Skip to main content

Content or Complacent


  Contentment is very much a biblical concept. Contentment comes from the right spiritual mindset and trust in God and his control. (Philippians 4:12-13). It is the idea of being happy with what you have. Contentment keeps us out of the temptation of longing for things that will lead us from God (1st Timothy 6:6-10). It is a trait we need to cultivate and admire.

 

   However, contentment isn’t complacency.

 

    Complacency is getting to a point and thinking that is all I have to do. It's not finding satisfaction as much as it is being static. It's finding a comfortable rut and staying in it. Complacency longs for something, the status quo, for nothing to change for things to remain in a predictable easy pattern at will require little effort out of us.

 

   While contentment is the secret of happiness, complacency is the recipe for failure.

 

 You see complacency ignores the fact that change will come. It expects everything to stay the same. That why complacency longs for the past because it is knowable and sure. The problem is we can’t move back to the past only forward to the future.

 

  Contentment realizes that the world turns on a dime. It understands that things may change but God doesn’t. So no matter how life ebbs and flows contentment will still be possible.

 

 Great businesses fail because of complacency. Great people fall because of it as well. We can’t just find a point in a spiritual journey and stop we must move forward sure in the knowledge that God will help us no matter what the future holds.

 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?   You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.   You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.   Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

  In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt.  He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!)  Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest.  Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt!   Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way.  He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal.  As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself.  He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors.   But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Until Midnight

    In Acts 20, there is the tragicomic event surrounding a young man by the name of Eutychus. He did what a lot of folks before and after him did, he fell asleep during a sermon. Unfortunately, he was setting in in the third story window at the time. So instead of nodding off and hitting the pew in front of him, he fell to his death. The good news was the apostle Paul was delivering the sermon and had the ability to bring him back.       I don’t know, however, if we can judge Eutychus too harshly. The sermon had gone on till midnight. Paul wouldn’t finish it up till daybreak. That’s a long lesson. I know some folks that might want to jump out of a window if I had a lesson that long, yet these Christians wanted to be there to hear Paul.   Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing for all night sermons but I think we might need to adopt these folks' dedication. They knew that Paul was only in town for a limited time only and they were determined to ...