Does Life Have a Purpose?

We hope that you enjoy this teaching from Christ Church.

This material is copyrighted and no unauthorized duplication, redistribution, or any other

use of any part is permitted without prior consent from Christ Church.

Please consider donating to this work in the San Francisco Bay Area online at ChristChurchEastBay.org.

Today's scripture readings are from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verses 1 through

Ecclesiastes 1 · chapter mention

18, chapter 3, verses 10 and 11, and chapter 12, verses 13 and 14, as printed in the liturgy.

A reading from the book of Ecclesiastes.

The words of the teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem.

Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher.

Utterly meaningless, everything is meaningless.

What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south and turns to the north.

Round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.

And to the place the streams come from, there they return again.

All things are wearisome, more than one can say.

The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again.

What has been done will be done again.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say, look, this is something new.

It was here already, long ago.

It was here before our time.

No one remembers the former generations.

And even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

I, the teacher, was king over Israel and Jerusalem.

I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens.

What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind.

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun.

All of them are meaningless.

A chasing after the wind.

What is crooked cannot be straightened.

What is lacking cannot be counted.

I said to myself, look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me.

I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.

Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom and also of madness and folly.

But I learned that this too is a chasing after the wind.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The more knowledge, the more grief.

I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.

He has made everything beautiful in its time.

He has also set eternity in the human heart.

Yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

Now all has been heard.

Here is the conclusion of the matter.

Fear God and keep his commandments.

For this is the duty of all mankind.

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Good morning, Christ Church.

It is so good to see you all.

And as Andrew said, especially if you are new with us for this Explore God journey,

if you've come along with a friend or received an invitation, we're delighted you're here.

We do hope that you've already been warmly welcomed.

And that you know this is a place where you can belong, whatever your spiritual or cultural background,

wherever you may be on that spectrum of belief or unbelief.

And we're excited to engage with you, explore God with you, and learn from you.

And if you're part of our Christ Church family, we just encourage you to take this.

The reason we gave it to you today is so you can give it to somebody else and invite them,

a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker along on this journey with us.

We have very busy lives, don't we?

And there's so many questions that we ask ourselves every day.

Like tomorrow morning, we're going to wake up and say, what should I wear?

And what's the weather going to be like today?

And what's happening at work?

And how am I going to fit it all in?

But there's also these questions that are bigger, right?

Like, why am I here?

And where are we heading?

And is this it?

And is there more to life than this?

These are life's big questions, but we rarely have the time to think through them properly.

And so that's why we're going to think seriously over the next seven weeks about these big questions of life.

And we're going to begin today with this question, does life have a purpose?

What's the meaning of life?

And in the coming weeks, we're going to explore other questions.

Is there a God?

Why does God allow pain and suffering?

Is Christianity too narrow?

Is Jesus really God?

Is the Bible reliable?

And can I know God personally?

And if you're like me, you hear those questions, you're like, well, I have like 20 more questions.

And so, as Andrew said, we do invite you to our Q&A time at the end.

And go easy on me, though, because it's kind of new for us.

When asked whether people think about the meaning and purpose of life, nearly three-quarters of people across the globe say that they do think about that question often or sometimes.

And if you were to ask me, is there a book of the Bible that really devotes itself to this search for purpose and for meaning?

And particularly that takes seriously the possibility that life may not have a meaning and that life may not have an actual purpose.

And a book that explores the consequences of that possibility.

I would have to say it's the book of Ecclesiastes that you just heard.

And I leaned to my daughter as I was being read.

I said, did you even know this is in the Bible?

She's like, no, I've never heard this in my life.

Meaningless, meaningless.

Everything is meaningless.

How can that possibly be meaningful?

And who in the world is this teacher?

Well, this teacher in this book, he's a parent who's trying to prepare his kids to live wisely.

And so he shares with his children his own agonizing struggle between skepticism and faith.

He says, look, I've already been there and done that.

And let me share with you this agonizing struggle that I've had between the absurdity of my existence and the fear of God.

Skepticism and faith.

And what we find is this book is full of skeptical questions.

And this teacher is really pushing his kids and he's pushing us to the logical conclusion of our positions.

He's trying to lay bare the foundations of our life and explore the boundaries of our thought.

