Luke 21:34 Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with dissipation, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you unexpectedly like a trap.

This is Jesus warning his future church what they need to be aware of. He has just been speaking about the last days and what will happen. He knows that with the progress of science and technology we will come into a point of history where we will be more affluent than any previous generation. He knew, the Son of God, that we would be living in these days of unparalleled prosperity.

 

Jesus knew the nature of these days. He knew that we would have plenty of food and drink, plenty of opportunity for pleasure. The excess of food, drink and pleasure activities is what dissipation is all about. The dictionary defines it as ‘wasteful expenditure, distraction, intemperate living'. These things blunt the spiritual life. We fall to these things because they are there, available to us, and because we are not wise, and also because our relationships with the Lord are weak and so we try to make up for that by pleasure and creating meaning through food, drink and ‘the good life'. Unfortunately as we drift from the Lord we also find that our lives are full of anxieties. These things creep up on us and before we know it, they hold us and it's like we are held firm in a trap and find we can't break free from this sort of life. The answer of course is to repent and to call on the Lord, and make Him the central focus on our lives. As we do that we find a freedom again. Submitting to Him is in fact the way to freedom, not the pretend freedom we had doing those things.