Fullness

While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Tony Campolo once turned an ordinary lecture into an unforgettable lesson. He asked an unsuspecting student sitting in the front row, "Young man, how long have you lived?" The student answered his age. Tony responded, "No, no, no. That's how long your heart has been pumping blood. That's not how long you have lived."

Tony Campolo then told the class about one of the most memorable moments of his life. In 1944, his fourth-grade class took a field trip to the top of the Empire State Building. It was the tallest building in the world at the time. When nine-year-old Tony got off the elevator and stepped onto the observation deck overlooking New York City, time stood still. He said, "In one mystical, magical moment I took in the city. If I live a million years, that moment will still be part of my consciousness, because I was fully alive when I lived it."

Tony turned back to the student. "Now, let me ask you the question again. How long have you lived?” The student sheepishly said, “When you say it that way, maybe an hour; maybe a minute; maybe two minutes.”

According to psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, the average person spends 46.9 percent of their time thinking about something other than what they're doing in the present moment. We're half-present half the time, which means we're half-alive.

Claude Alexander, bishop of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, urges Christians from all walks of life to step up into bold leadership. Here's his take on bold leadership:

There are questions that beg to be answered. There are dilemmas to be overcome. There are gaps to be filled, and the challenge is for you to fill them. That is the essence of the high call of spiritual leadership. There is a purpose for your being here. You are meant to answer something, solve something, provide something, lead something, discover something, compose something, write something, say something, translate something, interpret something, sing something, create something, teach something, preach something, bear something, overcome something, and in doing so, you improve the lives of others under the power of God, for the glory of God.

Ricardo Lockette rose up the ranks of pro football and eventually helped the Seattle Seahawks win the Super Bowl in 2014. But on November 1, 2015, the wide receiver and special teams player, was blindsided with a vicious hit and was left sprawled on the ground in front of 90,000 fans. A year after the hit that nearly broke his neck and took his life, Lockette reflected:

It's crazy what matters to you when you're in that situation. Cars, jewelry, big houses, Super Bowls? It all seems so meaningless. I came up from nothing. Undrafted, practice squad, released a bunch of times, then I made it to three Super Bowls in a row. I have a saying, kind of like a mantra, "A hundred dollars and a dream." I used to want a black Lamborghini and a seven-room house. That's what I dreamed about. Now, all of a sudden, I can't move. And the only thing that mattered to me in the entire world was being able to see my family again, to hold my kids in my arms.

After surgery to repair my damaged vertebrae and a few weeks of serious rehabilitation, I was walking around just fine and we were playing basketball again. But a few months later, in early May, I made the decision to retire from football at age 29. [My head coach Pete] Carroll used to preach to us all the time: "You live in a temporary fairy tale." Your fans are temporary. Your coaches are temporary. Your teammates, as much as they love you, are temporary. The big houses you live in are temporary. You can enjoy all that stuff, but it's not what will bring you happiness.

When I was laying motionless on that turf in Dallas, I was completely dependent upon the help of others. It was the exact opposite of the mindset I had from the moment I got to Seahawks camp as a rookie: You're a rock star. You're a leader. You're the alpha. This is all yours for the taking. Then, in one second, you're helpless.

In his best-selling book, Into Thin Air, John Krakauer tells the story of the ill-fated expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in 1996. In the book he mentions a member of the expedition named Yasuko Namba. Ms. Namba was a 46-year-old Japanese FedEx employee with a passion for climbing. She was an accomplished climber, having reached the summits of seven of the largest mountains on the planet. The only one left for her to conquer was Everest, the tallest in the world. She desperately wanted to get to the top of Everest as well.

This was her goal. So much so that Krakauer, who was also a member of the expedition, tells how "Yasuko was totally focused on the top. It was almost as if she was in a trance. She pushed extremely hard, jostling her way past everyone to the front of the line. She wanted to get to the top of Everest." Later that day, she made it. She accomplished her goal. She was the oldest person ever to make it to the highest point in the world.

