Garbage Where It Doesn't Belong

I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Garbage Where It Doesn't Belong."

From God's perspective, there's way too much garbage that gets dumped where it should never go. In the hearing, in the lives of people who have no business having to deal with your garbage. God really doesn't like it.

You can tell that from our word for today from the Word of God in Numbers 11:1. It says of God's ancient people, "The people complained about their hardships (now here comes the sobering part) in the hearing of the Lord, and when He heard them, His anger was aroused. Then fire from the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp."

Now, this passage could be entitled, "How to Make God Really Angry." It's called complaining - which amounts to dumping your garbage out in front of the people around you. It's not uncommon to check and see who's listening before we go ahead and start complaining, or whining, or criticizing. When you do, don't forget the One who's always in the room - your Lord. And He obviously doesn't like it at all.

One big problem with our complaining is that it focuses on what's frustrating us and it forgets about the big picture. For example, these people in Numbers 11 went on to complain about their wilderness diet. They went on to talk about what great food they had in Egypt for, as they said, "no cost". No cost? You were slaves, guys! But when we get all nearsighted and just looking at the irritations and the frustrations in front of us, we lose our perspective, we blow today's little messes way out of proportion, and we forget the larger picture of the great things that God is doing in our lives. We miss the big tapestry.

But God isn't expecting us just to ignore our frustrations, or bury our frustrations. He just wants us to dump them out in the right place - which David spells out in Psalm 142:1 - "I pour out my complaint before Him; before Him I tell my trouble." Bring your complaints straight to God. First, He's not going to be hurt or poisoned by them like the people around you will. Secondly, He can do something about your complaints - much more than the people around you can do.

Now, we all go through some garbage in our lives - and it's true we often need a place to dump that garbage. And, God has offered us a wonderful place to do that - in His Throne Room. But if you've been dumping on the people around you, you've been unloading garbage where it's not supposed to be and probably polluting them in the process. They don't need it . . . it makes your Father very unhappy . . . and it really pollutes the environment!