And he says to us relentlessly, well, why do you believe that?

And do you know what that means?

And have you thought about the implications of your beliefs?

And this is a book that it does in the end, as you just heard, it affirms a faith in a generous God.

But it does so first by pointing us to the grim alternative of life without God.

And it really asks us to consider that.

What is life without God all about?

Before it tells us what the purpose and the meaning of life is, it seeks to clarify for us what the meaning and purpose of life is not.

And so that's what we're going to explore a little bit together.

Okay?

You ready?

I want to talk about the meaning crisis under the sun.

The problem with self-made meanings and meaning above and beyond the sun.

Those three things.

The meaning crisis under the sun.

The problem with self-made meanings and meaning above and beyond the sun.

And I want to start by talking about the meaning crisis under the sun.

And I want you to hear again these words in verse 3.

What does anyone gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

And then he says in verse 14,

I have seen all the things that are done under the sun.

All of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

And this is a key word in this book is life under the sun.

He uses that phrase 29 times.

Just repeats it over and over.

And in that, the teacher is basically saying, let's do this.

This is a thought experiment.

Let's assume that nature, that material reality is all there is.

And let's bracket out for a moment anything that could possibly be above and beyond the sun.

Let's just say that there's no God who created you.

No one who's sustaining you.

No lawgiver, no judge, no heaven, no eternity, no afterlife.

And in this framework of all that's done merely under the sun,

he asks some questions.

What do we gain and profit from all of our labors?

And when all is said and done, what are we going to have to show for it all?

What will we have accomplished?

What difference will we have made in this life under the sun?

And then his answer to that question 37 times throughout this book,

it's just relentless, he says everything,

when you consider life only under the sun,

everything is utterly meaningless.

Everything he says literally in Hebrew, he says it's vapor.

It's a puff of air, it's just a breath that's here and then it's gone.

And that's the theme of this whole book.

And really the teacher's first goal is to get his kids and to get us to be realists.

And to face the fact that life under the sun is vaporous

and it's despairing and it's meaningless and it's absurd.

And in many ways, I can't think of a more contemporary book that if this teacher were here today,

he'd be critiquing the default belief system that's emerging in our culture,

which is secularism.

And I think it's captured very well in this article by James Wood in The New Yorker.

James Wood is a Harvard professor and he's a professor of English,

he's a literary critic and he's writing, really quoting a friend of his

who's an analytical philosopher and a convinced atheist

who wakes up regularly in the middle of the night haunted by a visceral angst.

And he's quoting his friend and he says,

how can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang?

How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose?

Can it be that every life beginning with my own, my husband's, my child's,

and spreading outward is cosmically irrelevant?

And then Wood, who's a secular man himself,

he admits that as one gets older and parents and peers begin to die

and the obituaries and the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place,

but local letters and one's own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral.

Such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing

and I find as likely to arise in the middle of the day as in the night.

It's a great article, it's called,

Is This All There Is, Secularism and Its Discontents?

And I want us to consider for a moment the belief structure of strict secularism.

And the beliefs of secularism are basically these,

that people are only physical entities without souls,

that when your loved ones die they cease to exist,

that our sensations of love and beauty are just neurochemical events,

and that there is no right or wrong outside of what we choose in our minds.

And that secularism tends to really flatten and reduce human life

so that as one author puts it,

all of our getting and spending amount to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death.

Now maybe you feel that way.

Many, many people in our lives feel that way.

They have good jobs, they have family, they have friends,

they have resources to live in a materially comfortable way,

but they say that their lives feel meaningless.

And maybe that's you.

I'm not really sure what all this activity that I'm doing is being done for.

All this making and getting, I don't know if it actually matters,

if it makes a difference, if it's accomplishing anything beyond itself.

And I'm not quite sure if I have an overall purpose for living

or making a difference by serving some good beyond myself.

Maybe that resonates with some of us.

And yet, you know, many of us feel conflicted.

We feel conflicted because we intuit,

either faintly or quite strongly,

that human beings and human loves and human aspirations

can't be reduced down to mere material reality,

that there's something more than just our chemistry

and our genes and our bodies, right?

So I think this teacher and his under-the-sun thesis

is an incredibly relevant contemporary thing

that speaks to this modern meaning-shaped whole

at the center of our culture.

