Discouragement certainly abounds today. Where is the hope? I read the news accounts of the young men and women committing suicide all around us. There is a loss of hope, and and its having a profound impact on life as lived in the Western world. Drug use to numb the pain is up. Suicide to end the pain is skyrocketing. This despite the fact that Ivory tower secularist academics who don’t live a regular life tell us to throw off our cares. There is no God, so don’t worry about sin! Do what you want!
Our culture has been living this reality, functional atheism, even if it has not confessed it to be so, for over half a century. And we are now where such thinking takes us. We have stopped seeing God as being relevant for life and for the moment by moment. And now the despair that is the only natural result sweeps over us and our young people. Hopelessness and purposelessness is killing us.
No cosmetics can cover over the ugly reality. No money can buy enough pleasure to deaden the pain. No power position can fill the void. No sex, no vote, no accomplishment, no honor or award can make life matter if there is no God.
One might argue that there IS the advancement of the species to consider. But what does that “great” cause matter to Joe average? In the back of Joe’s mind remains the haunting thought that he is only one amidst a sea of peoples, and he does not really matter that much anyway. Who cares if he’s missing from the “great cause” to propel the human race. And propel the race to what? The stars? Even they must die. And those who claim to know believe that the universe itself must be extinguished someday, even if its billions of years from now, in a great cosmic night. So what does the individual matter?
These are questions without an answer if there is no God.
If you feel despair and emptiness, its time to reconsider the meaning of life. If there is a God, then everything has meaning and value about you and for you. The tack you stepped on when you were five has meaning. The illness you had when you were ten has meaning. Your Father making you get a job at 14, and your first accident in a car at 16. That inexplicable firing when you had your first decent job...all of it has a meaning. You job has meaning and purpose. Your drive home has meaning and purpose. Its part of God making you and shaping you. Into what? That’s really the important question isn’t it… But now you are searching for meaning and you don’t know how it all fits. Things are not working out the way you expected, harder in fact, than you thought it would be. Why?
If you feel that life is meaningless, your feeling is flat out wrong! Its time to start centering on God! Its time to consider Him. Its time to see His hand in your life, and in all your circumstances. Its time to realize that He knows you by name, and has numbered the hairs on your head. You may have attended church in the past. You may have read your bible once in a while, but haven’t picked it up in months. You’ve tried what the world has told you would work: Be a better wife/husband; be a better business man; get more money; have more pleasure; buy a nicer car; get a better hobby; buy a bigger house; have a more important career; pave over the bad things, and seek the honor of people. It goes on and on. Yet you still feel empty. Its time to come back to God. “Seek his Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:33).”
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