Good morning. I trust you all had a pleasurable 4th of July. Speaking of the word pleasure, I need somebody to define pleasure for me. What does the word pleasure mean? Enjoyment. Satisfaction. Would you be satisfied with this definition? Pleasure is the enjoyment or satisfaction derived from what is to one’s liking, gratification, or delight. We can agree that the definition of pleasure is good. We can agree on what it means, but what we have a difficult time agreeing on is how do you experience the greatest pleasure in life. What are the things that you like to do that give you the most pleasure? I would imagine that some of you get a lot of pleasure from eating a nice piece of dark chocolate or a thick steak. That gives you a lot of pleasure. I suspect there are a lot of people here who get a lot of pleasure from being outside and taking a walk along a beach or sailing a sailboat or walking through the woods. Then there are other people who get pleasure from sports, watching sports, participating in sports, listening to sports. There are others who get enjoyment out of hobbies such as gardening or building things or whatever or just playing some music. There are still others who achieve some sense of pleasure from their achievements in life. From getting awards at the workplace and getting promotions and that sort of thing. Although we can agree on some form of definition of the word pleasure, what we can’t really agree on is the best way to pursue pleasure because there are so many avenues in life to pursue and to find pleasure. It seems like the corporate world is continuing to accommodate our need to find pleasure and allowing us to do so 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even so, we know that people are out there constantly pursuing pleasure but never becoming really satisfied.
As I mentioned last week, we live in a culture that is very bored. We will find in today’s passage out of the book of Ecclesiastes that really there is no eternal pleasure apart from a relationship with God. If you haven’t been here, we have been going through a series on the book of Ecclesiastes called Under The Sun. The idea of under the sun is just a phrase that is frequently used in the book of Ecclesiastes that basically means living a life right now for the here and now really apart from God. The book of Ecclesiastes is King Solomon’s attempt to document what life is like lived totally apart from God. The conclusion that he makes throughout the whole book is that life is meaningless and has no meaning to it. Last week we followed Solomon’s pursuit to find meaning in the life cycles of nature and the human lifecycle only to come up short and to realize not only is life meaningless and not only are all those things in nature meaningless, but they are pretty much monotonous. We found out that when you put God back into the picture, all of a sudden everything takes on a divine and eternal quality. We begin to see life and nature much the way a child is able to see nature. To be able to see God in all of it. Today, what we are going to do is follow Solomon’s quest to find meaning in the pursuit of pleasure. In order to do that, we need to read the first 11 verses of chapter 2. As usual, I would like somebody to stand up that hasn’t read before. Ideally, read from the New International Version Ecclesiastes, chapter 2, starting at verse 1 and going down to verse 11. (Scripture read here.)
As we talked about the last few weeks, Solomon was this guy who was very, very wealthy. He had the time, talent, treasure, and power to pursue pretty much any form of pleasure that he wanted to in all of life. He pretty much summed up that pursuit as he often does where he writes “I thought in my heart, ‘Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.’ But that also proved to be meaningless.” We know really the conclusion at the beginning and what he found out. As a side note, what some would suggest he is doing here is following the hedonistic philosophy of life. The hedonistic philosophy is just the idea that in order to achieve true happiness, the best thing you can do is avoid pain in life and to pursue pleasure. We find out that is what he did. We see that he did pursue a lot of different avenues of pleasure. Avenues that really are not unlike what we pursue today. He talks about at the beginning how he pursued wine and eating and laughter. You get the sense that it is a party-like atmosphere. And we know today that people find pleasure partying on Carson Street or partying with friends or just having a meal with friends and having a lot of laughter. We also found that he pursued pleasure through the building of great projects whether it was houses or buildings or monuments, to himself in many cases, or whether it was taking on some hobbies like building gardens and vineyards and groves of fruit trees along with the irrigation system that was necessary to keep that stuff alive. We also saw that like many men and women today, he also tried to find pleasure in his accumulation of wealth. While Solomon didn’t have a stock portfolio, we see he did invest in livestock, and he had a lot of stock. He also had a lot of gold and silver. Finally, we see in that passage that he also tried to find pleasure in relationships with women. As I said last week, Solomon supposedly had 700 wives and 300 concubines. He had the ability to seek pleasure through sexual intimacy. Obviously, we find people today seeking pleasure out through sexual intimacy.
