Lets start by looking at two passages.

Psalm 128:1-4

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in His ways.
When you eat the labor of your hands, you shall be happy, and it shall be well with you.
Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine in the very heart of your house, your children like olive plants all around your table.
Behold, this shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.

Proverbs 21:16-17

A man who wanders from the way of understanding will rest in the assembly of the dead.
He who loves pleasure will be a poor man; he who loves wine and oil will not be rich.

What are you living for? If you are living for pleasures and if the focus of your life is finding happiness, you will never find it. If your sole existence is to feel good, you will live a shallow life and will continue to find emptiness inside. We live in a society that only lives for pleasure. Many people spend their entire existence trying to find fulfillment and always end up feeling empty. The pleasures they hold on to quickly evaporate and leave them without fulfillment so they set out to find the next pleasure hoping to find fulfillment. Life is so much more than chasing pleasure. There is a difference between pleasure and happiness. Happiness may lead you to pleasures, but pleasures cannot give you happiness.

Lets take a quick look at pleasures. Pleasures are moments of enjoyment that are created to give spice to our lives. Pleasure doesn’t last because it cannot last and are not intended to last. If we commit our lives to living for pleasure, we will always be empty. We must constantly seek more and more pleasures to fill that emptiness and then we become enslaved by our desires. Our desires were never intended to be our master. When you look around, an amazing number of people live life as if there is nothing outside of temporary pleasures. No wonder the suicide rates are higher than any point in history. No wonder the youth act as if there is no value in this life. There is no value in this type of existence. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that so many people live with feelings of guilt. If you live for pleasure, you will never find fulfillment. If you live for happiness, you will never be happy. You will have moments of pleasure and moments of joy, but God intended us to live fulfilled lives, not moments of gratification followed by empty lives.

Proverbs 21 says that if you live for pleasure, you will be poor. I don’t believe this is only monetary poverty, it is spiritual bankruptcy. The greatest poverty is those who are not rich toward God. I believe this passage clearly warns that when we live for pleasures, we wander from the way of understanding and the result is that we will reside in the assembly of the dead. That assembly encompasses the world. The dead are those who are empty inside. Those who try to seek life from lifeless sources. Either your spirit is growing toward God, or you are dying inside. Will you try to find life in a pleasure that quickly evaporates? If so you will left holding the shell of emptiness.

Pleasures are neutral, the are not good and are not sinful. They become sinful when we make pleasures our hope and place them above God. Sexual immorality is a good example of this. To seek this gratification outside of God’s design of marriage requires disobedience. When we disobey, we are intentionally making the pleasure the object of our affection. In other words, we make pleasures into our gods.

Look at Proverbs 16:20 "he who heeds the word wisely will find good, and whoever trusts in the Lord, happy is he". This is a big contrast to pleasure seeking. The person that heeds the word of God wisely, will find good. God’s word is filled with promises. These promises always follow a command. If you do not obey the command, you can never receive God’s promised goodness. Here we see the promise that if we heed the word of God wisely, we will find the good that we seek. Look at Psalm 84:10-11

For a day in Your courts is better than a thousand. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord will give grace and glory; no good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.

God longs to give us every good thing. The only barrier to God’s blessings is our disobedience and sinful desires. If we walk uprightly and take and act wisely upon His word, we will experience God and all the goodness that belongs to God. Jesus said that we choose the measurement of God’s goodness. If you give God the minimum, you will experience the minimum. If you give God your all, God will fill you to overflowing and you will experience God to the fullest. God cannot fill a heart that is full. If you are full of yourself, there is no room for God. We experience God when we get outside of ourselves. When I shift the focus from myself to God, my entire perspective will change. When I desire to experience God, I will experience happiness, pleasure and fulfillment. When I focus on pleasure, I miss the real source of the pleasure and therefore can’t experience pleasure to the fullest. To focus on God, you must focus on God’s word and wisely act upon that word. That means applying it to your life. The complicated task becomes much simpler when you remember God is the object of our focus. Our desire should be to know, love and experience God. When I focus on God, I turn away from the desires that draw me away from God. I also begin to look for ways to draw closer to God. I obey the God’s will that is clearly shown to me in the bible and as I do, God reveals more of His will for my life.

Psalm 128 tells us that the blessings we seek, God is waiting to give to those who will fear Him. To fear God is to take God seriously. It does not mean to be afraid of God. It means to stand in awe of God, worship God and take Him seriously. We lift ourselves with pride against God when we disobey. When we reject His word, we are saying that our way is better. That is why we don’t experience God. When you choose your own way, that is exactly what God gives you. People fall away from the faith in discouragement because they have never tried to live God’s way. We try to mix His way with our own and it does not work. We are either obeying, or we are not. Either we are focusing on God and enjoying pleasures as a part of that relationship, or we are focusing on ourselves and seeking fulfillment outside of God. The choice is clear. Are you satisfied with chasing pleasures, or do you want to experience God?