Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I have with me Daryl Harrison. He serves as the shepherding and teaching pastor at Redeemer Bible Church in Gilbert, Arizona. He’s a co-host of the Just Thinking podcast, a long-form expository podcast with more than 7.3 million episode downloads since its debut in 2017.
Daryl holds a certificate in theology and ministry from Princeton Theological Seminary and is a fellow of the Black Theology and Leadership Institute at Princeton. He’s an author, teacher, and sought-after cultural apologist. Daryl and his wife, Melissa, are originally from Atlanta, Georgia, and currently reside in Queen Creek, Arizona. They have three adult children, Colin, Naomi, and Yasmin. Daryl, so good to see you, brother. This is our first time meeting in person, and I’m so looking forward to our time together and our discussion on discontentment.
Darrell Harrison: Same here, Dale. It’s an honor to be with you, brother. I’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time, so thanks for having me on.
Dale Johnson: Well, odd story, just I’ll give some context here. Virgil Walker, who’s your co-host on Just Thinking Podcast, dear friend of mine, love that brother. He’s been telling me for a long time, “you just got to get to know Daryl.” Here it is, finally—we’ve talked back and forth via text, and the Lord has made it possible where we get to meet in person.
We’ve already enjoyed some time fellowshipping together and I’m looking forward to our time together today, introducing our people to you and your work and your thoughts here. You help us to think so often on the Just Thinking Podcast about cultural issues from a biblical perspective. Even in our discussions, you talked about exegeting the culture and looking through a scriptural lens to understand what’s happening in the culture.
We’re going to do that today as we talk about exegeting people and think about people and what they wrestle with biblically, especially in relation to this issue of discontentment. So let’s jump into that, Daryl. What exactly is a biblical understanding of discontentment? Give us a definition, if you will.
Darrell Harrison: Yeah, I’d be glad to, Dale. I define discontentment in a biblical context to be dissatisfaction with God’s providence in your life. However, that dissatisfaction may manifest itself—fundamentally, the root cause of all discontentment is dissatisfaction, displeasure with how God’s providence has worked itself out in one’s life. It tends to be a sort of hidden attitude. It is not necessarily obvious or overt. That’s what makes discontentment such a potentially, anyway, dangerous attitude to have as a believer.
Dale Johnson: As you talk about that concept of dissatisfaction, I think that really is an underlying expression of this concept of discontentment, where God has described himself as sovereign. He’s revealed himself that way to us. This discontentment is, we are not appreciative of the providence that the Lord has given to us on a daily basis. This concept, I think, is really critical for us to understand conceptually. I think what’s happened culturally is we start to describe this level of discontentment with all kinds of different labels.
When we experience this sort of downtrodden emotion or this burden of heart, we’re not familiar enough with the biblical concept. We start calling it lots of other things, even trying to label it with some of the cultural labels that we see out there. I know you do a lot of counseling, and I see this certainly in the counseling room, where discontentment becomes sort of an underlying common theme in people’s lives that they really can’t detect.
I want you to help us to describe some of those common factors that we see. Maybe we’re familiar with it in our own personal lives. Maybe we’re familiar with it in other people’s lives as we see it. Describe some of those common factors that contribute to this discontentment.
Darrell Harrison: Yeah, as you mentioned, Dale, I do a lot of counseling at Redeemer Bible Church in Gilbert, Arizona, where I’m one of the pastors on staff there. In my counseling experience, especially when I’m counseling married couples, 9 times out of 10, the marital issues that bring them into my office have something to do with them being discontent to one extent or another.
Either in their spouse, or more specifically what they’re not getting from their spouse, dissatisfaction with expectations not being met—which is very, very dangerous in a marital situation, but they don’t necessarily see it as that when they come into my office. Most couples come in and what brings them in is an issue that they have with their spouse, a fault that they want me to help fix. But I try to reorient their thinking in that regard. One of the first questions I ask those couples is: What do you want God to do in your situation?
What that does is hopefully accomplish two things: Number one, it gets them out of this mindset that I can help them. And I think that’s why an emphasis needs to be placed on the term biblical counselors. This is why we direct them to the Word, because I want them to understand that Daryl Harrison cannot help you. Daryl Harrison wants to walk beside you, to help disciple you in what the Word of God has to say, what the Bible has to say about this. So that’s number one.
Number two is to help reorient their mind and heart again to what’s really important here. That is applying God’s word to your situation. So, in asking them what they want, what do they want God to do, it really sort of reorients and sort of inverts their way of thinking to the reality that, “hey, this is going to be different. This is not what I maybe expected to undergo in this counseling session.” We’re going to walk to what the Word of God says and I am going to remind you what Jesus says. For example, in John 15, five, that apart from him, we can do nothing.
