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Don’t Give Life to a Complaint by Joel and Victoria Osteen
Topic: Don’t Give Life to a Complaint
It’s interesting that soon after the people of Israel had been freed from slavery in Egypt, they started complaining about their hardships in the wilderness. One of their complaints was that they were tired of the manna, the bread that God provided supernaturally for them every single day. They grumbled, “Now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!” (Numbers 11:6). That complaint got them thinking about “the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic” they used to eat in captivity. They let the food they had become tired of become more important than their freedom from slavery.
God is taking all of us somewhere, and like the people of Israel, we have everything we need right now to get to where He’s taking us. But that’s where the Israelites missed it. They were only looking at their circumstances and what they thought they didn’t have. They forgot to look to their God! It’s so easy to see out of natural eyes that look for problems rather than see out of supernatural eyes that behold the hand of God working behind the scenes, the almighty God who’s providing for all our needs.
Today, you’re going to have many opportunities to find faults because there’s no perfect friend, no perfect spouse, and no perfect job. Life is filled with imperfections, so we can’t escape the fact that there will be much to criticize. What I want to suggest is that rather than enter into faultfinding that we figure out a way to be the solution to problems rather than complain about problems and find a way to act properly when we feel negative.
You can’t stop all the negative thoughts you have about people and situations, but you can stop giving those thoughts life by speaking them out. You can watch what you say by stepping back and reminding yourself that complaining only finds the worst in situations and other people, never the best, and speaking them out only makes things worse. Don’t give it life! Don’t ruin relationships and situations. Joel and Victoria Osteen
So what should you do? The apostle Paul says, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen” (Ephesians 4:29). Let’s keep our mouths closed, stay the course, and be grateful to God. Let’s not be faultfinders. Let’s be those who “rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18).
Culled from Joel & Victoria’s Blog
