Expecting More Than People Can Give

Expecting More Than People Can Give

Psalm 42:1-2

Have you ever wished that you could start all over?

The Associated Press this week reported out of Georgetown, Texas that Molly Daniels pleaded guilty to charges of digging up a woman’s corpse, and staging a fiery car accident to fake her husband’s death. She insisted the plan wasn’t motivated by greed, but rather was a desperate attempt to keep her husband out of prison. After spending weeks surfing the Internet, gathering information for a bizarre and grisly plot of deception, she learned how to burn a human body beyond recognition. She learned ways to deceive arson investigators, and took meticulous steps to create a new identity for her husband.

The plot began to take shape last year after Clayton Daniels pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. He was allowed to stay out of prison after the plea, but never reported to his probation officer, drawing a 30-day jail sentence.

Three days before he was to report to jail last June, police found a burned-out Chevrolet at the bottom of a roadside cliff. The corpse behind the wheel was unrecognizable. "Even the metal on the car was melted, it was so hot," said Thomas Vasquez, Molly Daniels’ defense attorney.

Molly Daniels told friends and relatives her husband had died. Her co-workers raised $1,000 for her and attended a memorial service. A few weeks later, Molly Daniels introduced "Jake Gregg," her new boyfriend, to their children, ages 4 and 1.

He looked a lot like Clayton Daniels but had black hair. Investigators say Molly Daniels also had forged documents to create a new identity for him, including a fake birth certificate and a Texas drivers’ license.

Maybe you wanted a new start to life but I seriously doubt that anyone of us here have ever considered going to such lengths of deception. Instead we all dream of a life with purpose and meaning. But most of us have never stopped to realize the purpose that we have right now.

What is life all about? It’s a hard question. It is much easier to ignore it than to answer it.

One reason people don’t spend much time thinking about their lives is because it doesn’t seem to matter. Remember the commercial, "Why ask why?"

Life is fine. Too many of us live from weekend to weekend, worshiping the American god the weekend. We have children, go to the mall, take vacations every third year, and stash away a few bucks for retirement. Everything seems pretty good. But really we are moving through life at warp speed without a rearview mirror to reflect on the past or a front windshield to make sure we’re going the right way. In all reality we are not living we’re just doing time. We don’t have any idea where we are going, but we want to get there fast. It’s a pointless way to live.

Another factor that sometimes holds us back from considering our life is fear. Most of us are a little afraid to meditate on our lives, fearful of what we will conclude. We hunger for something we don’t want to acknowledge.

That’s why people don’t look at their life until they are facing the end. This can be the end of an era, like when we graduate from college or retire, or experience extreme adversity such as illness or death.

Unfortunately, even when we allow ourselves to consider life, we often come up feeling empty, because the world does not have an answer to the question. The wisdom of the world tells each of us we must search and find our own purpose. This leads people on an endless, futile search for meaning.

Don’t believe me? Look at how have people fared from following the wisdom of the world: broken relationships, scarred lives, domestic violence, emptiness and loneliness, shattered dreams, substance abuse, and abandoned children. Christians are facing these pressing problems like everyone else.

But these aren’t so much the problems as they are some symptoms of a larger problem! And that problem is that we ignore the fact that we were made to live in relationship with God. When we ignore or minimize that need for a relationship we become like fish trying to live on land or humans trying to live on a planet that has no oxygen.

If Jesus were given a chance to offer his purpose of life, I think he’d have two messages.

First, he would say that God loves us deeply, just as we are. Our bodies may not be proportioned right, our marriages may be in shambles, we may be guilty of shameful sins. But God still loves us and longs to be in relationship with us.

Secondly, Jesus would tell those drifting characters that life does have a purpose. Their hunger can be satisfied-not by people, possessions, or money but only by being fined with God’s presence and having a relationship with him.