The Search for Satisfaction

the following message by aleister begg is made available by truth for life for more information visit us online at truthforlife.org father we thank you for your love and for your grace not least of all that's found in the wisdom of your word and in the way that it introduces us to christ we pray in the study of the bible now that you will show as ourselves and show us our savior in christ and make the book live to us for we pray in his name amen can i invite you then to turn once more to

ecclesiastes chapter 2 page 472 in the pew bibles if you wish to use them if you have read ahead as some of you will have done you will perhaps have been struck by how compellingly relevant the words of this ancient book prove to be that although the preacher the professor the speaker the pundit uh which is really these are all synonyms for ecclesiastes coeleth the name that is at the heading of the book it's amazing that although this was written some 3000 years ago when you read it it would appear that the man had been

reading time magazine and newsweek and u.s news and world report usa today and the new york times all in the past week to be able to write as he did it of course speaks to us of the compelling uh wonder and wisdom of the inspiration of the bible and we've determined that we're going to study this book together at a fairly high altitude moving through it quicker than we do most over these next few weeks believing that it would be purposeful to do so in light of some of the other things that are going on

we noted last time and i remind us of this fact so that we would have a grasp of how the writer is coming at his material that he's setting before the reader the emptiness of life that is a life that has lived without a practical faith in god this is what he's saying he's saying if you take practical faith in god and set it aside if you seek to live life go through all of your experiences of life whatever they may be ignoring denying the existence of god and his claim upon your life then you're

going to find certain things to be true and the way in which he illustrates this at least in the early part of the book is to walk down a number of dead-end streets and as he comes to the end of these avenues he says i want you to consider the realities that are conveyed in what i'm writing and i want at the same time simply to ask you have you learned to cope with this no one who is a thinking person is going to be able to deny what it is he says and therefore if

we're agreed that this is a circumstance of our human existence then it is legitimate for the writer to ask have you learned how to cope with this or better still do you have an answer for this in the debate at the bar which i referred to last week when staying in the south of england in that small hotel the proprietor whose name was mark proclaimed in the course of our conversation an interest in and a benefit that he received from the works of stephen hawking those of you who were present on tuesday evening to hear

dr philip johnson will remember that dr johnson quoted hawking at least on one occasion in the course of his remarks hawking of course from england is one of the most brilliant cosmologists and astrophysicists not only of our age but really of any age at all his most famous book which is found on the coffee tables of a great number of people who have never read it is called a brief history of time and in that of course he seeks to substantiate his thesis as it relates to the origins and significance of the universe he is

honest enough to recognize that his own arguments force him in the end to lament the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of science when it comes to answering ultimate questions and so he writes even if there is only one positive unified theory it is just a set of rules and equations what is it that breathes fire into the equation and makes a universe for them to describe the usual scientific approach of constituting a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe why does the universe go to all the

bother of existing good question he says we can construct the mathematical models we can put the rules together and within the framework of our astrophysical research we're able to make certain extrapolations but we what we cannot answer is where the fire comes from that breathes life into this what we cannot answer is why does the universe bother to exist at all now that's a very helpful quote because it serves to simply substantiate the way in which the preacher here the pundit is making clear statements concerning the dead end of in education or if you like

intellectualism and from verses 12 to 18 of chapter one we mentioned that last time albeit briefly not that the writer nor we are seeking to debunk education i know that many of you have never read this book although your education is incomplete without it but the book entitled how the scots invented the modern world will it will will tell you there in amongst many other wonderful truths that the first nation in the western world to establish elementary education for its citizens was scotland that is the very first place where a society said children must go

to school so it would be absolutely fetus for anybody to say well the idea that down there at the end of the road mark intellectualism or education you will find a group of people saying away with all of that stuff you know we are we are believers in god therefore we are we neglect education not for a moment no their christian faith has always been at the forefront of education and every parent wants the best of education both for themselves and also for their children but what the writer is pointing out is simply this that

it is a serious mistake to think that intellectualism or education holds the answer to the quest for meaning now of course we're confronted with this all the time constantly coming out said you know if we could deal with a drug problem if only people had more information we could deal with a smoking problem if people were only better educated we deal with pre-marital sex on the basis of education and so on is patently not the case but it doesn't stop us from continuing to believe the mistaken notion that education holds the answer it doesn't where

do you find the worst graffiti when you say well in the inner city i don't think so the worst graffiti i've ever seen is in the best of universities for there these individuals with the vast brains are able to bring their vast brains to bear upon that which is perverse where do you find gang rape first of all not in the inner city at least not as it has been highlighted for us at the end of the 20th century where where we found it in the highest echelons of our military academies where young men who

