I will practice the art of holy dissatisfaction. God deals only in holy, not unholy, dissatisfaction. This means dissatisfaction in spirit, not in the flesh. Jesus referred to this as being “poor in spirit,” and the result of this poverty is to receive the “kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3).
The Bible is full of dissatisfied holy people. I am sure Abraham left Ur because of the emptiness of the worship of the moon goddess Ishtar. David built his kingdom on men who were tired of Saul’s spiritual arrogance; his collection of men “in distress… in debt, and… discontented: (1 Samuel 22:2) was the raw material for his empire. The disciples of John the Baptist, and later Jesus’ disciples, were men who were tired of this world’s politics of greed and selfishness; they longed to see God’s Kingdom in operation on this earth. No matter where I look in church history, I see a trail of dissatisfied men and women who longed for higher, better things. They sought and found a spiritual ideal, and left a spiritual empire behind them.
Holy dissatisfaction always begins with God and ends with God. I can be easily dissatisfied about things – politics, money, the world situation – but that is usually selfish, and it leads nowhere. But holy dissatisfaction begins within me, in my spirit; it sees poverty there, and then it begins the quest for satisfaction that must lead to God. I will never be much of a disciple unless I have felt this kind of dissatisfaction; the greater the dissatisfaction, the stronger my discipleship. I need to keep asking myself, are you satisfied? If I answer yes, there is a sense in which I have become my own obstacle to a flourishing discipleship for Jesus Christ. On the other hand, when I “mourn” I have His comforts, and when I “hunger and thirst” I have His filling (Matthew 5:4, 6).
“Do not let your heart envy sinners, but live in the fear of the Lord always. Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off” (Proverbs 23:17-18).
Daily with the King 