Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: All right, I'd like you to turn to Ecclesiastes 2. We've sort of read little bits of it, but I want to underline a few of these verses because we're going to talk about searching for significance and satisfaction in the world today. Let's just look at the top part of it. I thought in my heart, "Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good." But that also proved to be meaningless.

Laughter, I said, is foolish. And what does pleasure accomplish? I tried cheering myself with wine and embracing foolishness, my mind still guiding me with wisdom, because I wanted to see what was worthwhile for men to do under heaven during the few days or the brief days of their lives. Then he gives this list of all the things that he did to try and figure out if he needed God and or just God.

In other words, could he be truly happy without the things that the world says, the devil says, and the godless people say are absolutely essential to make life meaningful and full? And then in verse 10, he says, "So I denied myself nothing my eyes desired. I refused my heart no pleasure. I never said no to myself. My heart took delight in all my work. But when I surveyed all that my hands had done, what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind."

That phrase, "chasing after the wind," is such a dramatic one. But God, remember, has put eternity in the heart of man, and it will not go away. Because God has put eternity in our hearts, and somebody gave us the gift of time, though brief to realize it, somebody is always whispering to ourselves, "You are made for another world. You are made for another world. You are made for another world."

That's why the heart of man is searching. It might not look as though he's searching, but he is. Stuart and I had an incredible opportunity to be in Australia and New Zealand. We had one day off, and we took it to go down to Canberra, which is a fabulous city. It was just hacked out of pure countryside in Australia because nobody could figure out where to put the capital.

It's a young country, and when they wanted a capital city, they started fighting. It has to be in Sydney, or it has to be here, or it has to be there. So they said, "Well, let's just go into Australia, big country, lots of land, take a piece of land that nobody's ever lived on, and that will be Canberra." So literally, the city of Canberra is absolutely new. I mean, there was nothing there before Canberra was put there.

In Canberra, there are many wonderful things, but there's a museum there. We went into the museum, and I found myself wandering away, and Stuart was looking at one thing. I walked down this little path and found myself at an exhibition of symbols, great symbols of Australia. Right across the doorway into this little alleyway where there were these exhibits was the word "Eternity."

I thought that's interesting. So I walked through the big word of "Eternity" and came face to face with the story of Arthur Stace. Now, I'd heard this story, but I had no idea that his life story was in the Canberra Museum. As I was reading it, some people gathered around me, some tourists, and they were reading it as well. Then we wandered on, and they had other words. They had peace, they had fulfillment, they had courage.

Under each word was a story of somebody in Australia whose life pictured that word. But it was all under this big word "Eternity" and at the entrance, Arthur Stace's story. I go into the bookstore to pick up some things, and there are T-shirts with "Eternity" written on them. There are mugs with "Eternity" written on them, and there are little badges like the one I've got here in my lapel with "Eternity" written on it. Because "Eternity," that one word, has become a symbol of Australia.

Who was Arthur Stace? He was a drunk. He was homeless, he was on drugs, and he wandered into a rescue mission and began to hear some things through his drunken stupor. He staggered out of there, slept the night under the bridge, and the next night staggered to what he thought was the rescue mission, but he missed it and walked into a church which was next to the rescue mission.

There was a very famous preacher preaching. He was preaching on eternity, and he was saying, "Oh, that Sydney might see the word eternity written all over." Arthur Stace believed that night. He came out a changed man, felt in his pocket and found a piece of chalk. He bent down and he wrote on the pavement in copperplate writing, he who could not spell and could hardly read: "Eternity."

Beautifully written. He said he couldn't even spell his name. From then on, until the day he died, 50 times a day, Arthur Stace walked around the streets of Sydney and wrote that word. The stories are legion. I remember hearing testimonies of sailors that had come on leave in Sydney and had come across that word, and it had alerted them to their heart's need, and they came to faith.

Fifty times a day until he died. In one place in Sydney, in brass, in the pavement, is the word, Arthur Stace's copperplate word, "Eternity." It has become one of the cultural things to go and see. Oh, that somebody would walk all over this city and write the word eternity. It was just something that alerted people to the fact, yes, there is something about that word, there's something about that concept.

As I thought about that, I wrote in my diary, "What am I doing with my piece of chalk in the world?" I asked myself as I stood in front of the pictures and the words about Arthur Stace, and I watched the public drop by to read, ponder, and move on. If Arthur Stace can alert a city and a world and have that word that he had written to alert people to the fact that we are made for another world, surely we can do a little bit better for God.

