Let Your Heart Cheer You

Let Your Heart Cheer You in the Days of Your Youth

“Let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth” (Eccl. 11:9)—I love that. Here’s why. The Bible is saying, in effect:

This barbaric world has no right to poison your heart. God looks upon “the days of your youth” with joy. And how God sees you is how you really are. You don’t have to invent enjoyment. It’s built in. Let it in. There will be time enough later on for bearing heavy burdens and overcoming impossible odds—of course. Following Jesus will cost you. But he will help you. So don’t fear the future. Enjoy the present. If you are wise today, you will be even wiser tomorrow, and you’ll be ready. God will make sure of it. Let his strategy be your confidence. And right now, while you’re young, make sure you keep doing this: let your heart cheer you!

Stewarding today wisely cannot set you up for failure tomorrow.

And look closely. The verse doesn’t say, “Let your heart be cheerful.” It says, “Let your heart cheer you.” See the difference? “Let your heart be cheerful” might get you waiting for outward advantages. But “let your heart cheer you” alerts you to your inner resource, whatever is going on around you.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry

Ray Ortlund

Meditating on Ecclesiastes 11:9–10, Pastor Ray Ortlund encourages readers to set aside our dour limitations and joyfully embrace the many good gifts God lavishes upon this world.

Your heart, confident in Christ, can grow into a happy force. “Let your heart cheer you” is emphatic, even defiant. Grab onto that wisdom! Christ died and rose again to give it to you, free for the taking. Your new journey with him begins here and now, in your present circumstances. Good. If the better life you want was always out in your future, you couldn’t rejoice now. The present moment always feels incomplete, distant from that life you were hoping for. So God wisely flips it.

I’ll state it as a question: What if your okay-ness will never be found in your dreams coming true, out there in your impressive future? What if you turn around and look back? What if the measure of your okay-ness, moment by moment, is where your life is coming from—namely, from God’s grace? The book of Ecclesiastes helps you stop waiting for what you might achieve and start enjoying what God is giving. That is wisdom. It frees you from pinning your hopes on how grandiose you might become and helps you give thanks for how generous God is—this very moment.¹

Okay then. Your ordinary right-now is where the word rejoice fits. How could it be otherwise? God gave you you. God thinks your life is worth living, and he knows a thing or two. Maybe you’re not a star on social media. But since when does this clueless world have any idea who you really are? God is caring for you, and he will never leave you nor forsake you (Heb. 13:5).

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Here’s a true story about God’s presence in a real life, a hard life.

In 1851 Richard Williams was a young surgeon and missionary on his way to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. His ship was forced to winter in a cold and bitter bay. The supply vessel was delayed. It arrived too late.

Williams, along with everyone on his ship, died of cold and starvation. In his last journal entry, he wrote this: “Should anything prevent my ever adding to this, let all my beloved ones at home rest assured that I was happy beyond description when I wrote these lines and would not have changed situations with any man living.”² Williams’s heart was cheering him. Only Jesus can do that. When your supply ship doesn’t arrive and your surroundings press hard on you, he can come to you with his felt presence.

He can make you decisive, settled, bold—and even “happy beyond description.”

Solomon, writing Ecclesiastes 11:9 as an old man—he has seen everything—he is looking you straight in the eyes and quietly saying, “Real happiness? For you? Yes. And I mean this with every fiber of my being.”

God’s Creation, Our Sin, God’s Grace

Here then is how you roll with this verse. You get traction by backing up to a prior truth. It’s a truth no mood of yours can change and no trend in this world can defeat.

Here it is: God made you. And when God made you, he was having a good day.³

Let that truth sink in. It means God himself has something at stake in your existence. He has a purpose for you, a calling for you to fulfill. It means your foundational, God-created you—your personality, your body, your abilities, your individuality—the you God created is not a problem but a strategy. You exist as you for nothing less than the display of God’s glory here in his world. You—yes, you—are essential to God’s plan for your generation. If you were not essential, God would not have created you. You’re here for a good reason. I’m not talking about your job. I’m thinking about your destiny. God’s purpose for you will outlast the whole world. Let your heart cheer you with that ennobling realization. And never give up!⁴

God’s purpose for you will outlast the whole world. Let your heart cheer you with that ennobling realization.

