The Christ who once died now lives and reigns. The Holy Spirit, whom He sends to believing hearts, is the connecting link between our faith-experience and the historical foundation of our faith. Without the Cross and Resurrection, there would be no Christian experience at all.

The historical facts make the experience possible, while the experience verifies the facts.

Christian experience is the final apologetic of the Christian faith.”

(Daniel Lamont, The Anchorage of Life, quoted in Iain Murray, The Undercover Revolution, 78)

Sometimes it’s borne out of loneliness, love of solitude, introversion, or just the desire to think more lucidly about something. Speaking out loud slows down thoughts to a manageable speed, helps to unmask those poisonous whisperings that would otherwise go unchallenged.

But it occurred to me recently that, in my spates of self-talk, I might be missing a trick.

Given that I have effectively been talking to an invisible interlocutor all this time anyway, why not turn it into something more useful? Why not address God? Like many Christians, I often reflect that my prayer life is shamefully threadbare. And yet I spend so much time effectively “praying to myself”.

Martin Lloyd Jones began his book Spiritual Depression with these words:

“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you.

Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for moment, I will speak to you.”

This is good – even life-saving – advice.

But notice that Psalm 42 begins with prayer directly to God:

As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, my God.

The Psalmist doesn’t simply “talk to himself”. He is, at the same time, talking to God.

[Image by Klaus Kommoss]

5. It makes our affliction a great deal worse than otherwise it would be.

It in no way removes our afflictions, indeed, while they continue, they are a great deal the worse and heavier, for a discontented heart is a proud heart, and a proud heart will not pull down his sails when there comes a tempest and storm.

If a sailor, when a tempest and storm comes, is perverse and refuses to pull down his sails, but is discontented with the storm, is his condition any better because he is discontented and will not pull down his sails? Will this help him?

Just so is it, for all the world, with a discontented heart: a discontented heart is a proud heart, and he out of his pride is troubled with his affliction, and is not contented with God’s disposal, and so he will not pull down his spirit at all, and make it bow to God in this condition into which God has brought him.

Now is his condition any better because he will not pull down his spirit? No, certainly, abundantly worse, it is a thousand to one but that the tempest and storm will overwhelm his soul.

Thus you see what a great deal of folly there is in the sin of discontentment.

Incidentally, the Kindle version of the book is still available for 77p, and the print version isn’t much more. Highly recommended.

3. There are commonly many foolish attitudes that a discontented heart is guilty of. They carry themselves foolishly towards God and towards men.

Such expressions, and such kinds of behavior come from them, as to make their friends ashamed of them many times. Their carriages are so unseemly, they are a shame to themselves and their friends.

4. Discontent and murmuring eats out the good and sweetness of a mercy before it comes. It God should give a mercy for the want of which we are discontented, yet the blessing of the mercy is, as it were, eaten out before we come to have it.

Discontent is like a worm that eats the meat out of the nut, and then when the meat is eaten out of it, you have the shell. If a child were to cry for a nut of which the meat has been eaten out, and is all worm-eaten, what good would the nut be to the child? So you would fain have a certain outward comfort and you are troubled for the want of it, but the very trouble of your spirits is the worm that eats the blessing out of the mercy.

Then perhaps God gives it to you, but with a curse mixed with it, so that you were better not to have it than have it. If God gives the man or woman who is discontented for want of some good thing, that good thing before they are humbled for their discontent, such a man or woman can have no comfort from the mercy, but it will be rather an evil than a good to them.

Therefore for my part, if I should have a friend or brother or one who was as dear to me as my own soul, whom I saw discontented for the want of such a comfort, I would rather pray, ‘Lord, keep this thing from them, till you shall be pleased to humble their hearts for their discontent; let not them have the mercy till they come to be humbled for their discontent over the want of it, for if they have it before that time they will have it without any blessing.’

Therefore it should be your care, when you find your hearts discontented for the want of anything, to be humbled for it, thinking thus with yourselves: Lord, if what I so immoderately desire were to come to me before I am humbled for my discontent for want of it, I am certain I could have no comfort from it, but I should rather have it as an affliction to me.

There are many things which you desire as your lives, and think that you would be happy if you had them, yet when they come you do not find such happiness in them, but they prove to be the greatest crosses and afflictions that you ever had, and on this ground, because your hearts were immoderately set upon them before you had them. As it was with Rachael: she must have children or else she died; ‘Well’, said God, ‘seeing you must, you shall have them,’ but though she had a child she died according to what she said, ‘Give me children or else I die.’ So in regard of any other outward comforts, people may have the thing, but oftentimes they have it so as it proves the heaviest cross to them that they ever had in all their lives.

