Waging war on discontentment?

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A South African man came home one evening and as he entered his house he surprised nine men who were robbing his home. Eight of the robbers ran away, but the homeowner managed to shove one into his backyard pool. After realizing the robber couldn’t swim, the homeowner jumped in to save him. The Cape Times reported that once out of the pool, the wet thief called to his friends to come back. Then he pulled a knife and threatened the man who had just rescued him.

The homeowner said, “We were still standing near the pool and when I saw the knife I just threw him back in. But he was gasping for air and was drowning. So I rescued him again. I thought he had a lot of guts trying to stab me after I had just saved his life.”

I cannot imagine being that homeowner, not only to come home to discover that the most private and personal parts of your life were being invaded by outsiders, but also to realize that your moral obligation was to save the very life of one of the invaders. That robber should have been in a very thankful mood, shouldn’t he? But if you will pardon my taking something so mundane as a robbery and attempting to draw some eternal parallels for life from it, in this season of Thanksgiving, we often find ourselves in the same situation – virtually dependent upon someone else to get us out of our life situation and then not being thankful for it, instead demanding more from the one who has saved our life.

Thanksgiving is more than a holiday to be celebrated once every year. It is a spiritual discipline. In fact, it has often been called “the forgotten discipline.” It is easy to presume and take for granted the blessings we have: our homes, our mates, our kids, our grandkids, and, yes, even our health. Ask anyone who has gone through a serious or life-threatening illness and you will hear the same sort of thoughts – “I never knew how good I had it before this hit me.” Or “It is so easy to take life for granted.” Whether we are hit by raging wildfires, economic downturns, or cancer, our lives afterward are never the same.

One author refers to the spiritual discipline of Thanksgiving as “waging war on discontentment.” I am convinced that Thanksgiving is a frontal attack on the armies of the enemy of our souls, the one who would seek to discourage and disarm and destroy our very lives. In fact, it is no more obvious than in the most direct reference to the confrontation we all face which is found in the very beginning of the Bible, the book of Genesis. The very essence of the temptation which was faced by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was the temptation to be discontent with the place and the provision that God had made for them. They were called to turn away from the very simple love of God and to stop practicing being thankful in the midst of ordinary life (check out Genesis 3 for the whole story). And when they did just that, they found themselves to be discontent with His perfect provision for their lives and souls. This dissatisfaction made Adam and Eve very susceptible to the temptation to try to circumvent the plan and provision of God, replacing His perfect plan with one of their own.

And, my friends, we do that every day of our lives when we worry, when we complain, and when we fail to acknowledge what God has done for us. John Calvin said it best when he said, “We are surrounded by God’s benefits. The best use of these benefits is an unceasing expression of gratitude.”

We tend to talk about how well we are doing “under the circumstances” when that condition is nowhere to be a cause for the way we live our lives. We are challenged in Philippians 4 to be content in any and all circumstances, but this has almost nothing to do with the situation of our lives and almost everything to do with how thankful we are to God and whether we refer everything to God in humble gratitude.

One of my hobbies is photography and some years ago I had the opportunity to chat for a few moments with a professional photographer. I asked him how he got into the business of photography. He told me that as an avid amateur photographer he always carried his camera with him wherever he went. When I asked him why he told me that he practiced the “discipline” of photography, that whether he felt like it or not he practiced “PAD,” taking a photo-a-day. That discipline gave him a sense of how to put together a picture that would communicate. It gave him the skill he needed to make it happen. And it gave him the joy of seeing his work come to fruition.

As we move from the Thanksgiving holiday to the Christmas season, may I encourage you to practice “TAD,” the spiritual discipline of Thanksgiving, a “thanks-a-day?” Try starting out each and every day with a prayer of gratitude to God for another day to be vertical. And throughout the day, look for ways to be thankful. It will revolutionize not only your holiday season, but your whole life as well.

God bless…

Chuck Tabor is a religion columnist for The Times-Gazette. He also serves as pastor of Port William UMC.

Chuck Tabor
http://aimmedianetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2016/12/web1_Tabor-Chuck-new-mug-1.jpgChuck Tabor

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