June 17, 2017

GOD’s Masterpiece

39 minutes

Please Click Image for complete Sermon Note

At some time in their lives, every human being who has ever walked the face of this planet will reflect on, and sometimes be haunted by questions like…

Who am I? What is my unique identity? How do I determine my significance in this world? Why am I here?

Back in 1988, a philosophy professor at Northeastern University named Dr. Hugh Moorhead, wrote a book called “The Meaning of Life.”

Now, if you’ve been around the church for more than a few years, I’m sure you’ve heard me quote the book before…

And you’ll probably hear me quoting some part of it again… because the idea behind the book is just so interesting to me!

In the book, the author asks 250 of the leading thinkers and writers of the 20th century to respond to the question… What is the meaning of life?

So, how would the brilliant minds of our day respond to the question of the meaning of life?

Well, unfortunately, their answers turn out to be pretty depressing… because the majority of them honestly have no idea!

Isaac Asimov, for example (who’s a famous American author & bio-chemist) says, “As far as I can see, there is no purpose.”

Albert Ellis, one of the preeminent psychologists of the 20th century, said, “Life has no intrinsic meaning.”

Here’s one that I’ve read before: This one really lays it out. Poet & Philosopher, Michael Anania, wrote this:

“I don’t want to retreat into the justly despised positivism,” he says, “but to question the meaning of life proposes its own answer. Life, if you think of it as an assertion of meaning and process, always exceeds assigned meaning. To offer a parody of technical language, the set of all meanings is included in life, which is an additional meaning, so expands the set by a hypo-set, and so forth. So, any statement, any such question expands the frame exponentially. What I’m saying in nutshell is the meaning of life is meaning.”

...more

View all episodes

By Vineyard Morris Plains