Right?

And over the last century,

we had many, many people writing.

Chekhov, Kafka,

Camus,

Sartre,

and they talked about this existential dread

that sort of came over

Western 20th century life

and this sense of angst and despair

and absurdity

and the nausea that ensued.

And they basically said,

we're all like Sisyphus, right?

That Greek myth where there's that guy

just rolling his rock up the hill

only to see your rock

come rolling back down at the end of the day.

We're trying so hard to do good

for the people we love

and yet we know that that good doesn't last.

We know that the people that we love don't last.

As the philosopher Bertrand Russell argued

about the secular view,

he said that all of our human labor

and love and genius

is, quote,

destined to extinction

and the vast death of the solar system

and that results henceforth

in an unyielding despair.

And I think our teacher would agree.

Our teacher's trying to help us

live for a moment

in that unyielding despair

and he's begging this question,

can purpose,

can meaning for our lives

be found only under the sun

in this here and now reality?

Like material secularism

suggests that we should try to do.

And some people shrug at that

and they say,

well, whatever.

You know, I'm not really looking for meaning.

If the universe is truly meaningless

and indifferent,

then why should we think

that it ought not to be that way?

In fact, maybe we should just celebrate

meaninglessness

and acknowledge that it's liberating,

actually,

to relinquish our expectation

that there ought to be

some kind of meaning

with a capital M.

In fact, the result

of there being no meaning

is that now it's kind of great.

We're free to determine

for ourselves

how we want to live

and we're free to construct

our own meanings, right?

And this is the great crisis

of meaning in our culture.

Some people,

modern people,

grieving our meaninglessness

and our loss of meaning.

Postmodern people,

gleefully celebrating

that we have no more meaning

and this sense

that we're cosmically irrelevant

and that we share

no more meaning in common

in our lives together

has created quite a bit

of confusion

and conflict

and chaos

that I think we've seen

increase, even,

over the last five

to ten years

in our culture.

And I think our teacher

gives us this incredibly

haunting image

that this crisis

of meaning for us

is like a chasing

after the wind.

We're trying desperately

but unsuccessfully

to grab hold

of something

that's slipping

through our fingers.

You tracking with me

on this crisis of meaning?

You feel that

in your life

and in our culture?

There's a crisis of meaning

under the sun,

our teacher says.

But then he goes on

and I want to explore

the problem

with self-made meanings

because many secular people

might respond to this

and say,

well, I have to insist

that I actually do have

a satisfying meaning

in my life.

You know, I'm seeking

to be a good parent.

I'm serving a crucial

political cause.

I tutor underprivileged youth.

I enjoy and promote

great literature.

And all this gives me

great purpose

and assurance

that I'm doing some good

beyond myself.

I'm serving some good

higher than myself.

And it's true

that, you know,

people can live

with these smaller meanings

and not feel tortured

like Kafka

and gloomy

like Camus.

And we should,

you know,

it's a good

and admirable thing

to find true purpose

and meaning

in ordinary tasks.

But I want to suggest

to you

that there's a vast difference

between assigned meanings

on the one hand

and inherent meaning

on the other.

I want you to see

and think about

this difference

between subjective meaning

that you come up with

and objective meaning

that's just there

whether you discover it

or not.

Right?

There's a difference

between created meaning

and discovered meaning.

For example,

you might determine,

well,

I'm going to live my life

for political change.

I'm going to live

for influence

in my vocational field.

I'm going to live

for happiness

in my family.

And those might serve

for you

as energizing goals.

But our teacher

would say

these kind of

self-made,

subjective,

constructed meanings

are actually quite thin

and fragile

and temporary.

And they don't really

pass the rigorous test

and really the withering test

of our teacher

because he would come to you

and he would say,

okay, great.

You're living for a project

that's larger than yourself.

You're caring for your family.

You're alleviating poverty.

But what's the point of that?

What difference does that make?

And you say,

well,

I'm trying to make the world

into a better place.

But our teacher

would keep boring down on you

and say,

but what's the point of that?

And you answer

and he says,

well,

what's the point of that?

And what's the point of that?

And what's the point of that?

And he says,

if you say,

if my meaning

is attached

to personal relationships,

the teacher would say,

well,

all those people

are going to die.

