1 "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. 2 Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. 3 Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David. 4 See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander of the peoples. 5 Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations that do not know you will hasten to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor."
Isaiah 55:1-5
Dissatisfaction is a two-edged sword. On one hand, dissatisfaction fuels creativity and progress. On the other hand, the drive to overcome dissatisfaction can consume a person and still leave him dissatisfied. It is as Douglas Horton put it, "Change occurs in direct proportion to dissatisfaction, but dissatisfaction never changes." However, the degree of dissatisfaction does change. It seems that the people of our culture have grown to new depths of dissatisfaction. Everything we've come up with to overcome it has failed. We've used entertainment, technology, materialism, consumption, sex, drugs, politics, and more to try to quench our dissatisfaction, but we're still dissatisfied. To make matters worse, we have spent ourselves, our money, and the limits of our borrowing power to our greater dissatisfaction.
The question put to God's people through the prophet Isaiah is just as relevant today as it was 2,600 years ago: "Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?" (Is. 55:2). We've spent our time, our money, our talents, our relationships, our very selves in efforts to find satisfaction. Yet the result has been a deepening rather than a lessening of our dissatisfaction. Far from being a healthy dissatisfaction that leads to creativity and innovation, our dissatisfaction has carried us into all sorts of destructive choices and behaviors. It's been a costly dissatisfaction.
Despite its destructive results in our culture, dissatisfaction is still a helpful experience for us. Our problem isn't being dissatisfied, but in how we've responded to our dissatisfaction. We've turned to all of the wrong things to find satisfaction. The result of turning to these things has been a downward spiral of dissatisfaction. The question, "Why spend yourself on what does not satisfy?" challenges us to turn away from the things that have failed to ease our dissatisfaction let alone bring us any satisfaction. Along with that challenge comes God's gracious invitation: "Come, all you who are thirsty, come to waters; and you who have no money, buy and eat!" (Is. 55:1). Only when we reject our efforts to find satisfaction in the things of this world can we find satisfaction in the things of God. He has paid the price for the satisfaction of our souls. Ours was a costly dissatisfaction, but He freely satisfies all those who come to Him.
