Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback to ever play the game of football, as five Super Bowl rings can attest.  After he won his third Super Bowl, Brady was interviewed by 60 Minutes. In an incredibly candid moment, he told the guy interviewing him, "There's got to be more to life than this, isn't there?"  Something is missing. Success isn’t enough.  Money isn’t enough.  Why? Because life is not satisfying. Life is not perfect. 

Anyone who is seeking to squeeze full value, meaning, and purpose from this life is perennially frustrated.  Someone has said that every one of us walks around the Earth with a can of peaches, and Jesus is the only one with a can opener. We're just frustrated.

In verse 8, Solomon says that the things we want most in this life, apart from God, will eventually weary us upon reflection. “All things are wearisome,” he says. “Man is unable to tell it. The eye is not satisfied, nor is the ear filled with hearing.” In other words, what we desire can't fulfill us. What we get delights us less and less.

The historian Sir Arnold Toynbee said that of the 21 greatest civilizations in the history of the world, ours is the first and the only one that does not teach its citizens why they exist.  Why not? Because we don't know. We don't know where we came from.  We don't know where we're going. We don't know why we're here. We've missed the big E on the eye chart. We go to school. We go to work. We get married and have kids. We spend money. We pay taxes. We drive cars. We get frustrated. We get happy. We get sad. We get busy.  We get bored. We don't know why. And then we die.  As Solomon said, life moves quickly; you blink and it's gone.

That's the message of Ecclesiastes. You can be rich. You can be smart. You can be successful. And you can even be significant.  But you'll never be satisfied apart from God.  We don't need to be significant. We don't need to be successful. We don't need to be rich. We don't need to be smart. Bu we do need God.  He’s all we need.

We can learn something from Solomon.  What he is saying is this: If you consider this life apart from God, you’ll see that there's no hope.  But that very hopelessness—the futility of any other approach to life, should lead us to the only hope—God our Savior.