Feeling Well the Peace of God
Contentment and the glory of God
In our last piece, we looked at how contentment is good for our own soul. Who wouldn’t want that? But Christians will want more: we aim to love God and love others in all we do. Is contentment just a self-serving pursuit?
Blessedly, no. Today we’ll see how contentment brings glory to God.
Contentment turns joy into worship
Last piece, we looked at how contentment enables greater joy in life. That’s true regardless of your spiritual or philosophical beliefs; but there’s another dimension of joy available to Christians. Remember the words of the Heidelberg Catechism:
leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, food and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, indeed, all things, come not by chance but by [God’s] fatherly hand.
Or as James the brother of Jesus puts it: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17).
We don’t just see the world as a series of gifts; we see a loving Giver handing them down. Contentment receives the good things in our lives, not just for themselves, but as tokens of our heavenly Father’s love. Just like a great gift from my wife leads me to enjoy both it and her more, contentment elevates joy by letting us enjoy both the good things in our lives and the great Giver providing them. This grateful joy is an act of worship that brings glory to God.
Contentment makes a virtuous cycle with worship
We’ve talked before about how worship is an element of contentment. Deliberately praising God and giving thanks for his goodness makes us more satisfied in him. But a beauty of contentment is that it leads us to worship God more, which fosters greater contentment, which leads to yet more worship:
Peter Leithart writes somewhere about attending a symphony with his son, who is a professional classical musician. Peter, who has some knowledge of music, can appreciate a well-played symphony; but his son’s deeper training and experience enables him to enjoy it more deeply than Peter can. His years of training and learning help him pay greater attention to the music and notice greater detail in it.
That’s something like what the condition of contentment enables us to do with God. The more we train ourselves to trust and worship him, the more naturally we’ll pay attention to him, and the more we’ll notice about his goodness. And because God is infinitely good and glorious, our attention will lead us to see things that incline us to worship.
Psalm 131 is one of the shortest poems in the Bible – it’s just three verses.
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and forevermore.
The first lines sound pious in English; but in Hebrew, they’re expressions of pride and existential discontent. David rejects discontentment and chooses to “calm and quiet” his soul like a weaned child: to simply sit in the presence of God. And the fruit of that, expressed in the last two lines, is remembering the hope that Israel has in God. His spiritual contentment leads to a fresh experience of joyful hope in God.
Discontent makes our souls like a fussy child – distracted, demanding, and restless, even in the presence of his mother. It leads me to fixate on my desires and my agenda. And to the extent that I’m consumed with my self, I’m that less able to experience and enjoy God. A contented soul, by contrast, notices God’s goodness; and as it does, it worships and enjoys him more fully.
Contentment makes sin taste less appealing
With the caveats that 1) there are sinful forms of complacency (laziness, refusal to change, ignoring those in need) and 2) there are forms of discontent that lead to godliness (discontentment with sin, or discontentment that leads to God-honoring action), Christian contentment properly understood leads us away from sin and toward godliness.
The Bible directly links discontentment with sin and contentment with godliness. Consider the following:
You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. (Exodus 20:17)
Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world. (Philippians 2:14-15)
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)
Coveting – the greedy desire for another’s good – is directly grounded in discontentment. A woman who is satisfied with her life by definition won’t covet parts of someone else’s. The apostle Paul correctly nails covetousness as idolatry (Colossians 3:5): the belief that I’ll find true happiness and meaning in some created thing instead of in the Creator. Idolatry is the fruit of a discontented soul. Greed, envy, lust, and even sinful anger (anger I can’t turn over to God and release) are all sins of discontentment: all rooted in the false belief that I need that thing (whatever it is) to be satisfied.
If I’ve had an excellent steak dinner, I won’t be as tempted to eat a junk food burger. If I’m happy with my house, I won’t go nosing around Zillow for others. Christianity offers the greatest “meal,” in terms of the goodness offered us, and the most wonderful home we could ever ask for; if we can be content with them, sin won’t seem as appealing to us.
Contentment reflects the life of heaven
The Bible also sometimes describes discontentment as sinful in itself. Grumbling – which is discontentment made verbal – as unbefitting a child of God. In the Old Testament, grumbling led a whole generation of Israelites to be banned from the Promised Land (see Numbers 14). Nurturing discontentment in our hearts, through grumbling or bitterness, leads us away from our identity as children of God.
By contrast, rejoicing and thanksgiving – the verbal expressions of contentment – are part of the family likeness. My dad always told us, half joking and half not, that our family motto is “Where there’s a will, there’s a Rhea” (Rhea rhymes with “way”). By that he meant that we’re willing, hardworking, and resourceful; and he raised us to live those values. They took eventually. In the same way, rejoicing and thanksgiving befit the family of God in a way that grumbling, complaining, and bitterness don’t. They fit with God’s goodness and grace at an experiential level. They’re the life of heaven instead of the life of hell.
Is it right to grieve and complain if that’s what we feel? Yes, in the same sense that it’s right to confess sin and temptation. And sometimes they’re proper responses to a broken world – the Bible has plenty of laments, complaints, and tolerance for sorrow and anger. This isn’t a call to hypocrisy. But it is important to note that Paul tells the Thessalonians to rejoice and give thanks – not to feel joy and gratitude. There is a place for practicing contentment like we practice all other forms of godliness. And doing so is practicing the life of enjoying God for eternity.