And if you say,

well,

my meaning

is invested

in future generations

and making the future world

a better place,

he would say,

but all that's going to pass away too.

He says in verse four,

generations come

and generations go.

And in verse 11,

he says,

there's no remembrance

of people of old

and even those

who are yet to come

will not be remembered

by those who follow them.

Within this secular vision

of life under the sun,

he says,

your influence

and your impact

is in the grand view

of things

going to be quite negligible.

How many of us

even remember

the names

of our great grandparents?

Some of us

can barely remember.

Think about that

for your own life.

In 50 years,

who is going

to be talking about you?

If you leave

a ton of money

behind to an organization,

maybe they named

something after you.

In 500 years though,

are they going

to be talking about you?

Maybe if you ruled

over an empire,

we might be reading

about you.

But 5,000 years from now,

are we going

to be talking about you

and even remembering

your name?

Our teacher says,

you know,

you kind of have

to tell yourself

that your self-made meaning

matters even though

you know

that the universe

is going to cool down

or collapse on itself

and when it's dying,

it's never going to care

that you even existed.

And so you have

to train yourself

as a secular person

not to ask

these meta questions

about the point

of your life.

You have to discipline

yourself not to think

about the ultimate outcome

of all that we do,

which in the secular view

of things

is sheer nothingness.

And you say,

yeah,

but I just put it

all out of my mind

and I try to focus

on the meaning

of this present moment,

but that,

what you just said

is that you get

your feeling

of meaningfulness

by a lack of rationality,

that through a suppression

of your thinking

and reflection

on the larger reality,

you can kind of

conjure up

this feeling

of meaningfulness.

And some of you say,

well, gosh, okay,

maybe humanism's

kind of not the way to go.

And some of you say,

well, I kind of actually

left this version

of humanism behind

and at some point

I just embraced

kind of a straight-up

hedonism, right?

Hedonism says,

well, I'm not going

to live anymore

for other people.

I'm now going to live

for myself.

And my main goal

in life now

is to just experience

as much pleasure

and as little pain

as possible

and hope that I die

in my sleep.

Maybe you feel this way

or maybe you know

people that live

this way,

but our teacher

would respond to that

in verse 8

and say,

well, all things

are wearisome

more than one can say.

The eye never has

enough of seeing

nor the ear

its fill of hearing.

What makes you think,

the teacher says,

that your eyes

or your ears

or any other sense

perception

that's going to take in

all those pleasure

feelings

are ever going to say,

that's enough

or I'm full.

It's never going

to satisfy.

We know that we can't

get enough dopamine.

The more dopamine

hits you get,

the more you have

to go find.

And the teacher

of Ecclesiastes,

if you keep reading

this book,

which I encourage

you to do,

he says in Ecclesiastes 2,

I tried this.

I tried shearing myself

with wine

and I built houses

for myself

and planted vineyards.

I made gardens

and parks

and planted

all kinds of

fruit trees in them.

I amassed silver

and gold for myself

and the treasure

of kings

and provinces.

I acquired male

and female singers,

even a whole

harem of women,

the delights

of a man's heart.

He says,

I denied myself

nothing my eyes desired.

I refused my heart

no pleasure.

And yet when I surveyed

all that my hands

had done

and what I'd toiled

to achieve,

everything was

meaningless.

A chasing after the wind.

Nothing was gained

under the sun.

In the secular vision

of life,

dopamine is not only

not enough,

but you have to

remind yourself

that none of the

good things you feel

have any meaning.

When you fall in love

and you're attracted

to that girl

or that guy,

it's just an accidental

collision of atoms.

Your response

to her

is only a psychic

phosphorescence

arising from the behavior

of your genes

and nothing more.

when you hear

that beautiful music

and you think

to yourself,

ah, there's such

beauty and significance

here,

you have to tell yourself

that's a pure illusion.

That the only reason

you like it

is because your nervous

system has been

irrationally conditioned

to like it.

The same goes

for hugging a child

or watching a sunset

or reading a book

and you say,

ah, this feels good.

That's just electrochemical

responses in your nerves.

And you cannot say,

I'm just going to project

my feeling of meaning

onto this senseless universe.

And you say,

okay,

well,

this is why I'm not

a humanist

and it's why I'm

no longer a hedonist.