But maybe you’re thinking, Whoa whoa whoa, Ray! You’re forgetting something. What about my sin, my mess, my damaged self? Good point. You are sinful—almost as bad as me! Christian teaching helps us to stay honest at two levels.

One is “original sin.” The doctrine of original sin means we are flawed in our very origins. The evil within isn’t a problem we picked up as kids in school. Our sin is more like a birth defect. And this disability we’re all born with goes all the way back to Adam (Rom. 5:12–21). We’re like the movie character Jason Bourne—the assassin with amnesia trying to figure out who he was. But the more he discovered, the worse his story became. For us too, there is something deeply wrong with us—dead wrong. Let’s be sobered.

Our other sad reality is “total depravity.” The doctrine of total depravity means that everything about us, at all levels, all the time, is corrupted (Rom. 3:9–18). We never have a perfect moment. If sin were color-coded, like yellow police tape at a crime scene, then everything about us would glow yellow constantly—including me as I’m writing, and you as you’re reading. Sin bleeds into even our best moments. Let’s be humbled.⁵

And what isn’t true is the make-believe naiveté of our modern world—that we all have these golden butterfly hearts inside, so innocent, so deserving of approval. And naturally, everyone is going to heaven when they die, right? You and I aren’t buying that dream anymore. Now we know:

Nothing is so beautiful, so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy as the good. No deserts are so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm.⁶

Ecclesiastes obliterates that glib fantasy with this hard reality: “The hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts” (Eccl. 9:3).

Our sin is real. And we can’t bootstrap ourselves out. The Son of God had to live a virtuous life for us. He had to die an atoning death for us. Our sin is that serious. But Ecclesiastes 11:9 still says, “Let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth.” Why? We are sinful, but we are not worthless, not trash, not godforsaken. Not at all.

The gospel does not begin with Genesis 3 and Adam’s fall. The gospel begins with Genesis 1 and God’s goodness in creation and our dignity as his image-bearers.⁷ And because God created us for the display of his glory, our sin is like a squatter in a palace (Rom. 7:20). That filthy intruder has no right to be in there. He keeps making messes every day. And we can’t kick him out by our own willpower. But the space he’s wrongly occupying is a palace, built by and for the King! Yes, let’s confess our appalling sins. But let’s also rejoice in this: We still matter to God. His purpose for you and for me holds firm. His gospel promises to restore our glory even better than before. And on our way there, he is giving us lives truly worth enjoying.

Here then are these two gospel truths, side by side: God’s goodness, our sin. And God’s goodness is the bigger, wraparound truth. So, let’s hold both truths together. It’s our God-given wisdom for ruggedly cheerful integrity, moment by moment.

Notes:

Eric Ortlund’s commentary, Ecclesiastes (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024), is helping me understand this wisdom from Ecclesiastes.
I thank Pattie Dixie of the South American Mission Society in Britain for providing a record of these events.
It reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton said about a birthday: “The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive. . . . In being glad about my birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about.” See Melanie, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Chesterton!” Reforming the Line (blog), May 29, 2021, https://reformingtheline.wordpress.com/.
Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (W Publishing, 1998), 54: “Do you want the best and most wonderful gifts God has given you to decay, spent on your own self? Or do you want them to be set free to come into their own as you link your profoundest abilities with your neighbor’s need and the glory of God? Listen to Jesus of Nazareth; answer his call.”
See Addison H. Leitch, Interpreting Basic Theology (Channel, 1961), 71–72.
Simone Weil, quoted in Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society, ed. Geoffrey Barlow, (Eerdmans, 1985), 91–92.
We should not draw a line separating Genesis 1–2 from Genesis 3 and the rest of the Bible. It is all one gospel narrative. Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator (Baker Academic, 2017), 23: “Given the wisdom, goodness and power of the creator God, creation and the history of redemption (and thus eschatology as well) are inextricably linked.”

This article is adapted from Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: A Gospel Call to Bold Enjoyment by Ray Ortlund.

Ray Ortlund is the president of Renewal Ministries, the pastor to pastors at Immanuel Church in Nashville, and a canon theologian with the Anglican Church in North America. He is the author of several books, including Marriage and the Mystery of the Gospel; The Death of Porn; and the Preaching the Word commentaries on Isaiah and Proverbs. He is also a contributor to the ESV Study Bible. Ray and his wife, Jani, have been married for fifty years.

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