Ecclesiastes 11:1-5

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Ecclesiastes — iconic scene

Service recording Sunday 13th September looking at Ecclesiastes.

Watch the service — 13 September 2026

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Chapters

Ecclesiastes 11:1-5

Scripture Readings

Let’s open the Word of God together. Today’s New Testament reading comes from Matthew, chapter 19, picking up from verse 27.

Then Peter said to Him, “Behold, we have left everything and followed You; what then will there be for us?” And Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms for My name’s sake, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last; and the last, first.”

Please open your Bibles with me, or your devices, turn them on for this occasion, or cast your eyes to the front. Five verses really today, just concentrating down on verse one, but we’ll read all five. Ecclesiastes chapter 11, verses one through five.

Cast your bread on the surface of the waters, for you will find it after many days. Divide your portion to seven, or even to eight, for you do not know what misfortune may occur on the earth. If the clouds are full, they pour out rain upon the earth; and whether a tree falls toward the south or toward the north, wherever the tree falls, there it lies. He who watches the wind will not sow and he who looks at the clouds will not reap. Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones are formed in the womb of a pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things.

Opening Prayer

Father, again, as we open Your Word together, we pray, Lord, that You would speak to us. Lord, perhaps there is something here that we’ve learned in the past but, Lord, needs to be reconfirmed to our hearts. Perhaps, Lord, there’s something new here that we haven’t thought of before. But we pray that we might not just hear it, but make application of it, having understood it. We ask, Lord, that You’ll be with us. We ask that You’d pour Your Spirit out on us as we do so, because, Lord, our eyes need to be continually opened to the glorious truth and the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Looking Back: Watch, Think, and Speak Carefully

Just a quick reminder of last week. We were looking at chapter 10. And I know that we didn’t finish chapter 10, but the rest of chapter 10, the bit that we didn’t cover, has been covered previously by some of the things that we’ve said. And if there’s something new that we need to go back to, we can. So, I wanted to begin looking at chapter 11 today.

Remember, we’re in the overall series of, how do we measure a man? How do we measure ourselves in terms of our lives and our conduct? And are we representing in our lives and in our conduct the Lord that we have chosen to name, whom we serve? That is the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, even being God.

And so, remember that previously we talked last week about how, as believers, we should be careful. We should watch carefully, we should think carefully, and we should speak carefully in our lives. We need to be guarded in all of those sorts of things. We need to watch, we need to take care in all that we do. Complacency can be our enemy. We don’t want to be a complacent people, but it’s easy, particularly if things are going well, that we become complacent, and we don’t want to do that.

We need to think ahead, to assess the consequences of what we do. Remember the Lord told the parable about the man that talked about building a tower. And what man goes to build a tower or build a building but doesn’t first of all determine that he’s got the means to be able to finish it? And that’s important as well. We need to be proactive rather than reactive in our lives. So much of our lives is just reactive. You know, we get really busy, and what happens is that something happens, so we react to it. But really, we should be more thoughtful than that as believers. And we ought to be proactive in what we do rather than reactive. In other words, we should be more planning and purposeful about what we do in our Christian lives.

And remember also that a person’s finest achievements can also be their biggest downfalls. Brothers and sisters, I’ve seen that so much in many people, many, many fine people. But even their finest points, even their greatest attributes as people, are very often the things that are their downfall. And so, we must remember that. You’ve all got good gifts. You’ve all got good abilities, I know that. But remember that it is those gifts and it is those abilities that may get you into the biggest trouble in life. And so, recall that.

So, we need to think carefully as well. Good preparation saves time and energy. Keep the axe sharp, as the passage said. Use your head, not your strength, in life. You can’t work hard enough and do enough in this life. Life is too short. It goes by so quickly. We need to be people that are head-driven rather than people that are strength-driven, because we’re all stronger; well, some are stronger than others, so perhaps that’s something.

We need to be careful in what we speak. Let our words be full of grace. There’s power in the way that we speak. Sometimes we can be hurt by just a single word, and so we must be careful when we’re talking to one another and be careful that we are not speaking discouragement rather than encouragement. We need to be building up, not destroying, with our words. We need to give life, not cause death, by our words.

