Sunday December 11, 2022 | Dan Kent
God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
We are meant to live with meaning, but our world seems to offer meanings that ultimately fail to measure up to their promises. Jesus came into the world to give us meaning, the kind of meaning that can only be found from knowing the destination of the journey of life.
In this sermon, Dan Kent explores how the coming of Jesus at Christmas addresses the problem of meaninglessness in our world. Today, it is quite common for people to feel a deep sense of lack of meaning. People invest so much time in their jobs, but research has shown that most do not find their work meaningful. Instead we tend to go through the motions doing things that we feel have little meaning at all. We are like Sisyphus who is given the task of pushing a bolder up a hill only to have it roll down the hill so he can push it up again.
This is something that philosophers have pondered. For instance, Camus argued that if there is no God, then there is no meaning. Sartre agreed that there is no God, but he proposed that we are meaning makers and that we find life’s meaning on the journey. Dan calls this “bottom-up meaning,” but it fails us because there is no meaning that is beyond us. It only keeps us on the treadmill of an endless journey while we try to find meaning.
Instead of meaning found in the journey, we need meaning that is based in our destination. This is where Christmas comes to play. Jesus came to give our lives meaning, the kind of meaning that is found and given from the “top-down” as it is from beyond who we are. It is meaning we discover through knowing God, and it is the reason that Christ came, as stated in the focus Scripture above.
We are all coming the destination of knowing God in different ways, which is why our testimonies matter. God came in Jesus Christ and he continues to come to show us himself and give us meaning in a world that lacks it.