Tag: Pleasure

Simple Faith, Like Enoch Who Walked with God

Most of us are more “prone to wander” than we are like Enoch, who “walked with God”.

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Man Walking to Heavenly Kingdom

I am afraid that the title to this piece promises more than I can deliver. I don’t have it all figured out. Not even close. If I had it all figured out in my mind, I would still be an impossible gap away from waling it out.

If my mind knew all there was to be known about faith, I am not confident my heart would be sure to follow. In fact, I fear my heart would not follow. It often does not follow where my mind, limited as it is, knows it should go – wretch that I am.

I say this with no love lost for myself and no false humility (to the extent that I can muster a humility that is true).

The worship leader prayed, “You are a God of love”, and he followed with the acknowledgment, “You loved us first.” He continued, speaking to us to remind us that “God forgives is; we fall short, but His mercies are new every day”.

I humbly, gratefully, and joyfully accept these truths. If God were not such as He is, I could not live with myself. I could not forgive myself, but that God forgives me.

This morning I tuned in online to the church service from my easy chair because I tested positive for COVID on Friday. I barely left this easy chair yesterday.

I don’t do well with nothing to do – nothing to do that I want to do anyway, other than mindlessly scrolling through everything my various technological devices will offer me.

Some people are given to doom scrolling, “spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of negative news online”, according to Wikipedia, which can cause the mind to race, leading to burnout, and causing you to” feel uncertain, anxious, or distressed”, according to WebMD.

Ironic, isn’t it? The Internet offers conveniently a ready definition to a malady caused by excessive time spent on the Internet. I don’t need to search my mind for the right words. They are at my fingertips with the click of a mouse. I barely need to think about it!

Not that it helps at all. I can define doom scrolling, acknowledge it, understand it and still fall victim to it. Knowledge is like that. It gives us a false sense of mastery and control.

Boredom and mindlessness are a bad combination for me. I constantly desire to be intrigued, engaged, entertained, piqued, inspired … yet I am not always willing to put in the work or thoughtfulness out of which real inspiration, meaning and purpose comes. I also sometimes look for inspiration and meaning in sources that are not capable of delivering it.

Sometimes, I simply don’t want to be bored, but I am too lazy to work at not being bored. Like I said, this is a bad combination for me. It’s a real time suck. An utter waste of time. It leaves me feeling completely unfulfilled and tempted to fill that gap with shadowy pleasures.

After getting up in the morning yesterday and reading through the daily Scriptures that are mapped out for me in the bible app I use, I failed to devote my attention to God or anything meaningful for the rest of the day. I might have said a half-hearted prayer or posted half a thought here and there – nothing but a mist floating over a never-ending torrent of things to see and hear on the Internet.

The sermon this morning was on “the crisis of pleasure”. The crisis of pleasure is a crisis of faith.

It’s a crisis of focusing our primary attention on seeking the scraps we can scrounge up in a world subjected to futility, heads down, eyes focused in the dust, when God is nudging us to look up. It’s a crisis of settling for the meager samplings found in the here-and-now while ignoring Christ, the hope of glory, who offers us things we can’t even imagine.

My mind knows these things full well. I write about them often. It might even be the most common theme of my writing – letting go of the things of this world to seek first the Kingdom, living as strangers and aliens in this world that is passing away, because we long for a heavenly country.

The pleasure we seek in this world is to please the self. There is no other kind. The pleasure we long for is the pleasure God gives back to us when we please Him:

“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.“

Luke 6:38

That brings us to the sermon, which was about Enoch, a man who was commended for his faith, because he pleased God. (Heb. 11:5) Enoch was a man who “walked with God”. (Gen. 5:22, 24) Reading these passages together tells us that walking with God and pleasing Him are the same things, and they are evidence of our faith, because:

[“W]ithout faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”

Heb. 11:6

Once again, we see that faith is an action word, something I have noted a few times lately. Faith is an action that involves walking!

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Learning to Walk in God’s Way: A Life Journey

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Solomon’s story is a tale of a wise and noble man, as far as men go. He was the wisest of men. (1 Kings 4:30) He had everything. He was handed the kingdom of Israel from his father, David, who had subdued all the warring nations around them.

Solomon had peace for the entire 40 years of his reign because of David’s prowess and provision. Solomon was also a great statesman in his own right, maintaining strong relationships with foreign leaders.

Without the ever-present threat of war, and with the help of favored nations, Solomon was able to build a stunning Temple for God and a magnificent house for himself.

Solomon was also called Jedidiah (beloved of the Lord).

