Dave’s Monday Blast – January 24, 2022

Blaise Pascal was a genius. If you have not done so quite yet, do some research as it will help you understand his enduring influence. His understanding of human experience was as brilliant as his scientific expertise. In a collection of writing called Pensees, Pascal observed: “All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they strive towards this goal. 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.”

Pascal concluded: “God alone is man’s true good, and since man abandoned him, it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take His place: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plaque, war, famine, vice, adultery, incest. Since losing his true good, man is capable of seeing it in anything, even his own destruction, although it is so contrary at once to God, to reason and to nature” (Pensees 425).  

We were reminded last week that God’s timeless word, enduring research and today’s headlines agree: Humans cannot flourish apart from an intimate, personal relationship with our Creator. This fact explains much of the suffering in our secularized culture that has abandoned God. But it also applies to you and me as much as to any lost person we know. If you have trusted Christ as your Lord, the fact that you have received eternal life through Him does not guarantee that you are experiencing that life today. In fact, the opposite can be the case: we think that because our eternity is secure, our temporal lives need little spiritual attention. INTENTIONAL men of God know the folly of this thinking. 

The two studies that we referred to last week are true for you and I: the quality of our relationship with Jesus is the single greatest determiner of happiness and flourishing. Neglecting this relationship is indeed a “threat to psychological well-being.” But fostering it is the pathway to the abundant life Jesus died to give to any who will receive it (John 10:10).  A cursory examination of the chaos of our world today affirms that humankind is profoundly unhappy and unwell; God provides the solution to this sad and destructive truth. Of course this is where you and I enter into the equation as His Ambassadors.

“To believe in Jesus Christ is not ultimately to wrap your brain around some existential concept. To believe is to embrace something with your heart as if your life depended upon it” (Br. Curtis Almquiest of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston). The English word believe comes from the same etymological root as the word belove, which is to hold dear, to love deeply. 

My friends…above all else hold dear your relationship with our Father. Make it your daily priority to cultivate and nurture. From it, all other relationships that you hold dear depend.