Why Everything Never Feels Like Enough

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[00:00:00] Bobby: I think learning to receive what God has already given me, learning to receive the limits of the lot He’s ordained for me as good for me are lessons I continue to learn, kind of my ambition butting up against hard realities and limits. He’s ordained. It’s a kind of twofold don’t strive for the wind and receive the goodness of what God’s given you as a gift.

Yeah. That continues to, to bear fruit in my life.

[00:00:37] Collin: Does it feel like you should be happy? You want to be happy, and you try to be happy, but somehow you can’t? It’s a simple and common but poignant question. It’s. Also in the preface to the new book, everything is Never Enough. Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness, written by Bobby Jameson. He is the senior pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge and previously served on the pastoral staff of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. This is a book about happiness that explains, you’re probably looking for it in all the wrong places. Jamison brings us into the world of Ecclesiastes and its enigmatic, author, KOIT, the World of Ha or Absurdity.

His inspired words help us see, our biggest problem with life is death. The epitome of pride is believing we can overcome it. We’ll never be happy until we surrender. Humility in humility to its inevitability. And Jameson guides us through three stories that guide that, that guide us on our life well lived.

The contentment of limits, the joys of resonance and happiness you can’t lose in this world because it comes from another world and he helps us to see, quote, happiness is not striving for gain from life, but receiving life itself as a gift. Now I’m excited to talk with Bobby about one of my favorite books of 2025, who was encouraged along the way by one of our dearest friends, Matt McCullough.

So, Matt probably doesn’t listen to podcasts at all. I’m not sure. I dunno if that fits into his anti-social media. Pay no attention to me persona. But anyway, if you’re out there, Matt, shout out from your friends here with Bobby. We’ll also talk about money, sadness and the categorical imperative of late modernity of that.

Great stuff. Bobby. Thanks for joining me on Gospel Bound.

[00:02:32] Bobby: Thanks for having me. Thanks for that warm welcome.

[00:02:34] Collin: Alright. Tell us a little bit about this Kohe, the preacher behind Ecclesiastes.

[00:02:39] Bobby: Yeah. He introduces himself just with that title. It’s a Hebrew word, meaning one who gathers, one who assembles and by implication seemingly one who teaches.

In an assembly. Of course throughout much of church history, people have taken him to be Solomon. He’s not named as Solomon or identified as Solomon. I think it could be Solomon. He just doesn’t say so explicitly, so I just call him Koha. I stick with his kind of self designation. He, I guess he’s, one of the unique things about his role and voice in the canon of scripture is that he’s really speaking from experience.

[00:03:11] Collin: Yeah.

[00:03:11] Bobby: He’s not giving us a direct, thus says the Lord. He’s not reporting the kinda large scale history of God’s dealing to his people. He’s telling us what he did, what he experienced, what he suffered. He even kind of set out with this experiment. To live life To the full, yeah. Sort of drain it to the bottom and then report back.

So his, his qualifications are more like, been there, done that. Seen it, lived it. Yeah. Nobody has more experience kind of cred than I do. Is there a reason to think he’s not Solomon? There’s kind of subtle scholarly debates about the language he’s using and whether it’s kind of Hebrew that could have only come in later.

I think there’s also a little bit of, you know, it could be a little bit difficult if you’re trying to splice Ecclesiastes in to Solomon’s life story. Where do you place it? Yeah. You know, is this Solomon at the end of his life, kind of after what we learned in the Books of Kings kind of repenting and looking back, I think there’s some difficulties there.

Not that they’re insurmountable, I just don’t have a firm stance.

[00:04:06] Collin: Yeah. I mean it for the preacher, it makes it a little bit more interesting when you can draw in Solomon Sure. And applies because we have so much of that narrative and so much of what we know about Solomon applies to, I mean, it’s consistent with what we see in Ecclesias.

Yeah. If there’s any biblical character who would seem to match. Preacher, it would seem to be Solomon. You also have, you also have his dad having written quite a bit of reflection along these same lines, so it doesn’t seem to be completely outta character. Yeah. With the family.

[00:04:37] Bobby: And you know, obviously there’s a different angle and emphasis and tone Van Proverbs, but one way to look at it is to say, Ecclesiastes ends where Proverbs begins.

So even apart from the question of authorship, they, they have a strikingly different emphasis, and yet Ecclesiastes winds up with. Fear God obey his commandments.

[00:04:54] Collin: Yeah, kind of.

[00:04:55] Bobby: Because he’s explored everything. He’s lived everything. And this is what it really does all boil down to. And of course Proverbs starts from there and builds there.

The, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

[00:05:05] Collin: Yeah. So I

[00:05:05] Bobby: do think there’s a fit and a harmony. Not that the same person, you know, couldn’t have written both theses ultimately the Holy Spirit. Wrote both these books,

[00:05:12] Collin: right? Absolutely. So this could apply to both Ecclesiastes, which I don’t think is probably the first place that most of your average Christians today are gonna turn in the Bible.

This could also apply Bobby to your own book. Why would I wanna read a book that disquiet more than quiet? I think most of us are looking for relief not to be disturbed, and I think a lot of us feel like, nah, the world’s got plenty of disturbance, not looking for more of it.

[00:05:38] Bobby: Yeah, sure. So it does, it, it, it does require something, a little bit of willingness to slog through some hard territory, but I would say the first.

The, the first kind of a pitch I would give for a book on happiness that actually kind of starts off with everything that’s making you unhappy and where you’re not gonna find happiness is you only have to live a little bit to encounter some serious disappointments, some serious setbacks, some serious, you know, bridges you tried to walk across that collapsed and that you wound up, you know, metaphorically kind of flowing down an icy river rather than safe, safe on the other side.

And to simply hear. In God’s word, the kind of clear, blunt statement of this won’t satisfy, and here’s why this is the wrong place to look and here’s why. There is a kind of refreshing, cleansing, kind of zooming back, you know, the kind of things we so often have our heart sunk into. The things we’re chasing day by day.

There is, there is almost like a, like a polar plunge ice bath type. Like good for your spiritual health to plunge into these chilly waters. Yeah. Kinda wake up from maybe some of these dreams you’re chasing or unquestioned ambitions or things that you can easily get too wrapped up in. So that, that’s my first pitch is that actually the bad news in and of itself is actually good for you.

And if you can sit still long enough in that ice bath, there’s some surprising health benefits that you feel good afterward.

[00:07:03] Collin: Yeah, I like that. Well, tell us a little bit more about this. He maybe the most important Hebrew word in

[00:07:11] Bobby: this book. Yeah, that’s right. It shows up in the, the book’s kind of opening trumpet blast.

It’s opening thesis, classically translated, you know, vanity of vanities. It says the preacher all is vanity. It’s a hard word to translate. You could also translate it as futile or meaningless or, or vapor. So it’s, it’s literal kind of sense is, is breath or vapor. And then of course words often have a sort of literal meaning from everyday life.

And then take on a kind of metaphorical or symbolic meaning. So breath or vapor. Well, what happens? You breathe it out, it disappears. You take out a breath, you, you expel a breath you need to take in another one. It’s always coming and going. It never lasts. And so he, even elsewhere in the Old Testament can, can come to take on the meaning of something that promises something but doesn’t follow through.

Charm is deceitful and beauty is heavy. Beauty is vain. It doesn’t live up to what it promises. There’s also often a sense of fleeting, you know, this, this doesn’t last, it just disappears. But I, I take it that that part of what Kheled is doing is he’s working with those nuances. He’s working with those different elements, but he is actually kind of pressing the word into a specific mold to serve as kind of a key term for his key idea, which I actually think in modern terms is, is best understood as absurd.

[00:08:26] Collin: Hmm. And

[00:08:26] Bobby: not absurd in the sense of like, physical comedy or like, you know, something outrageous, not absurd, like something obviously false but absurd in the very specific sense of something that fails to meet expectations.

[00:08:38] Collin: Hmm.

[00:08:38] Bobby: Something that fails to work rightly. Something where you have this longing, this desire, this hope, and the opposite happens.

There’s a number of different sort of avenues. Koha often sort of observes a scenario. He sees something taking place in life, whether this person getting this sentence in a courtroom or this person chasing wealth and here’s what happened to them, or this person, you know, rescues the city and becomes king, and then everybody forgets about him and he pronounces these whole states of affairs as he.

Absurd. So he’s noticing, wait a minute, this thing that should be doesn’t actually happen. This thing that you want. Yeah. You don’t actually get it. This good thing that you chase, aha, and I’ve seized it and now I can enjoy it, then it disappears. And his word for all of that is absurd. He, which resonates with at least some kind of mid 20th century philosophers in a more existentialist mold.

I think it’s, I think it’s a kind of a providential coincidence. I don’t think they were reading Ecclesiastes. I think they’re just seeing the same thing in life that he is.