God has put eternity in our hearts. What's more, He has inhabited our humanity. We are humanity dressing divinity, which is quite a thought. We are just Jesus' suit of clothes, as my boss used to put it in missions. The idea is to allow Christ within us to be seen and to use whatever gifts or talents we have, whatever learning we have, whatever stage of life we're at, that we might write eternity across the hearts of men.

We stopped last week talking about joy. Joy is an evangelist. Remember, we talked about the African church, a singing church, and how joy attracts people. The sense of dust that we are, yet dust dignified by divinity. Finite am I, yet graced to live in infinity. Weak am I, yet strengthened in all my extremity. Grace gave me Christ.

Poor am I, but rich beyond all expectation. Humble my lot, yet royal are all my relations. Accepted am I without putting me on hard probation. God gave me Christ. So I revel in God and I celebrate living in the good of salvation and a God who keeps giving all the power that I need to tell worlds of His dying. God gave me Christ. When He gave me Christ, He gave me His joy.

Jesus gathered His disciples around Him one day and He said, "My joy I'm going to give to you. My joy I'm going to give to you." Jesus' joy. We don't think of Jesus particularly as a joyful person, but if you follow some of the incidents through the Bible, when His disciples came back and told Him that even the demons submitted themselves to the authority that they had with the name of Jesus, it says that His heart danced.

His heart danced, and Jesus, full of joy, began to pray for His disciples and pray for us. Then He said to His disciples, "My joy I'm going to give to you." That's something that never ever goes away. Jesus wanted joy, despite heartache caused by life under the sun, to characterize His people. "You will receive my joy, and your joy will be complete."

His joy is my joy experienced, whatever's happening in my life. Joy is to be found when we find Christ as our heart search ends in His arms and we dance to the beat of His heart. I've told this story before, but when we were in Israel, and I'm thinking of it now with Israel so much in the news tonight again. We were in a hotel downtown together with 120 Brits who had come to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

That's why they were there. They hadn't come to teach, they hadn't come to do anything else but to pray. We joined them because it was a sponsored event and they knew that we were there. We are on radio in Britain on Premier Radio, and this was a Premier group of people. They'd said in England on Christian radio, "Who wants to go to Israel and just pray for the people and show our solidarity by going?"

So 120 Brits had turned up, but so had about 500 Israelis after curfew downtown Jerusalem, which was absolutely shut up. Nobody on the streets of Jerusalem; it was absolutely eerie. They had brought a small orchestra with them from All Souls Langham Place, John Stott's church. They said, "We want to teach you a song," and these 120 Brits got up and they sang "Teach Me to Dance."

"Teach me to dance to the beat of Your heart. Teach me to move in the power of Your Spirit. Teach me to walk in the light of Your presence. Teach me to dance to the beat of Your heart. Teach me to love with a heart of compassion. Teach me to trust in the word of Your promise. Teach me to hope in the day of Your coming. Teach me to dance to the beat of Your heart. You wrote the rhythm of life."

That's what we read about in Ecclesiastes 3: the rhythm of life. A time to live and a time to die, a time to build and a time to break down. "You wrote the rhythm of life, created heaven and earth. In You is joy without measure. So like a child in Your sight, I dance to see Your delight, for I was made for Your pleasure. I was made for Your pleasure." He is not there for my pleasure; I am here for His pleasure.

"So let my movements express a heart that delights to say yes. A will that leaps to obey You. Let all my energy blaze to see the joy in Your face. Let my whole being praise You. Teach me to dance to the beat of Your heart." I'll never forget watching the Messianic believers, the Jews, mixed up with those Brits that had come to say, "We've come to pray for you and with you here," and the joy in their face. Oh, the joy.

I went just for a routine check-up and took my file with me. On the cover are seven women from a nation country, which is a limited-access country. I was carrying it with me, and the technician who was taking all my notes glanced at my book and said, "Is that your family?" I picked it up and I showed it to her and I said, "Yes." And she said, "Yes?" I said, "Yes, that's my family. It's my second family."

She looked at me, and I said, "You see, I have two families. I have my personal family and I have the forever family, God's family. And I was with my second family. Yes, they're my family." I had a wonderful talk with this lady. It was so neat to say they have eternity in their heart and so have I, and both of us have realized it.

