It wasn’t an oldie when I first heard it.
I guess that gives away my age.
In 1965, the Rolling Stones’ big hit Satisfaction was released in the United States. I remember watching them on our little black-and-white TV as they were performing on Shindig! Looking back at my very conservative upbringing, I can’t imagine that my parents allowed it, but I remember it vividly. Mick Jagger sang “the verses in a tone hovering between cynical commentary and frustrated protest, and then leaps half singing and half yelling into the chorus, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction.’” (Wikipedia) The song was all over the airwaves, poor grammar and all. It hit a cultural, collective nerve whether you were a fan of the Stones or not.
Have you ever felt like Mick, that you simply couldn’t get satisfaction from anything? Maybe your list of things that haven’t lived up to your expectations differs drastically from Jagger’s catalogue of disappointments—or even Solomon’s—but I think it is a common human experience to be dissatisfied.
I know I have been.
As C.S. Lewis stated, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world” (Mere Christianity).
I think it’s incredibly important for us to remember that.
As our study of Ecclesiastes reminded us last Sunday, life is short. Our time on planet Earth, our life “under the sun,” is like a breath or a vapor compared to eternity which God has set in the hearts of all mankind. But this awareness of the brevity of our existence, this longing for the eternal, is a precious gift from our Father to provide an unsettling or a discomfort in the here and now as a reminder of what is ahead if we pursue our God who controls time, place, and purpose. There is another world. There is a lot more for us over the sun. And it is satisfying and eternal.
But do we really believe that our ultimate satisfaction will be found elsewhere? That it is eternity and rest that our hearts desire? Paul Tripp, New Morning Mercies, explains.
It is sad how many people constantly live in the schizophrenic craziness of eternity amnesia. We were created to live in a forever relationship with a forever God forever. We were designed to live based on a long view of life. We were made to live with one eye on now and one eye on eternity. You and I simply cannot live as we were put together to live without forever. But so many people try. They put all their hopes and dreams in the right here, right now situations, locations, possessions, positions, and people of their daily lives. They load moment after moment with undeliverable expectations. They ask people to be what people this side of eternity will never be. They demand that a seriously broken world deliver what it could never deliver even if it were not broken. They fail to recognize that at the bottom of all of this drivenness and insanity is an expectation that now can be the paradise it will never be.
It is wonderful for you to have a good marriage, but it will never be a paradise. It’s great to have a good relationship with your children, but they will never deliver paradise to you. That beautiful house that began decaying from the moment it was built will not be your paradise. Those still-flawed people around you will not offer you paradise-like relationships. In forgetting who you are, forgetting how you were designed to live, forgetting who God is, and forgetting what is to come, you make yourself and those around you crazy.”
Since our hearts have been hard-wired for eternity (Ecclesiastes 3:11), we hunger for paradise.
No one is satisfied with things the way they are. So either you try your hardest to turn your life right here, right now into the paradise it will never be and therefore become driven and disappointed, or you live in this broken world with the rest and peace that comes from knowing that a guaranteed place in paradise is in your future. You’re sad that things are as broken as they are, so you work to be an agent of change in God’s gracious and powerful hands, but you’re not anxious or driven. You know that this world is not stuck and that it hasn’t been abandoned by God. You know that God is working his eternal plan. He is moving things toward their final conclusion. You can’t see it every day, but you know it’s true. In the middle of your sadness there is celebration, because you’ve read the final chapter and you know haw God’s grand story is going to end.
So you get up every morning and give yourself to doing the things that God says are good, because you know that if grace has put eternity in your future, there’s nothing that you could ever do in God’s name that is in vain. (Paul Tripp, New Morning Mercies)
This is the end of the matter; all hath been heard: Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. (Ecclesiastes 12:13)
Unlike the Rolling Stones, you will get satisfaction. Genuine, lasting, and sweet.
For all eternity.
Now that’s something to sing about, Mick!
—Eileen Hill
