The Enemy to Your Contentment

Dannah Gresh: Are you content with who God made you to be? Here’s Melissa Kruger.

Melissa Kruger: The person who you are—exactly how you have been crafted, exactly how you have been made, your personality, your skin, your hair color, your eyes—were divinely chosen by a God who deeply loves you and who is ruling over everything in your life!

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for November 2, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh, and our host is the author of Choosing Gratitude, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I've got an important question for you: are you a contented person? I think we’d all love to be more content, more at peace, more satisfied in life. What would you say keeps you from contentment? That’s something we’ll explore today on Revive Our Hearts.

We’re continuing today in a message that Melissa Kruger gave in a breakout session at our most recent True Woman conference. She’ll explain about something she calls “the great joy thief,” and you may be surprised at what it is, as well as what it’s not. 

When we left off yesterday, Melissa was making some observations and applications from Philippians chapter 4. Listen to what the apostle Paul says in verses 11–13: 

Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.

Push pause for a second. What situation was Paul in when he wrote those words? Perhaps you have heard that Paul was in a Roman prison cell when he talked about learning to be content in whatever situation he was in. He goes on to say in verse 12.

I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Phil. 4:11–13)

Melissa Kruger's reflecting on this passage. Yesterday, she said:

1. Contentment is not available for only super-Christians. It's available for all of us.
2. Contentment is independent of our circumstances and is dependent on Christ.

Let’s pick up now with Melissa Kruger.

Melissa: I’ve spent too much of life thinking, If I can get my circumstances sorted, then I’ll be content.

This is what Thomas á Kempis said (he lived 1380–1471 A.D.). This is not a new problem, this happened a long time ago.

You cannot find complete satisfaction in any temporal gift, because you were not created to find your delight in them. Even if you possessed all the good things that God had created, you could not feel happy and glad. All your gladness and happiness rests in the God who created those things. 

Remember, our first mother had the perfect life! Eve had the perfect husband. She had the perfect relationship with God, and it was not enough. 

The third thingthis passage teaches us is that contentment is learned. Okay, I find this really hopeful!. I realized, I think I’m the slowest learner on the planet, and that’s why the Lord keeps having me teach on these things, because every time He gives me context!

I’ll tell you, this week the context was: I’m working on a new book. Every word is painful, every word! It feels like, “Oh! I don’t want to do it!” I’d written a thousand words. I hadn’t thought to save it. I moved my computer. It all shut down, and they were totally gone! 

And it was like, “Dear Lord, I’m trying to serve you! Why is it so hard!?” I just laughed to myself. We had just spent time praying with the Revive Our Hearts team. In my heart I had said, “How am I going to live like Heaven rules this week—this week, when my life doesn’t go as planned?”

I will say I did kind of scream out loud, but then I said, “I trust You, Lord. You must have not wanted those words on that piece of paper for this book today.” And I said, “I’m going to live like Heaven rules right now.” And it brought peace to my heart. 

And this is where I want to say that it’s a learned thing. We fight for it! We have to fight in our brain for contentment. It’s not like, “Oh, a thousand words, no big deal. Thank you, Jesus!” That’s not where I was, but I got there. I could say, “I trust You Lord. You’re good to me. This has to be Your good for me, because that’s what You promised me.”

I don’t know the last time you learned something new. I think the older we get we stop learning, and so we get a lot more scared by the failure. A few years ago my kids convinced me to try to learn the RipStik. I don’t even know if these even still exist now. It’s like, “Please, would you like a trip to the yard?” That’s what a RipStik is. (laughter)

It’s this little, almost like a skateboard, that wiggles. You get on it, and watch them! They were all going around the tennis courts and doing all this stuff. My friend and I were like, “We can do that!” So we get on, and we immediately fall off! And then our kids tell us, “Hey! You’ve got to wiggle your hips like this!”

And so we’re wiggling our hips, and we’re doing all these things. Then we tried a little more and fell off again. Eventually we got to the point where we could actually do it. But it was a really good reminder to me of what it takes to learn something.

So I want to give you some encouragement as you're on this fight for contentment: you’re going to fall off, and you’re going to fall down, and you’re going to look at yourself and say, “I was trying to trust You, Lord. I was trying to remember all Your promises.” And you might not, but you get back on and you keep trying. You keep saying, “I’m going to put this verse in my mind today, and I’m going to focus on Your truth today, Lord.” 

