Madonna’s Reviews > Better: How Jesus Satisfies the Search for Meaning > Status Update

Jesus knows the pressures of life under the sun. He was tempted to live for vanity—to place pleasure above His Father—but He resisted. Why? Because He knew the truth about pleasure.

As God in the flesh, Jesus saw through the lie of the pleasure-as-purpose approach.

We experience true pleasure by pleasing God, and Jesus came to live, die, and rise so that this would become true of us.

The human heart’s appetite for pleasure is not inherently wrong. The problem comes when our appetites turn us away from God.

God does not forbid pleasure; He simply reminds us of the vanity of trying to find purpose in pleasure or trying to find pleasure in the wrong ways.

Jesus was right when He asked, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matt. 16:26). We can experience all the pleasure that life can offer under the sun, yet without God there can be no true satisfaction, no way to avoid the threat of the spiritual death that will inevitably follow our physical decline.