The Story of Your Life (Complacency)

Complacency
Enough is Enough...

Over the past few months we have been looking at how can we make our life all that it was meant to be!  All that God wants it to be. 
We have been challenging you to think about how you spend your time and we have been asking you to think about your comfort zones.  Many of us never leave our comfort zones and stretch out to see what we are capable of.  Now we are going to look at the silent killer of complacency…  So do you always do you best?  Do you always seek to improve and get better?  Complacency is defined this way… a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's achievements.  We think that we have arrived and there is nothing else to work on.  What we do is good enough, and we don’t need to try any more.  Some people call this working smart “do only what you have to, to get by.”  People who live this way say things like, “I could do better, but a B is just as good as an A.”  “I could do more but I will have to put in more effort, people are happy with what I am doing now, so why bother.”  Complacency kills us silently because we are so pleased with ourselves that we think there is nothing more we need to do.  You become so caught up in all that you have done you don’t see the need to do more and work harder.  You become satisfied.  To write the best story of your life you have to strive, you have to strain, and push for something more.  If you are happy with what you got chances are you will not get anything more than what you got.  We all can fall victim to being complacent it is an easy thing to do especially when the expectations that are around us are low, and just keep getting lower.  To beat complacency we have to rise above the expectations that the world puts on us and set our own expectations and rise to the challenge.  Proverbs 1:32-33 says 32 For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
and the complacency of fools will destroy them; 33 but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.” Those are some pretty sharp words.  the complacency of fool will destroy them.  God does not call what He creates fools that often.  He has a ton of grace.  Here it is written that those who live in complacency are foolish and that very thing will destroy them.  I Love the contrast of verse 33 and how it states that if we are not fools we are listening to God Himself and though we are striving and going for more we will be safe and at ease as we strive for more.  I considering striving for more to the the opposite of complacency, because striving for more means that you are always looking to improve and grow.  It does not mean that you are dissatisfied, it means that you want the best and that means you have to give your best.    Even if we have worked hard we can still fall into complacency, take a look at this parable Jesus told.  In Luke 12: 16 And he told them this parable:“The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. 17 He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops. ’18 “Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” ’20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself? ’21 “This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”  This is a reminder to me that I must always keep going and never just do my best and then call it good.  God longs for us to offer our lives to Him for Him to use.  We must rise above expectations and go for more.  God’s love is always there and it is great, but just because I have gone this far does not meant that I am ready to stop.  Keep reaching! 

 

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