Even though we were chasing the wind for so many years, every single one of these women, looking different, dressing different, speaking differently, we have one thing in common: the word "Eternity." For God has put eternity in our heart, and we've found satisfaction. It's not a question of God and money, or God and somebody, a relationship, or God and a big house, or God and freedom.

Not even God and freedom. Some people are saying, "How could anybody ever be happy without freedom?" Come with me. Of course, freedom is an incredible gift. But freedom for what? Freedom to do what we want and be our own selfish selves? Or freedom to be as we ought? Ah, that's the difference. And we'll never find meaning and true satisfaction and significance until we hear the conclusion of the matter in Ecclesiastes chapter 12, that we are to fear God and keep His commandments.

When we do that, we find a freedom, whether we are free politically, whether we are free, free, whether we're in prison or whether we're out of prison. There is an inner freedom that God promises His people, and it's a freedom that can only be characterized by joy inexpressible and full of glory. It's a freedom. When you look at these pictures of these women who do not have political freedom, who do not have freedom to worship, who sing their hymns in whispers in case anybody hears them and comes and arrests them or worse.

And yet they have freedom. They are free. They're free from the tyranny of things. They're free from the tyranny of things. Finding meaning and finding satisfaction have to do with freedom in Christ. Of course, the devil is a killjoy. He's a murderer from the beginning. He wants to kill our joy and make us feel pointless and unnecessary.

The non-believer cannot experience the full measure of joy without knowing God, but the believer too is all too often robbed by the devil of joy as well. Because Satan wants to kill any concept that living in a right relationship with God could possibly bring us joy. I remember lying on my back as a student, 18 years of age. I remember a little voice saying to me, "If you accept Christ, if you become a Christian, you will never ever smile again."

I remember being seriously concerned about that and saying to the girl who was trying to bring me to faith in Christ, "What will I have to give up? If I accept Jesus Christ, what do I have to give up? What will I have to give up?" And I remember her saying, "Only your sin. Only your sin. Only the thing that would rob you of your joy."

The devil wants to rob us of significance and certainly wants to rob us of serenity and certainly wants to rob us of sense or wisdom so that we become really cynical. I have a good friend who is struggling with his faith. You can pray for him. He wrote me a note about middle of last year. He said, "Like Camus the philosopher, I believe that life is a bad joke. I believe that God is playing games with me."

Now, he'll be all right. He knows too much. He's been too far with God. And yet the devil wants to say, "God wants to rob you of joy. Now, if you play my way, I'll give you joy, I'll give you happiness, I'll give you the world." He promised Jesus. He said, "It's mine, I'm the prince of the world. Take it. I'll give you joy, I'll give you good time. I'll give you good time."

Just as we wouldn't dream of letting a burglar into our house and saying, "Help yourself," the Christian should resist the devil coming into this house and helping himself to our joy. Joy comes when we live rightly before God. So the devil is a killjoy and a fear-monger, and he wants to fill our hearts with fear. You cannot know joy, you cannot do significant things, make a significant difference, unless your heart deals with fear.

I don't mean apprehension and I don't mean a sensible thing, a sensible way of dealing with the fears that are all around us. If we live in low-grade anxiety, the result is a bad witness to the world around us. If joy is an evangelist, then fear and apprehension will put people off. They'll say, "Well, what's the difference between them and us?"

So what we've got to do, so the scriptures tell us, is when anxiety is great within us, His consolation brings joy to our soul. That's David, Solomon's father. I wonder if he told his son that? When anxiety is great within you, His consolation will bring joy to your soul. Anxious thoughts may fill my heart, but Thy presence is my joy and consolation.

So we have to deal with anxiety. I'm the most anxious person I know. Maybe my daughter beats me to it. But I remember taking Judy to Australia years and years ago as my companion and my helper. She'd just got married, actually. She was 21, and she came with me while her husband was doing his final exams and needed her out of the house anyway.

So Judy came to carry my bags. We got on the plane and my back, which was giving me a lot of trouble at the time, had gone out two or three days before I got on the plane. I should never have got on the plane, but I did. I didn't go to the doctor, foolishly, because I knew he'd say, "Don't go." So I thought, it'll get better, I'll just nurse it along.

Halfway to Australia, to Sydney again, I tried to get up to go to the bathroom and I couldn't move. My back had just locked. So I look at my daughter, who is anxious when there's nothing to be anxious about, and I say, "Judy, I can't move." And she said, "Don't do this to me, Mother."

