The core, the really core point about making your life work is figuring out what you want. I started to say it’s the hard part about it, but it isn’t so hard. It’s just something we don’t do. We never get around to thinking about it, and maybe taking a cup of coffee, sitting down and saying, What do I really want? What do I want to do tomorrow? Where do I want to be a year from now—or 20 years from now?

We just sort of go through life. We never sit down and think about it. Now for Solomon, it was not so very hard to decide. He faced a frightening challenge for a young man, but he did know what he wanted. So his objective was to meet the challenges of being a new, young king following in the footsteps of a truly great and a much-loved king.

But even Solomon, with the passage of time and the accumulation of power and wealth, got a little confused about what he wanted. Now fortunately for us, he wrote a book, and there is a lot that you and I can learn from that book about ourselves. It is the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Eternity is a very long time. They tell us the universe is 15 billion years old, give or take 3 or 4 billion years, but 15 billion years is not eternity. Eternity is longer than that because 15 billion years, or even 30 billion years, implies that there was a point where it all started, and the astronomers tell us there was a point where it all started. Eternity didn’t start. Eternity was before that.

You know, I can get my mind a little bit around the idea of time not ending—of there never going to be an end to things. God will last forever and ever and ever. But I have a hard time getting my mind around the fact that there was no start, no beginning, that He always has been.

What do you suppose it’s all about? Surely God didn’t just start all this and walk away, and leave it to run down. What are we, some sort of cosmic ant farm? As members of this earthly ant farm, we have vested interests in knowing what’s going on here. Because if we can discern the purpose of God, if we can discern that there is a purpose, then there is one who has purposed, and we have answered the question of his existence, and gone on to something a lot more important than that.

All of us have what some call a worldview. We are as unaware of this as a fish is unaware of water, but we all have a grid through which we view life’s problems and which we use to make decisions about those problems.

For the most part, that worldview goes unexamined. We have always thought the way we have and unless something jars us off our platform, we always will.

What are the foundational principles upon which we will base our end-of-life decisions, be it our own life or someone we love? As Christians, we like to think that the Bible is our foundation, our platform from which we view the world, and the framework for making the hard decisions of life. But we immediately, it seems, have a problem…

Do we truly understand how difficult the years ahead will be? Christians have often believed that we would escape the disasters striking the world simply because we were more righteous than others. Some thought we’d be taken to a place of safety, spared from the trials ahead. But the Bible tells us otherwise. Even the children of Israel faced plagues, and Jesus warned his disciples that they would face persecution and suffering.

As hard as it may be to accept, the road ahead will be long and narrow, filled with challenges. It will become increasingly difficult to obey God and follow his commands. The world is reinterpreting right and wrong, making it harder to know which way to walk. How can we remain steadfast in our faith, as a culture is continually redefined around us?

This message presents a small problem: it is almost too simple. And yet it contains a principle which can (and will, if you can apply it) change your life forever. Are you interested?

What did the First Christians believe about the last days? Forget about the expression the End of the World—the end of the planet is a long way off. It is plain, though, that the First Christians believed there was to be an end of the age (however one might take that) because that is what they asked Jesus about one day on the Mount of Olives.

They were familiar with the Old Testament prophets and their view of the last days and end of this system. Peter cited Joel with clarity on the day of Pentecost. He would be less than human if he had not seen what looked like the initial phases of the end times. And yet, Christ would not come in his lifetime, for some 2,000 years to come, or (for all we know) many more years yet.

The prophets told of a day of the Lord, a day of God’s wrath. And while they also saw it as a near-term thing, there is good reason to think that they also saw it as a distant event. It would be so cataclysmic that the destruction would boggle the mind. And they also saw it ushering in a new age. And not only did the First Christians have the prophets, they had Jesus’ Olivet Message to make them a little hypersensitive to prophetic events. Peter and the others thought they saw it coming, but they were also quite careful to avoid crying wolf. And they had good reason for that as well.