[00:09:38] Collin: Did you find in your research any Christian engagement from that mid-century period, especially when Camu was so popular talking about absurdity that was incorporating Ecclesias?

[00:09:50] Bobby: That’s a great question. What’s his name? Robert Short, who did the gospel according to peanuts. He also did a photo essay called A Time, A Time To Be Born and a Time To Die. He did a photo essay on Ecclesiastes, where it’s kind of like a picture for every verse, and it’s this kind of Vietnam era, black and white, and, and he wrote this like existential kind of essay to go with it and he, I don’t remember if he directly engages with Kemu, but that would be one more popular kind of.

Seven 1970s. He’s at least engaging deeply with those themes. And I read it early on when I was prepping the preaching series, one commentary I was reading kind of cited. I was like, that’s interesting. And so he does engage some of those themes. I don’t remember anybody else from kind of mid-century.

There’s, there’s more recent, you know, scholarly treatments that look at the absurd and all that sort of thing.

[00:10:37] Collin: Yeah. Well, we’re, we’re talking about. Preaching this book, this something you have experienced with. It’s what you do as your, as your daily living and calling, where do we find Jesus in Ecclesiastes?

[00:10:50] Bobby: Yeah, that’s such a good question and I do think it’s a legitimate question to bring to Ecclesiastes, I think. I think if you start from seeing Ecclesiastes as maybe the most sort of existentially profound reflections on life in light of the goodness of creation and life, in light of the badness of the fall.

Kind of Genesis one to two is still relevant, and Genesis three and four covers colors all of our experience. Ecclesiastes has some of the most profound, poignant kind of longings and reflections and unanswered questions. There’s all these questions. Who can, you know, tell us what will take place after us, or who knows what’s going to happen or who even in a, where is it?

Chapter or there. Okay. So sometimes there’s questions and sometimes there’s even negation, like in chapter eight, verse eight, no man has. Power to retain the spirits or power over the day of death. Hmm. So nobody can Now, of course, being on the purely human plane, what’s, what’s Kal do it doing? He’s, he’s reflecting on just the brute hard limits of the fall.

You can’t escape death. You can’t rescue somebody from death when that time comes. There’s nothing you can do about it. But that’s the kind of photo negative. Where Jesus is the reverse side. Jesus says, I lay my life down of my own accord. No one takes it from me. I lay it down willingly. This charge I’ve received from my father, I have authority to lay it down.

It’s even interesting therein. The word kheled is using has the flavor of kind of like authority or proprietorship. You’re not the owner of your life. When death comes knocking death gets to say, yep, see ya. I take your life away. Jesus has authority over his own life. He, he enters into the limits, the trials, the hardships, the struggles.

Of human life in this fallen world. But at the same time, he also exists beyond those limits. So Jesus, as it were, lives a life truly under the sun, subject to all of its futility, frustration, absurdity. But he also exists beyond. The sun brings a power from beyond the sun and is the only one who can deliver us from the futility, the absurdity, the fleetingness.

So in a way, Ecclesiastes is kind of a photo negative as a whole. For Jesus. Ecclesiastes is kind of a question that for the most part, it doesn’t actually answer. Maybe it just gives us little fleeting answers to Jesus is is the full answer to, and even in that sense of absurdity, if absurd is the disconnect between what you deserve and what you get or what you desire and what you get.

Jesus. Suffered the most the, deepest absurdity, the most thorough absurdity, and rescues us by his resurrection in the coming new creation into a world where that absurdity will be no more.

[00:13:31] Collin: This Bobby, what you’ve written here is the best book I know for incorporating and engaging with two of my favorite current writers, bong Chohan and, and Hartman Rosa.

Sometimes in my role for the Keller Center, I think. What, what are the books and the authors, Tim Keller would’ve been reading that a lot of us would’ve learned about from him that would make it into his books and preaching. And those are two who really, I’ve only learned about and, and heard a lot more people discussed since Tim died just a couple of years ago.

So again, you’re, you’re incorporating their work right away here, and I’m just wondering, how did you come across their work and what makes their work so relevant to this project?

[00:14:13] Bobby: Yeah, I’ll speak to Rosa first. I remember a little fragment of a quote that Alan Jacobs just posted on his blog that was kind of a summary of Rosa’s thesis on social acceleration.

Yeah. Which is basically that you could define kind of a pre-modern or non-modern society as one where there’s relative stability for kind of time out of mind. You know, things are pretty much stay the same a hunter gathering lifestyle or a farming lifestyle, the way you relate to nature. You know, just things are kind of the same.

