Holy discontent

Jeremiah had had enough. The cost of speaking God's word had been mockery, beatings, a night in the stocks — so he resolved to quit: I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. The resolution lasted about a sentence. The word he tried to swallow became a burning fire shut up in his bones; he grew weary holding it back, and he could not contain it. He could no more stop prophesying than a man can keep his hand in a flame.

That fire has a name. Bill Hybels called it holy discontent, and reached for the cartoon to explain it — Popeye absorbing one indignity too many until he plants his feet and declares he has had all he can stand. It is the God-given inability to accept what is: a wrongness you cannot un-see, a gap between what is and what God intends that you can no longer make your peace with. Jesus had it, braiding a whip of cords in the temple courts while zeal for His Father's house consumed Him. The prophets had it. Luther had it when he had counted the indulgence-sellers' lies one time too many. Every upheaval starts with someone who cannot stand it anymore.

Not all discontent is holy. Most of ours is grumbling, or envy, or wounded pride dressed up as principle, and it builds nothing. But there is a discontent God Himself plants, and it has a different feel: it burns for His glory and for others' good rather than your own, it does not go away when you try to be reasonable, and it costs you something to carry. That fire is often the very first move of God in an upheaval — the spark before the break, the ignition of everything that follows.

The temptation is to put it out. Holy discontent is uncomfortable; it makes you the difficult one, the person who cannot just be grateful and settle down. So we douse it with busyness or cynicism and call that maturity. But before you extinguish the fire in your bones, ask where it came from. The thing you cannot stop caring about, the wrong you cannot accept — God may have lit that, and He may be about to do something with it.