Monday, November 9, 2020
This world is plagued with a horrible disease, and truly it is so much more destructive than even the pandemic we are experiencing now. It is the disease of discontentment. We are riddled with want, comparing, replacing, and upgrading. Always searching for what is bigger, better, cooler, and what everyone else has. Social media certainly does not help us. We see the misrepresented posts of the “Insta worthy” lives of our friends - and many people we don’t know. Then we have the inundation of ads, the ones we mention out loud that mysteriously pop up in our feed, (major creepy) and the other ones that entice us to click on it, and the next thing we know, we are loading stuff in our cart. Everywhere we look, the world reminds us, or persuades us, how discontent we are.
Let’s face it, life in general (and so much more this year!) is just hard, and it can leave us feeling depressed, angry, bitter, and discontent. We reach a point that we cannot deal with it, or we choose not to, and we begin to seek something to make us content, even if it only temporary. We just want to feel good. We want to numb ourselves with something to take away the pain of what we cannot face or change on our own. Feeling discontent is a perfectly normal human emotion, it is how we handle this emotion that gets us in trouble. As a child we learn that we cannot have everything we want and we have to learn how to behave even when we are discontent. Then we grow up, and we are managing ourselves. No one puts us in timeout for not handling disappointment correctly, although there are consequences. No one sees how many times we have purchased things online this week. No one sees when we turn to pornography, drugs, alcohol, shopping, until they do see it. We turn to these indulgences because we have the freedom to do so and they bring us contentment - for the moment.
This freedom gets us in trouble. We have this freedom because Christ gave us the freedom to choose, and we are either choosing Him or the world, there is no choosing both. We turn to everything other than Him to fill the void of discontentment in our hearts, and though we keep filling it over and over, we are still not content. So we keep going, looking for something else to make us happy. We are caught up in a vicious cycle of chasing contentment and never finding it. We are on the treadmill and don’t know how to stop it so we can get off. We are looking in all the wrong places but we will never find the right thing in all the wrong places.
We aren’t good at self-regulation. We choose the wrong things and try to make them right. Giving in to our temporary wants in light of the treasures of heaven isn’t worth it. What we’ve gotten, most of the time, in return for our liberties is wild
dissatisfaction and pain. Lisa Whittle - Jesus Over Everything
The world will never satisfy our longings, bring us contentment, or heal our pain. Only Jesus and putting Him over everything in our lives will bring true contentment. What He offers is lasting, not temporary like the world’s enticements. He offers eternal satisfaction and when we go to Him to meet our needs and fill our voids when we let Him.
The world feeds our appetite, making us feel more discontent, and the
Lord feeds our heart, bringing true contentment.
We have to trust Him with our empty spaces and know that He longs to fill them with what we need. He is waiting for us to realize that what we have in Him is more satisfying than anything we have, or search for, here. Stop searching, bringing more discontent to your heart, and run to Him today.
