Ecclesiastes 7

Ecclesiastes 7:8

The End That Counts Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.— Ecclesiastes 7:8.I once lived in the same house with a little girl who was very clever with her hands. She could sew, she could knit, she could crochet, and she was always busy with some piece of work. She seemed to be tremendously keen on what she was doing, but I noticed that her piece of work was never very long the same. She seemed to be constantly starting something new, and what happened to the old piece I could not tell.One day I found the little maid in tears. Between her sobs she told me the whole sad story. A new governess had arrived, and she had discovered in a drawer a dozen half-finished pieces of embroidery, half a dozen small scraps of crochet, and three or four knitted articles that boasted a first half, but badly wanted a second.

She had found them all—this clever governess—and she had then and there decreed that not another piece of work should that little damsel begin till she had finished every one of those she had cast aside. It took her months and months and months, and it cost her many a sigh and many a tear ere she reached the end of that drawer full of work.

But wasn’t she proud the day the last stitch went into the last article? You should have seen how she beamed! And she had learned her lesson in the meantime. And she hasn’t forgotten it since.1. Now our text teaches us the very same lesson. It tells us that the end is better than the beginning. Everything has two ends—a beginning end, and an ending end—and it is the ending end that counts. There are heaps of young people in the world who are magnificent starters.

They set out on any new undertaking with a tremendous flourish of trumpets. You feel that what they are going to do should be a success, for they seem to be putting their whole heart into it. But alas! they are only starters. Their fatal fault is that they can’t keep at it, so they never get any further. Their enthusiasm burns so hot at first that it quickly burns itself out. We have a proverb, “Well begun is half done,” and a good beginning is not to be despised, but twenty yards ahead at the start of a race is not so important as twenty yards ahead at the goal.

It’s the keeping going that matters, and the people who have done the greatest things in the world have been, as a rule, not those who were cleverest at school and carried off all the prizes, but the people who were considered quite ordinary in class, but who made up their minds to “get there.”We should all be better of a little of the bulldog nose. The bulldog nose is not what you could call a pretty shape, but it is splendidly useful, for the flat wrinkly way it slants back enables the bulldog to breathe and to hold on to his enemy at the same time.

It is because he is able to hold on that he wins the fight. And victory in life is always to the boy or girl who holds on. We speak of holding on to the hitter end. That is a mistake. We should speak of holding on to the sweet end; for the joy and glow of a task well done is ten times sweeter than the joy of a task well begun.2. But I should like to tell you something most important—don’t long too much for the end. If you are always counting how many rows of knitting there are before the garment can be finished, or how many pages there are before the end of the lesson book can be reached, if you are always sighing for the end, it won’t help you to get there. The more you count and the more you sigh, the longer you will be on the way.You will be like a clock I heard of the other day.

It began to count how many seconds it would have to tick before the end of the year. It got so worried when it thought of the enormous number of times its pendulum would have to swing backwards and forwards that it determined to save itself further trouble by stopping altogether. Some of us are like that foolish clock. We think only how difficult it is to reach the end, and we forget how easy it is to take one tick at a time. Why, if we went on steadily tick by tick we’d be at the end almost before we knew! Don’t think of everything at once. Think of the little bit in front of you, and determine to do that well. Climb your ladder step by step, instead of looking up at the top step and saying to yourself, “How am I ever to get up there?”3.

The last thing I should like to say is this—there is no such thing as an end. Every end is just a new beginning. If you have won success, and have got the prize you worked for, don’t sit down and do nothing more. Make that success the starting-point for a greater success. Don’t be content with an end. Turn it into a beginning.That is the true secret of advancement. It is the secret of life itself. Life never ends.

Christ told us that death is not an end, it is only a new beginning. It is a beginning of something more glorious than we can ever dream or imagine; for who knows what wonderful things we may not do when at last we go to be with Christ?

Ecclesiastes 7:27

Counting One By Ïne Counting one by one.—Ecclesiastes 7:27 (AV).That is one of the first things we learn to do, isn’t it? While we are little more than babies, before we know our alphabet or can read tiny words, we begin to count one by one. “One, two, three, four, five,” we say, and feel very proud when we can count up to ten or twenty. And then, when we go to school, one of the first things we learn to do is to count one by one. We have to count colored balls or beads, or little round colored chalk marks on the blackboard, and we have to learn the difference between two and three and between four and five. We can’t get a bit farther on, we can’t do addition, or subtraction, or multiplication until we first learn to count one by one.Now I expect you are all fond of counting one by one. You are making a collection of postcards or postage stamps, and every now and again you take out your album and count over the contents one by one.

Or you are saving up your money to buy something special, and you take them out frequently and count them over one by one and calculate how many more you will require to reach the desired sum. Or holiday time is approaching, and over your bed you have a calendar, and every night you tick off one day—one day less to the holidays!

You are still counting one by one.And do you know that mother counts one by one too? What do you suppose she counts? Not her pleasures, not her treasures, just her boys and girls. If one of you were missing she would be very, very sad, and not all the others put together would make up for the loss of that one.I was reading a story lately about a census that was taken in New York. You know what a census is, don’t you? It is a numbering of the people. Well, one man had to take the census in a crowded district on the east side of the city. He came to a tenement where there were a great many children, and he found a woman there bending over a wash-tub. “Madam,” said he, “I am the census-taker.

How many children have you?” “Well, lemme see,” said the washerwoman, “there’s Mary, and Ella, and Delia, and Susie, and Emma, and Tommy, and Albert, and Eddie, and Charlie, and Frank, and” By this time the man was getting a little impatient, so he interrupted, “If you could just give me the number,” said he. “Number!” exclaimed the woman, “I want you to understand that we ain’t got to numbering ’em yet! We ain’t run out o’ names!”Do you see it? It would be an insult to call you by a number. Father and mother have given you a name, and your name means you and all that stands for you. They count you one by one, and you won’t do instead of Mary or George, and Mary or George won’t do instead of you. You each stand for yourself.

You are each precious in their eyes. You count for something very wonderful and valuable.And God counts us one by one too.

Out of all the hundreds of millions of people on the earth He knows you and loves you and cares for you as if you were the only one. In a sense you are the only one.Away in Africa there is a strange tribe of natives. It is said that they never count: they have no math. A gentleman once asked one of the tribe how many oxen he had, and the man replied that he didn’t know. “Then,” said the gentleman, “how do you know if one is missing?” What do you think the man replied? “Not because the number would be less” he said, “but because of a face I should miss.”Will your face be missing at the end of the day when the grand roll of God’s children is read? It will matter infinitely to God if it is.