It is not uncommon to find people dissatisfied as believers. They may be dissatisfied with their lot in life. They may be dissatisfied with their church. They may even have become dissatisfied with the Lord himself.

There is often a common theme with such dissatisfaction. There is a belief that either they deserve better or that the Lord had committed to giving them something that they don’t currently have or enjoy. When the Lord isn’t giving them what they think he should, they become dissatisfied. This may lead them to try and ‘make good’ what is currently lacking and chasing after things they hope will fill up their lack. In worse cases, it may lead to people backsliding altogether and rejecting Jesus because he hasn’t given them what they want.

The problem is obviously not with Jesus (you knew that!) The problem does not even lie in the dissatisfaction itself. We may all be prone to dissatisfaction sometimes. The issue in these kind of cases is in the belief that things are not how God promised they would be. Although more accurately, the real issue is that God often hasn’t promised these things at all.

Most of us can clock on to the more obvious stuff – the things of the unabashed health and wealth gospel – and recognise God simply hasn’t promised to make us all healthy, wealthy and happy if we just trust in Jesus. At least, not this side of glory. We recognise ‘Lord, fill up my bank account’ is just not something Jesus ever promised to answer with a ‘yes’. But there is a soft prosperity thinking that creeps in which says that God has effectively promised I won’t be dissatisfied, and if I am I must do something to find the contentment he promises.

Only, Jesus doesn’t promise us contentment; he commands us to be content. That is subtly different. Along with the command to be content, he also commands us to do a whole host of other things too. Some of which are quite difficult and may not seem like the obvious road to health, wealth and blessèd happiness. The same Jesus who tells us his yoke is easy and burden light is the same one who tells us to take up our cross and follow him. Cross carrying and dying to self doesn’t sound the joyous laugh riot some of us think the Christian life is supposed to be.

Of course, the easy yoke and light burden of Jesus only seems that way to those who so love him that they love his commands and therefore joyfully want to do what he has commanded. They are pleased to do as their master commands and content in the fact that they are honouring him irrespective of the difficulties we may encounter in doing it. The honour and glory of Jesus, the cause of his gospel and the good of his kingdom is a higher priority for genuine believers than the desire to pursue ease and comfort. The yoke is easy and burden is light because it is simply doing what we want to do.

But some, in obeying Jesus and doing some of these things, find that they may be hard in various ways. Going to a deprived place, joining a small church, having few friends in the community, serving on everything because you are the only person who can and any number of other such things can feel like hard slog. But rather than think of the glory of Christ and good of his kingdom, we begin to think Jesus owes us a better church experience. He has promised us a life where all our needs will be met by our church. We feel we need certain things and, if we aren’t getting them obeying Jesus in this hard thing, we’ll find somewhere else where we don’t have to ensure in the same way. Jesus wants us to be happy and have our needs met after all, doesn’t he?

I think this is how the soft-prosperity lies creep in. Rather than loving Jesus so much that we hear his call and gladly do it, finding our contentment in Christ and pressing on for his glory because it is what we most want to do, we focus on ourselves, our felt needs and end up shying away from what Jesus asks because it doesn’t “meet my needs”. It is, when all is said and done, a failure to trust in Jesus. We don’t trust that in obeying his commands and serving where we can be most effective in his kingdom he will give us all that we need, strengthen us, cause us to endure and give us the contentment we crave as we centre ourselves on him.

We can end up believing that Jesus has promised things he hasn’t. And when those things don’t materialise, shy away from his commands because they don’t seem to be producing the things we wrongly assumed he promised we’d get. Whereas if we stood on what Jesus actually promised, we would be less prone to discontent. Indeed, we might actually begin to see that God always keeps his promises. And if we were less discontent, we might be liable to go into those harder places, those smaller churches, those more difficult setups knowing that we might not get everything we would from a big all singing, all dancing, large church setup, but we’ll be most content knowing that we are serving the kingdom and enjoy the fact that Christ is being glorified.