Fun or Fulfilling?

Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man; he who loves wine and oil will not be rich. - Proverbs 21:17

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I recently had a conversation with my wife about the realities of adult life in relation to leisure and downtime.

To summarize, we have been trained by much of our culture through marketing, social media and entertainment to believe that the good life is a fun one. We are conditioned to believe that amusement and happiness should be our primary goals and that we should spend our time, energy and strength in pursuit of the things that reap the most enjoyable rewards.

Our society has been suffering the blowback from this kind of thinking for decades and its enormous relative wealth, comfort and security have not only made it more widespread and ubiquitous, (it’s hard to primarily prioritize fun things when you are forced to hunt or forage for food, draw your water from a well, chop and burn wood for heat, and always be ready to defend your life and those of your family from very real physical threats), but have provided us with the illusion that it has been working. Technology continues its advance and brings a higher standard of living enjoyed by a greater percentage of people throughout the world right along with it.

In so many ways, life is “better” than it ever has been for more people than it ever has been.

And yet.

The responsibilities of an honorable adult life - things like parenting, work, dependency of others, accountability, and discipline - bring with them the unspoken lesson that life is meant to be much more than simply fun. It is not that we should never seek to have a good time or that enjoyment of fun things is wrong, but that they need to remain in their proper place less they knock the balance of one’s life off-kilter.

Put simply: do you want your life to be defined by fun and enjoyment or by meaning and purpose? At your funeral, do you want people to comment about how you sure had a good time in the years that God gave you or that you leveraged those years to great consequence? What’s important to you at the end of your day? That you had fun or that you did something fulfilling?

Don’t misunderstand, it is not that a deeply meaningful life cannot at times be enjoyable and fun. But we are here talking about ultimate things, about primacy.

Proverbs 21:17 warns against making one’s life about the pursuit of luxury and enjoyment. At first, the proverb seems contradictory: are not wine and oil the very things that rich people could afford back then? How then could it be saying that people who can afford luxurious things will never be rich if what it takes to get those things in the first place is to be rich?

But remember: the Word of God is not as interested in defining rich and poor quite like we are. A man may achieve phenomenal wealth in his life and still remain a pauper in the only way that ultimately matters.

“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy on mankind: a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions, and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them,” Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 6:1-2, along with, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income,” in 5:10.

And do not forget Christ’s interaction with the rich, young ruler in Mark 10, who, when asked to prioritize his God over and above his luxurious wealth, “went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property.”

If you give your life to money, luxury, indulgence and fun, you may become wealthy. But you will not be rich in any way that matters to your soul (Mark 8:37).

I hope that as you walk through your life, God grants you the realization that the hard things, the things that require resolution and discipline and consistency, the things that don’t always seem to reap tangible rewards, the things that are uncomfortable in the moment and require us to walk by faith, are the things that make for a great life. And that indulgence in frivolities, no matter how expensive or costly they may be, can only be rightly enjoyed if they are not the primary focus of your life.

We were made for hard things. We were made to be satisfied and fulfilled by lives of meaning and purpose spent with our knees bent to a savior who suffered as a peasant instead of ruling like an emperor.

Enjoy the fun things. They are gifts of God and to be received with thanksgiving. But enjoy them rightly and do not make your life about them.

Let your days be marked by the fulfillment that comes with purposeful endeavors and not the fleeting pleasures of distracting entertainment.

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