Dear Baptized Ones,

       On Sunday, we will conclude our journey through Ecclesiastes with 12:9-14. This proscript will call us to reflect on how the Gatherer’s words delighted and guided us to fear God the Creator as the ultimate gift for all our life’s toils. The Editor will challenge us to display that fear in our grateful love for God and our joyous love for our neighbors. We will do this as our whole duty with the precious but fleeting time and resources that we’ve been gifted. Because we know that God has placed eternity in our hearts, we can feel free to live this way. Though the gifts are fading, the reward is not. As David Gibson writes in Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End:

Ecclesiastes teaches us to live life backward. It encourages us to take the one thing in the future that is certain—our death—and work backward from that point into all the details and decisions and heartaches of our lives, and to think about them from the perspective of the end. It is the destination that makes sense of the journey. If we know for sure where we are heading, then we can know for sure what we need to do before we get there. Ecclesiastes invites us to let the end sculpt our priorities and goals, our greatest ambitions and our strongest desires.

       As part of our time in worship together, we will baptize George Andrew Maphet, the youngest son of Jordan and Amanda Maphet. The death and resurrection of Jesus signified in his baptism will help us to improve our baptisms as an ongoing means of grace that helps us to live life backward. George’s baptism will declare to us afresh that death is not our primary shepherd; Jesus is as He, the Good Shepherd, swallowed up death with resurrected life. This life is ours in union with Him! Please come prepared to celebrate the gift of eternal life more abundant given to us in Christ alone by faith alone through God’s grace alone.

In Christ,
Cameron