Personal Fulfillment

Personal fulfillment has become a euphemism for pleasure.  Our culture is obsessed with the material and the pleasurable.  We have such material abundance that we quickly do away with the spiritual.  Or, is it that our material abundance quashes / submerges / overcomes the spiritual in our lives.  We are are comfortable.  We are fed, we are clothed, we are warmly housed so that only when faced with the most serious of crises do we even think about God.

We might say that we believe in God.  Even that we trust him and know that we owe our existence to him.  But, do we really trust him?  We seem to have no need to rely on him any longer because of our material wealth.  Does this just push God into the corner of our lives, retrieved at our convenience and only when we are at our last resort?

Has this not also infected our churches?  What do we go to church for?  Why do we belong to a church?  Do we go to truly worship an awesome and fearful God who holds our lives in the palm of his hand?  Or do we go to be "fed," to be entertained, to be amused, to have a pleasurable experience.  Not that true worship cannot be a pleasurable experience, but our personal pleasure is not the aim or purpose of true worship. Too often we go to worship for what we can receive or get out of the experience, rather than for what we can offer to God, a "sacrifice of praise."