The Silent Killer

Entitlement is a silent killer. It creeps in through your mind, nestles down in your heart, and slowly eats you alive from the inside. Entitlement is a virus of the soul. It puts you at odds with God. It stridently shouts at heaven, “What you have given me is insufficient. I must have more!” Entitlement prays blasphemously, “Give me today my daily bread all that You owe me.”

Entitlement takes many forms, but it is always destructive. Shopping entitlement will impoverish you. Food entitlement will wreck your health. Emotional entitlement will ruin your relationships. Spiritual entitlement will shipwreck your faith.

My first year of seminary was a difficult time for me, emotionally. I had just left a thriving young adult ministry and a wide circle of friends in Ohio to enroll at a well-respected evangelical seminary in Boston. Moving from the Midwest to New England gave me a serious dose of culture shock. Everything is so much different on the East Coast. As the darkness of winter dominated my days, I sank deeper and deeper into depression. (I hesitate to use that word because I don’t know if I was clinically depressed, but I don’t know what else to call it.) By way of medicating myself, I began to collect DVDs – as in, I would go to the store and buy five or ten DVDs at a time. Shopping became a form of emotional medication, and my DVD collection quickly turned into a source of pride and a sense of entitlement. “I deserve to buy these DVDs,” I told myself. But I was wasting money and feeding a monster by giving into my entitlement. The more you feed your entitlement, the harder it becomes to kill it.

We don’t recognize our entitlements for the soul-assassins that they are because we have bought into their lie. These murderers, after all, come from our own hearts. We are killing ourselves. We are ruining our own lives. And, being blind to the truth, we go on committing spiritual suicide with every unwise purchase, every indulgent bite, every self-centered tantrum. Our soul gasps for breath, but we press the pillow of our selfishness down upon its mouth until the unbearable spiritual twitching stops and the corpse of our soul lies still and cold. You are dying one moment of entitlement at a time.

Who you will be ten years from now is the culmination of the one million small decisions you make from now until then. You might even think about this way: The person you are becoming is largely determined by how often you say “Yes” or “No” to your sense of entitlement. Granted, it’s not the only factor in the equation, but it’s a very big part of it.

This is why I think The Year of No is so important. If entitlement is a virus of the soul, then self-discipline is your immune system, and self-denial is your white blood cell army. Saying “No” to your entitlements clears your head of the lie they have been telling you. Saying “No” gives you soul-strength to fight back. Saying “No” to your entitlements opens your eyes to see the grace and provision of God in your life. It’s time to kill the silent killer. The choice is simple: It’s either your soul or your entitlement. Which will you choose?