A sort of early modernity. Things are changing and turning over roughly on the timeline of say, like a human generation. There is change, there is upheaval, but things are changing at, at, at a span of sort of decades. What, what he then calls. So social acceleration or the condition of late modernity is where things are that the pace of change is speeding up.

Everything is changing sort of faster and faster, not just technologically but social mores. Think about how quickly a, a candidate or elected officer might evolve on a major position. You know, and you kind of forget that they ever used to have a different position a short number of years ago because the cultural goal goalposts have moved so quickly.

So when I saw that kind of paragraph summary, I thought, wow, that is one of the most insightful one paragraph distillations of a kind of major analysis of, of where we’re living and how it’s different from all of history that I’ve ever seen.

[00:15:32] Collin: Yeah.

[00:15:32] Bobby: And so it kind of got onto my two read lists through Alan Jacobs.

And then honestly I’m sort of complicit in the system here, but I’m pretty sure. It was actually an Amazon algorithm. Shortly after Rosa’s book, the Uncontrollability of the World came out. Okay. I’m pretty sure I was looking for more stuff to read on Ecclesiastes, ’cause I had finished preaching it. I wanted to write a book on it, and I saw, wait a minute, uncontrollability of the World, Rosa.

Oh, I remember that quote. That was amazing. I’ve been meaning to read him. This sounds like Ecclesiastes, like striving after wind. All his vanity. Sounds like this dude. Rosa wrote a book on Ecclesiastes and honestly, the Uncontrollability book, I mean it resonates with Ecclesiastes so much. And so I wound up coming to him as a major dialogue partner.

I read all of his, almost all of his books, all the essays and articles and stuff I could get my hands on, you know? I’m not sure. He was a little bit more in the air. I was intrigued by his book. Maybe it was ’cause I was looking for stuff on burnout. I honestly can’t remember. But his, his book on burnout was very influential for my writing This book, his book on the disappearance of Ritual mm-hmm.

Was also helpful thinking about how we inhabit time. There’s a lot of that in there. So those, I honestly don’t remember who turned me on to Bung Choong.

[00:16:41] Collin: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of produces of the uncontrollability of the world from Rosa is a shorter version of a lot of the other, more popular version of a lot of the, the bigger stuff.

And then J Chohan produces a lot of shorter books exactly on a variety of related subjects just for people who are watching and listening and wanna jump in themselves. Let’s talk about money and wondering does it play the same role in our day? As it did for Khalis. And I’m wondering, this is Rosa talking about how money is a religion substitute, a master of contingency, and then Han talks about how money saves the ancients or it, it saves us from our need for each other.

So I’m just wondering, is that the same back then? You know, it’s a,

[00:17:25] Bobby: it’s a good question. I do think that. At the very least, koha is living in a time in a society where it is, it is sort of mercantile to the extent that. If you have a lot of money, that money can get you a lot of stuff. And so I think that the historical background of what he’s living against has to be at least a somewhat commercialized, urbanized society because the way he talks about the love of money and his kind of analysis of it, he who loves money will never be satisfied with money, implies that money can play a kind of central role in getting you the things you want, that people have money.

Exactly. The people are, people are familiar with

[00:18:04] Collin: currencies, which not always an agrarian

[00:18:07] Bobby: environment. And that there’s, and that it’s connected to enough stuff that it’s not just like a means of exchange if you go travel some long distance and you have, you know, you have some goods and you, you know, you can exchange this or that, but that money plays actually more of a central role where the more you have of it.

The more it can do for you. So I think in, in that sense, there’s at least a, a resonance between his economic circumstances and ours to some degree. I do think it’s one of the ways though, that if, if Ecclesiastes sounds surprisingly modern, like in this critique of the love of money, I do think it’s one of those ways that that trajectory has, you know, radicalized, amplified.

We don’t just have a market, as Michael Sandel puts it in his book what Money Can’t Buy. We don’t just have a market economy, we are a market society. You know, I talk to my kids about how, oh, we wish there weren’t, you know, naming rights for stadiums, so there could be a historic name, you know, still stuck to it.

But they don’t just sell the naming rights to the stadium. It’s like then, then there’s like the two or three other sponsors of every game and all this stuff. And in the field, you know, everything. Then

[00:19:04] Collin: you can sell the field,

[00:19:05] Bobby: the field as well. So in that sense, it’s kind of like a, a pattern. We can see in whatever early ancient Israelite sort of market economy.

