Friday Sermon by: Alban Fejza, Online Congregation Director
Summary:
In this Friday sermon, Alban Fejza defines a full life as all the human experiences God designed, and explains why today’s civilization offers only about 55% of it, so that something will be lacking in everyone’s life.
Video Transcript:
Praise be to God! There is no other god except God. Let me explain why today’s world does not support a full life. But before I do that, let me define what I mean when I say “full life”. When I say “full life”, I mean having all the human experiences which were properly designed by God. And that includes being born, having a full family while you grow up, father, mother, brothers, more than one, sisters, more than one, learning the language from your mom, never having to learn a second language, one language is the natural way, growing up with your favorite food which your mom gives you, and never having to change it. Never having to experience the stresses of going to school and all those assignments, or staying away from your family while you are at school. As soon as you reach puberty, a spouse is already brought to you by your father, and it’s nothing less than what you wanted, and you having space already to live. No renting of houses. Having children, and a large yard, where they can play, and you don’t worry that a car will run them over, or that they are unsafe from strangers. Never having to pay the bills. Enjoying the morning and evening, and seeing the sunrises and sunsets, and have fresh fruits, directly from the trees, and cattle, and sheep, which reproduce on their own. See, these are real blessings because they are renewable and you don’t have to work for them. A sheep produces many sheep, and you can eat some of them, and there are still enough sheep left, because the remaining sheep will produce more sheep. But tractors do not produce more tractors. A car does not produce another car. To have them, you have to work to such an extent where the work you put in is always equal to the benefits you get out of it. Someone might say, well if the costs and benefits of these artificially created things are always the same, why bother doing them. Well, we have no choice now. It’s too late to go back. Let me explain. Let’s say that we lived in the time of Adam and we were fully blessed without working. The blessings would have continued just like that and you could have a fully blessed life, if all the people were believers. But most of those people are not believers. And their evil can be manifested in many ways, but let me simplify it. Let’s say that one day during those times you go to the river to drink water, which still has perfectly pure clear water, and once you go there, the disbelievers are rude to you, and you don’t feel comfortable drinking water there. Now, the next day, you would rather go upstream somewhere far to drink the water, but that’s too far for you to go every time, so you decide to create some kind of tool to carry the water from the stream back to your living place, but that actually requires work, and because you worked, you were less available to the other believers around you, so now they have less joy in life, and that means that they will become less tolerant, and now when someone makes a mistake, it will seem like a bigger problem to them because people who are less blessed are less tolerant, and then that big problem will push others to solve it, so they now have to work, and it becomes a vicious cycle where now everyone has less blessings, and civilization moved to another level where people have to work to live. So, the evils of the past generations lead to less blessings for each subsequent generation and there is no solution to it in this world. Each generation will have to work more and more for some of those blessings, while some of the blessings will keep coming for free, but less and less in each generation. And, as I have mentioned many times before, the best approximation to measure how much the blessings have been reduced, is to look at the tax to GDP ratio, which indirectly is a measure of how much of the blessings have been interfered by humans- how much of the total stuff which we enjoy has actually passed through human work, and it’s also indirectly a measure of how much the believers and disbelievers share together. And these days, the tax to GDP ratio has reached about 45% in well-functioning countries, and in the other countries where it is lower, it is only lower because the governments are not delivering the goods and services. So, had those governments done their job properly, it would be about 45% there also. So, we are at a stage of civilization where the blessings in life have been reduced by 45%. And this means that we lead a life which is only 55% full, which means that there will be things lacking in our lives, and there is no escape from it. One of these things will have to happen to every human, for example. Either you will have to get much married later, or have less children than you wanted, or have less money than you need, or work harder than it feels comfortable, or get married on time but with a bad relationship or end up divorced, or have less natural human interaction, or eat less tasty fruits, genetically modified fruits, or live in a place where you are not even allowed to walk freely because the highways give priority to cars, and the lands are fenced or dangerous, or you have to go and live in a place where you don’t get enough sunlight, or live in a place which lacks in beauty, some kind of bad basement with no view maybe, or achieve all of these at the expense of your health, or at the expense of bad relations and hatred with others, or at the expense of loneliness in old age. So, there is no way that a human can bless himself more than God blesses him. All blessings come from God, and humans can only transform them, but not increase them, or decrease them. and for this generation God is releasing only about 55% as much blessing as he released for the generations before Noah, which is why the Quran says that the previous generations were more blessed and stronger. They had a fuller life with richer experiences. So, how do we deal with it? What should we do? There is nothing we can do, but since the limitations to those blessings have been caused artificially by previous humans, we are allowed to compensate for it artificially.
We can just choose to escape reality with artificial things. And there are many artificial escapes from reality, like music, movies, games, internet, youtube, documentaries, artificial decorations, pets, and so on. But let’s imagine that from all of those, only music existed. In that case in our generation every person would have to listen to music 45% of their time, or they wouldn’t be able to handle life. That’s the reality. And let’s not even focus on it; it’s out of our control. It’s the part of the test in our life where God has filled the test for us already, and we will not be graded on that, and we can not fail or pass that part of the test. It’s already graded for us. But, instead, let’s focus on the other 55% where we can actually fail or pass the test, or get an excellent grade. In that 55%, we are being tested by God. So, let’s focus on the things which actually matter, where the test is real, for which we will actually be paid on the last day. And these real things which matter are action-oriented-things. Verse 36:54 says, “On that day, no soul will be wronged in the least.
You will be paid precisely for whatever you DID”. So, we will get paid for the things we did, and not for the things which were done to us (for which the treatment is mental escape from reality) and about 45% of our life has already been done to us, even if we don’t know it, and even if don’t want to be part of it. It’s done to us, and there is no escape from it. But for the rest, the 55% remaining aspects of our life, we are also the doers of things. Of course, ultimately God does everything, but he lets us participate in some of those deeds, in order to test us.