are the brightest and the best who have been hand-picked and educated and disciplined to the max are a glaring testimony to the fact that if education held the answer then they would not be involved in these derivative things so einstein says i've discovered that the men who know the most are the most gloomy information to the mind cannot in and of itself satisfy the needs of the heart nor is it capable of taming the unruliness of the soul well then if the way of wisdom at the end of chapter one doesn't hold the answer let's

go down he says the path of pleasure let the good times roll let's see what happens down here let's be a good time charlie let's see if this is actually the answer to the puzzle of life hedonism verse 1 i will test you with pleasure to find out what is good now some of you this morning are a little embarrassed to be here if we were honest the reason you're embarrassed to be here is because you don't want any of your friends from your work uh in environment finding out that you've been slipping into uh

to park site the reason being that you've been saying for quite a considerable time that as far as you're concerned uh christian faith is the ultimate escapism and you've been quite forceful about it and so consequently if the word gets out that you're actually here opening the door even just a tiny bit to the possibility of the reality of faith then of course is going to make it difficult when you get back to the office but i want to encourage you in this way i want to ask you to think about the possibility that the

real escapism is represented in a make-believe rose-colored self-focused life that leaves god completely out of the equation now it's on this route that the preacher says let's think about laughter for a minute laughter now laughter's medicine for the soul it says somewhere doesn't it i like to laugh don't you laughing's good i saw tracy allman the other evening you may know her the english actress and she was being interviewed in a biographical channel and and really what it came down to the end of the day as the man asked her a question about this and

a question with that she just said i love to laugh that's all he is i love to laugh my husband makes me laugh my kids make me laugh everything makes me laugh i say that's good i like to meet her just sit and laugh for a while it would be good but look at what he says laughter is foolish laughter is foolish well what does that mean what it means is simply this that if everything's funny nothing's funny that if everything is worth laughing about nothing's worth laughing about think about it when you choose your

entertainment if you go to see a comedy and you go to see a tragedy which one has the most lingering benefit to you if you're honest you must answer the tragedy because the comedy is light it's fleeting it's superficial there are a bunch of jokes you can't remember the half of them the tragedy by contrast is weighty it's lingering and it's capable of producing an emotional catharsis in you such that may last not only through the remainder of the evening but perhaps even for a lifetime you may find yourself saying i'll never forget when i

saw anthony and cleopatra i'll never forget that evening walking out of this place after i saw troilus and cressida i'll never forget those things but you've forgotten all the others the laughing ones billy graham tells the story in a book that was written years ago of a disturbed patient who consulted a psychiatrist for help the man was deeply depressed and nothing that the doctor tried to say to him was able to relieve him of the burden that he felt and as the time ticked up to the hour and the psychiatrist realized he had nothing really

to help the man with he said to him almost as a as a last gasp he said by the way he said i know i haven't been a great deal of help to you but i do want you to know that there is a terrific show in the local theater and there is a comedian in there that has got everybody rolling in the aisles and i think it would be excellent therapy for you if you just went in there had a couple of hours and just laughed for a while forget your troubles why don't you

go well thank you said the man as he stood up to leave and then he turned back and he said i am that comedian peter sellers the pink panther his biography is called the mask behind the mask and find this funny man and you'll discover that he knows that laughter is ultimately foolish let's go to a show it's empty let's go to the bar isn't that what he says so i tried cheating myself with wine now this isn't a comment on the merits or demerits of abstinence from alcohol this isn't the right or despising those

who drink wine as though to do so we're ungodly it's not that i mean people may do that with this passage but clearly that's not what he's saying he's actually referring to an approach to wine which is used in an endeavor to lift a man or a woman out of their sense of depressing emptiness it's an attempt to use this mechanism in such a way to get whatever i can from it if you like to squeeze the juice out of it to my own benefit but in actual fact it ends up working as a kind

of anesthetic depressant and so off the man goes with his friends after all he had the idea everything was coming at him saying you know it's far better down the bar that's what people tell me all the time you know you go to church a bunch of boring people you go down the bar everybody's nice down the bar that's why i go down the bar mm-hmm well fine no thanks for sharing now that's okay tell me more i love it down there they play the piano they sing the old songs sing me a song on

