Challenge for Thanksliving

Thanksgiving. It's almost here! Blake and I are looking forward to eating three Thanksgiving meals this holiday. There's amazing casseroles, desserts, meats, fruits, and cheeses all waiting for us! Oh I can hardly wait! With the overwhelming amount of food on the table, I can't help but think about how many people aren't able to eat three meals a day. I'm so thankful for my lovely home, family, friends, for the ability to wash clothes, to have long meaningful conversations, and resources to study God's word. I pray that I can continually give thanks and learn more about what contentment means. Thanksliving. 

I'm especially thankful for a loving husband. An unconditional love. How are we loving people unconditionally? Conditions always change but the word of the Lord stands forever! Life is about the glory of God and if you are married, specifically glorifying Him and sharing the love of Christ through that marriage. The bigger picture!! Marriage should never be about mere happiness. There's so much more!!!!

How are we sacrificialy loving our spouses so that they will become more like Christ? Who or what is our marriage about? Marriage is so much more than happy, need meeting, comfort. Its a display of God's love of His bride, the church.  Sharing real compassion with real people, real love, sacrifice, giving of our time and effort to be the hands and feet of Christ. We say we know and love God but do we know his word? Do we know what he says about life, purpose, contentment? Father, I love big picture moments. The big picture is... life is not about me. Life is about our awesome Father. I was riding in my car to work this week and good ol' John McArthur was speaking about contentment and marriage. You may find that it hits the nail on the head!

"Our wants always exceed our needs." Do you know that's been reversed? Do you know we now live in a society where our needs exceed our wants? You say, "What in the world do you mean by that?" Follow this kind of thinking. Television doesn't appeal to us on the basis that "wouldn't you like to have this?" It appeals to us on the basis that "you need this." So now what I'm finding is that I need things I don't even want. Have you noticed that? I didn't want them in the past, I don't want them now, but I need them. That's a whole new ball game. I can't say in a sermon, "You can't allow your wants to exceed your needs," that isn't true anymore. Everything is a need (in our consumer driven society.) "You see, the whole thing is perverted. Once you have a humanistic base and you say the goal of man's life is to meet his needs, you give the devil everything he needs to move out and then he just redefines what all your needs are. Homosexuals need to be free to live like homosexuals. Young people need to have unending sexual encounters to liberate their repressed egos. Women need to revolt against these...the suppression of their husbands and they need their own careers. Women don't want children, they need children. And your children don't want certain things, they need to express themselves, they need to be freed up from the bondage of parent repression.

See, the society then starts defining everything as a need. So where does it stop? Because the premise is we're going to meet needs because that's why we are here, to get all our needs met. And what does Christianity do? Stupidly, blindly, ignorantly blunders into the same thing and says, "Oh...oh, so that's the theology." And comes up with health, wealth and prosperity and says..."Good, since we all need to be rich and we all need to be successful and we all need to be liberated and we all...that must be what the gospel is, so we'll chase that." So what do you get out of it? An utterly discontent culture and an utterly discontent church. The whole idea of this thing is to produce discontent. It's really tragic.

But, you see, Paul knew this, Paul knew that the chief end of man was not to meet his needs, but the chief end of man was to worship and enjoy God. Paul knew that it was not the meeting of human need that was the issue, but it was living to the glory of the God who created him that was the issue. And so he was content with very little of this earth stuff, only what he really needed. And that was enough to satisfy him.

People, it's not easy to pull ourselves out of this, not easy at all. But when you...the worst of it is when you start redefining the gospel, and you make God this big need meeting genie, you know, you're going to rub your lamp, He's going to jump out and give you everything you need, positive confession, whatever...you see it in the psychology of today, everybody is running to talk to the counselor because, "I have these needs that aren't being met in my marriage." What? Your husband is not feeding you? It's not warm in your house? "Oh no, I have need for expression and...all these needs." 

How in the world are you going to get Christians in the middle of this to say, "I don't really care if I have little, I don't care if I have much, I'm perfectly happy, all I need is God,"? Now we've lost that. We've lost that satisfaction with little that Paul knew. I'll tell you, folks, you will never know real contentment in your heart until you have a total trust, a total confidence in the providence of God who is ordering every circumstance of life for His glory and you don't need to manipulate and you don't need to lose your mind in trying to control everything. And, secondly, you'll never know contentment until you are satisfied with little because your satisfaction is not dependent on what the world defines as what you need."