Later that afternoon, however, Yasuko and a number of other climbers were caught in a terrible blizzard. And as the icy winds blew, Yasuko succumbed to the exhaustion of her climb and froze to death. Yasuko Namba died agonizingly close in time and location to where she had gained her greatest prize. This helps explain her tragic mistake. According to Krakauer, Yasuko's fatal flaw was that she adopted the wrong goal. Yasuko's goal had been to get to the top of the mountain. What she wanted the most was to stand at the top of the world, and all of Japan cheered her when she did. But this was the wrong goal, and a frequent and sometimes fatal mistake that climbers make. The goal of climbing should never be to get to the top of a summit. Successful climbers know that the goal is not to get to the top—it is to get back down to the bottom. The tragedy is that Yasuko accomplished her goal. Against incredible odds she made it to the top of the mountain. But as she poured out her energy to get to the top, she did not save enough strength to make it back down. Yasuko failed because she adopted the wrong goal.

This world and its history are prelude and foretaste; all the sunrises and sunsets, symphonies and rock concerts, feasts and friendships are but whispers. They are a prologue to the grander story and an even better place. Only there, it will never end. J. I. Packer said it so well: "Hearts on earth say in the course of a joyful experience, 'I don't want this ever to end.' But it invariably does. The hearts in heaven say, 'I want this to go on forever.' And it will. There can be no better news than this."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Afterlife; Heaven; Hope; (2) Easter; Resurrection—In light of Christ's triumph over death, those who trust him experience the incredible good news in this quote.

Christopher Parkening, considered to be the world's greatest classical guitarist, achieved his musical dreams by the age of thirty. By then he was also a world-class fly-fishing champion. However, his success failed to bring him happiness. Weary of performances and recording sessions, Parkening bought a ranch and gave up on the guitar. But instead of finding happiness after getting away from it all, his life became increasingly empty. He wrote, "If you arrive at a point in your life where you have everything that you've ever wanted and thought that would make you happy and it still doesn't, then you start questioning things. It's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I had that and I thought, Well, what's left?"

While visiting friends, he attended church and put his faith in Christ. Parkening developed a hunger for Scripture and was struck by 1 Corinthians 10:31: "Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." He explains, "I realized there were only two things I knew how to do: fly fish for trout and play the guitar. Well, I am playing the guitar today absolutely by the grace of God … I have a joy, a peace, and a deep-down fulfillment in my life I never had before. My life has purpose … I've learned first-hand the true secret of genuine happiness."

What the happiest time of our day? A study of Twitter users found an interesting pattern: humans tend to be happy at breakfast time, not so happy at midday, and then happy again near bedtime. The study, which analyzed 509 million tweets from 2.4 million users in 84 countries, found that moods fluctuate in a predictable pattern. On weekdays, positive tweets peak between 6 A.M. and 9 A.M., then decline steadily to a trough between 3 P.M. and 4 P.M. In the late afternoon, positivity begins to rise again, peaking after dinner. On weekends, the pattern is similar but morning happiness shifts later, starting at around 9 A.M., when most people are beginning their day. The study's authors used a text-analysis program that scanned the tweets for words that had positive and negative affects.

Possible Preaching Angles: Happiness; Joy—True joy depends on our connection to Christ, not to the time of the day.

Psychiatrists call it "The Paris Effect." It simply means the disappointment that many first-time visitors to Paris experience after hyped up expectations from the media. An article in The Wall Street Journal explained: "It was Dr. Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist working in France, who first identified the syndrome in the 1980s, which often affects women … who arrive expecting an affluent and friendly European capital where slim, beautiful Parisians walk around smelling of Chanel."

The article went on to note that many Japanese, and now Chinese, visitors "expect a place full of romance, beauty, and wealth. Instead, they find pavements peppered with cigarette butts and aggravated commuters in packed metro trains … For some, the shock is too much to bear, prompting them to seek medical help for symptoms that may include irritability, fear, obsession, depressed mood, insomnia, and a feeling of persecution by the French. In extreme cases, the only remedy is a one-way ticket out of France."