They took me off in a wheelchair, took me into Sydney airport, laid me tenderly on the floor, and the reception committee gathered around with their bunches of flowers and looked at their guest speaker. And I could hear them saying, "Don't do this to me." Five weeks' ministry ahead of me, a lot of it in a Jeep going out to the outback, and I knew that was not going to be possible.

So we get to our little motel or wherever it was they put us, and I'm lying on the floor in agony, and I said, "Judy, you're going to have to help me." She said, "What do you mean, Mother?" I said, "You're going to have to do some of the speaking." She said, "Mother, I've never spoken to adults. I've run the youth group and I have one talk."

I said, "Oh," I was really interested. I said, "What's it about?" She said, "Anxiety, Mother." I said, "Perfect, absolutely perfect." She said, "Mother, I don't have it with me. I was not expecting to stand up in front of thousands of people and talk about anxiety." So I said, "Well, you're going to have to remember it."

So lying there that night, I helped her remember the pieces of this talk and then we began to put together our first book eventually, "Space to Breathe and Room to Grow: The Life of Ruth and Naomi." All through the night we couldn't sleep anyway, and the first time my daughter ever stood up to speak was in front of 1,000 women in Downer Tops in Sydney.

As she tells the story much better than me, she said to the women, "I am the most anxious person in the universe, and so I'm a perfect person to do what I don't think I'm going to be able to do for the next hour." And she told what had happened, and it was wonderful because they're all women, and oh, poor little thing, you know. They ate her up. They were looking at me, "The cruel mother, making her do this."

Judy, bless her heart, bit the bullet and did her very, very best. And she began. I said, "Judy, you're going to have to go in that Jeep and you're going to have to do this on your own. I can't do this." She went out into the outback in the Jeep. She took her little talk on anxiety all over Australia. We were at Perth, and suddenly, I was then a bit better. I was wandering around, keeping limbered up at the back waiting for my turn, and Judy was speaking.

And suddenly, she took off. I looked and the audience looked, and she just took off. The wind came into her sails, and I watched her and I thought, "She's enjoying this. This gal is enjoying it and she's getting good at this." No question about that. Wow. And afterwards, I said, "Judy, what happened?"

She said, "Mother, I was just going along and suddenly right from the base of my feet, this great big, 'Yes! This is what God made me to do. This is what He gifted me for. This is the work for eternity that He's called me to.'" And in a sense, Dr. Judy Briscoe Golz was called to ministry at the age of 21, being obedient, so anxious, you can imagine.

This is my anxious child, and yet in obedience, she said, "I will try to please You, I will try to serve You, I will try to do what is necessary to do here." And in the doing of it, she found her calling. But the thing I want to tell you about is, oh, the joy. I mean, she was not only enjoying it, she was really getting into it. In fact, she came down, she said, "Now Mother, I'm happy to take two sessions. I have a lot to say about anxiety." And she was off.

In three weeks, Judy and I go back to South Africa, not to Australia this time, to teach for 10 days, and I was talking to her over the weekend about this and the joy has never left her. The joy comes when you find what you're supposed to be doing with your life, and only He can tell you. And the significance comes when you're making a significant difference.

Here is Solomon, who'd given himself over to self-importance, self-indulgence, and self-seeking, self-aggrandizement, as John Stott calls it, and he was miserable. Meaningless, meaningless, stupidity, foolishness. It's not the end. It's not the thing I was meant to be. It's not the thing I was meant to do. James Michener's account of what kept him writing is interesting.

He says that an aging, unproductive apple tree in his garden was not producing apples. So the old farmer hammered some nails into the trunk, and it gave it a shock and reminded the apple tree that it was its job to produce apples. He says, "In the 1980s, when I was nearly 80, I had some nails hammered into my trunk. Heart surgery, vertigo, a new left hip, and like a sensible tree, I resolved to resume bearing fruit."

Nails got driven into old Solomon's life. He began to see his courts, who were supposed to give justice, fall down on the job. He began to see graft in the marketplace, and he began to see, as he says in Ecclesiastes, outrageous violence. Absolutely outrageous violence. And he had failed as a king. He'd been too busy chasing all those women around and overindulging and collecting surplus and hoarding wealth instead of using it as a good steward for the good of others.

So what happened in his kingdom began to disintegrate, and enemies came, and he hadn't got his army up to date, and he hadn't been looking at what he should have been doing as the leader of the nation. God began to hammer nails into his trunk, and like a sensible tree, he began again producing fruit. "What am I supposed to be doing? Oh, I'm supposed to be using all this wisdom to teach the next generation. I'm supposed to be when I'm old and gray teaching the next generation about You, telling them about eternity in their hearts."