The child whom you were discontented for the want of, may have been sick, and your hearts were out of temper for fear that you should lose it; God restores it, but he restores it so as he makes it a cross to your hearts all the days of your lives.

Someone observes concerning manna, ‘When the people were contented with the allowance that God allowed them, then it was very good, but when they would not be content with God’s allowance, but would gather more than God would have them, then, says the text, there were worms in it.’

So when we are content with our conditions, and what God disposes of us to be in, there is a blessing in it, then it is sweet to us; but if we must needs have more, and keep it longer than God would have us to have it, then there will be worms in it and it will be no good at all.

Tune in next week for the final reason. (And you can still get the Kindle version of the book for 77p).

2. By all your discontent you cannot help yourselves, you cannot get anything by it.

Who by taking care can add one cubit to his stature, or make one hair that is white to be black? You may vex and trouble yourselves but you can get nothing by it.

Do you think that the Lord will come in mercy a whit the sooner because of the murmuring of your spirits? Oh, no, but mercy will be rather deferred the longer for it; though the Lord was about to send mercy before, yet this disorder of your hearts is enough to put him out of his course of mercy, and though he had thoughts that you should have the thing before, yet now you shall not have it. If you had a mind to give something to your child, yet if you see him in a discontented, fretting mood you will not give it him.

And this is the very reason why many mercies are denied to you, because of your discontent. You are discontented for want of them, and therefore you do not get them. You deprive yourselves of the enjoyment of your own desires, because of the discontent of your hearts, because you do not get your desires – and is not this a foolish thing?

Tune in next week for reason number three. (And remember you can get the Kindle version of this excellent book for only 77p).

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to serialise one small section of the book, just to whet your appetite. But I’d encourage you to read the whole thing (currently, the Kindle version is only 77p).

Burroughs called this section THERE IS A GREAT DEAL OF FOLLY, EXTREME FOLLY, IN A DISCONTENTED HEART; IT IS A FOOLISH SIN.

Why? He gives five reasons. Here’s the first:

1. It takes away the present comfort of what you have, because you have not something that you would have. What a foolish thing is this, that because I have not got what I want, I will not enjoy the comfort of what I have!

Do you not account this folly in your children? You give them some food and they are not contented, perhaps they say it is not enough, they cry for more, and if you do not immediately give them more they will throw away what they have.

Though you account it folly in your children, yet you deal thus with God: God gives you many mercies, but you see others have more mercies than you, and therefore you cry for more; but God does not give you what you want and because of that you throw away what you have. Is not this folly in your hearts? It is unthankfulness.

Tune in next week for reason number two.

“Joy”, as defined by Lewis in Surprised By Joy, is an intense experience of longing. This yearning, he came to understand, could not be satisfied by any earthly experience. It seemed to point to something which, as an atheist, he did not yet know. This “joy” is what drives artists to create art; indeed, art itself has the capacity to create “joy” as we contemplate it.

But listen to the way Lewis concludes the book:

To tell you the truth, the subject [i.e. "joy"] has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian. I cannot, indeed, complain, like Wordsworth, that the visionary gleam has passed away. I believe (if the thing were at all worth recording) that the visionary stab, the old bitter-sweet, has come to me as often and as sharply since my conversion as at any time of my life whatever.

But I now know that the experience, considered as a state of my own mind, had never had the kind of importance I once gave it. It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer. While that other was in doubt, the pointer naturally loomed large in my thoughts.

When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, “Look!” The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold.

“We would be at Jerusalem.”

(C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, p237-238; Image: Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures)

[Image: Peter Saville's sleeve for New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies]

Here’s an extract from Keller’s excellent Counterfeit Gods where he touches on the same theme:

If you get married as Jacob did, putting the weight of all your deepest hopes and longings on the person you are marrying, you are going to crush him or her with your expectations. It will distort your life and your spouse’s life in a hundred ways. No person, not even the best one, can give your soul all it needs. You are going to to think you have gone to bed with Rachel, and you will get up and it will always be Leah. This cosmic disappointment and disillusionment is there in all of life, but we especially feel it in the things upon which we most set our hopes.

When you finally realise this, there are four things you can do. You can blame the things that are disappointing you and try to move on to better ones. That’s the way of continued idolatry and spiritual addiction.

The second thing you can do is blame yourself and beat yourself and say, “I have somehow been a failure. I see everybody else is happy. I don’t know why I am not happy. There is something wrong with me.” That’s the way of self-loathing and shame.

Third, you can blame the world. You can say, “Curses on the entire opposite sex,” in which case you make yourself hard, cynical and empty.

Lastly, you can, as C. S. Lewis says at the end of his great chapter on hope, reorient the entire focus of your life toward God. He concludes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

(Counterfeit Gods, p38-39)