Making the Best of a Bad Situation
Advice for the Discontented
Jeremiah 29:4-6
Ever since the beginning of creation, when the first creatures came from the hand of God, there has always been someone, somewhere, unhappy with his position in the universe.
It all started with an angel named Lucifer, the brightest star of the heavenly firmament, who was not satisfied to be the apex of God’s creation. He wanted something more than his assigned position as the greatest of all created beings.
His discontentment caused him to lead a rebellion against the Most High. A full one-third of the angels joined with him in his attempt to overthrow the Throne of the Lord. For his rebellion, he and his followers were kicked out of heaven.
And ever since that day, he has been known as Satan and the devil, and he has been the enemy of God and all his works.
It was discontentment that made him do it. And discontentment has been one of his best weapons ever since. His earliest triumph came in the Garden of Eden when he sowed seeds of discontentment in Eve’s unsuspecting heart.
By misquoting the Lord, he made Eve think that God was somehow trying to cheat her, to keep her down, to keep her from becoming “like God.” So Eve took the fruit and ate it. She gave it to Adam and he ate it. Thus did sin enter the human bloodstream.
The seeds of discontentment brought forth the bitter harvest of disobedience, which led to the loss of paradise and the entrance of evil into our world.
Unhappy Ever Since
And ever since then we have been an unhappy race. After Eden we have never been fully satisfied with anything on earth. And we’re still not satisfied thousands of years later. We always want something different.
* If we’re young, we want to be older. If we’re old, we wish we were younger.
* If it’s old, we want something new. If it’s new, we want something newer.
* If it’s small, we want something bigger. If it’s big, we want something really big.
* If we have a hundred dollars, we want two hundred. If we have two hundred, we want five hundred.
* If we have an apartment, we want a condo. If we have a condo, we want a house. If we have a house, we want a bigger house. Or a new house. Or a nicer house. Or maybe we want to scale down and live in an apartment again.
* If we have a job, we dream of a better job, a bigger job, a closer job, with a bigger office, a better boss, better benefits, more challenge, bigger opportunity, nicer people to work for, and more vacation time.
* If we’re single, we dream of being married. If we’re married, … (you can finish that sentence yourself.).
None of this is unusual in any way. We were born discontented and some of us stay that way forever.
And I would venture to say a certain amount of discontentment can be good for the soul. It’s not wrong to have dreams about what the future might hold. The hope of something better drives us forward and keeps us working, inventing, striving, creating and innovating. We certainly need some spiritual discontentment with our lives and the way we live.
But there is a kind of discontentment that leads in a wrong direction. It generally expresses itself in at least one of five ways:
1) Envy (the inability to rejoice at the success of others)
2) Uncontrolled Greed or Ambition (the desire to win at all costs, no matter what it takes or who gets trampled in the process)
3) Critical Spirit (the tendency to make negative, hurtful, cutting remarks about others)
4) Complaining Spirit or Bitterness (the disposition to make excuses and to blame others or bad circumstances for our problems; refusing to take personal responsibility; the inability to be thankful for what we already have)
5) Outbursts of Anger (angry words spoken because our expectations were not met)
The discontented person looks around and says, “I deserve something better than this.” Because he is never happy and never satisfied, he drags others into the swamp with him. No wonder Benjamin Franklin declared, “Contentment makes a poor man rich, discontent makes a rich man poor.”
Discontentment is the cancer of the soul. It eats away our joy, corrodes our happiness, destroys our outlook on life, and produces a terminal illness of the soul so that everything looks negative to us. We cannot be happy because we will not be happy. We cannot be satisfied because we will not be satisfied. Such a person is truly a lost soul—miserable today and miserable tomorrow.
So how can we overcome this debilitating condition? I believe the answer (as always) lies with good theology. Sin always stems from wrong thinking about God, about ourselves, and about life in general.
Jeremiah 29 contains some amazingly helpful insights about discontentment even though the word itself is never used. We’ve already looked at one of those last week.
1. You Are Where You Are Because God Wants You There.
Remember the background of Jeremiah 29. It is a letter from the prophet Jeremiah in Jerusalem to the Jewish exiles in faraway Babylon. They felt abandoned, rejected, unloved, discouraged and forgotten.
How could they ever sing the songs of Zion while living in a pagan land? How could they ever find hope knowing that it was their own foolish choices that put them in Babylon? And how could they find the courage to go on when God had said, “You will be in exile for 70 years?”
