God and Earthly Pleasure Today's Three-minute Bible Study Print, Study and Apply Title: God and Earthly Pleasure -------------------------- Date: 12/2/2000 Keywords: "buckets" "empty" "eternal life" "water" Welcome to eXXit, the web site designed to help you stand strong in the face of sexual temptation. Passage: Ecclesiastes 2:24-26* 24. A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, 25. for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? 26. To the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness, but to the sinner he gives the task of gathering and storing up wealth to hand it over to the one who pleases God. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Question Based on the passage above, what is the connection between God and earthly pleasure?   Practical help Have you bought into the notion that earthly pleasure is ungodly? This bogus holdover from medieval asceticism would dictate that if you want to a) please God you need to forget fun, and/or b) if you want to have fun you need to forget God. Thus the choice confronting many Christians who struggle with porn: pleasure or piety. The passage above says you can regale in God and earthly pleasure at the same time. But far from licentiousness, such freedom doesn't condone sin, which results in meaninglessness and "chasing after the wind" (verse 26 above). No wonder porn is such an empty bucket (click to see our previous study). Rather, the idea in the passage above is that true happiness can be found only in honoring God. How might the porn struggler apply this freedom? Stay tuned for our ongoing studies. eXXit homepage Index of three-minute studies Copyright 2000 by eXXit *Scriptures are from The Holy Bible: New International Version © Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved.