“Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good. But that proved to be meaningless.”

                                                                                    Ecclesiastes 2:1

Rev. Dan going all existential on you today . . .

Imagine you are walking through the halls of death row, and it is just a few hours before the execution of a man who has been sentenced to death.  The guard comes to the bars of his cell and tells him it’s time to decide on the menu for his last meal and asks him what he wants to eat.

But the man refuses. He says he is not going to eat because it’s useless. The guard tries to give him encouragement, and offers him all kinds of delicious food, but the man rejects all his suggestions.

The guard can’t figure out why this man is refusing a last meal. But the prisoner has realized it is irrelevant whether or not he stuffs himself with good food or eats at all. He has decided that the organ that will process that food – his stomach – will not have time to do its job of digesting the food because in just a few hours it will be shut down and part of a corpse that won’t need that food or the life it provides.

The few moments of pleasure the food would give him seem pointless in light of the fact that just a couple of hours later his life will be over.

Pleasure, in and of itself, does not and cannot give our existence meaning. If we spend our lives striving only for momentary pleasure and nothing else, then at the end, when the whole of life stands in the face of death, we will look back and have no answer to the greater purpose we served.

Enjoy the pleasures of life, big and small, but realize that a life in Christ is more than those things, for the greatest pleasure is found in serving Him and reaping the rich reward of eternity.

Father give us pleasure in simply knowing we are a child of the King. In Jesus’ name, AMEN.