In other words, disappointment sets in when visitors realize that daily life in the City of Light is nothing like the romanticized vision in movies like Midnight in Paris and Amélie, or Sofia Coppola's evocative Dior commercials. The suggestive images of Paris in the media inevitably build up high expectations and create a lot of room for disappointment.

In 2014, software giant Microsoft paid $2.5 billion to acquire Mojang AB, the Swedish company that created the worldwide gaming sensation Minecraft. The deal made Markus Persson a billionaire, with a personal net worth of about $1.3 billion, according to Forbes. Persson promptly outbid Beyoncé and Jay-Z for a Beverly Hills megamansion—a $70 million home that's been described as an "overwhelming sensory experience," as the listing read, outfitted with insane amenities like M&M towers, vodka and tequila bars, a movie theater and 15 bathrooms, each equipped, we're told, with toilets that cost $5,600 each.

But on August 29, 2015 Persson posted a series of tweets that captured his gnawing sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction:

4:48am: The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance.

4:50am: Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated.

4:52am: When we sold the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of, and they all hate me now.

4:53am: Found a great girl, but she's afraid of me and my life style and went with a normal person instead.

There was a front-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a metro-transit operator named Linda Wilson-Allen. She loves the people who ride her bus, learns their names, and waits for them if they're late and then make up the time later on her route. A woman in her eighties named Ivy had some heavy grocery bags and was struggling with them. So Linda got out of her bus driver's seat to carry Ivy's grocery bags onto the bus. Now Ivy lets other buses pass her stop so she can ride on Linda's bus.

Linda saw a woman named Tanya in a bus shelter. She could tell Tanya was new to the area and she was lost. It was almost Thanksgiving, so Linda said to Tanya, "You're out here all by yourself. You don't know anybody. Come on over for Thanksgiving and kick it with me and the kids." Now they're friends. Linda has built such a little community of blessing on that bus that passengers offer Linda the use of their vacation homes. They bring her potted plants and floral bouquets. When people found out she likes to wear scarves to accessorize her uniforms, they started giving them as presents to Linda.

Think about what a thankless task driving a bus can look like in our world: cranky passengers, engine breakdowns, traffic jams, gum on the seats. You ask yourself, How does she have this attitude? "Her mood is set at 2:30 A.M. when she gets down on her knees to pray for 30 minutes," the Chronicle states. "'There is a lot to talk about with the Lord,' says Wilson-Allen, a member of Glad Tidings Church in Hayward."

When she gets to the end of her line, she always says, "That's all. I love you. Take care." Have you ever had a bus driver tell you, "I love you"? People wonder, Where can I find the Kingdom of God? I will tell you where. You can find it on the #45 bus riding through San Francisco. People wonder, Where can I find the church? I will tell you. Behind the wheel of a metro transit vehicle.

Pastor/author J.R. Vassar writes about ministering in Myanmar (Burma) and coming upon a broken Buddha:

One day we were prayer walking through a large Buddhist temple, when I witnessed something heartbreaking. A large number of people, very poor and desperate, were bowing down to a large golden Buddha. They were stuffing what seemed to be the last of their money into the treasury box and kneeling in prayer, hoping to secure a blessing from the Buddha. On the other side of the large golden idol, scaffolding had been built. The Buddha had begun to deteriorate, and a group of workers was diligently were repairing the broken Buddha. I took in the scene. Broken people were bowing down to a broken Buddha asking the broken Buddha to fix their broken lives while someone else fixed the broken Buddha.

The insanity and despair of it all hit me. We are no different from them. We are broken people looking to other broken people to fix our broken lives. We are glory-deficient people looking to other glory-deficient people to supply us with glory. Looking to other people to provide for us what they lack themselves is a fool's errand. It is futile to look to other glory-hungry people to fully satisfy our glory hunger, and doing so leaves our souls empty.

