contentment (10) treasure

A man was walking across a cow pasture when his foot hit something. He bent over, rubbed his aching toe, and noticed the corner of a box sticking out of the ground. Curious, he grabbed a stick, dug away the dirt, and opened the lid. His heart thumped as he reached in and felt the solid weight of gold. He glanced around to see if anyone was watching, then covered the box with chunks of turf. He went home and sold everything he had, from the coat on his back to the roof over his children’s heads, and bought the pasture, cows and all. The whole town thought he’d gone crazy. He ended up a richer man than he’d ever been before. (Matt 13:44-46)

We have a great treasure. We have Christ himself! Yet we complain about what we don’t have. We envy those who with more than us. We write bucket lists. We regret what we’ve given away. We wish life had turned out differently. We have enough, but we’re greedy for more. We whinge when things don’t go our way. We worry we don’t have enough stored up for the future. We look back longingly at the things we left behind.

And all the time we tell ourselves that discontent is just a little sin. But we don’t notice how it eats away at our lives, our relationships, our faith. We fail to see the idolatry at its heart, how we have become adulterous lovers and false worshippers, seeking fulfilment apart from God. We abandon his living water and look for satisfaction, security and significance in the leaky wells of this world, then we’re surprised when we are left empty.

If we grasped just how great our blessings are in Christ – how richly he supplies every need, how tenderly he watches over us, how bright our future is with him – would we ever feel like we lack anything? I think we’d be content. More than that, I think that, even in sorrow, we’d rejoice to be found in him.

If you’re anything like me, it won’t be easy to learn this lesson. It won’t be easy to find your contentment in Christ alone. It will be a life-long battle. It will be challenged every time you suffer, every time you fail, every time you notice someone is better off than you. But it’s worth fighting, because it’s a battle to treasure Christ over all.

Contentment isn’t horizontal. It doesn’t come from comparing ourselves with others. It doesn’t come from counting our blessings. It doesn’t come from thinking about those worse off than us. Paul never tells us to be content because we have more than someone else.

Contentment is vertical, not horizontal. It comes from knowing Christ. We will become content when we learn to turn to him every time we feel dissatisfied; when we trust him to care for us; when we value him above everything and everyone else.

We find satisfaction in him, for he alone can fulfil our deepest longings. We are secure in him, for he will never leave us. We have significance in him, not because we have done great things, but because he has done great things for us.

Jesus is the secret of contentment.

I am a long way from learning this. I guess you are too. So let’s pray together that we learn to be content.

You'll find some follow-up questions, and the rest of this series, at TGC Australia

Image: Alton Hoard (British Museum)

contentment (9) godly discontent

It’s not just contentment that is godly. Discontent can be godly too. In fact, true godliness is always discontented.

There are many things in this life that should make us deeply dissatisfied. We should be dissatisfied with sin. We should be dissatisfied when friends and family don’t know Jesus. We should be dissatisfied when brothers and sisters in Christ drift away from God. The difference between ungodly and godly discontent is that the first is centred on us and our needs, and the second is motivated by love for Christ and others.

It’s also okay to be dissatisfied with suffering ... The Bible is full of grief and pain. Just think about the Psalms ...

We are supposed to be discontent with this life. We are supposed to long for eternity. If we are content with this life – if we don’t long for the next – there is something wrong with our faith ...

Read the rest at TGC Australia.

contentment (8) getting practical

Hold up your hand. Five fingers, right? Here are five steps we can take next time we notice ourselves becoming discontent, one for each finger to help us remember them easily:

Stop. Think. Turn from. Turn to. Turn out ...

Read the rest at TGC Australia.

contentment (7) significance

What makes you feel significant? Where does your identity come from? Whose opinion do you value? When do you feel good about yourself? What gives you a sense of worth?

Maybe it’s doing well in your career, staying fit and healthy, or being in a relationship. Maybe it’s your IQ, attractiveness, or creativity. Maybe it’s ministry, being a “good” person, or belonging to a certain church or cultural group. We look to all kinds of things to make ourselves feel worthwhile ...

One of my friends was ill for many months. She lay in bed, stared at the trees outside the window, and felt useless. She couldn’t work, care for others, or even carry out the basic tasks of each day. As she lay there, she learned an important truth: that God loves her just as much when she can’t do anything for him, as he does when she can do things that feel significant.

God doesn’t love us because we have value. We have value because he loves us. ...

You can read the rest at The Gospel Coalition Australia

contentment (6) security

What makes you feel safe? What makes you feel secure? If you’re not sure, ask yourself another question: What do you most fear losing?

When I found out my husband has cancer, it felt like my whole world was crumbling. When you’re married, you place a lot of your sense of safety in the person you love. And it’s not just our relationship that I fear losing. If the worst should happen, how will I provide for and protect our family? How will I raise our children? How will they cope without a father? These are real questions, but when they fill me with fear, I know I’m looking to other things besides God to keep us safe.