We have this wretched enemy, that's the problem. The devil, who's the master of illusion, and he keeps insisting, "You've got all the time in the world." God keeps saying, "Brief, brief, everything's brief. Remember, this is the timeline. Brief, brief, everything's brief. This is eternity and this is time and none of us know when our day is up."

Of course, that's an illusion of which the devil is a master. Even though Solomon knew better, he got into this getting obsession. To see it is to want it, to want it is to have to have it, or to be it. If you could be this, you'd be happy. If you could have this, you'd be happy. As we look at Madison Avenue culture, the culture says to us, "We can define and shape ourselves and become the people we really want to be."

Self-expression, self-fulfillment, self-actualization lie at the heart of the cultural agenda as we travel the path toward superhuman status through self-empowerment. And I love the Ralph Lauren advert where Ralph talks about his daughter Dylan, who was modeling a Christmas perfume. And he says, "My daughter believes she can do anything." Nothing wrong with that.

"She has hopes, dreams, promises, and possibilities. She and all her friends." Nothing wrong with that. "And the power to make it happen." No, not. Does the Ralph girl really believe she has the power to make her dreams happen? According to Ecclesiastes, time and chance happen to everyone. Is life all about being a Ralph girl? Does he really want us to believe if you wear this perfume, you'll get what you want?

You may go to your coffin smelling beautiful and with the smoothest skin, but then what? Ecclesiastes 11:7: "The dust returns to the ground it came from. All you are doing is decorating dust." That's all. I wrote a poem once because I was down in Florida at one of these hotels where people that don't want their mother and father living with them have made it possible for them to live out their days in one of these places.

It was the most sad place I think I've ever been in. Very wealthy people sitting in little basket chairs, all crunched up, not talking to anybody, in absolute luxury. All dressed up and nowhere to go at 9:00 a.m. in the morning. Sad. And I wrote this poem about being decorated dust. Decorated dust, how sad. Because it's family, it's love, it's friends, and it's relationships where the satisfaction lies.

So we live in this "must-have" society that promises what it can't deliver. Toys are bright and beautiful, but they promise more than they can deliver. Time and its toys. Solomon tried it all, did great things, built houses, planted vineyards. He was a food-aholic, he was a workaholic, he was an alcoholic. That's what he says in chapter 2. And he amassed all the wealth, and it was dust in the end.

You cannot enjoy gain or surplus without God. The word he uses over and over again in this book is "surplus." Surplus, surplus. We think if we could just have surplus, more of, then we would be happy. The idea of gain in itself producing joy in this book is non-existent.

The human heart searches for satisfaction, and I'll tell you where it is. In service, in giving your life away, in de-accumulating big time, in giving until it hurts, in paying the price, in going to a meeting and hearing somebody say, "We really have a need here," and taking out your purse and emptying it into the offering plate. Have you ever done that? I did it once, and then I couldn't get home. I didn't even have money left for the bus, which isn't really what it's talking about. But have you ever gone beyond the penny-pinching, getting rid of your small change out of your purse on God?

Oh, the joy of giving it away, giving your life away. And we're going to see what it really means to get involved with people in need, because what happened to Solomon when he returned to God is he made up for lost time and he gave his life away. He just gave his life away and got going.

Pray with me. Heavenly Father, thank You that You are the one who knows where significance lies, and that if we are going to make a significant difference, just a piece of chalk in our hand, Lord, starting with what we know we have and what we can do. And we can do so much more than Arthur Stace did, Lord, because we've been blessed with education, we've been blessed with living in this fabulous country, we've been blessed with freedom in order that we might use it for the gospel and for Your kingdom.

Lord, if we could just come back and find our calling and find what it is that You made us to do and in obedience begin to address the need as it appears to us right in front of our face, then we will find a joy, absolutely ridiculous, outrageous joy that will not quit. And a power in our lives that will attract other people.

And Lord, as we begin to think about our other family, as we begin looking at some of the verses in this book that point out that there is another family that we are responsible for and it is Your family—the poor, the oppressed, the ones who have no one to speak up for them—then convict us, Lord, and may our little bit of the world never be the same because we pull ourselves in line with the will of God for our own lives. We ask it for Christ's sake. Amen.