#16: In Search of Meaning
After 10 years of Forefront we’ve now done over 120 message series. Thought it might be fun and interesting to share with you my top twenty.
This was a series through the book of Ecclesiastes. When I became a Christian I started voraciously reading the Bible. I loved it (still do) and couldn’t get enough of it (still can’t). I read through the entire Bible in no time and read most of the books in the New Testament 10 to 30 times each. About a year or two after I became a Christian I was talking to this sweet old Christian woman, who found out I loved the Bible, and asked me what my favorite book was. “Romans in the New Testament, but overall, I think Ecclesiastes is my favorite,” I told her. I expected her to say, “That’s great dear.” Or, “Those are good choices.” Or maybe even, “Those are pretty deep books for a young whipper snapper like you.” But she didn’t say any of that. She exclaimed, “Oh, that’s horrible! Ecclesiastes? It’s so depressing!’ It was quite a shock to me, and since then when people ask what my favorite book of the Bible is, I say, “No habla englais.”
Okay, so it’s true, Ecclesiastes is a little depressing. Maybe a lot depressing. But it describes life “under the sun” – life without God – and that IS depressing. In our series we didn’t shy away from the depressing nature. Our worship leader, Joe Heilman, went into the recording studio and made these wickedly cool and morbid recordings of Ecclesiastes being read to bizarre music, and we put them together with dark, mysterious video images.
What lifts the depression of meaningless-Ecclesiastes style living is the life and presence of Jesus and so, each week, we started in Ecclesiastes, sat their awhile, and then got up and high-tailed it to the gospels. Our search for meaning, and all of our searches, end in Him.
– featured on newchurches.com