It's why I became

at one point

an existentialist.

And I said,

well, okay,

now I'm going to

fight for justice.

I'm going to fight

against oppression.

And with Dylan Thomas,

I say,

do not go gentle

into that good night.

Rage,

rage against the dying

of the light.

Yes,

life is meaningless,

but I'm going to rage

against life

and I'm going to rage

against all that meaningless

and I'm going to hope

that I do something

to put some wrongs

in this world

to right before I die.

And our teacher

would say to you

in verse 15,

what is crooked

cannot be straightened

and what is lacking

cannot be counted.

It takes a certain

level of narcissism

to think that you

finally are going,

you've arrived

to straighten everything

in this crooked world out.

And our teacher

would say to you as well,

where do you even get

your standard

for straightness

and fullness

by which you discern

that the universe

is crooked

and lacking?

have I lost you completely?

You would have to appeal

to some authority

above yourself

and above this world

to even say

that something's wrong

with this world.

And the teacher would say,

how can you say

that your origin

is insignificant

and your destiny

is insignificant

but while I'm alive

I'm going to work

for human rights

and human justice

as if somehow

those things

are significant?

You can't say that.

How can you say

that my origin

is an accident,

my destiny

is to be annihilated

but for right now

we should all love

our neighbors

as ourselves.

Where did you get that?

And is that even

consistent

with your vision?

That actually takes

an entire giant leap

of religious faith

and some kind

of transcendent reality

to say that human beings

have some sort

of inherent specialness

or dignity

that we should do

something for them.

But isn't it

more consistent

with the secular vision

of reality

to say the strong

should devour the weak

and might makes right?

That is actually

the ethic

that goes along

with your metaphysic.

And the teacher says

in verse 18

he says,

for with much wisdom

comes much sorrow,

the more knowledge

the more grief.

He says,

maybe you just

haven't lived long enough

because the more

you live,

the more you see,

the more you know

that all of these schemes,

humanism,

hedonism,

existentialism,

all the other isms,

they've been tried

in some form

or fashion

and they've been found

wanting.

They fall apart.

They come to nothing.

They end,

he says,

in sorrow

and in grief.

And at some point,

you know,

some of you have said,

okay,

this is the worst sermon

I have ever heard

and I hate this book

of the Bible.

But,

and I get that,

it's super depressing

but we have to think about

what the meaning of life

and the purpose of life

cannot be

if we're going to discover

what it actually is.

And so we,

if you agree

that there's some sort

of meaning crisis

under the sun

and if you agree

that all these self-made meanings

are quite thin

and fragile

and temporary

and don't stand up

to these tests,

then I'd like for you

to consider

for these last few minutes

a meaning above

and beyond the sun.

Because our teacher says

in the third chapter

of this book,

he says,

I've seen the burden

God has laid

on the human race.

He's made everything

beautiful in its time.

He has also set eternity

in the human heart

yet no one can fathom

what God has done

from beginning to end.

The teacher says

your heart

is telling you something

if you'll listen

very closely.

Your heart is telling you

that there's something

more to life

than what's merely

under the sun

in the here and now

material moment.

Your heart

is longing

for justice

and for the world

to be put right.

Your heart

is longing

with a thirst

for some hidden spring

of spirituality

and mystery

and fullness

and coherence

that's beyond

the space, time

and matter continuum.

Your heart

is hungering

for love

and you know

somewhere in your being

that you're made

for other people.

And your heart

is desiring beauty

to stand

at the top

of that mountain

to be on the edge

of the ocean

to peer

into the eyes

of your beloved

and you know

in your heart

that all that justice

and all that love

and all that beauty

and all that fullness

is not meaningless.

You know that.

These are signs

that God has put

in your heart

pointing to eternity.

And more than that

God has put clues

of himself

into the world

divine fingerprints

everywhere

that cause us

to ask the question

why is there something

more than nothing?

When you think about

the fine tuning

of the universe

the speed of light

the gravitational constant

these weak

and strong

nuclear forces

and how all of that

is precisely calibrated

at one

in a trillion

trillion chance

that the universe

supports human life.

And you might say

well that's not a proof

that God exists

but I would say

it certainly seems

to be a cosmic

welcome mat

that says

I'm glad

you're here.

