Chapter Nine: Discontentment
CHAPTER NINE
Discontentment
Anxiety is a fearful uncertainty over the future, whether short-term (as in my plane trips) or long-term, such as might result from a job loss. Frustration is usually the result of some immediate event that has blocked my plans or desires. Discontentment, the subject of this chapter, most often arises from ongoing and unchanging circumstances that we can do nothing about.
Before we get into the subject, however, I want to acknowledge that there is a place for legitimate discontentment. All of us should, to some degree, be discontent with our spiritual growth. If we are not, we will stop growing. There is also what we might call a prophetic discontentment with injustice and other evils in society that is coupled with a desire to see positive change. The subject of this chapter is a sinful discontentment that negatively affects our relationship with God.
Actually, the most frequent warnings in Scripture against discontentment concern money and possessions, but in this chapter, I want to address what is perhaps a more common form of discontentment among committed Christians, an attitude that may be triggered by unchanging circumstances that are trials to our faith.
Here are some examples of such unchanging circumstances:
I’m sure there are other painful circumstances I haven’t included in this list. But whatever they are, the truths of this chapter will apply to them all.
In addition to the really painful circumstances of life, the cause of our discontentment may even be trivial at times. I am not good at administrative details, so having to constantly deal with them can become an emotional leak for me and thus a temptation to be discontent. Obviously, the necessity of having to handle administrative details is trivial compared to any of the areas I’ve listed above. But I mention it to point out that however good our overall circumstances may be, there is often some small thing over which we can become discontent.
It’s not that I am unacquainted with some of those more difficult areas. I was almost thirty-four when I got married, so I know something of the loneliness of single adult life. And even after marriage I struggled with discontentment at our son’s soccer or basketball games because I was at least ten years older than the other parents around me. And then there are the physical disabilities. All my life I have had both a visual and a hearing disability, neither of which is treatable. I can remember the feeling of rejection as I was growing up when, because of my visual disability, I could not play baseball like the other boys. Still today, even as an older adult, those lifetime disabilities often make life inconvenient, if not difficult.
I don’t intend that last paragraph to sound like a pity party. And I readily recognize that the circumstances I deal with are minor indeed compared to what many believers experience. But I do want you to know that if you struggle with discontentment, I’m right there with you. Your circumstances may be much more difficult than any I’ve ever experienced, but the truth is, it is our response to our circumstances rather than the degree of difficulty that determines whether or not we are discontent.
Whatever situation tempts us to be discontent, and however severe it may be, we need to recognize that discontentment is sin. That statement may surprise many readers. We are so used to responding to difficult circumstances with anxiety, frustration, or discontentment that we consider them normal reactions to the varying vicissitudes of life. But if we tend to think this way, that just points out to us the subtleness and acceptability of these sins. When we fail to recognize these responses to our circumstances as sin, we are responding no differently from unbelievers who never factor God into their situations. We are back to our ungodliness as the root cause of our sins.
The primary purpose of this book is to help us face the presence of many of these subtle sins in our lives and to recognize the fact that, to a large degree, they have become acceptable to us. We tolerate them in our lives with hardly a second thought. That makes them more dangerous because, in addition to the basic sin itself, they can open the door of our hearts to greater sin. Discontentment, for example, can easily lead to resentment or bitterness toward God or other people.
The second purpose of the book is to suggest means of dealing with these sins, even though these sections are admittedly brief. And you will find as we go through these chapters that, for me, appropriate passages of Scripture are my first line of attack. After all, in His High Priestly prayer, Jesus prayed, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17). While the “word of truth” probably refers primarily to the gospel, it certainly includes the truth of God’s moral will throughout Scripture as well as the words of instruction and encouragement that help us obey that moral will.
I have already mentioned Psalm 139:16 as a passage of Scripture that helps me with frustration. But the same truth that God has ordained all our days, with all their ups and downs, their blessings and disappointments, can help us (and does help me) deal with the circumstances that tempt us to be discontent. Whatever your circumstances, and however difficult they may be, the truth is that they are ordained by God for you as part of His overall plan for your life. God does nothing, or allows nothing, without a purpose. And His purposes, however mysterious and inscrutable they may be to us, are always for His glory and our ultimate good.
