Then he became ambitious for money. He had inherited an estate and made a large amount of money out of his books. Yet that did not satisfy him either. He sought success, fame, and importance. These he also achieved. He wrote what the Encyclopedia Britannica describes as “one of the two or three greatest novels in world literature.” But he was left asking the question, “Well fine. So what?" to which he had no answers.

Then he became ambitious for his family, to give them the best possible life. He married in 1862 and had a kind, loving wife and thirteen children (which, he said, distracted him from any search for the overall meaning of life). He had achieved all his ambitions and was surrounded by what appeared to be complete happiness. And yet one question brought him to the verge of suicide: "Is there any meaning in my life which will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?"

He searched for the answer in every field of science and philosophy. The only answer he could find to the question "Why do I live?" was that "in the infinity of space and the infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity."

As he looked around at his contemporaries he saw that people were not facing up to the first order questions of life: "Where did I come from?" "Where am I heading?" "Who am I?" "What is life about?" Eventually he found that the peasant people of Russia had been able to answer these questions through their Christian faith, and he came to realize that only in Jesus Christ do we find the answer.

Over a hundred years later nothing has changed. Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the British rock group Queen, who died at the end of 1991, wrote in one of his last songs on The Miracle album, "Does anybody know what we are living for?" In spite of the fact that he had amassed a huge fortune and had attracted thousands of fans, he admitted in an interview shortly before his death that he was desperately lonely. He said, "You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man, and that is the most bitter type of loneliness. Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds, but it's prevented me from having the one thing we all need-a loving, ongoing relationship."

He was right to speak of an "ongoing relationship" as the one thing we all need. Yet no human relationship will satisfy entirely. Nor can it be completely ongoing. There always remains something missing. That is because we were created to live in a relationship with God. Jesus said, "I am the way." He is the only One who can bring us into that relationship with God that goes on into eternity.

When I was a child our family had an old black-and-white television set. We could never get a very good picture; it was always fuzzy and used to lose its horizontal hold. We were quite happy with it, since we did not know anything different. One day, we discovered that it needed an outside antenna! Suddenly we found that we could get clear and distinct pictures. Our enjoyment was transformed. Life without a relationship with God through Jesus Christ is like the television without the antenna. Some people seem quite happy, because they don't realize that there is something better. Once we have experienced a relationship with God, the purpose and meaning of life should become clear. We see things that we have never seen, and it would be foolish to want to return to the old life. We understand why we were made.