I just want to encourage you, just because you’re at whatever point in your faith . . . I’m going to be learning contentment, I feel like, my whole life.

And what I would say is this: it will get faster. You will fall off, and you will get back up faster the longer you keep fighting this battle. So what maybe would have put you under for like two months, you will learn to more quickly trust God the longer you walk with Him. But just remember that learning takes time. It’s okay that we fall off, but we keep getting back up and getting back on. 

The last thing I just want to say is that we talk about contentment; this isn’t just something we pursue because we want it. It’s actually commanded. The author of the book of Hebrews said this: 

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because He has said, "I will never leave nor forsake you." (Heb. 13:5 NIV)

He commands it of us, because He wants what we know about God to be so rooted in our lives that it has to be expressed by our contentment . . . that what we know about God—that He is with us, He tells us—is the thing we need. 

We think we need X, Y, or Z. Everybody in here probably has an “if only this.” “If only this . . . then I would be content.” We all have an “if only” list. But He is saying, “Because you have Me, you can be content.” That’s the sentence. There’s nothing else to fill in.

 

Because we have God, we can be content, because He is in our lives. I know that that is actually really a difficult thing. We’ve talked about what contentment is, we’ve talked about what it kind of looks like, what verses point to it. 

But the second thing I want to talk about is what actually robs us of contentment. I call coveting “the great joy thief.” I think we so often don’t relate these two things, because we have mirrored coveting so much in our modern world that we think it’s just with money and possessions. 

But coveting is a much bigger problematic sin. It is exactly what leads to our discontentment and our grumbling. Again, I want to always stress, coveting is not a problem of desires. It’s not a bad thing to want things. We live in a world that is far from Eden. I want a lot of things. A lot of things are very broken in this world. 

We all want a lot of really good things that sometimes do not happen because this world is broken, so having desires is not the problem. Here’s the definition I want to give you for coveting—and it’s kind of a complicated definition, so I’ll define some of the parts after I give it to you.

Coveting—it’s using like Puritan language. I love the poor Puritans, but they sometimes have old-fashioned language: “Coveting is an inordinate or culpable desire to possess often that which belongs to another.” So it’s “inordinate” or “culpable.” What do I mean by those two words? 

“Inordinate” is the depth of our desire. So, if our desire is so deep for something that it has essentially become an idol in our lives—we love something so much because we value it over the love of God—it has become an idol.

The second is a “culpable” desire. What do we mean by a culpable desire? If we want something that is clearly prohibited to us in Scripture, that’s a culpable desire. So I might have a desire for a husband, if I’m a single woman, but if I have a desire for your husband, it’s a culpable desire. It’s out.

That’s a covetous desire. It’s never going to be okay to be wanting someone else’s husband. So there are certain desires that we need to look in our heart and say, “That’s wrong. It’s not one for you to have.” 

There are some desires that we need to look at our heart and say, “That’s an okay desire, to want a home, to want a meal, clothing . . .” whatever it might be. “But how’s my desire for it?” The word I like to use is, “Has my desire for it soured?” Has it become a desire that is idolatrous in my heart in such a way that I believe I cannot live a joyful, content life without it? 

So that’s the question we have to talk about when we talk about “inordinate.” And that’s what most of us are dealing with. I think most of us can accept, “If God’s Word prohibits it, I need to entrust that to Him.” But let’s think a little bit more about the inordinate, and we’ll get to that in just a minute.

I want to explain one other thing about coveting. (There are a lot of words that talk about inordinate desires.) Coveting in Scripture (and this is how the Ten Commandments normally work) they’re umbrella commandments. So coveting—the “do not covet” commandment in the Scripture that says not to want these things—is actually the big umbrella. Under it are three other words: “envy,” “lust,”and “greed.” 

So envy is setting our affections on something that belongs to another, most likely it’s like your neighbor. Our “neighborhood” with Instagram has gotten a lot bigger! So we have a lot more neighbors to look at than living rooms now.

The second one, lust, is coveting that is usually sexual in nature, so that’s a different type of coveting. And then greed describes coveting that is usually about money and possessions. And that one, just always be careful, the wealthiest person in the room is not necessarily the greediest. They might be, but you can have very little money and still be extremely greedy. You can be incredibly wealthy and be incredibly generous. 

