God Please Fulfill Me!!!

 

• Without God, man is unfulfilled, even in his mortal life. Thomas Merton remarked that man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself, and that he is restless with himself because he has no peace with God.

 

 

• The pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake is a sign of inner turmoil. Pleasure-seekers throughout history have found over and over that the temporary diversions of life give way to a deeper despair. The nagging feeling that “something is wrong” is hard to shake off. King Solomon gave himself to a pursuit of all this world has to offer, and he recorded his findings in the book of Ecclesiastes.

 

 

• Solomon discovered that knowledge, in and of itself, is futile (Ecclesiastes 1:12-18). He found that pleasure and wealth are futile (2:1-11), materialism is folly (2:12-23), and riches are fleeting (chapter 6).

 

 

• Solomon concludes that life is God’s gift (3:12-13) and the only wise way to live is to fear God: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (12:13-14).

 

 

• In other words, there is more to life than the physical dimension. Jesus stresses this point when He says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Not bread (the physical) but God’s Word (the spiritual) keeps us alive. Blaise Pascal put it this way: “It is in vain, oh men, that you seek within yourselves the cure for all your miseries.” Man can only find life and fulfillment when he acknowledges God.

 

 

• Without God, man’s destiny is death. The man without God is spiritually dead; when his physical life is over, he faces continued death—eternal separation from God. In Jesus’ narrative of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), the rich man lives a sumptuous life of ease without a thought of God, while Lazarus suffers through his life but knows God. It is after their deaths that both men truly comprehend the gravity of the choices they made in life. The rich man “lift up his eyes,” being in hell’s torments. He realized, too late, that there is more to life than meets the eye. Meanwhile, Lazarus is comforted in paradise. For both men, the short duration of their earthly existence paled in comparison to the permanent state of their souls.

 

 

• Man is a unique creation. God has set a sense of eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and that sense of timeless destiny can only find its fulfillment in God Himself.