That Ecclesiastes emerges from Those trajectories are, are extended and so, but I think there’s a continuity. I think Koha would say, absolutely. You know, money is a false God. Yeah. You can look to it for refuge, you can look to it for security, you can look to it to obtain pleasure because you can turn money into all this other stuff.

Whatever the desires of your hearts are, it can sort of bring ’em into reach. So for that, that more modern point from from Rosa master of contingency or, or Han, it can sort of, relieve you of depending upon other people. Yeah. You know, which Andy Crouch developed nicely in his book the Life we’re looking for.

I think Ecclesiastes, especially chapter five and six, really resonates with that, particularly in how our desires for this worldly goods are insatiable. That’s part of our fallenness. It’s also part of our desire for an infinite God, whether we acknowledge it or not, and money maps tightly onto that because money can become an object of insatiable desire.

[00:20:11] Collin: Talking with Bobby Jamison about his book, everything is Never Enough. Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. Again, you can already hear why one of my favorite books of 2025. Bobby, how did preaching and then writing about Ecclesiastes change your life?

[00:20:27] Bobby: Yeah, it it certainly exposed and continues to expose some ungodly ambitions, some ungodly striving.

Oh, a sense of kind of always wanting to do the next thing or get the next thing. If I would’ve thought, oh, I’ve got those kind of desires pretty well under control. I’m, I’m aware of pridefully striving after this or that, you sit with Ecclesiastes and it just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper layers.

Yeah, and, and I also think that the sense of receiving life as a gift, recognizing how much is outside of my control. Recognizing, you know, it’s like the Calvin and Hobbes comic where I forget, you know, Calvin says to Hobbes, if you could have anything, what would you want? Hobbes says, A sandwich, you know, and, and what about you?

And Calvin says, oh, I’d wanna be supreme dictator of the universe. And have people might come in, you know, and then Hobbes later he is eating a sandwich. And he says, well, I got my wish. You know, I think, I think learning to receive what God has already given me. Learning to receive the limits of the lot he’s ordained for me as good for me are lessons I continue to learn, kind of my ambition, butting up against hard realities and limits.

He’s ordained the kind of twofold don’t strive for the wind and receive the goodness of what God’s given you as a gift. Yeah. That continues to, to bear fruit in my life.

[00:21:51] Collin: Is there anything that changed, like a specific practice or thought or intention or plan that changed as you were confronted by Ecclesiastes?

[00:22:00] Bobby: You know, the chapter on time was deeply personal. And these are even lessons I’m learning and working on right now and talking to my wife about. And but time we so often try to master time and it’s like what, what Lewis says in the screw tape letters, you know, at all costs. You want to foster this illusion that, that the subject is the master of his time.

That the time belongs to him. That it’s like a possession he can claim and say mine. Ecclesiastes has so much to say about how we are not in control of time. Times will happen to us that we do not want. God is in control of them and in this mortal life, under conditions of the fall, bad will replace good, good will replace bad.

There’s a time for singing, a time for mourning. There’s a time for war. There’s a time for peace, and there’s a kind of merry-go-round quality to our lives that ultimately we’re called to submit to and trust God in. And I think for me. Okay, here’s one very concrete practice. It didn’t so much come outta writing the book, but I’m working on it now.

I think when there’s a clear providential assignment or limit serve my family in this way, be with my kids, give, give this to faithfully steward the lot God has given me, rather than striving for something else, to not view it mentally as kind of, oh, there’s a trade off here and I could be doing X or it’s competing with.

Why, or it’s, or it’s costing me in sort of, you know, time management. It’s costing me this, this opportunity cost that I could just, if this is the providential assignment, it’s just the thing I have to do and it’s the thing I get to do and I should be joyful and cheerful in doing it. And yeah, there’s a certain miserly mastery that’s deep in my heart of the way I wanna relate to time that I think Ecclesiastes shook loose and needs to keep shaking loose.

Yeah.

[00:23:44] Collin: Oh, that’s good. Bobby, if knowledge, if more knowledge means more sadness, does that make us in the internet age the saddest people ever?

[00:23:55] Bobby: Well, I do think that kind of immediate exposure to every possible tragedy, disaster. I do think as so many people have observed, and increasingly so in the past, you know, decade.

That is hard to handle and we’re sort of not really wired for that. And it takes some work to kind of put up appropriate boundaries for the things you’re gonna let yourself be exposed to. So yeah, there, they’re in the internet age. I do think there we can experience the truth of what kohat says. Like, I’m looking at I’m looking at chapter two, where he has a couple of sayings about this.