And then we mentioned especially that thing called gossip. Gossip is something that comes from the very depths of hell. It happens in families, and it happens in churches, but we must be very, very careful that we are not gossiping. In other words, that we’re not saying something about someone else that we could not or would not say in their presence. I’ve never seen anything more damaging in a church or in a family than gossip, and it can be very, very hurtful, and comes out of the very pit of hell. We must remember that in Proverbs 17:9 Solomon said, he who conceals a transgression seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates intimate friends. And it’s a very, very powerful thing to do if you want to separate people: you know, spread a little bit of a word, or a bad thing about somebody. And we must be guarding against that in the church all the time. Be very, very careful.

Cast Your Bread on the Waters

Anyway, that’s enough really of an introduction to the time that we want to spend together. And so, I want to just zero in really on the one verse, that if we cast our bread upon the waters, it will return to us. Just that verse one. So I want to zero in on this: cast your bread on the surface of the waters, for you will find it after many days.

Now, I don’t know about you, but this sort of language is a bit confusing to me for a starter, and I was thinking about feeding the ducks. I don’t know about you, but we go down to the local Hutt River, and there’s always a lot of ducks there, and they’re always coming up, and they always want to know what you’ve got for them. And some people come down, the ducks know the people that are the weak links, and they bring bread down on a daily basis to the edge of the water, and they throw it out, and the ducks get them. This passage is not talking about feeding the ducks. That’s the first thing that we can say about it.

It’s not talking about feeding the ducks, but it is talking more about sowing seed, the sowing of the seed. So, what happens is that if you’re along a river in ancient times, and even in some countries today, the rivers are up in the winter times, and then as the spring comes on the river starts to decline a little bit, and it leaves a sort of a shallow pool beside the edge of where the river is, and under that pool is a nice, fertile silt lens.

And so, what the ancients used to do was that they used to throw their corn seed on the water, and then the water would swell the seeds, the seeds would sink to the bottom, the river would carry on receding, and you’d be left with a seed that has been planted beside the river, but in the fertile silt loams beside the river. And so when it’s talking about cast your bread on the surface of the water, it’s really talking about the corn seed that you plant by the waters, and on the surface of the waters, and then when they go down, they plant and then they grow. A bit like today in many countries, they grow rice in a similar sort of way, don’t they? You talk about the rice paddy fields and stuff like that.

And so that’s really what we’re talking about here. In other words, we should be sowing the seed rather than grinding it up and making bread of it. Because if you’ve got a kilogram of seed and you grind it up, that’s what you have: a kilogram of bread. However, if you take that kilogram, and we’re talking in kilos here because we’re a modern lot, but if you have a kilogram of seed and you sow it, it’s going to grow, and it’s going to multiply, and it’s going to give you a return that is going to be far more than what you would have had if you took that same seed and you ground it up and made bread of that particular seed. That’s what we’re talking about.

It’ll Never Grow in the Sack

Now, it says here that we should cast it, that we should throw it out. Of course, otherwise it’s not going to grow. My old step-grandad apparently used to say this. I didn’t know him very well, particularly when he could speak. When I was a very little boy, and I’m talking about three years old, he had a severe stroke, and so he never spoke after that, and he lived for about another 10 years after that, and I can recall him as an elderly gentleman that didn’t walk, didn’t talk, but had a lot of mobility issues and stuff like that because he had a severe stroke.

But one of his favourite sayings, which was passed on by my dad, who was always fond of passing on words of wisdom, he used to talk about Grandad saying, he says, it’ll never grow in the sack. It’ll never grow in the sack. And he’s talking about planting seed. It won’t grow in the sack, because if it’s in the sack, it’s in a dry spot. It’s in storage. Take it out, sow it in the field. In other words, cast it. Cast it out.

