Bemoaning God’s kindness sounds a bit strange, doesn’t it? Do you know why? Because it is.
Sadly, many, if not most of us, bemoan God’s kindness daily…and we’ve practiced it so much, rarely are we aware of it.
We bemoan God’s kindness when:
- Someone gives us a gift with all their heart, but it doesn’t meet our standards of what we most value;
- We’re envious and unkind to anyone our loved ones (parents, spouse, children, friends) give honor and respect to, because we feel their admiration belongs to us;
- We give a gift, serve, etc. and we don’t receive the measure of gratitude we feel our giving deserves;
- Someone loves us enough to not sin with us;
- We reject someone (with or without their knowledge) that God uses to reprove or admonish us of sin we are entertaining/practicing;
- We won’t even greet someone because we are envious of the spiritual gifts or natural talents God gave to them and not to us;
- Our first instinct is to complain and criticize rather than to consider it all joy when God brings any difficulty or pain into our lives in order to make us more like Christ—complete and lacking nothing.
What is the cure for bemoaning God’s kindness? Repent and rejoice.
Yep. That’s it! There’s no 12-step program, no counseling needed, and no in-depth meditation required. We’d like to think it’s much more difficult than it is because our pride demands it. The more difficult things are, the more we feel accomplished when we’ve acquired it.
The biggest hurdle we all have is our pride that refuses to readily submit to anything we don’t already want to do.
But love to God is this: That we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 Jn 5:3-5)
God, as always, does all the heavy lifting because He alone is the Almighty. We are not. Our only duty as His faithful and loving children is to demonstrate our love for Him, not with mere words, but with deeds and truth (1 Jn 3:18). And we can, because Christ our God suffered, died, and resurrected so that we may suffer for Christ, die to self, and rise in the newness of eternal life—the holy and righteous life of Christ the Father has generously poured out to us.
God is kind. And God is good. He never commands us to obey anything He hasn’t already and abundantly provided us with the means and ways to obey Him wholeheartedly.