When God offered him whatever he wanted, Solomon chose wisdom. The wisdom literature in the Bible, and possibly Ecclesiastes, were written by Solomon, along with some Psalms that remain with us today. Leaders from around the known world traveled to take counsel from Solomon.

Among the things Solomon wrote was Proverbs 5:1-4:

My son, pay attention to my wisdom,
turn your ear to my words of insight,
that you may maintain discretion
and your lips may preserve knowledge.
For the lips of the adulterous woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil;
but in the end she is bitter as gall,
sharp as a double-edged sword.

In Proverbs 5:15-16, these famous poetic words were penned:

Drink water from your own cistern,
running water from your own well.
Should your springs overflow in the streets,
your streams of water in the public squares?

Surely, Solomon was too smart and wise to be tripped up by lust, right?

Well… no. I am not sure that Solomon committed adultery (like his father David did, taking Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, who gave birth to Solomon). He didn’t need to, because he took for himself hundreds of wives and hundreds of concubines on top of that! (1 Kings 11:3)

God had spoken many years before to Moses about the conduct of kings. Solomon in his wisdom certainly would have known these words: “[The king] must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.” (Deut. 17:17)

Of course, Solomon did both. We learn in 1 Kings 11 that those hundreds of wives turned Solomon’s heart from God, which tarnished his legacy and led to the break up of the nation of Israel forever.

What does the story of Solomon tell us?

Some people might conclude (too easily) that the Bible is full of contradictions. Is this the lesson: don’t do as I do; do as I say?  If Solomon, as wise as he was, got tripped up by common lust and greed, what does that mean for the rest of us?

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The False Promise of Pleasure

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Statue of writer and playright Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square in Dublin, Ireland.

“Meaninglessness does not come from weariness with pain. Meaningless comes from weariness with pleasure….  No one is more fed up with life than one who has exhausted pleasure. Some of the loneliest people in the world are those who have lived indulgent lives and emotionally and physically drive themselves to impotence.”

This is a quotation from Ravi Zacharias in a talk he gave titled, the Problem of Pleasure.* If you listen to Ravi Zacharias much, you will note that he returns to this theme often, and he often mentions Oscar Wilde, the famous Irish poet and playwright. Wilde, of course, was a brilliant writer and thinker who was an outspoken atheist and lived a hedonistic lifestyle.

Wilde is described as “the supreme individualist”. His book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is described as a “novel of vice hidden beneath art” tinged with “self-conscious decadence”. The Importance of Being Earnest, commonly believed to be his best work written at the height of his career, is more subtle and nuanced, but continues the same theme, as do all of the works of Oscar Wilde. (See Wikipedia)

We know much of Wilde’s private life. Many of his secrets were paraded before the world to see in a much publicized court case, ironically, when Oscar Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel.

Queensberry’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, was the person who introduced Wilde to “the Victorian underground of gay prostitution”. Queensberry’s defense to the libel charges was to prove his statements true by hiring private investigators to uncover the “salacious details of Wilde’s private life”. The trial that Wilde brought against Queensberry left him bankrupt and exposed.

Wilde, the “colourful agent provocateur in Victorian society”, spared himself no pleasure. He also wasn’t shy about his lifestyle. He championed licentiousness in his art and in his life.

Like Solomon, though, he retained a sort of wisdom borne of experience. Having been baptized as a child, he often used biblical imagery in his writing, though it’s use would have likely been considered sacrilegious.

During a two year prison sentence for homosexual actions, he requested copies of the Bible in multiple, languages, Dante’s Divine Comedy and other works with Christian themes. When he was released from prison, the Catholic Church turned down his request to spend six months at a monastery, and Wilde wept at the news.

As I sit here thinking of these things, I am also thinking of the unfolding story of a friend, a very enthusiastic and committed believer in God. He is a lover of the stage, a former Shakespearean performer. In that sense, he shares something in common with the playwright, Wilde.

My friend is in a hospital ICU as I write, having suffered a series of strokes that could leave him uncommunicative and paralyzed. Even in his desperate physical situation, he and his family have experienced the presence of God sustaining them in faith. They exhibit a transcendent joy and peace in the middle of the difficulties they face.

We are naturally attracted to pleasure and pull back from pain. Sometimes, however, the pleasures we seek cause us pain. We tend to think that pleasure is good and pain is bad, if not in a moral sense, then certainly in an experiential sense. God gives us the ability to experience pleasure and pain. In that sense, God gives us both pleasure and pain.

Neither one is intrinsically good or bad. CS Lewis implies this when he says that God whispers to us in our pleasures, but He shouts to us in our pain. Though pain can be the result of our own reckless indiscretions, it isn’t always so. My friend in the hospital is proof of that.

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