In an interview in AARP magazine, singer and poet Bob Dylan talked about his new music, life on the road, and true happiness. Towards the end of the interview Dylan said, "OK, a lot of people say there is no happiness in this life and certainly there's no permanent happiness … I'm not exactly sure what happiness even means, to tell you the truth. I don't know if I personally could define it."

When the interview asked if Dylan has touched and held happiness, Dylan replied, "We all do at certain points, but it's like water—it slips through your hands. As long as there's suffering, you can only be so happy. How can a person be happy if he has misfortune?"

An article in The New York Post ran the following story about the 49-year-old designer, L'Wren Scott, who shocked New York City by committing suicide:

To look at her carefully curated Instagram feed, L'Wren Scott was a 1-percenter, a gold-plated member of the international elite: There she was on vacation in India with boyfriend Mick Jagger; at his retreat on the island of Mustique; about to board a chartered helicopter; lounging poolside in gold jewelry and designer sunglasses; stretched out on a private plane, using her $5,000 Louis Vuitton handbag as a footrest.

"I always say luxury is a state of mind," Scott told a reporter. "Because for me, it really is. It's legroom, it's a beautiful view, it's great food at a great restaurant you've discovered because you obsessively read Zagat, as I do."

And then, on Monday, March 19, 2014 she committed suicide, hanging herself in a $5.6 million Chelsea apartment that likely did not belong to her. Within hours, Scott's life was revealed to have become an elaborate façade—her business at least $6 million in debt, her fashion-world friends and celebrity clientele unaware of her despair. Philip Bloch, a stylist for celebrities, said, "Ironically, last week I said to three different people, 'I wish I had her life, look at her life—she's always somewhere fabulous and fancy. You think, here's someone who has it all. You just never know.'"

The article concluded, "While the chasm between Scott's marketed life and her actual life came as a shock, she was just one of countless New Yorkers who secretly fake their fabulous lives."

Editor's Note: Like this illustration, sometimes a good sermon illustration raises a challenging issue or question that the sermon must address.

The 1963 non-fiction book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan is often credited as a catalyst to the modern feminism movement in the U.S. In essence, the book examined the general state of unhappiness of many middle-class American women. According to Friedan's research, a comfortable, predictable suburban life didn't give women the fulfillment they were expecting.

The first chapter of her book, titled "The Problem that Has No Name," raised a question that resonated with many women across the nation:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Women; Women in Ministry; Spiritual Gifts—Namely, women have so much more to offer the church and the world than just making beds, matching slipcovers, and chauffeuring kids to activities.

Everybody has to live for something, but Jesus argues that if that thing is not him, it will fail you. It will enslave you …. Nobody put this better than the American writer and intellectual David Foster Wallace. Wallace was at the top of his profession. He was an award-winning, best-selling novelist who committed suicide in 2008. But before his death he gave a famous commencement address in which he said this to the graduating class:

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism …. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And … pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough …. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you …. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

According to Amnesty International, North Korea has a vast network of gulags that imprison over 200,000 people. The most feared camp is known as "Total Control Camp 14." In Camp 14, hunger is so rampant that prisoners behave like "panicked animals" at mealtimes. Teachers at the camp school beat students to death for minor infractions. Medieval torture devices are employed in dungeon-like underground cells. And human relationships are so degraded that prisoners inform on family members.

The book Escape from Camp 14 tells the gripping story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the first known escapee from Camp 14. Shin was born in Camp 14, but at the age of 23 he escaped, finding his way to South Korea and eventually the United States. Today, Shin lives in Seoul, South Korea, a nation that in many ways resembles the United States and other developed countries.

In a 2012 documentary, Shin reflected on the nature of true freedom and happiness. Towards the end of an interview Shin said:

When I lived in the labor camp, I had to suffer a lot of pain …. But in South Korea you have to suffer when you don't have enough money. It's exhausting. It's all about money. That makes it tough for me here. When I think about it, I rarely saw someone committing suicide in the camp. Life was hard and you were an inmate your whole life. But in South Korea many people attempt suicide. They die. It may look like the people here don't want for anything. They have clothes and food. But there are more people committing suicide here than in the camp. There are news reports about that every day.

