Silence the Noise: What Ecclesiastes 5 Says About Approaching God

The average adult in the U.S. sees more than 4,000 ads a day. In a city, that number climbs closer to 10,000. Add in roughly 7 hours of screen time a day, outside of work and school, and it's no wonder we're exhausted. We are surrounded by voices competing for our attention, all day, every day.

American podcast listeners rack up over 800 million hours of content a week. Globally, we watch more than 650 billion hours of YouTube every year, about a billion hours a day. We fill every quiet moment with something: a podcast in the car, a video while doing dishes, music in the background at work. Silence makes a lot of us uncomfortable.

Here's what caught my attention recently: those same years that saw this explosion of noise also saw a shift in church attendance. From 2021 to 2023, 44 percent of Protestant Christians attended worship weekly or nearly every week, but 43 percent attended seldom or never. Those numbers are almost equal. And the fastest growing group isn't the weekly attenders. It's the once a month crowd.

Go back 30 years and "active church member" meant something like four or more times a month: Sunday school, Sunday morning, Sunday night, and a midweek Bible study. Ten to twenty years ago that dropped to two or three times a month. Today it's one or two.

I think these trends are connected. We live in a world where the best sermons, the best Bible teaching, the best worship music are all a click away. So why show up? Why give real, sustained attention to God and to a local body of believers when you can offload that connection to a screen whenever it's convenient? I think our noise problem and our engagement problem are the same problem. And Ecclesiastes 5 has something to say about it.

Guard Your Steps

Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 marks a turn in the book. Up to this point, the Teacher has been looking outward, searching for meaning in wealth, pleasure, and knowledge, and calling it all fleeting. Here, he looks upward.

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Better to draw near to listen than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil.

"Steps" here isn't about literal footwork. It's about lifestyle, about how you're actually living. The question isn't just "did you show up," but "what did you bring with you?" Are you coming out of habit, or are you actually paying attention?

The Teacher gives us three ways to guard our steps.

1. Draw Near to Listen

In Hebrew, "listen" and "obey" are the same word. There's no difference between them. So when the Teacher says to draw near and listen, he means come prepared to actually change.

There's an old saying: Sunday morning begins on Saturday night. Are you staying up too late? Do you know what you're wearing? Have you looked ahead at what's being preached, what songs you'll sing? Are you preparing your heart during the week, not just showing up empty on Sunday?

This echoes a moment from 1 Samuel 15, where King Saul gets impatient and offers a sacrifice he wasn't authorized to make. When the prophet Samuel confronts him, he asks, "Does the Lord take pleasure in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord?" The point lands the same way in Ecclesiastes: God isn't impressed by the performance of religion. He wants obedience. You can bring your Bible, underline every verse, and take copious notes, but if nothing in your life actually changes, what was the point?

This also de-centers our egos. Maybe the room was too cold, the song didn't sound like the radio version, or the sermon ran long. Here's the truth: it was never about you. When we gather to worship, God is the audience. We are not.

Silent reverence beats rambling religious jargon every time. Better to keep quiet and actually listen than to fill the air with the kind of language that sounds spiritual but means nothing. As Daryl Tippens writes in Pilgrim Heart, "It may well be that the deepest form of prayer begins when we run out of things to say."

Think about a long marriage. Early on, you talk for hours, you can't get off the phone. Years later, some of the best moments are the quiet ones, sitting together and just knowing. That's how it can be with God. You don't need to fill every silence with words. Sometimes prayer just means listening.

When young Samuel heard God calling his name in the night, Eli told him what to say: "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." If you don't know what to pray, start there. Say it, mean it, and then stop talking long enough to actually listen.

2. Fulfill Your Vows

The Teacher shifts to promises made to God:

When you make a vow to God, do not delay fulfilling it, because he does not delight in fools. Fulfill what you vow.

A vow in this sense is a voluntary, binding commitment, an act of consecration. Nobody forces you to make one. But once you do, God holds you to it.

We're full of good intentions. We'll start the diet, save the money, lead the Bible study, show up every week, and then life happens and we quietly let it slide. The Teacher's warning is blunt: don't let your mouth write a check your life can't cash. It's better not to vow at all than to vow and break it.

Jesus tells a similar story in Matthew 21 about two sons. One says no to his father and then goes and does the work anyway. The other says yes and never shows up. The son who obeyed is the one who initially said no but changed his mind, not the one who talked a good game.

A.W. Tozer put it sharply: "Christians don't tell lies. They just go to church and sing them." Think about the songs we sing without a second thought. "I surrender all." "We cast down our idols." Do we mean it? Are we willing to go home and actually reevaluate what we've put ahead of God, or are the words just words?

3. Fear God

The passage closes with two words: fear God.

This isn't dread of punishment so much as awe-filled reverence, the kind that presses toward obedience rather than away from it. God is holy, meaning he is set apart, other, completely unlike us. And yet he is also Father, close and intimate, running out to meet us the way the father ran to the prodigal son. Both are true at once.

Hebrews 10:31 doesn't soften this: "It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God." Our commitment to Christ isn't something to enter lightly, and once we make it, God holds us to a higher standard. Not because he's harsh, but because he takes us seriously and wants us to take him seriously in return.

Let Your Words Be Few

So what does guarding your steps actually look like? Come prepared. Watch what you sing, because you might be held to it. Watch what you promise. Don't fill the silence with noise just because silence feels uncomfortable.

"God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few."

There's a moment in Revelation where a seal is opened and heaven goes silent for thirty minutes. If that's what awaits us, maybe we can practice it now. Not with a pile of words, but with a heart set on listening and obeying.

If you don't know where to start, try this: Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

Then be quiet long enough to hear the answer.

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