The Lord is awe-inspiring, fearsome, fascinating, intriguing, majestic, and full of splendor: breathtaking! Here is what I saw of him in Ecclesiastes 11:9,
"Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment."
Be happy. Indulge yourself. "Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see." The reality is this is exactly what most of us do. We don't need to be told to indulge ourselves. Even the ascetics of old and the religious do-gooders of today do the same thing. They deny themselves and those around them in an effort to indulge themselves in a sense of accomplishment they have wrought at establishing their own righteousness. The ultimate problem with indulging the ways of our hearts is that our hearts are deceitful. "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Jeremiah 17:9. As far as what our eyes see, John warns us, "Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." 1 John 2:15-17.
My feeling is we live our lives often in desperation in the absence of God's presence. We have a deep lingering need for something that can't quite be filled by the things of this world, what there is in "life under the sun." Even those of us who have enormous wealth, beautiful wives, accomplishments and accolades struggle in indulging ourselves. Just read the news. We have an emptiness that, like a vacuum in the creation, seeks to be filled with something.
"But know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment." Go ahead and indulge yourself, but know that you will have to give account of yourself before him to whom we must give account. God is our judge.
The need is real. The vacuum exists. Our hearts draw us into all sorts of things that will bring us before God's judgment. Sin will never satisfy and the indulgence of where our hearts take us will only bring us to that judgment. So, what to do with that vacuum? God reached out to us by sending his Son for us. When here Jesus said, "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty." John 6:35. To the Samaritan woman at the well Jesus said, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." In the sermon on the mount Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." Matthew 5:6.
Here is the rightful fulfillment of our hears so many of us yearn for. We have a felt need that was created, that vacuum, when God's very presence was ripped from us in the garden of Eden. In our estrangement from him, all there is under the sun will never bring a satisfaction to us. We have to look beyond what lies under the sun. Only our Creator, he for whom we were created, can bring us fulfillment and satisfaction, in both this life and in the resurrection.
Anything of the Lord capture your heart from Scripture today? Share your thoughts of worship with us from your Bible reading today. We'd love to hear from you!
Trevor Fisk
trevor.fisk@gmail.com
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