The interviewer asked, "What do you miss about the life in North Korea?" Shin got out his cell phone and started looking at it and tapping the screen before he said:

I miss the innocence and the lack of concerns I had. In the camp … I didn't have to think about the power of money like I do in South Korea. Though I don't miss everything from that camp …. I don't know how else to say it: I miss my innocent heart.

In his book Fill These Hearts, Christopher West describes a surprising and simple discovery that changed his marriage:

Years ago [my wife] and I were out to dinner and she observed that something was different about our marriage in recent years, something good. She asked me if I had any insight into what it was. After reflecting a bit I said with a smile, "Yeah, I think I know what it is. I think I've been realizing deep in my heart that you can't satisfy me." She got a big smile on her face and said, "Yeah, that's it. And I've been realizing the same thing: you can't satisfy me either." I imagine anyone overhearing us in the restaurant would have thought we were about to get divorced, but to us that realization was cause for joy and celebration. We had never felt closer and freer in our love.

I love my wife more than words can express, and I know she loves me. But I can't possibly be her ultimate satisfaction, and she can't be mine.

And that's why our conversation at the restaurant was cause for rejoicing. Only to the degree that we stop expecting others to be "god" for us, are we free to love others as they really are, warts and all, without demanding perfection of them, whether a spouse, a friend, a son or daughter, or any other relationship. And only to the degree that we are free from idolizing … human beings are we also free to take our ache for perfect fulfillment to the One who alone can satisfy it.

Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision, reflected on his visit to a church in Port-au-Prince, Haiti nearly a year after the devastating earthquake. The church's building consisted of a tent made from white tarps and duct tape, pitched in the midst of a sprawling camp for thousands of people still homeless from the earthquake. This is how he describes the church and the lesson he learned in Haiti:

In the front row sat six amputees ranging in age from 6 to 60. They were clapping and smiling as they sang song after song and lifted their prayers to God. The worship was full of hope … [and] with thanksgiving to the Lord.

No one was singing louder or praying more fervently than Demosi Louphine, a 32-year-old unemployed single mother of two. During the earthquake, a collapsed building crushed her right arm and left leg. After four days both limbs had to be amputated.

She was leading the choir, leading prayers, standing on her prosthesis and lifting her one hand high in praise to God .… Following the service, I met Demosi's two daughters, ages eight and ten. The three of them now live in a tent five feet tall and perhaps eight feet wide. Despite losing her job, her home, and two limbs, she is deeply grateful because God spared her life on January 12th last year … "He brought me back like Lazarus, giving me the gift of life," says Demosi … [who] believes she survived the devastating quake for two reasons: to raise her girls and to serve her Lord for a few more years.

It makes no sense to me as an "entitled American" who grouses at the smallest inconveniences—a clogged drain or a slow wi-fi connection in my home. Yet here in this place, many people who had lost everything … expressed nothing but praise.

I find my own sense of charity for people like Demosi inadequate. They have so much more to offer me than I to them. I feel pity and sadness for them, but it is they who might better pity me for the shallowness of my own walk with Christ.

A study by Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that "belief in a concerned God can improve response to medical treatment" in patients diagnosed with clinical depression. The operative word here is "caring," the researchers said. "The study found that those with strong beliefs in a personal and concerned God were more likely to experience improvement."

The researchers compared the levels of melancholy or hopelessness in 136 adults diagnosed with major depression or bipolar depression with their sense of "religious well-being." They found participants who scored in the top third of a scale charting a sense of religious well-being were 75 percent more likely to get better with medical treatment for clinical depression. "In our study, the positive response to medication had little to do with the feelings of hope that typically accompanies spiritual belief," said study director Patricia Murphy. "It was tied specifically to the belief that a Supreme Being cared."