It’s no different if you’re single. Maybe you long for a relationship. Or maybe it’s a high-achieving career that attracts you. Or owning your own home. A young woman once told me she hopes Jesus doesn’t come back until she has a career and is married with children. I get that, because I remember feeling that way myself when I was young. But she longed for it so much that she chose to go out with a non-Christian.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a relationship, a job, or a home – they are good gifts from God. But what happens when they become the source of our security? What if God never gives us these things, or if he takes them away? Will we still hold on to him then? Will we seek them in places or people he doesn’t want us to?

What makes you feel safe? ...

You can read the rest at TGC Australia

contentment (5) satisfaction

What brings you joy? What gives you satisfaction? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying God’s good gifts, but how can you tell when a good thing becomes a God-thing? How do you know when you’re looking to something or someone else for contentment, rather than to God?

One way we can tell is to ask ourselves: what happens when we lose something we value? How do we react when our friend gets the job we applied for, our quiet weekend gets disturbed, or we flush our new phone down the toilet? Of course we’ll be disappointed; but do we also react with envy, irritation or self-pity?

Or what about bigger things? How about when we have to live without a relationship we deeply long for? Or when we lose something or someone important to us? Yes, there will be grief and anguish and sorrow, and that is fully appropriate. But will we also give in to bitterness? Will we give way to despair? Will we turn our backs on the God who stole our dreams away?

Watching my son Ben struggle with chronic illness over the last five years has made me ask lots of hard questions ...

You can read the rest at TGC Australia.

contentment (4) the heart of contentment

I once heard an advertisement on the radio. It went like this (you’ll have to imagine the broad Aussie accent):

I want the kids to go to good schools. I want great holidays in exotic places. I want a comfortable retirement for me and the missus. And you know what? I’m making it happen!

I must admit I tuned out at that point, but my guess is he was advertising some kind of investment portfolio.

Do you hear what this guy is saying? He’s convinced he needs three things to be happy:

• Significance: the kind to be found in good schools and good careers
• Satisfaction: exotic holidays and unique experiences
• Security: enough superannuation to guarantee a comfortable retirement.[1]

Money, he thinks, is the key to all these things.

The problem is that, like most of us, he’s looking for contentment in all the wrong places. He’s like God’s people in these words from Jeremiah ... one of the saddest passages in the Bible ...

Read the rest at TGC Australia.

contentment (3) what's so bad about discontent?

Last time we talked about how becoming content isn’t as simple as practising a set of techniques. ... Contentment requires change at the level of our hearts.

But if it’s that hard to be content, why bother trying? What’s so bad about discontent? ... 

Discontent is incredibly destructive. It ruins three things ...

You can read the rest at The Gospel Coalition Australia.

contentment (2) the secret

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to feel content. I’d love to feel fulfilled. At peace. Like I’m not missing anything. I’d love to feel satisfied with my life.

And that’s exactly what contentment means. If you look in a modern dictionary, it means “happy” or “satisfied”. The word usually translated “contentment” in the New Testament means “enough”, “sufficiency”, or even “self-sufficiency”. Contentment means to be satisfied with what we have.

In his famous book The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs goes a little deeper. He says,

Christian contentment is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to, and delights in, God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.

That’s a beautiful picture, isn’t it? Not to want more. Not to complain about our burdens. But to freely and gladly accept what God chooses to give us, at all times and in all places. Now that’s contentment.

But how do you get it? In Philippians 4:2, Paul says he learned the “secret” of being content in every circumstance. What’s the secret, the key that unlocks the door to contentment? Here’s what some people have to say ...

You can read the rest of this article at The Gospel Coalition

contentment (1) at a time like this

A good friend of mine agreed to give talks on a woman’s conference. The topic? Contentment. A few weeks before the conference, she found out she might have breast cancer. She gave the talks anyway.

If you can’t talk about contentment at a time like this, when can you?

Five years ago, my son got sick. The doctor thought it was whooping cough. But instead of getting better, he started getting worse. He was home from school for weeks at a time, and then for months. He was finally diagnosed with chronic daily headaches and migraines complicated by chronic fatigue syndrome. He has learned to manage his condition, but he still suffers daily. His illness prompted me to add the topic of contentment to the teaching schedule for our women’s group.

If you can’t talk about contentment at a time like this, when can you?

Just over a year ago, my husband began to experience strange symptoms. He grew weaker and weaker. Medical tests came up blank. He started vomiting, became unable to keep any food down, and was hospitalised. We found out he had a rare small bowel cancer that couldn’t be picked up in the usual scans. Two months after major surgery and at the beginning of six months of chemotherapy, I was due to give a talk on contentment. I could have cancelled, but something told me there would never be a better time. ...

Read the rest at The Gospel Coalition Australia.