The Necessity of Man’s Spiritual Being

Let me ask you a question: Are you happy? What would make you happy? Maybe a deeper question would get more to the heart of the matter: What do you think you were made for? It seems to me that everything about us as human beings screams that we were made for something more than just material existence—something more than the mere accumulation of things and more things—for something more than the pleasures of this life.

Listen to Russian writer and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as he critiques our American culture and the politics of plenty: “If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot [be] unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty…. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary…self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”

Things and more things, creature comforts and more creature comforts, cannot satisfy you because you were made for something much greater than temporal pleasures. You were made for God.

Something to think about from “The Kingdom Perspective.”

“All a man’s labor is for his mouth and yet the appetite is not satisfied.”

~ Ecclesiastes 6:7