Jamberoo Anglican Church
What’s On Your Mind?
Most of us have a thousand things on our minds on any one day.
Some of us have more than one thing at a time, and it seems our life is crowded with demands, disappointments and decisions.
Others may seem to have nothing in particular and cruise through life with never a care in the world.
But we all have an ‘internal drive’, that hard wired default place where we dream, hope and desire for what we think is good.
Hugh Mackay, the Australian psychologist, tried to capture what is on our collective minds in his 2015 book, The Good Life. In it he asks Aussies “what makes life worth living?”
We could be cynical and compare ourselves to the citizens of ancient Philippi, who Paul described in chapter 3 verse 19 in his letter: “their god is their appetite, they think about shameful things, and they think only about this life here on earth”.
Not us, surely!
Mackay has a surprising conclusion to his research. He writes ‘The good life is not the sum of our security, wealth, status, postcode, career success and levels of happiness.
The good life is one defined by our capacity for selflessness, the quality of our relationships and our willingness to connect with others in a useful way.’
Mackay is on the right track.
But the Gospel is both much worse news, and much better news. Without God’s rescue mission through Jesus, we are all like the citizens of Philippi – driven by selfish desires, giving ultimate worth to possessions and experiences, and not a thought for eternity.
We are heading for destruction.
The great news is that if we love God and follow his Son Jesus, he has taken hold of us for his very own.
We can now live for Him, love others as He has asked us to do, have our minds made new, and live with the certain hope of seeing him face to face forever.
Now that’s a good life!
Andy McPhail