He does say some positive things about knowledge, but he asks like, why? What happens to the fool will happen to me also, why then have I been so very wise? In other words, there’s a whole lot of knowledge and even wisdom you could accrue that will not change anything. And so maybe the temptation to view knowledge as a kind of intrinsic good or commodity that’s always good to stockpile.

Yeah. That can especially tempt us in the internet age to then ask, well, what can I do about it? And maybe it’s not the wisest investment in my time, my attention, my energy to learn a whole lot about a whole lot of stuff, especially a whole lot of bad stuff that I really can’t do anything about, you know?

[00:25:05] Collin: I mentioned in my introduction, Bobby, the categorical imperative of late modernity, which you summarized this way, quote, always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased. And one things we talk about a lot at the Keller Center are these cultural narratives, the stories that guide how we live without us even often knowing that the guiding.

I think you talked earlier about a market economy or an explorer nation or a settler nation like we are in the United States. I think this is especially relevant for us. Tell us a little bit more of what you mean by this. And like I said, I think it feels like something we just assume in our day. But it would’ve been foreign to virtually all previous generations.

And I’m talking about in the grand scheme of history. Yeah. Age of exploration. That changes a little bit. And there’s always been people pushing boundaries and things like that. But I think just this sense that we always need more. I think that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s us. And it’s not always been that way.

[00:26:10] Bobby: Yeah, that’s right. So I’m borrowing that phrase and that concept from Rosa, and he’s talking about how there, there, there’s these different ways you try to bring more of life under your grasp to make it as he puts it available, accessible, attainable. And that could be experiences, it could be traveling, it could be money, and then the resources and the things money can get you.

It could also be in a, in a more subtle or social sense in terms of your, your influence, your range of connections, your relationships. That could always be extended. You could always have a bigger footprint. You could always make more of yourself kind of socially or in terms of your influence. Yeah, and I, I think that, and this is obviously sort of heightened and accelerated in the internet age.

But it, but it, it creates in one sense, both a fundamental burden and an entitlement. The burden is I always must be doing more and kind of maximizing and optimizing, whether that’s in terms of work or money, whether that’s in terms of relationships. So there’s a burden there. You have to make something of yourself.

There’s also can be kind of a sense of entitlement that that contrasts strongly with COHEs repeated use of this idea of a lot, a portion. You know, a portion is like a portion of food. This is all that you get served. Yeah. Or a lot. It can also mean in the ancient Israelite context, you know, the inheritance of land that you or your family would be given and Well, this many acres is only gonna produce this much.

You wanna steward it Well yeah. And help it to produce in a sustainable way. But if this is all the land you have, it’s all the land you have. And that, that’s almost a. That’s almost a concept that’s just foreign in our society where you would just kind of run roughshod. Oh, it can always be expanded. You can always buy another field.

You can always get bigger equipment. You can always can always get another

[00:27:49] Collin: sandwich.

[00:27:50] Bobby: You can always get another sandwich. That’s right. Hobbes. Why? Why just one. Why Just one. Yeah. And I think, I think it’s a, there’s very sophisticated structures for attaining those things, for promoting those things, for pursuing them in a way that never turns off for social media.

Feeding them back to you in a way where you could always, you know, want something more, something better. So there’s a real discipline. As koal, it puts it to accepting your lot. It that’s not just a sort of grateful act of, of kind of receiving it and thanking God for it. I think there’s also a discipline of bringing your desires in tune with it and into line with it.

That is, that is inescapably individual. Somebody else’s lot is not my lot. Somebody else’s family is not my family. Somebody else’s work is not my work. God has given it to him. That’s what, that’s what five 18 says. This is his lot. God has given us these days, this work. And so it really stands in kind of direct opposition.

To that imperative to always be getting more or making more of yourself.

[00:28:51] Collin: Is this the same thing, Bobby, as the problem of meritocracy? If you, if everyone can be exceptional, then everyone must be exceptional. Just wondering, how does Ecclesia, does this kohat tackle the problem the same way of what you just described?

[00:29:07] Bobby: That’s, I I do think it’s relevant to that kind of critique of meritocracy ala Michael Sandel. Right. You know, I think kohat, he in, in living his kind of rise to the top. He particularly highlights it in chapter two and he highlights a couple of things, both in his first person experience and some of his observations in chapter four.

You can work yourself into a kind of anxious stupor, you know, sleepless nights being unable to sort of stop, unable to, to sort of detach from your work. He, he talked about that, you know, he talked about giving himself up to his, to despair because like 2 23, all his days are full of sorrow and his work is a vaccination.

Even in the night, his heart does not rest. This also is absurd. So I think, I think Khel pinpoints the inward liabilities. A work fixation that, you know, a number of scholars have observed, he kind of diagnosed the workaholic, you know, two and a half millennia in advance or what, or whatever it is. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. You know, chapter four verse seven, there’s somebody who has nobody else to work for, no sibling, no air, no family, but they never stop, and they never stop either enough to ask why. And so I think, yeah, in that sense, a, a meritocracy if, if you, if you view the world around you, particularly as kind of like a pure meritocracy, you only have yourself to blame.

You know, hard work gets ahead, fair play you know, make the most of the opportunities given to you, you’ll rise to the top. So not only do you have to sort of be always working, but you only have yourself to blame if it, if it doesn’t work out. I think those inward pitfalls of work being a kind of treadmill that your, your mind and hearts and in a sense body can never get off of.

I think Ecclesiastes totally spots those. You know, millennia in advance.

[00:30:48] Collin: No. And combine that through. Oh, expressive individualism. You can be anything you want to be, anything you set your mind to, which is then if you set your mind to being a professional athlete and you fail, you have no one to blame because you didn’t believe.

Yeah.

[00:31:06] Bobby: And, and that expressive individualism saying kind of, this is who I’m created to be, or sort of this is my deepest self makes it even more of a personal kind of attack on your worth, an attack on your value. You know, Ecclesiastes doesn’t address this question directly, but, but there has to be like, if, if you’re, if you’re.

Aiming at that type of elite endeavor at any level, you know, there, there has to be some way in which you can, you can distinguish striving for excellence, from striving for superiority. Even at a competitive endeavor, like, like sports, you know, there’s a winner, there’s a loser. Somebody comes first.

There has to be a sense of, you know, even as important as a winning is to use the cliche, you know, winning can’t be everything. I think, I think Ecclesiastes would. Yeah. In, in a sense, Ecclesiastes is a very anti-expressive individualist book. Yeah, that’s good. That’s, why it’s timely for our day. Who, you are is fundamentally given, not fundamentally achieved.

You have to start with the givenness of life itself. The givenness of every good thing in your life. Kinda wake up, look around. God has given you so much. What God has given you is always more fundamental, more important. It’s a bigger deal than anything you make of it. You’re required to be a faithful steward but you didn’t make it in the first place.

He is the one, as it were, who cooked the meal. He’s the one who apportioned it out to you. Your job is to eat and enjoy.

[00:32:30] Collin: The expressive individualist is more Rousseau with the sense that I’ve been born to this world with. Inward desires that are always constrained by people on the outside and institutions and authorities.

And my whole goal in life is to break free from those. And I break free from those by, certainly by protesting them, but mainly by looking inside myself for guidance of how to resist them and how to ignore those siren songs of tradition and religion and family and everything else. And Ecclesiastes comes back and says, life is a gift.

All of life is grace and your problem is that you’re prone without the, the guidance of the Lord to veer off a cliff.

[00:33:18] Bobby: Yeah, absolutely. And, and at a kind of infinite velocity. Yeah. In the sense that Ecclesiastes keeps highlighting that our hearts are insatiable. You know, chapter six verse nine, better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite.

You could even have something in front of you to enjoy. But then your appetite goes, well, what about something else? What about something different? What about something more? Or, or chapter 6, 4, 7, all the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. I think Ecclesiastes is saying that as a kind of parable, you have to keep working to keep eating, but that’s a sort of pointer to the deep structure of our souls where I think, I think receiving a good gift from a good creator is a key part of that.

That’s a more prominent theme in Ecclesiastes, and ultimately, kind of in light of chapter three, verse 11, he’s put eternity into the heart of man. Yeah. Ultimately being satisfied in God alone is the only kind of, you know, silver bullet, the only magic key. There is a way to be appropriately satisfied with the good gifts God gives you a food, family work enjoyment.

There’s an appropriate way to receive all those, but ultimately, the kind of happiness you’re on a treadmill seeking to get. Is found in God alone.

[00:34:27] Collin: Yeah. Bobby, if you could teach this message in any setting outside the church, where would it be?

[00:34:36] Bobby: Well, I do think on college campuses today is an important one, and I’m thankful I’ve got an opportunity to kind of go give a talk on this at the study center here at UNC coming up in the fall on, on November 10th.

So I do think university campuses are important. You know, I, I’d have to tweak it a little bit. But if I you know, if I got to get a bunch of whatever influential culture making Silicon Valley types in a room, the more transhumanist, you know, yeah. You can, you can sort of math your way out of any sort of pitfall and optimize.

