Illusion of More

I reflect on the story of Jake, a carpenter whose dream of building the perfect house led him to neglect his health and relationships. Drawing on Ecclesiastes, the Gospel of Luke, and Colossians, I explore how our culture’s pursuit of “more” can distract us from God’s love and the richness of the present. I invite you to consider where your heart is set: on fleeting ambitions, or on the freedom and grace God offers us now, in community and worship. Let’s discover true fulfilment together, rooted in God’s presence and love.

I once knew this guy called Jake, and Jake was a carpenter and he was working on different people’s houses. He began to get these big ideas, big dreams of of what his dream house was going to look like. And he worked really hard. He saved up his money. He bought the block of land. It was out in the bush on the side of a mountain, with views of the surrounding valley and the stream kind of flowing through. He thought, yes, this will be the perfect place to build my house. And he began to develop the plans. As he worked on other people’s projects, he saw the things that really worked, the things he liked, the elements that kind of came together well. He saw those media rooms that were really fitted out beautifully. He saw the wonderful man caves and thought, okay, I’ve got to have one of those in my house. And he looked at the different areas and saw the, you know, the wonders of the butler’s kitchen and the indoor swimming pool, all these different elements.01:02 And he began to to dream and to begin to draw plans as to what this house might be. But as he went on and he continued to research, he spent more time thinking about the house, drawing plans, beginning to think about how things would fit together, and he began to kind of neglect his health. Even his work began to to suffer. His family and friends began to drift away because he just wasn’t available. And then one day, suddenly, out of the blue, he has a heart attack. He survives. But the doctor said, look, you you know, you’re overworked, you’re overstressed. You need to take things easy and to to lay off for a while. And suddenly he realized that this dream house of his will probably never be built. So often we have that sense within ourselves, these dreams that we have, this vision of what our life might be, and we spend so much time and energy thinking about this dream reality that we neglect to actually live in the present moment.

02:12 So when Jake was lying there on his hospital bed and looked out over the scene from the hospital window and realized that he hadn’t taken time, even just to look at the sky, to look up, to see the blue sky and the reality of what this present moment is able to offer to us in a vanity of vanities. Havel, of Havel is the Hebrew. Havel is just means gas, or the sense of this thing that you know it’s there, it’s around you, it surrounds you, but you can’t grab hold of it. You can’t do anything really with it. So when the English translators were trying to come up with an idea of how do you capture this sense of What do you use to to capture this? And so vanity felt like a good word to describe these things that are real, that are powerful, and yet we can’t quite grab hold of and and capture within our lives. And so often, we build our lives on things that are merely herbal, things that don’t actually give us a shape and extractor for our lives.

03:27 Jesus wants us to find that freedom not just to exist, not to live in the what ifs, not to live in the the what might happen when we achieve that financial goal or whatever that thing is, but to actually live with that full human flourishing right here and right now, that this is the only place where we can encounter and discover God and His love. It’s in this moment. It’s in this present experience. It’s with the friends and family that we have in cultivating those friendships and those relationships, allowing all of that to bring us into this place of wonder. This experience of gift. And so often our world is built on the predicate that you don’t have enough. And if you don’t have enough, then you are not enough. All of our marketing campaigns tell us that if only you buy this new shiny gadget, your life will be complete. If only you invest in this share portfolio, then you will have enough money to be able to have your life complete. If only you were able to to do this thing, or to own that thing, or to build that thing.

04:44 Then your life will be full and complete. I mean, how often have we seen the stories of the rich and famous and you? And they say, how much more do you want? And people will say, well, just a little bit more that then my life will be full, then my life will be complete when we just have more of whatever it is that we have. But Jesus will say to us, no evil. Your life will be judged this day. What will be your realization? What will be your judgment? What will be the place on which you stand? It’s interesting that there are two parables that Luke tells in his gospel that have this similar language of someone being called a fool, of someone being judged straight away and immediately, not to the place of light and love and goodness, but to the place of damnation, the place of Hades, the place of Gehenna, the the valley of Henan, the place where the the fire was always burning just outside the city of Jerusalem.

05:53 It’s here, in this story of this rich man who’s He’s only possessed about himself. Did you know the number of times that he just says my soul? I will do this. I will prepare this. I will construct this. It’s all this sense of just this, this life that has collapsed in on itself. He doesn’t build community. He doesn’t go and consult with other people. He doesn’t share his life with others. He doesn’t go to the elders in the town to see what the needs might be. How can I share this abundance with others in my need? The other story is of the rich man and Lazarus. Both are condemned. Both are found. Warning not because they’ve done anything necessarily that is all that terrible, but their lives have collapsed in on the hovel, on the vanity of their life. They haven’t found this freedom to be in community, this place, to be able to share that life with others. Paul invites us in Colossians today to see our identity simply in God, in the God who is above calling us into freedom and to the life, the God who wants us to possess, that full abundance, that creativity that we can only find and experience when we give ourselves and surrender our hearts to God.

07:17 Will we build our lives on the dreams of the more, or will we live in this present moment and experience the wonder of God’s love and God’s tenderness? Will we experience the call to worship, to surrender ourselves to the God who is in everything, the God who is all? Or will we continue to collapse our lives into these dreams of myself and I and what I can do? Let’s surrender ourselves. Let’s give our hearts and our dreams to God today and allow him to call us back into freedom, into life, and into the gift of his grace.