A Boomerang That Wouldn’t Come Back

Now, this reminded me somewhat of another instance of when I was a youngster. In the days when I was a young fella, during the summer months we didn’t have to get up very early to go and feed the sheep on Sunday so that we could get to church. Sundays were very often much earlier than even the rest of the times, because we had to get up, and we had to feed the sheep, and we had to do all of our jobs before we would gather up as a family and then go to church. And we were always quarter of an hour early, because my mother would murder us if we were ever late. And so, you know, it’s very important that you get there on time. That’s the winter months, when we had to feed the stock. We were like that.

In the summer months, though, it was much easier on a Sunday morning. And sometimes my mum and dad would like to lie in bed and relax and have a cup of coffee in bed, and what they didn’t want is their children disturbing them. You know, you all know what that means, don’t you? That means that you’ve got to find something else for the kids to do to keep them occupied.

And what we used to do is, some of you that are old enough will know, they used to turn the radio on for us, and we had what we called the Sunday Morning Request Show for Children. And there were all sorts of things going on there. You could listen to stories about Bad jelly the Witch, if you were into Spike Milligan. You could listen to stories about Flick, the little fire engine. You know, I’m a little fire engine, Flick is my name. That’s the sort of things that we used to listen to in those days. This is not a tablet or a computer. Today, you know, I know what you do, you parents. You give your child a computer and a tablet, and you say, go play and leave me alone. But in the days when we had just the radio, that’s what we had. And we had Flick the little fire engine. We had Toot the tug engine, and we had all sorts of good stories like that. Man, it’s just a blast of memories.

Anyway, the one I wanted to tell you about was a song sung by a popular artist at the time, called My Boomerang Won’t Come Back. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard it, but the gist of the story, I’m not going to sing it because that would be wrong. But basically, it’s a story about a little Australian Aborigine child whose boomerang wouldn’t come back. Now, you know what a boomerang is. You all know what a boomerang is. It’s something that those peoples in Australia used to use to go around killing kangaroos. Those of you that are from Australia, you used to know this. He used to throw it, and he used to wallop the kangaroo behind the ear, and, well, you had your dinner.

So anyway, this was a little song about the fact that the boomerang didn’t come back. And anyway, the old elder of the tribe answered the question. He says, well, why doesn’t my boomerang come back? And the guy says, in the song, he says, well, if you want your boomerang to come back, you first have got to throw it.

That’s the story. But it reminded me of that when I’m here. If you want to receive a blessing, if you want to appreciate that which is given to us, you’ve got to cast the seed. You’ve got to do it.

Why We Don’t Cast the Seed

And sometimes we’re not really good at casting the seed. We’ve got issues, haven’t we, often? We don’t want to cast seed in life. And really, we can start talking here about the spiritual lessons. There’s one thing about casting actual seed. But when we start talking about casting seed in the spiritual sense, we’re talking about sharing words and our lives with those around us, serving and praying for those around us. Why don’t we throw our prayers, as it were, into heaven? Why don’t we serve one another as we ought to do?

Well, I was thinking about it, and there’s a few reasons why that could well be the case. The first is that we don’t always see immediate results. Is that not the truth? We’re geared, if we do something, if we pray something, if we think of doing something, we’re geared to think that there has to be an immediate result to that. But life’s just not like that. But we know that’s the reason why we don’t cast, as it were, the seed of prayer and the seed of good works to those around us: it’s that we don’t see immediate results, and we like to think that we’re going to get immediate results.

Sometimes we don’t cast it because we don’t feel adequate, or we don’t feel good enough to do that. Or perhaps we don’t do it because we’re not sure of success, and we think that if we’re not successful, then we’re somehow not as big or as important as we think that we might be. It could be that we’re too lazy. It could be that we’d rather eat our blessings now rather than wait for later.

But listen, as Enyabnai said years ago, you can’t reap what you don’t sow. You can’t reap in life what you don’t sow. Jesus talks about this in Luke 6:38. He says this: give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you in return.

