It Starts Small

Do you have any complainers in your life?

They possess a special calling to share their grievances with the world, even if you want to hear them or not. With in a few minutes, how do you feel around them? There is something off-putting about murmuring and complaining.

Maybe we should ask ourselves another question: Do you tend to think about the blessings in your life or the problems you wished were different? Would people describe you as grateful or a grumbler an complainer? Is your prayer full of thankyous or give me more?

I caught myself grumbling in thought while working yesterday. I learned in my journey about grumbling and complaining and is it not cool that in the middle of a thought, the Holy Spirit will say, Hey! BE mindful what you are thinking about. None of us are immune from grumbling and ingratitude. Lets us evaluate one of the biggest group (we can sit with them) of complainers in the Bible.

⁹ So because the Israelites’ cry for help has come to me, and I have also seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them, Exodus 3:9

A few hundred years after Joseph had been made overseer of Egypt, the current Pharaoh had no memory of what He had done and put the Israelites into captivity. They were made slaves. They cried out over and over for God to rescue them. They got what they asked for. It was not a month into freedom they slid from the mountain of freedom to the valley of groaning as soon as things did not go their way.

¹¹ They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? ¹² Isn’t this what we told you in Egypt: Leave us alone so that we may serve the Egyptians? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” Exodus 14:11-12

They were literally ready to go back to captivity, bondage, and slavery. This is an extreme example. To go from human slavery to freedom, but it still illustrates our lives. We pray, and pray, and pray, and God gives, but we slip into that valley of complaining because it was not exactly how we wanted it to be or we hit a storm and wanted to return to our old nature with this dumb idea our life would be better off.

We all experience spiritual amnesia, myself included. Answered prayer or God’s gracious acts fade from our memories and we get stubborn and think that we know better than God. Other times we misremember. As our discontentment comes to mind – which is often lies and misperceptions – they shade our view of God. Instead of Israel celebrating the manna in the wilderness that God so graciously provided, they grew tired of it. They recollected the time in Egypt as if they had been eating high off the hog and staying at a 5 star resort in the Caribbean.

⁴ The riffraff among them had a strong craving for other food. The Israelites wept again and said, “Who will feed us meat? ⁵ We remember the free fish we ate in Egypt, along with the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic. ⁶ But now our appetite is gone;^[b] there’s nothing to look at but this manna!” Numbers 11:4-6

This was not the entire reality of the situation. They seemed to forget they were under complete bondage and slavery. They’re memory did not square with reality and they were overstating how splendid life used to be and they minimized the blessing of God.

Spiritual forgetfulness leads to foolishness. We think or speak false things about God. A grumbling spirit is rooted in something deeper: a wrong view of God. Ingratitude is rooted in idolatry and unbelief.

Grumbling is a sign of a severe problem in our hearts. We need to connect our grumbling to its source to help us identify what is going on. We are not just “venting.” We are unhappy with God because of the circumstances He’s allowed. There is a deeper issue of entitlement, pride, discontentment, and forgetfulness we need to attack.

We need to apply grace and the gospel to our disgruntled hearts and become aware of our sin. When we grasp God’s mercy and grace to us through Christ, our memory is jolted with gratitude.

God has treated us infinitely better than could ever deserve. We are entitled to nothing but death and judgement, but GOD, in HIS LAVISH GRACE, pours blessing upon us. The gospel awakens gratitude and buries murmuring and complaining in the grave we were pulled from. We will always tilt toward grumbling or gratitude. We can resist the former by choosing the latter.

¹⁴ Do everything without grumbling and arguing, Philippians 2:14

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Part 1: Remembering Landmark Moments
Part 2: The Overflow of Your Heart
Part 3: Saying Grace
Part 4: Blessings or Problems?
Part 5: The Lord’s Supper
Part 6: Remembering and Forgetting
Part 7: Remember God!