What is the point of complaining?

I Corinthians 4:7b-8a (Message)

Isn’t everything you have and everything you are sheer gifts from God?  So what’s the point of all this complaining and competing?  You already have all you need.    

There’s a Finnish proverb:  “The water is the same on both sides of the boat”.  Now that seems silly and irrelevant from our narrow human perspective, but think about your life and current situation from the height, breadth and depth of an eternal Godly perspective.  Has not God promised that He will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19)?  The problem is that you are finite, limited, and, frankly, ignorant of life from an eternal perspective and so you tend to complain and compete. 

As The Message translation states, “What’s the point of all this complaining and competing?”  Yet, what discourages me a bit is thinking about how long ago this verse was written.  Apparently the church at Corinth was having problems with people complaining, thinking of oneself as superior over others and comparing one leader with another.  These same wrongs occur today.  Has humankind not progressed at all?  No, humans are humans and will never change until the Lord comes again.  And with all that is going wrong with our economy and what disasters this may lead to later, His coming might not be far off. 

It is never right that any of us should feel self-sufficient.  You are God-sufficient.  Everything you have comes from God.  It is God who makes us all different from one another with each of us having different personalities and gifts that come from Him.  Ecclesiastes 6:9 states that “It is better to be satisfied with what you have than to be always wanting something else.”  There is great vanity in humankind, we never seem satisfied; we covet what others have.  No wonder coveting was the subject of the tenth of the Ten Commandments!

Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997) states on page 261 that there are four “cancers” that are so deadly to family life—criticizing, complaining, comparing, and competing.  These negative factors will destroy a family or at least keep a family from being healthy.  This is true not only for the basic family unit but also for the church family and really any kind of group living and/or working together.  Logically, we know this all this is true, yet these four “cancers” are still huge problems in families. 

William Arthur Wood wrote a great quote: “A complaining tongue reveals an ungrateful heart”.  Hopefully, this does not describe you, but deep down, if you know that it does, do something positive to change.  Depend on the wisdom of God’s Word implanted deep into your heart to change. 

We mutter and we sputter

We fume and we spurt

We mumble and grumble

Our feelings get hurt

We can’t understand things

Our vision grows dim

When all we need

Is a moment with Him      -- Unknown