, that is, a slave. Nor do I like the label “prisoner of the Lord.” Yet that is what the Bible says that I am. Christ is Master and I am His slave – a blessed slave, to righteousness, having been freed from the dominion of sin – yet a true slave. I must live a life of obedience to my master’s pleasure. If I disobey I will receive His stern, yet always loving, hand of discipline to correct me. I have been bought with a price; I am not my own. This is not the kind of autonomy and independence that my American sensibilities are comfortable with.

When I was called to Christ I came to Him packaged and molded by my culture. It is not easy to divide between my inherited cultural values and the new ones which are being cultivated in me by Christ. For example, my culture has taught me to value freedom and independence through years of public school, and Saturday morning School House Rock cartoons. These fun cartoons depict the shooting of British soldiers set to catchy jingles. My revolutionary spirit is bolstered when I see evil King George, who had the gaul to tax our cup of tea. My inclination to resist dominion is reinforced when I see him – in cartoon form – laughing at us colonists from his throne in England. It makes me want to grab my musket, grab my gun, and report to General Washington. Through such influences I have been trained to abhor the mention of the words “subjugation,” “submission”, or “slavery,” – they are noxious to my freedom loving sensibilities.

But with regard to God, subjugation, submission and slavery are among the highest of spiritual virtues. Under the gospel, independence and freedom are given new names – pride and arrogance. As an American Christian I can be severely blind to how my love for independence might rot my relationship to God.

As an American, becoming conformed to the image of Christ will involve considerable repentance with regard to my love for personal independence. God must go to work on me to kill my notions of human preeminence and personal freedom. My soul must be rid of self-reliance and give way to humble, Christ-oriented faith. This is hard, and involves much putting to death of things that have always seemed good and right, but which, in relationship to God, are terribly evil. For example, when I was in high school I memorized a portion of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance which begins, “Who so would be a man, must be a non-conformist….” As a high school student I went so far as to call his essay my own personal bible. What seemed so noble, so right, and so good to me then now reeks of the stench of human pride and arrogance. These words reveled in the glory of man, obscuring the glory of God. It was the foolishness of a young man which boasted in arrogance and promoted the glory of self. But God, in mercy, reached down to save an arrogant one like me. I thought well of myself and called God names. I had no fear of God. I had no respect for my creator, rather I boasted in self-reliance. Praise the Lord of mercy for His grace that chose to die for such a sinful, boastful race!

God, in His inscrutable mercy, reaches down and plucks sinners like me from our self-driven race toward eternal destruction. His bewildering mercy displays the riches of His glorious grace. God ordained and established the very moment my salvation. Though His sovereign choice and effectual calling, a proud sinner bent his knees at irresistible grace. Transforming grace fell upon a happy recipient in an instant. Yet God has worked much more slowly to bring this rebel into conformity to Christ. For example, when Christ called me, I still had a high regard for Emerson and disdained the very notion, even the very word “conformity.” This distain continued for years after I was saved. My old self died with Christ, but it seems that it will take a lifetime for rigor mortis to finally set in on the corpse of my flesh. Slowly though, old polluted values like self-love and self-reliance start to stink like they should. Likewise, it takes time as my new sense of smell develops, so that the heavenly, pleasing aroma of the superior glory of God becomes far more desirable than the old smells of personal freedom. Slowly, God reveals more of my pride, kills it, and replaces it will soul satisfying trust in Christ.

The forms of pride are many and varied. Independence is one form I inherited from my culture. Self-reliance is another form, and this one I ate eagerly and cultivated even more than my culture might, because I loved it. More refined forms of pride in my life include ambitious invention and vain innovation, forms I have only recently begun to recognize.

My cultural inclinations and natural appetites cause me to stumble again and again. Identifying the sinful roots and poisonous fruit of pride, as it weaves itself into independence, self-reliance, innovation, and invention is increasingly harder for me to discern. It is easy and right to vilify sinful pride as an abstract. It can’t be redeemed it must be killed. Not much subtlety is needed – pride bad, kill pride. However, as pride infiltrates my life it gets trickier. Independence and self-reliance are well concealed targets. But putting them to death is hard because they are not always enemies and they can in some cases be redeemed for proper use. For example, as already mentioned, independence can be good is relationship to government. Self-reliance can be good in the sense that it is good for a young man to be trained up so that in due time he becomes confident enough to leave his father and mother to form a family of his own. This growth into a man who can rely on himself rather then his parents, making a living wage to support himself, is one of the objectives of his parenting throughout his life.