And this teacher

he entertains

the possibility

that life

is a tale

told by an idiot

full of sound

and fury

signifying absolutely

nothing

and maybe you believe

that.

The teacher also

you know

considers the idea

that maybe life

is a tale

told by nobody

and maybe that's

where you are

or maybe that life

is not even a tale

there's no narrative

structure to reality

you say.

But our teacher says

I thought about that

and I've actually

tried to live

by all these thin

and fragile

temporary

self-made

meanings

under the sun

and the result

in my own life

was that I became

cynical

and I became

bitter.

But what I want

you to do

my son

what I want

you to do

my daughter

what I want

all of you

to do

he says

is pay attention

to those signs

in your heart

pay attention

to all those

clues

in the world

and ask yourself

what do they mean?

He's begging

the question

is it possible

to live

a life

that's not merely

for what's

under the sun?

Is it

can we live

in a reality

that takes

into account

what's above

and beyond

the sun?

You see

our teacher's

brilliant

because he drives

us to despair

in this present

reality

and then he meets

that despair

with hope.

He drives us

to see the absurdity

of things

and then he meets

that absurdity

with meaning.

He drives us

to say

yes you're right

everything is a vapor

and then he confronts

us with the reality

of eternity

and he says

in the final chapter

of this beautiful

short book

he says

now all has been heard

here's the conclusion

of the matter

fear God

and keep his commandments

for this is the duty

of every human being

for God will bring

every deed

into judgment

including every hidden

thing whether it is

good or evil.

He says

my eyes see

that life

is meaningless

and life

is a vapor

but my heart

knows that God

is there.

My heart

knows that God

is someone

that I must deal

with.

My heart

knows that God

is somehow good

and wise

and just

and that he's

the one writing

the story of history

and the story

of my life

and so finally

finally

finally

he tells us

the real purpose

and the real meaning

of our lives

in two words

fear God

fear God

that's the conclusion

of the matter

he says

it's the summary

of the whole

Bible

stand in awe

and wonder

of this being

who is permanent

and supreme

and worthy

of your highest

esteem

stop living

by what's merely

by sight

and what's here

under the sun

start living

by faith

and what's above

and beyond the sun

this God

who is your maker

this God

who's your judge

this God

for whom you were

made to love

with all of your heart

soul

mind

and strength

now I could

land the plane

right there

and hopefully

I've gotten you

to think about

the fact that

maybe secularism

is not really the way

maybe I should consider

deism

or theism

and that would be

a good thing

but the New Testament

says that this God

who's a maker

and our judge

has not only written

these signs

in our heart

and these clues

into the world

he's the author

who wrote himself

into the story

as the main character

as Jesus Christ

who was born

in the manger

and rose from the dead

when you look

at the gospel

of John

John 1 · chapter mention

chapter 1

the opening words

of that gospel

say

in the beginning

was the logos

and the logos

was with God

and the logos

was God

and that's

an astonishing statement

it's this incredible

revolutionary claim

that Jesus Christ

he's the meaning

behind the universe

he's the reason

for life

that the universal

order of the cosmos

is in fact

an individual person

the power

that undergirds

all reality

this absolute

personal God

became human

and eternity

stepped in

to time

and he was there

and he saw us

under the sun

alienated

and cut off

from the life of God

because of our

preoccupation

with ourselves

because of our sin

and our pride

and so he came

from beyond the sun

and he became human

and he died on a cross

and on that cross

what did he say

my God

my God

why have you forsaken me

and in that moment

God himself

experienced the darkness

and the meaninglessness

of life

without God

which is the penalty

for all of our sins

Jesus got life

without God

so that we could have

life

with God

he put himself

in our lives

of misery

and mortality

and meaninglessness

so that we could be brought

into his life

of joy

and immortality

and eternal

meaning

and so friends

I leave you with this

that meaning

is not a concept

or a cause

that you go out

to find

meaning

with a capital M

is a person

who's come

to find you

and the purpose

of life

is to fear him

to follow him

to put your faith

in him

and when you do that

you've found

why it is

that you're even

here

there's probably

a ton of questions

I'll see you

over here

at the Q&A

in just a little bit

but I'm going to

park it there

in the name

of the Father

Son

and Holy Spirit

Amen

Amen