It is not believed that we have his entire lists of pursuits, but just in case he missed anything, he sums up his pursuits in verse 10 when he writes “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor.” Reading this passage, it almost sounds like it was a pretty good success. He found delight. He found the pleasure he was desiring. But as we know, Solomon often will eventually put a negative spin on things, and he does in the very next verse where he writes “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.” You may recall that a few weeks ago I mentioned the word gain as the idea of profit and basically of what is left over after a transaction. When he uses this word, he is basically saying after all that pursuit of pleasure, there was nothing left over. He uses the phrase like “chasing after the wind.” If you read through Ecclesiastes, you know that just like under the sun, the phrase chasing after the wind is very common. It basically means pursuing something that ends up slipping through your hands. King Solomon had the ability to extract pleasure from every possible avenue of life at that particular time, yet he always came up short. It always came up meaningless. So just like we learned in the first chapter that when he looked for meaning in nature and the cycles of life, he came up short and found it to be meaningless, today, as he pursued pleasure, it also came up meaningless. I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time directly on the passage, but it is a pretty clear lesson for us that the pure pursuit of pleasures for this world alone is pretty much meaningless. It is a lesson that should be taught at the graduating class at Northgate because I think it would save them a lot of unnecessary pain and hardship and disappointment, but we know that is probably never going to happen.
But really it doesn’t matter because we may not learn it in high school, but we will learn this experience through the school of life. Most of us have been alive long enough to know that all those things out there that we pursue always do come up less than satisfying. In fact, we know that if we pursue something too hard and too long, we actually may damage our ability to find pleasure in anything. That is what you find in addiction and that sort of thing. There is a professor named Dr. Archibald Hart. He wrote a book called Thrilled to Death. The premise of the book is pretty simple. He thinks that the younger generation and really even the generation coming up have pretty much overstimulated their brains or are in the process of overstimulating their brains, which is going to limit their ability to experience any long-term pleasure at all. He actually refers to this inability to experience pleasure with the word anhedonia, which is basically the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences. It is a real word. It is from the Greek a-, which means without, and hedone, which is pleasure or delight, so anhedonia basically means without pleasure or delight. Hedone is also where we get the word hedonistic, a pleasure seeker. His book Thrilled to Death suggests that we have overstimulated our brain so much, or at least the younger generations, to the point of not being able to experience pleasure to the degree that we were meant to be able to. This inability to experience pleasure is a byproduct of the culture we live in today where we have access to stimulating our brain 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There is no reason to be bored. If you get bored or lonely, just send somebody a text or go online and go into a chatroom. Or maybe go into online gambling or a gaming room. Or if you don’t like anything you see on the internet, just flip on your TV and look at the channels you have there and if you can’t find something on the 200 channels, then just look at your DVR and watch one of the 20 shows you recorded last week. If the kids are bored riding in the car going on a long trip, just pop in the video or plug in their iPads so they can become occupied. We are providing constant stimulation of the brain in a way that it was never designed to be this way.
I am no neurologist, but my understanding of this is based on my reading from Dr. Hart. We have this place in our brain, and I forgot the Latin word, nucleus accumbens, which is basically a fancy name for pleasure center. We each have a place in our brain that is responsible for helping us to feel pleasure when it is stimulated by something. The things that stimulate it come down different pathways depending on what the source is. Watching a sunset stimulates the pleasure center. Food or sex or drugs or alcohol or even watching or playing a stimulation video game. All these things come down through these pathways and create pleasure in your pleasure center. This whole system of the pleasure center and the pathways is known as the pleasure system. The system is very, very powerful. I was reading that there were some experiments done in the 50s with rats. These rats basically were taught that if they pushed a certain button, it would stimulate the pleasure center part of their brain. After a while they said I kind of like that. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. They kept doing it. They couldn’t get enough. In fact, I find this hard to believe, but they said one rat was able to achieve about 10,000 impulses an hour. It couldn’t get enough. So much so that when the choice came between food and water and that electronic stimulation, they consistently picked the electronic stimulation to the point of almost death. Dr. Hart pretty much says that nowadays it applies to human beings. We have all this stimulation. All the potential for stimulation around us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I know some of you older folks who say I want nothing to do with technology, but the younger folks do and especially the children that are coming up. That is the world they are entering into. We are allowing them to have access to all this stuff. There is no reason to be bored. Just hit the button. Hit the button. Hit the button. You constantly stimulate, stimulate, and stimulate. Some of you might say what is wrong with that? We had stuff in our day. But it is different. We didn’t have the ability to stimulate our brains 24 hours a day, 7 days a week as much as the young people have today. You say what is wrong with it? Dr. Hart would say what is wrong with it is we are frying our brain. We are destroying our pleasure center. Like any addiction. Why does an alcoholic need to drink more and more and more? Because the pleasure is no longer there. It forms an addiction. Over time, that threshold for pleasure becomes higher and higher and higher. You have to constantly be stimulating over and over to get to that threshold. Eventually what happens is you have no pleasure left in your brain. Imagine the children when they grow up. Imagine their marriages. Imagine their workplace environment. Imagine that they are not able to even achieve a sense of pleasure from watching the sunset on a beach. Imagine the difficulties in their marriage when they are not able to experience any form of pleasure with their mate. This is serious stuff. In fact, Dr. Hart would go on to say that this anhedonia is the cause of mental illness as seemingly minor as a sleepless night and all the way up to schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, ADD. That is what is happening to the brains that are overstimulated. We learn from Solomon, we learn from experience, and we learn from scientists that too much of a good thing is not always good. It is not always good to have too much of a good thing. I think most of us know this, but yet we see that the world just can’t get enough. Constantly seeking some form of stimulation. Some form of pleasure in any way they can get it.