Now ambitious invention and vain innovation are seriously moving targets. That’s because raw pride takes every advantage it can as it tries to permeate my character and establish a foothold. When pride finds areas like invention and innovation that are potentially good and have the possibility of glorifying God, it can more easily mimic and corrupt them. There are truly good and God-glorifying ways to pursue innovation and invention, which are redeemable characteristics. Innovation has some very proper and good use – especially in commerce where such inventiveness can result in cures for illness, work for the idle, and food for the poor. Discernment of the effects of pride in invention and innovation is very difficult for me. Here is where I am torn. I am reluctant to call pride in its sinful forms by any friendly names. Pride and its fellows are my mortal enemies and I hate how they intercept my view of the glory of God and diminish my enjoyment of God’s goodness. Because pride kills in all of its sinful forms, I must concern myself with killing it wherever I discover its influence. Yet it would not be right to indiscriminately kill every impulse to inventiveness or innovation (or independence). God forbid – He gives creativity to His creatures for the express purpose of glorying Himself and blessing mankind. Therefore I must seek God’s grace daily, and I must use every means of grace to improve my understanding of God’s wisdom in His Word concerning ambitious invention and vain innovation.

I have found the book of Ecclesiastes particularly useful in learning to discern between ambitious invention and godly invention, vain innovation and godly innovation. I have observed in myself, that innovation and ingenuity have their roots in pride when they desire to create something that hasn’t been thought of before, or when it seeks to abandon something that has existed for a very long time in favor of a new idea or what I think is a better idea. The notion of creating and improving always sounds good to my American ears. And they can be, but they can also be full of deadly pride. God wants me to be humble. He wants me to see Him as the purpose behind all things. And Ecclesiastes is a wonderful book that can be used to humble prideful ambition, converting it into its proper form – godly aspiration. Ecclesiastes does this first by reminding me that there is nothing new under the sun.

That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

Innovators like me hate that statement. The book goes on to reinforce the futility of work and ambition for all will die and whatever gains we might make will be eaten up or obscured over time. I will not be remembered.

For there is no lasting remembrance of the wise man as with the fool, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man and the fool alike die! Ecclesiastes 2:16

Solomon also tells me that there are some things that God has intentionally bent that cannot be straightened, and to try to straighten these will result only in failure and fatigue – it is a grasping after wind. What God has bent, man cannot straighten. Likewise there are some things I might desire to know that cannot be discovered.

Consider the work of God, for who is able to straighten what He has bent? Ecclesiastes 7:13

…and I saw every work of God, I concluded that man cannot discover the work which has been done under the sun. Even though man should seek laboriously, he will not discover; and though the wise man should say, “I know,” he cannot discover. Ecclesiastes 8:17

I do not believe that this means God never wants us to pursue improvements. Subduing the earth is a fundamental part of fulfilling God’s will for mankind to the glory and praise of God. However, if such improvements are pursued arrogantly – as though I can unbend something God has bent, or that I can create, invent, or discover something new as though God has not already thought of everything that can be created, invented, or discovered – I commit a grievous evil against God and in the process my own soul becomes vexed.

This is another example of how hard it can be to divide between my American influences and truly Christian values. Americans value ingenuity. We are ambitious to improve upon the way all things work. We’ve “invented” electricity, assembly lines, telephones, and computers in our pursuit of innovation. I remember one episode of “This Old House” where they were demonstrating a new gutter attachment for a leaf blower. Amazing! Leaf blowers themselves are an amazing example of how thoroughly Americans are inclined to find ways to move stuff faster and more efficiently. And now to conceive of a gutter attachment – brilliant! I don’t think such ingenuity and invention is bad, quite the opposite in fact. However, the impulses to invent better mousetraps coupled with rigorous independence can easily result in a worldly ambition that supplants what might otherwise be good and godly aspiration. Selfish ambition is a grievous evil full of vanity and futility. But godly aspiration founded upon the humility of accepting my existence as a dependent creature can lead to a proper fear of God, one fruit of which is a God glorifying satisfaction and joy in all allotted work – even when one’s work is to be an innovator.

There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good. This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God. For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him? For to a person who is good in His sight He has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, while to the sinner He has given the task of gathering and collecting so that he may give to one who is good in God’s sight. This too is vanity and striving after wind. Ecclesiastes 2:24-26

The idea of doing something truly new through innovation and ingenuity is a notion devoid of God – for there is nothing new to God. He is already complete and perfect. I can never improve upon God. And all the innovation of the world will never allow me to live apart from God – not that I would ever want to. He is the source and power that sustains life moment by moment. My cultural value for independence, freedom, ingenuity, and invention are not impressive to God. I have no life independent from Him. I find true freedom only in becoming a slave to His righteousness. Anything new I might discover, invent, or improve was always known to God from the beginning. Nothing has even been discovered that had not be intentionally concealed by God it in the first place.