To all of those concerns, God answers in verse 4, “I carried you to Babylon.” Here is one of the clearest statements of God’s sovereignty in the Bible. Although the hated Babylonians had captured them, behind the pagan army stands the Lord himself.
“I did it,” says the Lord.
“Don’t blame the Babylonians. They were merely my instruments to do my will. You sinned and brought this judgment on yourself, but I am the one who carried you to Babylon.”
To say it that way doesn’t cancel human choices and the very real consequences of our sin. It merely points out that things are not always as they seem on the surface. The exiles had vivid memories of the shock, pain and shame of being wrenched from their homeland and being carried away to Babylon.
God says, “There is more going on here than you know. I warned you this would happen. You ignored me, and now what I said has come to pass. If you want to blame anyone, blame yourself. Don’t blame the Babylonians. They were acting on my command—though they did not realize it.”
Solomon said it very succinctly in Proverbs 16:9. “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.” The Jews never planned to end up in Babylon. In fact, that would have been the last place they intended to go, but the Lord determined that would be their destination for the next 70 years.
Is this any consolation? It all depends on what you believe about God. If you don’t believe that God involves himself in the affairs of life, then it won’t matter because you won’t see his hand at work even in the darkest moments.
But if you believe God is a God of the details, then it makes all the difference in the world to know that he takes personal responsibility for allowing certain things to happen that you regard as catastrophes.
Tony Evans says that everything in the universe is either caused by God or allowed by God, and there is no third category. That’s huge because many of us create a third category, something like “really bad things that happen for no reason at all.” There is no such category.
You are where you are right now because God wants you there. You may be happy about your current circumstances or you may be miserable. Most likely you are somewhere in between. It doesn’t matter. You are where you are at this moment because God wants you there.
How do I know that? Because if God wanted you somewhere else, you’d be somewhere, and when he does want you somewhere else, that’s where you will be. If God is God, that must be true.
When God says, “I carried you to Babylon,” he wants his children to know that though they have sinned grievously, he has not forgotten them. He carried them to Babylon—partly as judgment and partly as a sign of his mercy. They certainly understood the judgment part. They would understand the mercy part later.
Sometimes the most we can say is, “I know I am here because God wants me here. I don’t know why, but I know I am not here by chance.” It is a great advance in the life of faith to be able to say that much—even if you can’t say anything else.
2. You Are Called to Make the Most of Your Present Circumstances.
Verses 5-6 give us God’s specific directions to the exiles in Babylon. It definitely was not what they expected to hear.
Verses 5-6
They wanted God to say something like this: “My children, I know you don’t like living in Babylon so I have some very good news for you. Do you remember what I did for Moses and your ancestors? Well hang on, because help is on the way!”
But that’s not what God said. His advice is quite different. “You’re going to be here for a long time—70 years, to be exact. Since you won’t be coming home early, it’s important that you make the best of your situation.”
Build houses and settle down.
Plant gardens and eat what they produce.
Marry and have sons and daughters.
Let your children get married and have children.
Increase in number. Do not decrease.
To borrow a familiar phrase, God’s command is simple. Bloom where you are planted. You may not like where you are, but that doesn’t matter.
As I have planted you in Babylon (transplanted would be more like it), go ahead and put your roots down. Buy some land, build nice homes, plant some gardens, go into business, build a community.
In every hard situation, we have to face the same question. Are we going to complain or are we going to get busy? God says, “You are in Babylon now. Make the best of it. Don’t complain. Don’t mope. Don’t spend your days pining away for Jerusalem. You aren’t going back there for 70 years. I put you in Babylon for a reason. Don’t waste a single moment looking back on what used to be. Use your energies to make your life better now.”
That’s really good advice, isn’t it?
The truth is, we never really arrive in this life. We are not home. What we’re living in is just a house. It’s all temporary. It’s not the eternal destination.
In fact, the people that made home “home” when you were a kid are, most likely all gone now. The house may not even be there.
Do they hold a lot of happy memories? Absolutely, and some sad ones as well, but they were never intended to be the eternal source of my happiness and well-being.
And yet, think about all the emphasis we put on all that stuff. We like to play “if only”. . .
If only I get married, I’ll be happy.
If only I could get a divorce, I’d be happy.
If only I get a new job, I’ll be happy.