You can’t make judgments on who’s coveting the most based on what they have. It’s an issue of our heart. So I want us to look at a few characteristics of coveting, because this is going to help us. 

And let me say, the reason we’re going through the exercise, we have to know our enemy if we’re going to fight well. So, fighting and cultivating contentment, the first thing, if you’re going to do battle, you need to know about your enemy. Coveting is the enemy to your contentment.

 

I’m going to dig into some of the places in our hearts. I’m going to tell you this is not always comfortable, but it is what we need to do. As we excavate the heart we’re going to see, “Yeah, we have some big problems!”

But this is the good news: we have a Savior who His mercy is more! That’s always the good news as we start digging into these heart desires. His mercy is more than the problem of our sin! I want to look at some characteristics of coveting.

Coveting is a sin pattern, not a circumstance. It’s not going to be solved by attainment. I don’t know if you remember the story of Rachel in the Old Testament (see Genesis 29–30). Rachel was locked in a covetous battle with her sister; they had the unfortunate reality of being married to the same man. (It’s not a great place to begin your sisterly relationship or continue your sisterly relationship.)

She watched her sister give birth again and again and again. She had a good desire. Her desire was to have a child. And finally she has a child. And do you know what she names him? Do you remember? Joseph. Do you know what the name Joseph means?

“Joseph” does not mean, “The Lord has finally given what I desire and now I’m finally content!” The name Joseph means, “May the Lord add.” Okay, here’s the thing about coveting: it’s a heart problem, not a circumstance problem. As soon as you obtain the thing you desire, you will just start wanting something else.

She has one baby, but she’s looking at her sister who had just had her sixth, and so she’s like, “A little bit more!” And that is the nature of our hearts, right? John Calvin, the famous theologian, said, “Our hearts are an idol factory.” They’re perpetually producing more.

And that’s the same of our covetous desire as well, always wanting more. Think about what you desperately wanted at age sixteen. You may have gotten it. And then think about what you wanted at twenty. You probably somewhere along the way got that.

If we look back on our lives we see this constant craving for more. We get something, we attain, and then we want something more. And so that’s the first characteristic. The second, it’s marked by comparison and entitlement.

Coveting is all about looking over the fence and saying, “I will have what she’s having, please!” It’s not just looking over the fence, it’s actually looking over the fence and saying, “Why does she get that and I don’t? Why does she have these things and I don’t?”

And it’s not just things. Here are four areas that we tend to covet: money and possessions is definitely one; relational, we long for friends, a husband, a different mother-in-law, a different daughter-in-law, seasons and circumstances, giftedness and abilities.

Have you ever looked at someone at church and said, “If I just had that gifting, I would really serve in the church well!” I look at people who can sing. I cannot sing; it would not benefit any of you if I burst into song right now. Sometimes I look at people who can sing—like Kristyn Getty—and I’m like, “Oh, that’s the way to serve the Lord! It makes everyone joyful and happy! And I’m here, stuck talking about coveting!” (laughter) So you can look at somebody else’s gifts and sometimes say, “If I had that, then I would serve!” Serve the Lord with what you have.

So we’re always comparing. I want to talk about this type of comparison. Sometimes we compare ourselves to one woman in particular. I want you to take a minute to think about her. There might be one person in your life that you’re like, “Yep, nothing bad ever happens to Sue! It always goes well for her.” 

And you kind of sit there and you think, Yep, if I had her life, though, I’d be content. You know, she’s always walking around happy and all things, and that’s because she has the perfect house and the perfect husband. Her dog even obeys and doesn’t bite people. You look at her life and think, She’s got it all!

I did women’s ministry in the local church for ten years. Do not believe the lie of the facade you see outside, that women are wearing. People cannot always share how their life is falling apart. My deepest pains, I’m not posting those on Instagram . . . and I doubt you are either. No one says, “I’m hiding in my closet crying because my husband and I just had a big fight.”

No one says, “I think my teenager hates God.” You see the pictures posted that show everything that’s going okay. We can’t share the most painful places in our lives, and you know what? We don’t have to. The Bible tells us everybody is walking through a broken existence. It’s hard for everyone out there. 

