The world has tried for centuries to answer the question of what makes life meaningful, and its best answers are surprisingly bleak. Philosophers like Albert Camus concluded that without God, the only reasonable response to a meaningless universe is defiant self-determination. Just keep pushing the rock up the hill. But Scripture offers something radically different, and the contrast could not be more striking. The Apostle Paul, writing in Ephesians chapter two, does not describe people without Christ as simply lost or broken. He calls them dead. You cannot self-improve your way out of death. You cannot help a corpse reach its potential. That is Paul's honest diagnosis of the human condition apart from Christ, and it is the starting point for understanding why the meaning of life cannot be something you manufacture on your own.

The answer t ...