For Christians that are familiar with the New Testament, this should be no surprise because this is exactly what Paul said back in 2 Timothy 2,000 years ago. He said “There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power.” Does this sound familiar? Does it sound anything like today? I suggested last week that I think we are in the last times. This is evidence. “Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” Don’t get me wrong. The solution is not to stop pursuing pleasure. It is not. God gave us that pleasure sensor. God wired us that way. The solution is not unhooking those wires. The solution is found in this passage. If the problem is that we have created lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, the solution is simple. Become lovers of God rather than lovers of pleasure. It is easy. In other words, to destroy the idols that you have made in your life. We all have idols. We talked a lot about idols in the series on The Story. They were these wooden things and things made of stone and in some cases gold that the people would worship. We have idols today except our idols are made from different materials, plastic and metal and silicon and paper. The bottom line is they are idols. To have idols in your life of any kind is a violation of the first and the second commandments that say “You shall have no other gods before me” and “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or the earth beneath or in the waters below.” Nothing. No idols. But we have them in our lives. It is not that we stop pursuing pleasure or we stop doing enjoyable things. It is just that we begin to reverse things and begin to make God our greatest good and our highest form of pleasure. We become what this theologian John Piper refers to as Christian Hedonist. Those two words don’t seem to go together especially if a hedonist is someone who pursues pleasure. But he goes on to write “By Christian hedonism, I do not mean that our happiness is the highest good. I mean that pursuing the highest good (in other words God) will always result in our greatest happiness in the end.” It is a reversing of the order. A Christian hedonist knows that the sin is not pursuing the happiness. The real sin is being satisfied with the things in the world when God wants to offer you so much more. It is as if God is sitting back on his throne saying why are you messing with this stuff? You are trying to get your mind stimulated by this plastic, paper, silicone thing and all the while I am sitting up here just wanting to heap out an abundance of pleasure to you.
I think the writer C. S. Lewis sums it up best when he says “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to continue to make mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant to be offered a vacation at sea.” That summarizes it. We are too easily satisfied. We are satisfied to play with mud and he says I have a 12-day cruise to the Mediterranean waiting for you and you are going to stay on the pier and play in the mud. That is how ignorant we are. And I include myself in that because I get caught up in a thing. But again, God is not trying to be a killjoy. What he is trying to do is help you to find real joy in life. When you pursue God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, you will begin to find that pleasure. The pleasures of the earth some of them will still stick around. They will be fine, but you will view them differently. You will view them not as an idol, but you will view them as gifts from God. C. S. Lewis talks about in one of his books “as refreshments on the journey.” God offers you refreshments. He offers you a game of golf or football or a sunset or those types of things. Those are refreshments on the journey. The one thing you don’t have to worry about when you see these things as gifts, you are unlikely to become addicted to those things. You are not going to be overly attracted to those things. You are not going to become addicted like an alcoholic. Frank Laubach says “You learn to become intoxicated with God.” As you pursue God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, what happens is God begins to open up pathways of pleasure. It talks about the pathways that are provided, through food, alcohol, gaming, golf, and whatever it is, all these things are pathways. But all they do is give you a temporary buzz. They are not lasting. You cannot name something on earth that is eternal pleasure. But as God opens up these pathways for you, you begin to experience the eternal pleasures. The pleasures that not only are valid here but valid into the life to come. The psalmist says it best in Psalm 16:11 where he writes “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Why are you settling? I don’t like to use this word, but the bottom line is it is crap. Compared to what God offers, every pleasure that this world gives us is crap compared to what he gives us. There is no other way to explain it. But we settle. He says again that I would make known to you the path of life and we know that the path of life that he made known to us is through Jesus Christ. It all fits together. As we pursue a relationship with Jesus Christ through the daily practices or the weekly practices of prayer and bible study and meditation and fasting and worship, what happens is we truly begin to tap into the eternal pleasures of God.
In closing, my question to you is pretty much the question that I started with: Where do you find your greatest pleasure in this world? If you find it in anything less than God, you have idols in your life. There is no two ways about it. If you find more pleasure in anything in life other than what you find in God, you have idols in your life and you need to destroy it. But if you destroy those idols and begin to find the pleasure in God, you begin to experience not only the temporary pleasures of life but the eternal pleasures that are made available to us through Jesus Christ. “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Let us pray.