Don’t believe the lie that someone’s got the amazing easy life. It’s just not true. I had a situation with a friend; we were all in a small group together. One friend was single, one friend had been yearning for a baby for years. I was talking with my single friend and she said, “Well, look at Elizabeth! She finally got the baby she wanted!” (We had just been at a shower for her baby who had just been born.)

And she said, “See, some people do get all the things that they want!” She said this to me, and the week before I had met with Elizabeth, and the week before Elizabeth’s baby was born she found out her husband had been having an affair. My single friend didn’t know, and I couldn’t tell her. All I could say was, “You know, I think everybody’s life has tough things in it.”

We just don’t know what is going on behind someone’s life. So don’t compare your life to someone else’s and say, “Lord, please give me this life.” You do not know what you are asking for, you simply do not know.

But here’s what do you know: the person who you are—exactly how you have been crafted, exactly how you have been made, your personality, your skin, your hair color, your eyes—were divinely chosen by a God who deeply loves you and who is ruling over everything in your life! And so whatever He gives you, He is entrusting to you. He says, “You can do this with Me.”

Do you remember somewhere in the Chronicles of Narnia, I think it’s Shasta, The Horse and His Boy, he wants to know about somebody else’s story. And Aslan looks at him and says, “I tell no one else someone else’s story. I only tell them their own story.” He’s only asking you to trust Him with your story. 

Focus on God, not what’s going on with other people, because our comparison is always blind. We don’t know what we are comparing. 

Nancy: Melissa Kruger has been helping us see the link between true contentment and trusting that Heaven rules. She’s also warning us to steer clear of that enemy of contentment, covetousness. 

Melissa’s book on this subject is called The Envy of Eve: Finding Contentment in a Covetous World. When you think about it, the mess that this whole world is in goes back to a woman in Genesis chapter 3 who wasn't content with what God had provided for. Oh what a mess we make when we go the way of this covetous world rather than swimming upstream and choosing contentment. You’ll find more information on how you can get a copy, linked in the transcript of this program, at ReviveOurHearts.com. She’ll be back with the conclusion of her message tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Before we leave today, I want to take a moment to say "thank you" to our sponsors. You might be thinking, Sponsors? I didn’t know Revive Our Hearts had sponsors. Well, we do. We’re a listener-supported ministry. So this program is sponsored in part by you, if you’ve ever made a donation to Revive Our Hearts. 

And there’s a special group of our sponsors who give on a regular basis. We call them our Revive Partners. They pray for us, they pass the word on about Revive Our Hearts, and they donate at least $30 each month. 

Recently we heard from Nicole. Here’s a portion of an audio postcard she sent.

Nicole: Dear Nancy and the entire Revive Our Hearts Team!

I have been listening to your program since I was a teenager. Your messages throughout the years have greatly encouraged my walk of faith, they have grown and challenged me spiritually, and have made an impact on the woman I am today.

Nancy: Nicole says she and her mentor attended a Revive Our Hearts conference in 2015. They both are Revive Partners.

Nicole: It's been an amazing journey. Through all my years I've listened I've been encouraged by your podcasts, blogs, and books. I'm continuing to grow from your teaching. Thank you for being by my side for all these years. Thank you also for the way you defend the gospel, especially in a culture that is so against it. I appreciate you sharing the faith and teaching us how live as godly women, wise as mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends.

Nancy: Thank you, Nicole, and thank you for supporting Revive Our Hearts. 

And let me say to our listeners, if you’ve benefited from this program at all, we would love to hear from you. Maybe you’ve listened for a long time, like Nicole, or maybe you’ve just discovered us. Either way, we need your prayers and financial support. So pray about what God would have you give. If you’re married, talk to your husband about it, too, and then contact us.

You can do that at ReviveOurHearts.com. Click where you see the word “Donate,” or call us at 1-800-569-5959. Thank you so much! You’re helping us spread the message of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ with women all around the world.

Dannah: And for your gift of any amount, we’ll say "thank you" by sending you a set of tabletop Advent cards that you can display in your home or workplace throughout the month of December. Ask about them when you contact us with your donation.

Nancy: We’ve heard some helpful insights today from Melissa Kruger on the enemy of our contentment: covetousness. Tomorrow she’ll turn the corner and help us learn how to cultivate contentment in our hearts. I hope you’ll join us next time on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to help you fight covetousness as we call you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

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