If only I graduate from college, I’ll be happy.
If only we have children, I’ll be happy.
If only we can retire to Florida, we’ll be happy.
If only I make more money, I’ll be happy.
If only we move to a new home, I’ll be happy.
If only I climb this one last mountain, I’ll be happy.
Listen: You can’t live in the past, but you can’t live in the future either. Somewhere I read that when new inmates come to prison for the first time, they are given a crucial piece of advice: “Keep your head where you seat is.” If you spend your days thinking about the past or about what might have been, you’ll lose focus on where you are, and you’re liable to do something stupid that will get you in even worse trouble. You have to live in the present—not the past or the future.
And the key to dealing with both is the present. What will I do right now about what I’m having to deal with? Am I going to pine for better days or will I complain about my momma not hugging me enough when I was a kid? Or will I take responsibility for myself and move on from right here?
Some of us get messed up at this point. We feel bad about the past and therefore we never move forward. The key to a better future is to stop trying to have a better past. Here’s a deep theological truth about your past: It is what it is. You can’t change it, you can’t delete it, you can’t improve it, but you can accept it and move on from it.
God bless those brave souls who embrace reality with courage, who accept the past for what it is, and who move forward with energetic faith in God.
3. You Must Come to Grips With Reality.
This point follows from the last one. If we are going to settle down in Babylon and make the best of a
bad situation, we must come to grips with reality. This may be the hardest thing for all of us to do.
Sometimes the best thing that can happen is to get a cold splash of reality right in the face. It might shock you when it happens, but we owe it to ourselves and those around not to live in a fantasy land believing everything is always fine and dandy.
Your children will be blessed if they see you making the best of a bad situation. God told the exiles to settle down and build something for themselves in Babylon. And he told them to have children and then grandchildren, to increase and not to decrease. Blessed are the sons and daughters who see their parents making the best of their situations.
Blessed are those kids who watch and learn from their parents as they trust God and depend upon Him.
What is the bottom line?
1) You are where you are by the sovereign choice of God.
2) You can serve the Lord where you are right now.
3) You can glorify the Lord where you are right now.
4) If you complain, you are attacking the Lord, not serving him.
So the question comes down to this: Do you believe in God or don’t you?
Do you believe God will give you what you need right now so you can serve him right where you are? There is a sense in which, when you complain and dwell in discontentment, at that point you no longer believe in God.
That is, on one level you certainly do believe in God, but by your discontented complaining, you are denying the truth you claim to believe. If you can’t do everything you would like to do, you can joyfully accept your situation as being from the hand of the Lord.
You can always pray, you can always praise, you can always sing in your heart to the Lord, you can always refresh yourself in the streams that flow forth from the heart of God.
How should we apply the truth from this passage?
1) Bloom where you are planted.
2) Serve the Lord right where you are.
3) Stop moping!
4) Don’t live in the past or the future!
5) Let God define your life, not earthly circumstances.
6) Don’t expect change to make you happy.
7) Never forget that you won’t be here forever.
That brings us to a very important spiritual truth: The only thing that matters is knowing Jesus and through him, growing closer to God day by day. Nothing else matters. If we know God in Christ, then we are of all people most blessed and highly favored. We have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 1:3).
And if we don’t know Christ, then the rest of life won’t satisfy our deepest longings anyway. Christ must be the center of life or else the circumference will never satisfy. Circumstances—even happy ones—can never replace the soul’s longing for the Lord.
Seen in that light, discontentment is a grievous sin because it is an attempt to overthrow God. It is an attack on the Sovereign who sits on the throne of the universe.
When you complain against the Lord, you are repeating Satan’s mistake. It’s the first great rebellion played out in your own heart. And you will not be any more successful than Lucifer was.
I would like you to consider the following two sentences carefully:
If I am in Jerusalem, I will serve him in Jerusalem.
If I am in Babylon, I will serve him in Babylon.
This is true no matter where you are. You can be in Ardmore or Malawi or Idaho or Mexico or anywhere else on God’s green earth and still serve the Lord.
It’s not about geography. It’s about your heart. If God has put you in Babylon, serve him there.
Build a house; Plant a garden; Start a business; Have some children; Have some grandchildren.
Settle down and enjoy life. You can serve God in Babylon just as well as you can in Jerusalem. It’s a hard lesson, but it is also good news if we will receive it from the Lord.
Let’s pray.