the piano man you're the piano man and he's sharing a drink that's called loneliness but it's better than drinking alone no you see what he's referring to here this is jimmy buffett this is what he's referring to this is wasting away in margaritaville that's what he's doing here looking for his lost shaker of salt i tried it down the laughter i went to the comedy club it left me empty i went down the bar it did the exact same thing he's talking about wine here not as a good thing that has been granted to people

in the living of their lives but as a drug to mask the unsatisfied longing of his soul well he said let's just uh move on and try projects verse four i undertook great projects notice i built houses for myself and so on in other words i just had a jolly good go at the whole business i think what i'll try and do is uh add an extension i think i'll extend my extension i don't know what i'll do i think i may build a new house i think i may knock my house down and build

another one on the same place whatever it is i try these projects and i built parks and i planted vineyards and i had all these wonderful fruit trees and i had reservoirs to water the groves of the flourishing trees this is a pretty nice setup you've got to admit i mean this is not your average great homes of ohio in here i mean this is this takes it up a couple of notches from the back of the the uh you know sugar and valley times or the sun valley newspaper or whatever the jolly thing is

you can look at the best of that and then just go nothing compared to what he's talking about here but it did nothing his influence was insignificant i bought male and female slaves and i had other slaves who were born in my house i've i've got it together now i've got a number of people working for me yes i have uh this group and that group and the knicks group and so on big deal and stuff boy do i have stuff there's eight silver gold for myself treasures of the kings and provinces it's music i've

got all kinds of music men singers women singers and i hear him as well i've got all of the delights of the heart of man i have become greater than anyone else in jerusalem before me he's given himself over to the wanton indulgence of his senses this is what people say if only i could get there that would be it presumably verse 10 i denied myself nothing my eyes desired i refused my heart no pleasure nothing resisted that might be outwardly entertaining or that might be inwardly satisfying there was some satisfaction in the activity but

as soon as the activity was over as soon as the goal had been reached it was just empty again now to whatever degree that we live our lives you know whatever it may be anything from as small as moving from a three-wheeler to a two-wheeler bicycle in the progression of life to take it at his most trivial terms as a child you're going along and this little trundling three-wheeler operation and you see the people further down the journey of life on the two-wheelers you say on the two-wheeler must be where it is and finally you

make the transition to the two-wheeler and then when you're on the two-wheeler pedaling like crazy comes flying past the scooter the lambretta you know oh it's only had a scooter you know and so it goes on there's no end to it there's no end to it i haven't moved in these circles a great deal but i've moved in them a little i remember i'm thinking of a man right now you would know his name i'm not going to tell you what his name is we spent the day as a family at his home vast home

and in the afternoon he took me out into his gardens and as we walked around all of his trees like in a botanical garden were marked with signs with latin names on them he had pawns and groves and all manner of things and we walked all around and in the course of it all he said to me do you believe in the resurrection i said yes i do none of what he had was satisfying to the great longings of his life says robert burns the poet pleasures are like poppies spread you seize the flower it's

bloom is shed and like a snow falls in the river a moment white then melts forever or like the rainbow's lovely form it vanishing amid the storm reaching out for it and it's not there robert burns scotland's national poet was well respected amongst the intelligentsia of edinburgh but he was notorious as a womanizer and as a drunk and if you go to the grass market in edinburgh you know that this plowman from ayrshire who wrote these amazing verses had been down this avenue and he knew that it was a dead end street eventually you see

the marie antoinette syndrome takes over and men and women are forced to acknowledge the fact that nothing tastes it's easy for us always to assume that in our particular generation we have you know the sort of archetypal representation of this it's probably unwise to do so but there is no doubt that there is something about this baby boomer group of which unfortunately i am included from a sociological perspective at least there is something about this particular group that is moving through time at the moment that wrestles with this perhaps as much as any other group

before it and every so often as you read secular literature you're able to dip into something where an individual puts their hand upon it of course [Music] some books appeal to one and not to another i read this book some time ago now called balsamic dreams those of my family are sick of me reading it to them in the house and other friends put the phone down if i reach for it to give them a quote but i don't think i've forced any of it on you and so i want to just for a moment

not not because i'm looking for something to to fill in a gap but because it is it it is my express purpose to show especially to those of you who are wondering that the the key to effectively teaching the bible is to be able to show how this book impinges upon this book that that our study of the bible does not does not happen somewhere away in a box unrelated to yesterday and tomorrow but indeed if our study of the bible does not immediately impact yesterday and tomorrow then there is something wrong with our study