And here back home in California, that’s. Back home to California. If I could get a, a bunch of, you know, big time Silicon Valley CEOs, I’m not sure they would listen, you know, dah dah, dah. But that the, the sort of Silicon Valley pro and reshaping our humanity kind of ethos is, is so anti limit.

[00:35:27] Collin: Yeah.

[00:35:27] Bobby: You know, not, not, not being limited by givens of human nature.

Not being limited by, you know, we’ve messed things up here on earth. Oh, let’s go to Mars. You know? So I think the sort of ethos of limits. And the ethos that flows from recognizing creation is a good gift. It is pretty antithetical to anything coming out of Silicon Valley, which just has such a, such a, I’m gonna sound like a cranky old man here, but sound it, it has such an outsized influence on our culture compared to what it deserves for any type of intellectual substance.

You know, you don’t, yeah. Anyways. I’ll, I’ll get a hustle. Well, intellectual

[00:35:58] Collin: substance and simply received wisdom. Sure. There, there’s a clear antagonism toward a received wisdom, as if it’s irrelevant or a hindrance to this transhumanist project. This ever, never ending effort to try to escape limits and ultimately to escape the ultimate, to escape the ultimate limit of all, which is, which is death.

And then that swings you right back to Ecclesiastes. Again, which is totally, that’s the essence of pride. Yes. And pride leads to your fall and it, and

[00:36:34] Bobby: you’re prob you’re probably seeing a more concentrated form of that particular hubris. You know, whether it’s the trying to optimize your way out of death in particular.

I mean, that’s the most obvious one.

[00:36:45] Collin: Yeah. Practical question here to close, Bobby. How should a preacher approach Ecclesiastes in his church?

[00:36:53] Bobby: Yeah, great question. A few tips. I think I found it helpful to, you know, there’s this delicate balance, right? Where you want to preach the thrust of the text.

You want to preach the weight of the text, you wanna preach the tone of the text. Yeah. And yet you wanna leave your people with some hope. And, and I think so that kind of photo negative approach, I, I think I pray, I hope I preached Christ and the kind of fullness of the gospel from every passage.

Sometimes it’s more of a photo negative of kind of where Ecclesiastes leaves us. What’s the problem? Ecclesiastes sharpens for us, almost Ecclesiastes sort of driving us to despair. So we cry out who can deliver us from this. So I do think letting the congregation kind of sit under that pressure as long as you, and they can bear it.

Is, is is one important kind of prerequisite to preaching Christ faithfully from Ecclesiastes? I think another one would be that even just as a, a sort of holi point, my outlines would often sound very negative ’cause it’s a pretty negative passage. My outline is more in demolition mode, but once I’ve given the kind of thrust of the text, I would sort of zoom out.

And say, well, what is, Ecclesiastes is not telling us what fills this picture out. What else do we know and how does this fit with the, the God who is sovereign and loving the, you know, what he created us for? So there’d be kind of like a, here’s the main thrust of the passage, and I’d sort of come back around a little bit, maybe in each point.

So that, again, in some of these darker sections, we really are following the thrust of the text, but there’s kind of a, but. To help us sort of remember and get our bearings. And I think, you know, preaching, I’m, I’m a firm believer in expositional preaching. We’re also preaching the fullness of, of inspired scripture and helping our people put it together.

So those would be a couple preaching tips. I would also just say it is a book that that bears extra dividends for kind of putting in some big picture interpretive work on the front end. So if you can set aside a little bit more time to just study the big picture of the book as a whole, map it out, that was certainly very beneficial for me.

[00:38:53] Collin: Yeah, that’s good. And this book will no doubt be an aid to people. I hope so. In that process. Hope the book is Everything is Never Enough. Ecclesiastes, surprising Path, resilient, happiness. The author, my guest, Bobby Jamison from Trinity Baptist Church, chapel Hill, North Carolina, Bobby. In conclusion, I wanna just quote you here.

Happiness comes not from trying to make this world satisfy all your desires. But from realizing that it never will. Happiness begins to glimpse new dimensions when you discover that everything is never enough. Thankfully, Christ is, thanks Bobby for pointing to him through this difficult but ultimately rewarding book of Ecclesiastes.

Thanks so much, Colin.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Goss. Bound for more interviews and to sign up for my new weekly newsletter unseen things. Head over to tgc.org/gospel bound rate and review gospel bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join us in this conversation. Until next time, remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.