Seeking Fulfilment?

Easter 6 2026 John 14. 15-21

The Scriptures teach us two ancient truths today. One: If you love God, keep the commandments. Two: If you do this, God will come and abide with you.

Starting with the second of these ancient truths: St Augustine put it like this many centuries ago, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you”.

We are made by God to love God. We need this relationship to be happy. We are made for something. We are made for a particular purpose, an end, a telos. Our hearts tell us what that purpose is. The heart is the centre of our longings and desires – not a modern sentimental Valentine’s Day idea of the heart – but the heart as the core of our most fundamental longings “a visceral subconscious orientation to the world”. We are made to love God. We have a God-shaped hole inside us.

But we often try to fill it with the wrong things. Because every day we are told a thousand lies. Every day we face a cacophony of lies. Turn on your TV, log onto the Internet, listen to the radio, look at your smartphone, open a magazine, even look at the clothes people wear, you’re presented with a lie. That lie comes in a million different forms, but it’s really always the same lie. It says that there is another way to satisfy your restless heart. You can shop your way to happiness. Just buy more stuff. Your can find happiness in this life, which is just as well because this life is all there is. As John Lennon put it in an a song that has been played to death, “Imagine there’s no heaven”. So being happy has nothing to do with God. Being happy has nothing to do with going to church. You have to buy happiness. Use your debit card.

A lot of people make a lot of money by telling us these lies. But how is living by these lies working out for us in England today? I think our souls being suffocated by this consumerism and secularism. So many people are so unhappy, especially young people. Is it any surprise when we have no sense of the transcendent? Is it any surprise when our deepest desire is trivialised and frustrated?

But we are told we’ve never had it so good. We are told we have to enjoy our distracted and endlessly unsatisfying lives and we lose ourselves in the work of constant upgrading. As consumers we seem to have to make an infinite effort to find satisfaction in things that we somehow know can never satisfy us. To quote a film called Fight Club: “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” We are like gerbils on a wheel. We can never get anywhere, no matter how fast we run: But there are people who are making a huge profit from our unhappiness.

The truth is that nothing we could ever buy can finally satisfy us. It’s nice for a bit, of course, but then we have to buy something else to get that feeling back: and something else, and then something else, and so on forevermore – to infinity: because we are made for more than shopping. We are more than consumers. As Shakespeare has Cleopatra say: “I have/ Immortal longings in me”. We have an infinite desire that can only be satisfied by the infinite God. As St Augustine prayed to God “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you”.

And Jesus promises to send us God. He promises to fill our God shaped hole with God – not superficial pleasures. I will not leave you orphans, He says. I will come to you. … On that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me and I in you.

That’s strong language: We are orphans without God, people with something huge missing from our lives. There is a heaven. Heaven is the place where we will be united fully with our true Father. In heaven we will be truly fulfilled. We will be truly happy.

Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit will come and fill our lives.

But that brings us back to the first ancient truth the Scriptures teach us today. If you love God, keep the commandments: God does not just come to us as a nice feeling or to help us cope with our worries. He makes demands.

Jesus says, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. St. John Chrysostom explained. “We need everywhere works and actions, not a mere show of words…God requires that love which is shown by works. Wherefore He said to the disciples, If ye love Me, keep My commandments.” Everyone seeks fulfilment. Everyone feels the need for infinite, unconditional love. Today we learn that there is only one way to find it: by doing the will of God.

Amen.

The Rev’d Dr James Lawson,
St Mary Magdalene, Enfield, 10/05/2026