of the bible the only way that i can effectively do that is constantly urge you in the direction of making sure that you're reading effectively both your bible and what is going on in the world around you joe queenen writes this book called balsamic dreams which he refers to as a short but self-important history of the baby boomer generation and he starts it quite facetiously in a prologue by telling how he wakes up one morning and he has a very bad cough and he self-diagnoses lung cancer now that's another feature of the baby boomer generation

there's they're more than more than the quota of hypochondriacs amongst the baby boomers and so having determined that he is now on the road out he says i'm going to have to get on and do something useful with my life and so he starts taking piano lessons he begins reading intelligent books he gets to edward gibbons fall of the roman empire and so on he decides that he needs his ashes uh put somewhere he doesn't know whether the uh the skullco river of philadelphia or the delaware are mythical enough waters in which to have his

friends scatter his ashes one of his friends says why don't you go to the banks of the sen after all you know on the left bank of the sen was where you spent time as a student oh he says that's a terrific idea and so he makes plans for that and after he says and i quote i taken care of the piano lessons and the tai chi and the personal trainer and the airplane lessons and that made the relevant relevant inquiries about a ceremonial trip to kathmandu i figured it was time that i got my

wife and children up to speed mortality wise here i hit some rough sailing seeing that i had only just entered my prime earning years and my career seemed to be going extraordinary well after hitting a fiscal plateau in the mid 90s my wife was a little ticked off that i should have picked this time to die she suggested that i seek a second opinion which is just as well because when i did finally get the cough checked out it was diagnosed as a generic allergy attack immensely relieved i dropped the piano in cooking lessons put

off learning to fly an airplane stuck the trip to the unscrutable orient on the back burner and jam marcel proust back up there on the bookshelf with all those unread robert muessel and natalo calvino navos i informed my friend that on his next visit to paris he would have extra room in his luggage since he would not be carrying my ashes but that night my sleep was deeply troubled my brush with death however fleeting however absurd had brought me face to face with my own most jealously guarded values look at how i had reacted to

the thought i might be dying did i say to myself now might be a good time to help eradicate poverty in rural america no did i ask myself wouldn't this be a good opportunity to spend some time in a leper colony no did i ask myself why not use your few remaining months to make this planet a better place than the way you found it of course not instead i embarked on a mad binge of self aggrandizement rather than capitalizing on my remaining days and weeks to recognize reconcile myself to my enemies spend more time

with my loved ones consult wise men regarding the meaning of life i had succumbed listen to the siren song of self-actualization yet in my defense i wasn't the only member of my age group who would have reacted in this way for in choosing this pointless self-involved course of action i was if nothing else being true to the ethos of my generation when faced with unsettling developments like death baby boomers always react in the same way we sign up for self-improvement classes a baby boomer par excellence a prototypical product of the me decade i only knew

how to respond to the world insofar as it responded to moi everything i had ever learned as a baby boomer had oriented me in a single direction further into myself now my friends and especially those of you who do not believe ask yourself the question does that information as it constantly presses in upon us does that information match the deep longings of the human heart does it satisfy are we finding the answers within ourselves are we finding the answers in education are we finding the answers down the pathway of pleasure look at the realities that's

what he's asking us to do and i say a word to young people who are here this morning and some of our young people many of them are often their retreat this weekend and we have been thinking of them and i'm sure they're having a wonderful time but for those of you who are here and you're under the age of whatever you regard yourself as uh still in the high school realm or younger than that anything from 18 down everyone else is not allowed to listen to this except you everyone else puts their fingers in

their ears i want to speak to you the way the whole of our society is set up for you young folks is to call you down each of these dead end streets now it is important of course that you are educated and you're going to be and you have choices to make concerning that it is equally important that you do not succumb to the idea that education will answer the deepest longings of your soul it's important that you learn to laugh and you have a wonderful time it is equally important that you do not buy

the idea that the answers to your existence can be found with a bunch of good time charlies laughing about everything when the cynics call you and say nobody believes that anymore it's important that you have a robust enough reaction to be able to stand against it and when you look at those who've gone before you who have reached the apex of the answers of materialism and you find yourself distanced from that in your mind it's important that you recognize the distinction between work as a means to an end and work as an end in itself

here's the deal you may meet christ at the crossroads at the entryway to all these dead-end streets and there are more and you may meet him now in your youth and you may be saved from the heartache that is represented down those avenues or you may choose to resist the influence of your mom and dad who have brought you to this place you may choose to turn your back on the information that has been provided for you by those who have only the longing loving urgency of their hearts to bring to bear upon you and

you may go down each of these roads i tell you you will at the end of those roads end up bloodied beaten broken and sad and even if you should remain happy at the end of all of those roads you will stand for they finally lead to one ultimate destination before the throne of god when you will answer to god as to why it was that you chose to reject all that he offered at the crossroads in the person of his son the lord jesus christ i am an older man now i have both been

down some of the roads and i have watched others go down the roads and i have for 27 years sat with parents and with children and agonized as they have built for elongated stories that have come about as the result of running away from this i say to you today make your parents faith your own faith trust christ for yourself this is not about what your dad is doing or your mother is doing you will not stand in their custody before god you will stand alone you need a faith of your own you need a

savior who is your very own you need help because all of the bombardment of these things will not diminish it will only increase as time goes by i say to you where you are today in your heart of hearts just cry out and say lord jesus be my savior at the crossroads of my life before i go down into this educational world before i go further into this pathway of pleasure and all that it offers before i succumb to all the allures of cynicism before i become just another disaster on the scrap heap of materialism

lord jesus be my savior be my friend will you do that just where you are now the rest of you can start listening again i'm going to finish and some of you are sitting here the parents the father's especially saying well this is a wonderful talk i'm glad i'm glad that you did that terrific i mean i've been so concerned about my son and my daughter they're doing the they've been down these paths i'm telling you down the whole rotten lot of them they have and some of them are down there just on friday evening

i wish they could be like me i've been trying to tell them you know there's only one answer to this great tyranny of life just become like me just just give it all to your work just become a workaholic it's all meaningless in a chasing after the wind why don't you give it to your work listen one of the reasons that your kids are down those streets is because you've given it to your work oh you say here we go guilt trip for dad no no no guilt trip for dad but it is a legitimate

response on the part of our children to look at us and say is this really ringing my father's bell i mean i'm grateful for my bedroom and i love my room and i like the wallpaper and i'm glad that i've got money in my pocket and it's good of him to give me this car that i can drive but ultimately look at what he's doing to my dad i don't want to be that after all he's building castles in the air look at verse 18. i hated all the things i told fought around the sun

because i got to leave them to the one who comes after me some of you are attorneys that's how you spend all of your life you're making a great deal of money sitting with people who are phenomenally concerned because they're phenomenally successful and now the transition as they're facing death is such that they just don't know what to do what am i going to do with this stuff what am i going to do with my money how am i going to make a transition look at who's going to get it my succession plan isn't working

what does a man get verse 22 for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun remember under the sun is so important we're not saying that work uh where god is in control is an irrelevancy we're saying that when that's the the the totality of it verse 23 all his days his work is pain and grief and even at night his mind doesn't rest he wakes up in the night he turns over in his bed he has pills to get him to sleep pills to wake him up pills to get

him to the airport without losing his temper and pills to bring him home successfully to his wife and if he's not using those pills perhaps he's gone down to one of the other possibilities and he's got 86 proof anaesthetic crutches propping him to the top where the smiles are all synthetic and the ulcers never stop they say well where'd you come up with that nonsense well that's a song but the nonsense is all around me in london just like whatever two weeks ago in the continental club which sounds grand but it's a dreadful little place

where i was sitting in the early hours of the morning two hours ahead of my flight and then came two fellows and and they weren't in the door a split second before he said are you ready to hit it and i looked round and i wonder what they're gonna hit then i saw what they were referring to the big free drink steal everything there didn't matter what time it was in the morning the fact that it's free they must have been scottish or something the fact that it's free let's hit it and so they hit

it boy did they hit it i was looking at them they can do what they like i mean i'm not condemning them but i thought eight o'clock in the morning how can you do this and i said by the time they get in their bags you know and we sat in the same section on the plane and the lady said can i get you something to drink before we take off yeah yeah please it was pathetic it was tragic you say well how come you can do a drunk so well what's that about it's called

growing up in glasgow which is the the center of the western world's center of heart attacks in the center of alcoholism in in western europe just travel on public transportation as a small boy and you can do it you know let me end with a hint of hope because our time is gone the final little section verse 24 gives us an indication that he's pushing beyond the canopy he's going up and out he's essentially pointing out the fact that there is a way to live your life that is built on sand and eventually everything will

collapse that's the story jesus told the picture he used in matthew 7 and there is a way to build your house upon the rock and that life then will stand and last you see it would be a dreadful misunderstanding if anybody was to take from this that somehow or another this was a story about how christianity is disinterested in education in pleasure in laughter and in work and employment nothing could be further from the truth what the writer is saying is this that none of these things will make sense of your life or answer your

