Back in the 70s many on college campuses were asking the critical questions we all must answer: Why am I here? What is my  purpose? Is there a purpose bigger than just to eat, live and die? They looked for self-fulfillment. Many young people were asking the right questions but looking in the wrong direction for answers. They turned to sex, drugs and Transcendental Meditation.

That’s when the sexual revolution and women’s lib started. The answers folks came up with didn’t seem to satisfy. They pursued all sorts of things going farther and farther from the truth. We cannot satisfy our quest apart from God.

Blaise Pascal said,

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?

This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself”

[This is from page 75 of Blaise Pascal’s Pensees (New York; Penguin Books, 1966).]

Basically, he is saying there is a God-shaped vacuum in all of us that can only be satisfied by a personal relationship with God.

In my Bible reading this week I was reading I Corinthians 8 verse 5 through 6. “For even if there are so-called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we live: and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things were created, and through whom we live.”

Those two little verses pack a lot of existential truth. It tells us where we came from and why we are here. We are here because God placed us here. God is the Creator and Jesus is the Keeper. We exist for Him. So we do not live for ourselves but for Him.

If that is true, does my life reflect it?