You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Exodus 20:17 NIV
God created us to crave; to want; to desire. God created us to have a deep yearning for something– Him! At the fall of man, our wanter got a little mixed up and started wanting the world. If you read Ezekiel 28, Isaiah 14, and Revelation 12, you will find that Satan was created because an angel desired more than God.
We now live in a society that really has a mixed up wanter system. Sometimes it seems we have lost all sense of fairness and have entered into an all-I-can-get mentality. We are driven, not by our desire for righteousness, but by our desire to keep up with the Vanderbilts (the Joneses are out of style now). Our children no longer dream over the Sears toy catalog; instead, they receive a new toy as soon as it hits the shelf (if it doesn’t sell out first).
Contentment is not a word we teach in homes, schools, or even churches anymore. We have courses on how to achieve, succeed, crush the competition, buy and sell more, meet all our desires, and we have plenty of credit cards to get what we can’t afford. The shame is not in being greedy anymore, but in doing without.
What happened to our contentment? Didn’t Paul encourage us to learn the secret of being content with what we have? Didn’t Jesus say apart from me you can do nothing? If our retirement plan is Heaven and we are fully vested, what else do we really need?
I don’t know about you, but I need to change my wanter! I need to correct my cravings and focus them in the direction they were intended: on loving and honoring our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! What a difference it would make in the way we live, if only we could be content with what we have!
But guess what the good news is! If you have Jesus, and even if He is all you have, HE’S ALL YOU NEED!
The tenth commandment may be the best of all, because once we get our wanter fixed, what we want will cause us to keep all the rest!
Call on the wanter repairman today! His name is Jesus!
Oh… “the wanter”. I collect Native American pottery…small pieces cause it’s so spendy. I was looking at a lovely little piece of Lakota pottery, very happy with it… it was the one I was going to get.
Then Himself came over and told me to get whatever piece I wanted in the store.
Ron… I could feel “greed jump on my head”. All of a sudden that beautiful little piece of pottery in my hand paled as I looked at the other (bigger) pieces.
After a few moments God opened my eyes to what I was feeling. I wanted to sit down on the floor and cry. That has been one of the most profound moments in my life. Now everything filters past my memory of that little pot.
I’ll show you that wee piece of pottery when y’all come out…