What did the First Christians believe about the last days—the end time of man on the earth? It may not have been a lot different from what some of us believe today, as I suspect more than a few of us have been disquieted by events in the Middle East. Even if we don’t fully understand all the implications of biblical prophecy, we know that the Middle East looms large at the end time, along with serious loss of life. With the Iranian regime certain to develop nuclear weapons, and with the stated intent to destroy Israel, you have to take this seriously and wonder how much longer are we going to be able to go on this way.

But we aren’t seeing a lot more than the First Christians did, and they can be excused for thinking the return of Christ would be in their lifetime. There were prophets among those First Christians but strangely, as far as the record is concerned, they express little interest in the far horizon. Perhaps, because they thought it wasn’t all that far away.

The activities of the prophets in the church seem to be very timely—that is, concerned with the events of the immediate future. But that doesn’t mean at all that there was not a broader view of prophecy in general and of the last days in particular. In fact, you are probably already thinking about the Book of Revelation. But it is plain that they had a belief system about the last days which was, at first, somewhat off-base. To some extent, this is accounted for by something Jesus said. We’ll find it in Matthew, chapter 24.

I am beginning to think that Americans, along with losing their Christmas spirit—whatever that is—are also losing their sense of humor. A law school in Indiana removed a Christmas tree from its atrium because of complaints. Some folks felt that the tree made them feel excluded. Now apart from the fact that I haven’t a clue what that means, since when did everyone have to feel included in everything that goes on? I am absolutely amazed at how thin-skinned atheists are. They are offended by the very word, God. In the words of Shakespeare, Methinks milady protesteth overmuch.

I wouldn’t have thought so, but it is beginning to appear that atheists are insecure in their beliefs. They seem to fear, if not God, the idea of God. The law school replaced the Christmas tree with two evergreen looking trees, fake snow and a sled. One of the trees has lights in it. Now there’s an idea. We take down the Christmas tree and we put up an evergreen tree, hang lights, tinsel, colored balls on it, put snow around the base and call it a…tree…for decoration. What’s funny about this is that the Supreme Court has ruled that Christmas trees are legal. They ruled that: The Christmas tree, unlike the menorah, is not itself a religious symbol. Although Christmas trees once carried religious connotations, today they typify the secular celebration of Christmas.

I submit this as exhibit one to demonstrate that we are losing our sense of the ridiculous. One, that the Supreme court of the land should be wasting time on issues like this. Two, did no one notice that Christmas is another form of Christ and Mass. Christ being the God of the Christian faith, and Mass a purely religious ceremony. And yet the Christmas tree is not a religious symbol. Well, I agree that it really is not, but it is hard to call it a Christmas tree and utterly ignore the meaning of the word. How is it that the constitution does not permit a display of the Ten Commandments in the atrium of a courthouse, but will permit the display of a Christmas tree. Not only at the courthouse. We have a National Christmas Tree on the grounds at the White House. What is the real reason why we can have one and not have the other, and what is the holiday all about?

If you’re planning on celebrating the birth of Christ in the near future…well, I hate to be the one to tell you this but you’re about three months late. Yeah, really. What’s funny about it is that the whole story is right there in the Biblical account of the birth of Jesus, right in your Bible, but nobody pays much mind to it. You can read it, for example, in Luke 1:

And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.

And what follows is the annunciation of the birth of Jesus, and you’ve probably heard it in a hundred little Christmas plays—that is, if you’ve lived long enough. But did you notice the expression in there—the sixth month? Did you ever wonder about that? It was in the sixth month that the angel Gabriel came to Mary and announced the birth of Jesus. Well, sixth month of what? Well if it’s the sixth month on your calendar, that would put the conception of Jesus in June and his birth in, well, nine months later, March. On the other hand, if it’s the Hebrew calendar, well the sixth month in the Hebrew calendar would be September and that would place Jesus being born in June.

So, what’s with this December 25th business? How on earth did we get the birth of Jesus in December? Well as it happens, it isn’t the sixth month of the Hebrew calendar. It isn’t the sixth month of our calendar. It’s the sixth month of something entirely different. Let’s find out more beginning in Luke, chapter 1.