I watched a movie recently which was actually pretty good, but it got me thinking. And that is always good. The movie, One Week, is about a guy who gets the news that he is terminally ill, and so he sets off on a motorcycle quest across the country in search of the meaning of life.
As I said, the movie is compelling. It is beautiful and poignant. But it perpetuates a lie which all too often I feel Christians fall for. It is played out in a scene where, far away from home, the main character is drawn into the arms of a beautiful stranger (although he is engaged to someone else). She asks him why he wants to be with her. He answers, "Because I am just searching for moments."
To me, that phrase codifies the lostness of our generation and our own lives. Other phrases that sometimes carry the same weight are "Seize the day", "You only live once", "Chase your dreams", etc. It is all about the here and now. It is all about one person - you. Or rather, me.
The lost world is simply chasing. Always there is one more thing to achieve, to have, to grasp, and it is never what I have NOW. Its what I almost have, and when I have it, true satisfaction will be realized.
We have all played the game, what would you do if you won the lottery. Well, to win the lottery you have to play it, which in itself reveals something of people's hearts. I talked to a guy who played the lottery regularly. I told him I didn't think it would make him truly happy if he won. He replyed, "Well, I'd sure like to try it and find out!" Money only multiplies the disfunction of the human heart, it does not fix it! People who win the lottery (without making too general a statement) often find themselves in far more misery several years down the road than before.
The human heart is a tanlged web of desire and deceit. Dallas Willard, in Renovation of the Heart, writes extensively on the nature and state of the human heart without God. He says the following,
"The constant character of the will apart from God is duplicity - or more accurately, fragmentation and multiplicity. It wills many things and they cannot be reconciled with each other. Turned away from God, thought and feeling fall into chaos, and the will cannot but follow. There is nothing outside it that can pull or push it right...Accordingly, the natural and proper complexity of the will leads those thus living as their own god in their world into ever-deeper layers of deception, and then into darkness, where they cannot even understand themselves and why they do what they do."
Echoes of Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"
It is therefore not surprising that the world is in the mess it is in. It makes sense for those that having nothing else - why not chase every whim, every desire, every pleasure in the hope of finding something more, something lasting? But it is troubling for me to see Christians engage in a similar thinking. It is, after all, us who claim to know the hope of the world, to have God residing in our hearts, to know the light that gives light to every man (John 1). To agree to this lie, that we should in fact pursue a particular desire for desires sake, that we are entitled to a level of happiness as the world would prescribe it, is akin to saying as Paul said, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." (1 Cor. 15:32, Isaiah 22:13) It is the only humane way to live if there is no God and no ultimate good. But is insane for those who have been entrusted with the very hope of the nations.
A read through the book of James is perhaps an appropriate prescription for this sort of thinking. James 3:13-16,"Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice."
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