A Generous People

The second thing that’s worth noting is that this particular text teaches us to be a generous people. You know, what should characterise us as believers? What should people know when they think about a church such as ours, or about you as individuals or your families? What is the first thing that would come to their mind about us? Is it because we’re theologically correct? Is it because we hold the Bible as central, and we hold it as authoritative, and we hold it as sufficient? What do people think about us when they think about us collectively as a church, or maybe as individuals?

Well, I suggest to you that perhaps one of the best things they could think about us is that we are a generous people, that we are generous. Doing more, sowing more so that we can reap more, because that would make us like our Father in heaven, who, by the way, sends the rain not just on the just, not just on the godly, but on the unjust and the godless as well.

It could be that we should take more notice of Jesus when He’s teaching on the Sermon on the Mount, that if somebody wants to sue you for your shirt, we should give our cloak to them as well. If someone wants you to walk one mile, you should walk two. Not because you have to walk two, but because you’d be generous to be able to do that. We should perhaps lend more to those that are in need, because we have plenty.

Or we should be like Zacchaeus. Remember that small man who was climbing the tree to see who Jesus was? And when Jesus said to him, Zacchaeus, come down, today I must eat with you in your house, Zacchaeus promised that, on being converted to the Lord and to the kingdom, he would pay back double all of that which he had taken previously. He was a generous little man.

No Word Spoken for Christ’s Sake Is Wasted

No word or action taken or spoken for Christ’s sake will ever be wasted. There’s a lovely passage, and I know some of you will know it, in Isaiah 55, verses 10 and 11, the sum of which is, My word will never return to Me void. In other words, every word that you and I speak, every action and every task of generosity which we perform, is a word that we speak for Christ’s sake, is an action that we live for Christ’s sake, and it will go out and it will achieve everything that God intended it to achieve through us.

We are but just His instruments. Poor instruments, actually, but instruments whom God has promised to use. And He says, look, He says, My word won’t ever return to Me void. In other words, I will achieve everything which I intended to achieve through your words and through your lives. And never mind that many times in life there is not an immediate return.

Jesus tells another story about an individual who was the slave of a man, and he was out toiling in the fields. And he comes back in, and would the owner of the slave say to him, look, go and have your own food, go and do your own thing and then come back and see me? No, He says; in those times it would have been uncommon for that to happen. He says what would happen is that the slave would come in and he would work to prepare a meal for his owner, and that would have been the right way around to do so.

And so, a culture foreign to us. But, you know, in our egalitarian society in which we live, it’s hard for us to grasp that sort of idea. But in those days a slave would have attended to his master. And then He goes on to say, he would only be doing that which he should be doing anyway. The words that we speak, the lives that we live, the actions that we take in our lives, we should only be doing anyway, whether we receive praise, adulation, or applause, regardless of all of those things.

So, we’re not in it for that. We’re in it for God’s glory, not for our glory, not for what we get out of doing it. And so as Christians, I assure you, and it’s happened many times to me, I can tell you, that you put it out there, you’ve given, you have been generous perhaps, or perhaps you have gone out of your way to help someone, but there is no return, particularly immediate. There will be a return, but it may wait until heaven.

It could be that we do what we ought to do, not because we have to, but because we ought to, regardless of what we get out of that. There will be no loss in the end. The passage that we read from Matthew in chapter 19: Jesus is talking to His disciples and He said, well, you need to come and you need to follow Me, but it’s going to be a cost to it. But listen, He says, nobody that has left their houses, their brothers, their sisters, their fathers, their mothers, their children, or even their farms for Christ’s sake, will they not receive many times more, and will they not inherit eternal life?

Cast your bread upon the waters. In due time, in due time, you will be repaid many, many more times in your life. The first shall be last, He finishes, and the last shall be first.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You again for Your Word and the encouragement it is to us. Lord, help us to be a people that are generous. Help us to be a people that care about others more than we care about ourselves. Help us, Lord, to not be reticent or backward in sowing the seed of the Word of God, and in living the Word of God in the lives that we live, so that others might see us and glorify our Father in heaven.

Help us to be generous and to be loving and to be kind, and to generously cast our seed, our bread, upon the waters. Help us, Lord, to do that, and to wait for a large return on what we do. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.