An Empty Life

An Empty Life
Wednesday, February 05, 2020
by Dr. Paul Chappell

“For there is a man whose labour is in wisdom, and in knowledge, and in equity; yet to a man that hath not laboured therein shall he leave it for his portion. This also is vanity and a great evil. For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night. This is also vanity.”

Ecclesiastes 2:21–23

Viktor Frankl was a prominent Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist before the Second World War. In 1942 he was deported to a concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia before later being sent to the dreaded Auschwitz death camp. Frankl’s wife and all the members of his immediate family except one sister perished in the Holocaust. After the war, Frankl became a noted author and speaker. In his best-known book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Whether we find meaning and purpose and satisfaction in life is not determined by our surroundings. King Solomon had everything imaginable, yet in his backslidden state, he found life to be empty and pointless. And apart from God, that is the best that is available to man. Because of our sinful natures and the effects of the curse on our world, the best of this life is empty and meaningless. But we have a choice. We can stop living “under the sun” and start living for God. We can refuse to allow our circumstances to dictate meaning and purpose in life. We can say with Paul, “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before” (Philippians 3:13).

Today's Growth Principle:
Only when God is at the center of our lives and affection will we truly find meaning in life.