What's Overwhelming You?

Our society is the perfect place to look when you don't want to be content with the life that you have because an overwhelming number of people around you are waiting to tell you that your happiness would increase exponentially if you had/bought XYZ. If there is any one thing that could cripple your chances of living a life of contentment, it would be listening to the lies that more stuff will make you happy. I would bet that this is one of the easiest ways that Satan distracts Christians from following God's direction in their lives.We generally lay the blame on the American society which has programmed us to never be satisfied with what we have, but Satan has been using discontentment to distract and mislead people ever since the beginning of time. If you think about it, why else would Eve have eaten that fruit? She and her husband had a beautiful garden to live in, plenty to eat, a perfect marriage, and the ability to communicate (even hang out with) their Creator! All they had to do to maintain this perfect life was follow the one rule God had laid before them and not touch a specific tree. Considering they were in a beautiful garden with many different kinds of trees, skipping over one little tree should not have been an issue. Even with the one rule, they had no reason to change anything about their lives, except that Satan planted seeds of discontentment in their hearts.The serpent got Eve to question her willingness to obey that one rule. He convinced her that the abundance she had wasn't enough--she should be entitled to know everything God knew. She was convinced that her life would be better without that one rule.Often, we look at the life that God has given us and say, 'this isn't good enough, I deserve better.' Then we chase after all the earthly things that we think will make it better...a better job, a nicer car, a bigger paycheck, smarter phones, or a larger house. We walk around during the day and we rate everything in our lives.

Then we take those numbers and compare it to what those around us have or what we see on TV. With each new rating we store up a little more resentment for the people with nicer stuff and a little more anger that we don't have what we clearly "need" to be happy. The more we see people who look better off, the more unhappy we become with our own lives and the heavier our load becomes. Everyday we go about our jobs and activities with this sense of discontentment and frustration that God hasn't given us better.So, instead of seeing that ways God blesses us everyday and instead of being grateful for the houses, phones, cars, and jobs that many people, even in America, don't have, we sit in our houses and whine and complain that we deserve more. Rather than being happy with our lives and finding ways to use our blessings to bless others, we spend our time feeling miserable for ourselves. While we could be embracing the life God has given us, we choose to waste it wishing for something else.After eating the fruit, Adam and Eve immediately began to experience the consequences of disobeying God. For Eve and all women, the process of childbirth became more difficult and the relationship between man and wife would have strains that hadn't existed before. Adam found that his work of caring for the ground and producing food to eat would never be as easy as it was before. Then, God was forced to throw them both out of the Garden of Eden to keep them away from the Tree of Life.When Eve chose to indulge her discontentment and eat the fruit, she changed the course of history forever. No one knows what this world would have been like had Adam and Eve just been happy with the life they had and left that tree alone. Eve's choice to not appreciate what God gave her has impacted every single human being that has been born since--that would be a horrible weight to carry! Granted, for most of us, wallowing in and acting on our self-pity won't affect the lives of the whole of humanity, but you can bet it will impact the people around you. A negative and discontented attitude will probably also have unpleasant repercussions in many areas of your own life.God's first response to their sin, delivering punishments, is logical because all wrong actions produce negative consequences. However, his second reaction is what amazes me. He had to punish them--there was no getting around that, but after that, He continued to faithfully care for them. He made them the clothes that they needed. When they lost their sons Cain and Abel to the sin that they themselves had brought into the world, God gave them another son who became the beginning of the lineage of Christ. Adam and Eve rejected God's blessings for their own desires, which brought sin to the entire world, and God still used them to bring redemption to all mankind.Likewise, God's faithfulness is consistently extended to us, even when we spend more time whining about our lives than we do offering our lives to Him. God used the line of Adam and Eve to produce the Savior whose death and resurrection still offers us redemption from our sins.Despite the fact that we often choose to dwell on what we don't have, God perpetually loves us and uses us to further His kingdom. And that truly and completely overwhelms me.So my goal is to ignore the discontentment that tries to creep in and focus on the blessings God has given me because if my option is to be overwhelmed with materialistic discontentment or overwhelmed with God's goodness....I think I'm going to pick the second one.What about you?