> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.chrisknightwrites.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Chasing the Wind - URL: https://www.chrisknightwrites.com/chasing-the-wind/ - Published: 2026-08-23T12:00:37.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T02:46:44.000Z - Author: Chris Knight - Tags: After Amen, When Life Doesn't Add Up Sermon Series ****After Amen** helps continue the conversation after Sunday’s sermon at Wakarusa Missionary Church through personal reflection and group discussion. A video of the sermon will be added to this post within 48 hours. *"Everything is meaningless,"* the Teacher says in **Ecclesiastes 1:2**, *"completely meaningless."* It's not the gentlest opening line in Scripture, but it isn't meant to depress us. It's meant to wake us up. The Hebrew word behind "meaningless" is ***hevel***: vapor, breath, mist. Think of your breath hanging in cold air for a moment before it vanishes. That's the picture. The Teacher isn't saying life is worthless. He's saying it's fleeting, hard to grasp and impossible to control. Some of the things we spend our lives reaching for are really just smoke. So the question underneath this whole sermon is simple and uncomfortable: **what are you chasing that will not last?** **Ecclesiastes 1:3-4** describes life's exhausting rhythms: sun up, sun down, generations coming and going while the earth just keeps spinning. We work to earn money, earn money to buy things and watch those things wear out, break, or go obsolete, so we work some more. None of that makes work meaningless or possessions wrong. It means none of it can be the reason we live. Temporary things make wonderful gifts and terrible gods. The Teacher also names something our culture runs on: more never feels like enough. **Ecclesiastes 1:8** says no matter how much we see or hear, we're never satisfied. The phone we couldn't wait to buy becomes the phone we can't wait to replace. That's because we're asking temporary things to answer eternal questions. Am I valuable? Am I secure? Am I loved? Am I enough? Those are questions only God can actually answer. Even the Teacher, who denied himself nothing (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11), called it all *"chasing the wind."* Centuries later, Jesus asked a version of the same question: *"What do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?"* (Mark 8:36). The world measures how much you got, how successful you were, how many people knew your name. Jesus asks who you became, whether you were faithful, whether you knew Him. None of this means we stop enjoying life's good gifts, things like career, family, achievement, rest. It means we enjoy them without asking them to carry weight they were never built for. As Jesus put it, *"Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be"* (Matthew 6:21). Enjoy God's gifts. Just don't ask them to be God. --- **Questions to Process** 1. What occupies most of my thoughts and energy right now? What am I constantly trying to get, achieve, change or become? 2. What am I quietly expecting that thing to give me: identity, security, approval, significance, peace? 3. Can Jesus still be enough if I never get what I want most? What does my honest answer reveal? 4. Where have I turned a good gift (career, family, achievement, possessions) into something I'm depending on to prove my worth? 5. If I'm honest, what do I believe will finally make me feel "settled," and is that belief actually true? --- **Questions to Discuss** 1. The Hebrew word ***"hevel"*** pictures breath on a cold day, there for a moment, then gone. How does that image change the way you think about the word "meaningless" in Ecclesiastes? 2. Discuss this line: "Temporary things make wonderful gifts. They make terrible gods." Where have you seen a good thing quietly become an ultimate thing, in your own life or someone else's? 3. Ecclesiastes 1:8 says we're never fully satisfied no matter how much we see or hear. Why does "more" keep moving the finish line, even when we finally get what we wanted? 4. Jesus asks, *"What do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?"* (Mark 8:36). Why do you think He chose such an extreme example, winning everything? 5. As a group, talk through the three application questions from the sermon: What am I chasing? What am I expecting it to give me? What happens if I never get it? What did that reveal for you?