And for those of us who face physical disabilities or even physical appearance issues, Psalm 139:13 can help us. “You formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.” God so directed the DNA and other biological factors that determine our physical makeup that the psalmist can say, “God formed me in my mother’s womb.” That is an incredible thought! You and I are who we are physically because that is the way God made us. And He made us the way we are because that is how we can best fulfill His plan for our lives. For some with severe disabilities, that plan may at times seem meaningless. But if we believe that we are who we are and what we are because that is the way God made us, then we can learn to accept our disabilities and believe that He can even use them to glorify Himself.
Psalm 139:13 can be helpful to those of us who experience some degree of physical limitation. Obviously, there are many other areas of life that would not be addressed by this text. But you can be sure that you will be able to find in the Bible specific texts or principles that will address your particular circumstances.
Years ago a friend gave me a poem by Amy Carmichael titled “In Acceptance Lieth Peace.” In the first four verses Amy Carmichael portrays the suffering speaker in the poem as seeking peace in forgetting, in restless endeavor, in aloofness, and even in submission to the inevitable. Finally in the fifth verse the sufferer finds relief in these words:
He said, “I will accept the breaking sorrow
Which God to-morrow
Will to His son explain.”
Then did the turmoil deep within him cease,
Not vain the word; not vain:
For in Acceptance lieth peace.1
One avenue of dealing with disappointing circumstances that Amy Carmichael did not cover is that of resignation, which can often be done grudgingly because we have no choice. We can resign ourselves to circumstances we know will never change but still harbor in our hearts a smoldering discontentment. But as Amy Carmichael so helpfully brought out, it is neither in resignation nor submission but only in acceptance that we find peace.
Acceptance means that you accept your circumstances from God, trusting that He unerringly knows what is best for you and that in His love, He purposes only that which is best. Having then reached a state of acceptance, you can ask God to let you use your difficult circumstances to glorify Him. In this way you have moved from the attitude of a victim to an attitude of stewardship. You begin to ask, “God, how can I use my disability (or whatever the difficult circumstance may be) to serve You and glorify You?”
You may ask, “But shouldn’t I pray for physical healing or for relief from any other painful circumstance?” Yes, we are invited to pray about these circumstances, but we should always pray in confidence that our infinitely wise and loving heavenly Father knows what is best for us, and we should be willing to accept His answer to us.
After the death of my first wife, a friend sent me a card with the following anonymous quote:
Lord, I am willing to —
Receive what you give,
Lack what you withhold,
Relinquish what you take.
Obviously, at the time, the thought of being willing to relinquish my wife was the message appropriate for me. But if through an accident you become totally disabled, could you say, “ Lord, I am willing to receive this crippling disability You have given me”? If you are single with no prospects of marriage, can you say, “Lord, I am willing to lack what You have withheld”?
Some years ago, I experienced a crushing and humiliating disappointment. At the time, I didn’t know the little anonymous verse I’ve just quoted, but I did know Job 1:21: “[Job] said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.’” The morning after the event, I knelt before the Lord and said, “Lord, You gave and You have taken away; blessed be Your name.” Through that Scripture and that prayer, God enabled me to relinquish what He had taken. I did not know at the time that that experience was a trial run for the far greater challenge of relinquishing my wife several years later.
You will recognize that there is a recurring theme running through this chapter as well as the previous one. That theme is the importance of a firm belief in the sovereignty, wisdom, and goodness of God in all the circumstances of our lives.2 Whether those circumstances are short-term or long-term, our ability to respond to them in a God-honoring and God-pleasing manner depends on our ability and willingness to bring these truths to bear on them. And we must do this by faith; that is, we must believe that the Bible’s teaching about these attributes really is true and that God has brought or allowed these difficult circumstances in our lives for His glory and our ultimate good.
Finally, I realize that in dealing with discontentment, I probably have touched some raw nerves. And this may be especially aggravated when I label discontentment as sin. You may be thinking, If he only knew my situation, he wouldn’t be so glib and “preachy.” It’s true, I don’t know your situation, but I write as one who has struggled with discontentment and has sought to overcome it with the truths I have set forth in this chapter. They have helped me, and I pray they will help you. May all of us, with the help of the Holy Spirit, move from any negative attitudes of discontentment to a positive attitude of being stewards of the difficult and disappointing circumstances God has given us so that we may somehow glorify Him in all of life.