But most of those issues fundamentally have some sort of thread of discontentment, dissatisfaction, expectations not being met, their emotional expectations that they have with one another. They’ve been let down. They’ve been sold a bill of goods, even to the extent that where some of them believe, “hey, I might have married the wrong person because, you know, you’re not meeting my expectations.”
Discontentment is a very subtle, almost invisible sin attitude to have. And it is, it is a sin attitude, but it’s so hard to detect because it’s not readily evident. The person whose discontent doesn’t want anyone to know their discontent. So, you have to do some digging to get there.
Dale Johnson: I think that’s so well said. Discontentment is never dormant. It is going to flourish in some way if it’s not dealt with, right? You mentioned the concept of working with couples and you see it in couples. And honestly, Daryl, as I’ve been working with couples over my time as a biblical counselor, one of the most distinct things that I can recall is sometimes the hardest marriages to work with aren’t the marriages where one single event has been devastating and difficult.
You know, many times a couple can recover from things like that. They move forward, reconcile, trust is rebuilt, those things move forward. Some of the most difficult marriages that I’ve had to work with are the death by a thousand paper cuts, right? Where there’s an attitude of discontentment that flourishes continually.
Expectations are not met with each other. Conflict is not dealt with. And this attitude of discontentment grows into bitterness. And then moving forward as it progresses into anger, wrath, malice, and so forth. So yeah, I think you’re identifying exactly sort of the dangers of discontentment. And I think that’s the deception of the evil one, right? Where we don’t even detect that there’s a problem going on, but it never remains dormant when those expectations are not met, and we find ourselves discontent.
As you describe this, I’m thinking, man, this is something that’s not good to deal with. It’s hard to deal with. And we need to keep a short wick in our own life in dealing with discontentment. Talk about why that’s important. Why that’s important in relation to—there are dangers if we allow discontentment to flourish in our hearts, if it’s not dealt with, it’s going to lead to some terrible things. So, talk about biblically, if discontentment is not dealt with, what are some of those dangers from a biblical perspective?
Darrell Harrison: I love what you said there at the latter part of your commentary there, Dale, is that if it’s not dealt with, it will lead to some other things. And I call discontentment a gateway drug to other sins, because if it’s not dealt with it, and you actually mentioned some other sins that sort of bleed out or branch out from an attitude of discontentment that remains unrepentant.
I remember back in the eighties, I think it was the American Heart Association that use to run a television ad campaign where they called heart disease, the silent killer. Discontentment is a silent killer. I remember as a boy, Dale, I used to want one of those yellow Tonka dump trucks, the one with the yellow loader with the big black plastic wheels. I used to want one of those so badly just to be able to play out there in the dirt and load the dirt in the back of the dump truck just to only dump the dirt right back out.
Well, discontentment is like that. It’s like you just said, it never lies dormant. It may lie unexperienced, meaning you don’t see it overtly. It’s not necessarily evident. Discontentment is never dormant in the heart. And the danger of that is most people who are fostering an attitude of sinful discontentment, it’s like that Tonka dump truck. They over time, they just keep filling it with dirt. That’s what discontentment does because it’s unforgiveness, it’s bitterness, and those attitudes, the unforgiveness, that’s dirt that you put in the dump truck.
Bitterness, that’s dirt that you put in the dump truck. Envy, jealousy, those are all covetousness. Those are all things that go in the discontentment dump truck until one day—like you said, it may not be just one incident—but one day, something’s going to happen that’s going to so trigger that person’s discontentment where they’re going to dump all the dirt that’s in that dump truck onto that other person. And discontentment works concentrically—It’s almost like the epicenter of an earthquake. The people who are closest to the person who’s discontent, they’re going to feel it first, and then it’s going to bleed out to other people. The further that thing, the further that attitude goes, and becomes undealt with.
So, discontentment is a very, very dangerous attitude to have because unless you repent of it. Unless you resolve that your satisfaction is found in your identity in Christ, in Jesus Christ. Unless you, and God so works in your heart to remind you that, as Peter said, “you have in Christ everything you need for life and godliness,” that attitude is going to bleed. It’s like trying to separate watercolors. You can’t do it. It’s impossible to do.
It’s going to bleed into everyone and everything you touch. So, that’s what I mean when I say discontentment is a silent killer. It kills the person who’s discontent first, and then by association and extension, it affects everybody else in that person’s circle.
