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including our gathering times in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., visit us online at passioncitychurch.com.

Today's talk comes from Pastor Ben Stewart. Well, when the famed author Leo Tolstoy turned 50, he noted that he had been a success.

He had a loving family, he had a grand estate, he had been a successful author, and yet he

wrote in his confessions that when he turned 50, he began to realize that everyone he loved

would die, that they would be taken from him. And all he had written would

ultimately one day be forgotten. He hit his Benson Boone moment. Please stay. God don't take these

beautiful things that I've got. But then he realized, hey, I don't get a vote. Everybody dies,

all leaves. And he wrote, in light of that,

the question was, then why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do anything?

Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?

And then he felt shame. How could I have failed to see this?

One can only live while one is intoxicated with life. As soon as one is sober, it's impossible

not to see that it's all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud. That was his quote. Welcome to church.

Victor Frankel, who survived the death camp at Auschwitz, wrote Man's Search for Meaning, and he describes the experience of the concentration

camps, and he wrote this. He said, prisoners who gave up on life, who lost all hope for a future,

were inevitably the first to die.

They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope,

lack of something to live for.

Now, why do I quote these men?

Because meaning is important to us.

We have to have a reason, something that gives us a reason for getting up in the

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