My discovery of anything should always lead me to delight in the glory of the God that concealed it. Never should I exalt myself as an inventor – rather I should give praise to God as a revealer. God invents and may sometimes grant me the grace to discover – praise be to God! This kind of innovation can be a tremendously God glorifying and soul satisfying activity, and its effects are a bonus, which like gutter attachments, are granted for the blessing of mankind. In contrast, arrogant compulsion to un-bend the intentionally bent, or discover things that God has not permitted, or act as though we discovered something new leads only to futility, judgment, and despair.

Now I must make specific confession. For in as much as I inherited American values for independence and self-reliance, I have also inherited a love of innovation. Such loves need to be killed in their sinful forms and renewed in their God glorifying intents. God has done a measure of work in my life, which is necessarily ongoing, with regard to independence and self-reliance. Only recently has He revealed the sinful character of my ambitious desire for innovation and improvement. And this paper is part of my repentance, nailing this form of pride to the cross – and to remind me of its dangers in the future.

I must speak with great caution in this regard. I have to be very careful to speak only of my own sin, and not to excuse myself or seek to lessen blame in view of cultural influences. I must be especially careful because some of the specific fruits of this sin in my life were lived out corporately. In as much as I make personal confession of sin for things I did as part of a group, I might also infer that the group committed the same sins. I have no desire to make such accusations. Only God knows the heart. The same actions taken by different people can flow from entirely different motives. It is possible that while I participated in certain group decisions that the decisions themselves were good, that the motives of others who agreed were pure, and that only in my own sinful, self-reliant, and ambitious heart did I sin against the rule and sovereignty of God.

Nevertheless, I must confess that it was in regard to how I helped lead and guide our church that I am guilty of prideful ambition and independence. God has brought me to a place, over the past three years, of repentance and acknowledgement that the struggles, failures, and ultimate disbandment of our church were the result of the firm but loving discipline of our heavenly Father. I have suffered loss. I have been humbled. And God has been good to call me to repentance. I now reject my love for independence and autonomy with regard to the church. I think that in part, my extreme independence, and regrettable arrogance, often kept our churches isolated from the influence of the greater Christian community, to its detriment. Because I was independent and arrogant I despised other churches, spoke against what I perceived as their fatal flaws and actively resisted outside influence.

I confess that I thought of myself as part of a group of innovators whose ingenious methods and improved ways of doing church could “fix” the church at large. I hear echoes of my own words criticizing “the church” for its infirmities, rejecting out of hand, much of what my Sovereign God has done with His church throughout the centuries. I despised, thought little of, and easily disregarded the methods and wisdom of the “traditional church” in favor of new schemes. Before I continue I feel I must qualify these statements. Many, even most of the values I embraced in my church, and those that as a leader I promoted in the church were, in fact, very good, biblical, and right. I still hold almost all of them today. I value my past experience deeply and have great affection for those by whom I was taught, and with whom I later ministered.

But even though most of what I experienced was good, yet there was, on my part, a subtext running along much of these right and good values and biblical principles. In the same way that innovation can be very good, yet if ambitious invention underlies it, the efforts become dishonoring to God. Trying to hold biblical principles from an arrogant and independent spirit is simply pride hiding its true nature by mimicking something good. The prideful subtext in my heart was the attitude that we had somehow figured out how to do church right, while others churches were lost in their weaker church practices.

We had some ideas that were categorized in my mind as “radical discoveries.” And that’s where pride grabbed hold. I feel no need to itemize which ideas were of this ilk – because it’s the thought I had discovered some radical wisdom that was the folly. For God says, “And what do you have that you have not received? But if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” 1 Corinthians 4:7. I will never have an inventive thought about the church that God was not always aware of. If God were to happen to reveal some “new” way to pursue church or ministry, such an idea would not be new to God. If I find some clue in the scriptures that brings my thinking and practice into a new light, it came from the light that God Himself put into the Bible from the beginning. God is never amazed at my “discoveries.” They are never news to Him.

I must reiterate that what was wrong in our church was not in the church so much as is it was in my heart. The fact that I was only one of a group of elders responsible for our church does not minimize my guilt. I credit any influence or inclination in our church toward independence and self-reliance to my own fault. I fault myself because I know how much my soul loved independence and ambition. I really wanted to be a part of a revolution in church planting. I wanted to un-bend things that either God has intentionally bent, or were never truly bent in the first place – they only seemed bent from my distorted perspective.

Finally, I must again qualify my use of repentant language because not every desire to improve the church and how it operates is bad. Quite the opposite, we are all commanded to exhort one another daily. And what is exhorting if not a plea to improve and do better? Innovation in ministry that accords with humility and Christ exalting intentions is truly virtuous and pleases the Lord. Church leaders should always strive for improvement and look for new ways to be a blessing to the body. The church should strive to find new ways of proclaiming and ministering the gospel. We should pour ourselves out in entrepreneurial efforts to reach the ends of the earth with the gospel. But all things should be done humbly, trusting in God who will not let us see the whole work of God under the sun. Therefore I should be filled with godly aspirations, while always fighting against selfish ambition. Discerning between the two is not easy for me, and it requires much cross-centered introspection, mutual accountability and personal vigilance in prayer.

To you, O God, and you alone be glory throughout the earth both now and forever. Amen.

I live, now, on Crawford Dairy Road. The place lives up to its name. There are fields on either side of my house and tall dear corn growing across the road. Crawford Dairy rolls and gently bends past a farm house and then slips behind the tall North Carolina pines that frame our skyline. In the evening the lightning bugs launch themselves by the hundreds to dance the night away. I am captivated. Yet, as I sit on my porch soaking in this a pastoral place, I consider that the same idyllic scene has been played out for hundreds, even thousands of years. The snapshot is indeed beautiful. Yet as I think about the corn, I remember that it grows there by the sweat of a farmer’s brow. He tills, he sews, he waits, he harvests. Next year he’ll do it again, and the next year, and the next, until he comes to the end of his days. Then his sons will serve of the land as he did and his father did and his father’s father before him. The dance of the lightning bugs flickering above the corn is also futile. For they launch, dance, mate, and die, only for their offspring to do it again.

The book of Ecclesiastes is all about futility. The cycles of life under the sun, when viewed from its generational perspective are called futile, a “striving after the wind.” And so it has been ordained by God that we are all to be subjected to the futility of inevitable corruption and endless toil. This is our allotted portion and so we groan in chorus with all creation. But we are not left without hope.

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes is limited in its range. It does not extend its field of view beyond that which is observable on the earth. It does not consider anything beyond what will happen beyond the grave, except in a faint acknowledgment that something awaits – but we know not what. In this limited context our greatest good in the midst of toil is to enjoy pleasures and partake gladly in what prosperity may result from our work. Ecclesiastes is good medicine. It is an elixir against having too much ambition. But in the end it is merely a suppressant, keeping us from insanity. Toil and reward kindly distract us as we live out the length of our appointed days. Hope for enjoyments is good, but there is a much greater hope.

If our lives only contend with what each toilsome day brings, we groan and eventually, we die. To live for appetites that are never satisfied is a grievous evil, and O, how many of us in groan under our oppressive appetites. For the creation was subjected to futility and so it groans, waiting to be freed from its slavery to corruption.

But above the earth, and beyond Solomon’s wisdom, is heaven. While the site of heaven is obscured to us as we dwell beneath the clouds, there is one who has been sent from there to redeem a people. And though He has returned again to heaven, leaving His adopted people on a subjugated earth, yet He left us with a great gift – the Spirit of adoption. For the creation will be freed from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

The Spirit of adoption bridges the gulf between our earthly days of toil and our eternal inheritance. When eternity breaks into history all common wisdom is displaced. No longer are our lives measured by a number of days under the sun. No longer is joy attached only to earthly blessings. No longer does the oppression of the unrighteous trouble the just. No longer is work merely distraction. The measuring rod of life is no longer a segment with a definite starting point at birth and a definite end point at the grave. Rather it becomes a ray. It has a firm starting point but an infinite length. Along the ray is a point marking death, but that point is no futile end, but rather a glorious transition from sweat to sweet.

And yet, while we sojourn, we groan. Our earthly bodies are still subjected to corruption and we indeed waste away. We toil for our food and yet our stomachs are never satisfied. But even in our groaning we hope. We hope because we have received this blessed Spirit of adoption, and through Him we wait eagerly for our redemption. We have this Spirit of adoption as present and precious possession in the midst of our earthly toil. It is fully ours and we experience its wonderful effects. As our bodies waste away, inwardly we are renewed day by day. While our skin and bones submit to the laws of decay, our spirits are very much alive in righteousness.

And one day, one blessed day, our spiritual adoption will consummate in full adoption as sons. We will inherit our glorified bodies which will never again be ruled by futility. Such is the glory of this inheritance that all creation eagerly waits for its revelation. What a day!

O Lord, grant me perseverance to wait eagerly – in weakness groaning for your revelation in glory. Amen.