Dale Johnson: As you’re describing this, it takes a keen eye to see these things. A vigilance that when you see the dangers of something—this is what makes one wise biblically—you can see good and evil from God’s perspective. And you know when something like the silent killer is growing within you, you know what it leads to in the future. That forces me, as 2 Corinthians 10 would describe, to “take these kinds of thoughts captive,” to take these unseen, hidden things captive before they blow up into something bigger.
The Lord is, as you’re describing this, giving you a keen eye, discernment, in seeing this in people, recognizing it even in ourselves, as we’re tempted with that at times consistently. Help me to understand biblically, and maybe even some good books that describe this concept in ways that’s helped you to grow in your keen awareness, your vigilance, as it relates to discontentment: seeing it in yourself, dealing with it, and maybe with others as well.
Darrell Harrison: Yeah, so biblically speaking, I think when you talk about contentment, Dale, the most common passage that most people would probably go to would be 1 Timothy 6:6, where Paul writes, “but godliness actually is a means of great gain when accompanied by contentment.” And then in 1 Timothy 6:8, he continues, he says, “if we have food and covering with these, we shall be content.”
I think the more you uncover the layers of discontentment, the tentacles of discontentment, we have to see discontentment, first of all, as not necessarily being limited to just a dissatisfaction with not having a lot of stuff. Discontentment is a spiritual issue, first of all. It is an attitude. It’s a mindset.
I remember one of my former pastors, when I was living in Atlanta a long time ago, he would say, “the battlefield of Satan is the mind,” you know, and that’s where discontentment takes root, it takes root in the mind. Taking the thoughts captive, it’s Romans 12:2, renewing your mind. You have to fixate your mind on rebuking discontentment in the light of what you have in Christ. And for the believer in Jesus Christ, you lack nothing. So, the question becomes, why are you discontent?
So, as far as resources that may be helpful in this, obviously, and in addition to Scripture, John Flavel’s book, Keeping the Heart, is probably a book that I would recommend every person read. Jeremiah Burroughs’ book on contentment, as well. I think Thomas Watson’s book, The Doctrine of Repentance, because listen, these books that I’m mentioning all have to do with the heart. So, that’s where discontentment is connected to all this, because at its most fundamental level, discontentment is a heart attitude.
So, those resources and others that are out there. I mean, you know how I love the Puritans, Dale. The Puritans have much to say about these topics. But Keeping the Heart by John Flavel would probably be my number one recommendation in terms of people who may want to read more about how to keep the heart in a right frame that’s centered on Christ. So that you can genuinely repent from this attitude of discontentment and find your joy, true joy and peace and comfort in Christ.
Dale Johnson: Yeah, well said. I think about it in terms of the way Paul in the New Testament really helps to flesh out this concept of gratitude and thankfulness—they really is a quintessential sign of the gospel really taking root in the heart of a person.
And when we see discontentment flourishing, that really is the deception of the evil one. To convince us, as you mentioned, you tied that so well together—that we start to question or doubt the gospel. We doubt the providence of the Lord, the sovereignty of the Lord with the situation of our life. And discontentment flows and discontentment is that fruit of the flesh that’s in opposition to the fruit of the Spirit, which is gratitude and thankfulness. And so, seeing those in a person’s life in the counseling room is so helpful.
You’re going to get to the root of the problem. Some of these resources that you mentioned, I think are so helpful. So, maybe even just a final word, Darrelll, as you think about discontentment, some of the helpful things that you can help up, maybe a counselor or a pastor think through as they’re working with people. Maybe a final thought there.
Darrell Harrison: Final thought, Dale. I want to go back to 1 Timothy 6, because we have Paul saying here in 1 Timothy:18-19, Paul really gives us a focus on what really is important here. He says in 1 Timothy 6:18, “Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share.” In 1 Timothy 6:19, “storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed.” Paul, here, is really reminding us of what’s truly important: You want to be rich in good works, not in material things.
This earth, this world, this life here is not meant to satisfy you completely. Your satisfaction is in Christ and the reward that awaits you after this life. So, I would encourage pastors, individuals who are dealing with this to focus on 1 Timothy 6:18-19 to sort of reorient your heart to what truly matters.
Dale Johnson: Brother, this has been a great treat for me personally to get to meet you and enjoy our time together. Great to introduce our people, our listeners on the Truth and Love podcast to your work as well.
So, thanks for guiding us on this topic, helping us to think biblically about this issue of discontentment and how destructive it can be in us. But the Bible gives remedy for this and you’re helping us to see that well. Indeed. Thanks for being with us, brother.
Darrell Harrison: Thank you, Dale.
