Authentic Meaning

Do I really matter?  If I was gone tomorrow would it make any difference?  Do the things I do every day really mean anything?  These questions and many like them are asked every day by people in all walks of life, young and old.  I asked myself some of these same questions when I was around 16 years old.  Over the last twenty years I have come to know some pretty meaningful things about meaning in life.

Answers to meaning in life are given in many different areas today.  Entertainment is so important in American culture right now, so many are "plugged in" spending so much time with TV, online, or talking on mobile phones or working on tweets that a fair place to look for what contemporary culture offers is important.  A quick look through the Billboard music charts shows that ideas like fame, money, relationships, success and wild indulgences is where to find real meaning.  In fact, most of American culture now has been secularized to the point that the common view of meaning was summed up by Jean-Paul Sartre many years ago.  Sartre said that existance preceeds essence, or what you do defines who you are.  Although some of the fundamental understandings of this belief were radically different for Sartre, most today feel that meaning in their life is up to them.  Francis Schaeffer pointed out the difficulty in this line of thinking.  He said in his work Escape from Reason, "First, Jean-Paul Sartre.  Rationally the universe is absurd, and you must try to authenticate yourself.  How?  By authenticating yourself by an act of will.  So if you are driving along the street and see someone in the pouring rain, you stop your car, pick him up and give him a lift.  It is absurd.  What does it matter?  He is nothing, the situation is nothing, but you have authenticated yourself by an act of the will.  But the difficulty is that authentication has no rational or logical content - all directions of an act of the will are equal.  Therefore, similarly, if you are driving along and see the man in the rain, speed up your car, and knock him down, you have in an equal measure authenticated your will.  Do you understand?  If you do, cry for the modern man in such a hopeless situation."

As a believer the issue of meaning is approached in exactly the same way.  We believe that essence preceeds existence.  Or who we are defines what we do.  We are created by our Creator in the image of God.  We are knit together in our mother's womb, and God knows us before we are born.  So we have value and importance that is intrinsic.  We don't have to do some grand work, or make a lot of money, or be a success at work for our lives to have meaning.  We are valuable from birth not because of what we have done, but because of what God has done in us.

A true understanding of worship is a key to the meaning in life for a believer.  Worship was defined by William Temple as, "the submission of all of our nature to God.  It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose.  And all this gathered up in adoration is the greatest human expression of which we are capable."  Notice that the focus here is not on what we do, but on God.  Worship is submitting ourselves totally to God.  Recognition of His holiness, His truth, His beauty, His love and His purpose.

You see, if we define ourselves by how we look or our job or money or even acts of our own will for meaning, or value, or authentification then what of the times when those things are gone?  If our meaning in life is all centered around our looks and popularity, what happens if there is an accident and our face is marred, or age takes its inevitable toll and our looks are gone?  Do we then cease to have meaning?  Pride drives us to think more of ourselves than we ought, but a true understanding of worship allows us to submit ourselves to God and adore Him and that brings meaning to everything in life.

Worship is not just something that takes place for a believer for 30 minutes on a Sunday morning.  No, it is an involvement in everything we do in life.  A submission of all of our will to God.  We turn over all our lives to God and every second of every day becomes an act of worship, it is co-extensive with life and brings a richness and respect to life that is absent otherwise.  In the next two posts I hope to bring out some illustrations of why the idea of worship is so important to how we see the world and how our behavior is effected, and some of the biblical linkages to the concept.