Bad Habits Are a Lack Of Contentment: 3 Observations
Contentment and God never leaving you; will God leave you if you’re not seeking contentment in Him?
Hebrews 13 says: Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
No, God doesn’t leave us when we get caught up the bad habit of seeking everything but being content. But, as the writer to the Hebrews wisely says: contentment and trust should go hand-in-hand.
Here are a few observations on how bad habits are exacerbated when we’re not content:
(1) Life is a bad habit when you’re not content
God seeks for us to have a life of balance, and balance breeds contentment. Balance cannot truly be found but in Christ and God’s reconciliation, so anything that doesn’t find it’s reconciliation in Christ can be seen as a bad habit. Idolatry is a bad habit; so are all of the other Commandments that are broken every day. The Christian life is one of consistently seeking Christ that we might avoid breaking God’s Commandments, not a belief that God will just forgive me so I don’t need to care about not staying in those perpetually bad habitual sins. God has the power to break the bad habit of sin, so we must intentionally be clichéd in pointing people to Christ to receive His redemptive power.
For the Christian, we must be about the business of not letting our lives be one big bad habit of carelessness before His Word.
(2) For a lot of people, forgiveness is not enough
If all we had in this life was the forgiveness of our sins, most Christians would say that this is enough. Secretly, it isn’t. People want stuff, and the more we see other people have stuff, the more we want stuff for ourselves. The desire for more stuff leads to a myriad of imbalances in our lives, and as I said earlier, a lack of balance leads to bad habits.
One of the greatest ways for us to break bad habits is to seek contentment in all things. Then we won’t be tempted to fill our lives with useless stuff that becomes the norm.
(3) We can believe God will jettison us if we’re not dreaming big and living bigger
Do a Google search for Christian books on dreaming big and God’s plan for your life. I don’t even want to guess how many you will come across, but I do know that I’ve gotten promo material for many of the big-name ones that have come out recently. I have no problem with working hard and glorifying God with living a life in Him, but with all of these self-help books on dreaming big and the big business of Christian motivational speakers trying to help you move in that direction, I think we can get fooled into thinking that if I’m not looking for that trajectory, that God will intentionally remove Himself from our presence until we get on board.
This goes against the simplistic virtue of contentment. People can get bullied into thinking that their lives are never enough, even if it’s unintentional. This dream big/live bigger platform is all the rage, and it’s making people at the top rich and making others feel hopeless if they can’t match that type of control of their gifts and lives.
We must instill the virtue of contentment, even if it goes against what culture is trying to teach us.
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Contentment has so many positive qualities. Contentment is one of the great ways that God calls us to trust in Him. If we can’t trust Him, no amount of stuff is going to make up for it. Why not renew that spirit of trust in our Creator today? Amen.
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