deepest longings if you approach them down these avenues but when you understand the true and living god and why it is you've been made and why it is that christ died for your sins then all of a sudden all of the enjoyment of these things becomes a magnificent and wonderfully attractive proposition so it's quite wonderful the saddest book that i've read in the last 24 months i have in my hand the private diaries memos and letters of howard hughes he was once the richest man in america if not in the world and in this book

and i don't recommend you buy it i don't even recommend you get it out of the library i read it to the end because i was committed to it it's full of so much that is sad and empty he is ultimately the great hedonist i think you know he's been down all these roads you know for those of you who are saying yeah i'll just get around a couple more corners i'm sure that you know it's down there well let hughes tell you he's been down there mammal from las vegas nevada may 12 1969 to

robert mayhew who was his key guy to whom he had given everything and entrusted everything in terms of his business empire bob i want you to remember one thing i can buy any man in the world or i can destroy him if that wasn't true people like me wouldn't exist then a biographer goes on to say in the two years that howard hughes had been in las vegas his bed sheets had only been changed five times the shag carpet in his bedroom had never been vacuumed and the end table had never been dusted in the

bathroom never cleaned his closets were beginning to fill with mason jars filled with urine and the order of rubbing alcohol barely camouflaged the stench from his rotting teeth and fungus contorted nails his greatest dilemma at this point was the transition was the exact expression of the preacher here what am i going to do with all this stuff and he was annoyed and frustrated because this guy bob to me had entrusted so much had begun to think for himself and he knew i can't have him thinking for himself if he thinks for himself he may think

me right out of the equation and so he continued to give himself to writing these prolonged memos that were about absolute nothing at all the tragedy of it is seen for example in this he's in the dunes hotel and with this i'm going to finish i don't feel we're here for the rest of the afternoon he's within the dunes hotel and he is occupying the vast majority of his time rewriting instructions about tiny details for example the correct handling of the envelope which contains the cord for his hearing aid and these are his instructions the

door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of 15 kleenexes great care is to be exercised in opening and closing the doors they are not to be slammed or swung hastily so as to raise any dust and yet exceeding care is to be exercised against letting insects in nothing inside the cabinet is to be touched the inside of the doors the top of the cabinet the sides no other objects inside the cabinet are to be touched in any way with the exception of the envelope to be removed the envelope or package is

to be removed using a minimum of 15 excess if it is necessary to use both hands then 15 kleenexes are to be used for each hand it is to be understood that these 15 kleenexes are to be sterile on both sides of each tissue with the exception of the very outermost edge of the tissue the center of the tissue only should come in contact with the object being picked up if something is on top of the package to be removed a sterile instrument is to be used to lift it off now this this is only

a tiny excerpt from the focus of this man and then says the biographer the content of the memo on the handling of the hearing aid cord did not differ substantially from the one that hughes had dictated 11 years earlier the major distinction lay in the fact that when hughes was devoting days to the rewrite in 1970 he had not worn his hearing aid in over six years or asked for the court now says somebody that is a wonderful rhetorical ploy you have just used you're setting up the apex of it all a weird strange psychotic

individual and then you're saying soul therefore well you see if we had time i could show you what a wonderfully handsome young man this was how excellent in sports how clever in mind how devoted in family life he didn't get up one morning and decide he was going to end up dying on a plane as they hastened him to help at the end of his life no he just went down all the dead end streets one after another and eventually it ensnared him and killed him the only solid joyce the only lasting treasures that may

be discovered in all of the journey of life are those joys and treasures that are found in a personal living faith in the god who said by means of this little book careful don't go there instead trust my son i sent him to make your life all that it might be to fill you with all that joy could be so we must choose today whom we're going to serve father we thank you for the word of god which is the bible we thank you for the truth that it conveys we pray that you will draw

to yourself men and women young people i pray for young men that are buffeted by all of these advances who are wrestling trying to figure it out trying to make the shift from all that is represented in the faith of their fathers whether it is their own whether it will become their own lord god i pray that you will grift to them such a sense of your welcoming and your beckoning and all of the joy and the reality that is found in christ that they may lay hold upon your great and precious promises we pray

that the events of this coming week may serve to draw us closer to yourself that as we think of inviting friends to the opportunities that are before us that we may do so purposefully that we may call out to them on the highways and byways of life and we pray that the grace of the lord jesus and the love of god our father and the fellowship of our holy spirit may be the abiding portion of each one now and forevermore amen this message was brought to you from truth for life where the learning is for

living to learn more about truth for life with alistair begg visit us online at truthforlife.org