He Restores My Soul
The blessings of contentment, part 1
What makes contentment worth fighting for?
In his first letter to Timothy, Paul writes, “godliness with contentment is great gain” (6:6). For Christians, godliness is a nonnegotiable; but if we can experience contentment as well, it’s great gain – a blessing. We can feel that blessedness in David’s great psalm of contentment:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
A contented soul is a blessed soul. It’s blessed in the sense of “happy” (it’s good for us), in regards to our relationship with God (it’s good for our worship), and in how it affects our relationships with others (it makes love easier).
Today, we’ll look at how contentment is a gift to my soul.
Contentment brings peace to the mind and heart.
Discontent disturbs the soul. When I feel an unmet need or desire, it makes my heart restless, just like hunger makes my stomach restless. That sense of unsatisfied desire need gnaws at me, intruding on my thoughts like an alarm. In 1991, Vanity Fair interviewed Madonna, who was then astoundingly famous and popular, about what drove her to do what she did. She said:
All of my will has always been to conquer some horrible feeling of inadequacy. I’m always struggling with that fear. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being and then I get to another stage and think I’m mediocre and uninteresting. … My drive in life is from this horrible fear of being mediocre. And that’s always pushing me, pushing me.
In her quote, we can hear both the hunger of discontentment – the gnawing, pushing need to fill a hole in the soul – and also the fragility it creates in our soul. Madonna was one of the richest and most famous women in the world at the time, but she was stuck on the same treadmill of dissatisfaction that she was on when she was a nobody.
But a contented soul is like a satisfied belly. It’s at peace, able to rest, rather than grumbling over its lack. When our souls are satisfied and submitted to God, it creates a foundation of peace. Instead of being distracted by desires, it’s free for calm contemplation and gratitude.
Contentment enables greater joy.
That peace doesn’t guarantee joy; but it enables joy to grow, like weeding a garden enables vegetables to grow. When my soul is settled in contentment instead of frantic with envy, worry, or bitterness, it’s better able to see and appreciate the blessings in my life. Discontent is like having a picnic and dropping my food in the dirt; it might still be edible, but its taste is marred by the dust and grit covering it.
Contentment frees me to cultivate gratitude, the appreciation of the blessings in my life. It allows me to taste the goodness I am being served right now, rather than scorning it or looking for something else. G.K. Chesterton, a journalist who wrote in the early twentieth century, grew up in a culture that expressed discontent with monogamy and the desire for what today we might call polyamory (because there’s nothing new under the sun). His response beautifully illustrates the connection between contentment and joy:
Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.
Just as committed monogamy allows me to enjoy my one wife to the fullest, committed contentment allows me to enjoy the relationships, opportunities, goods, and everything else that God’s providence has given me.
Contentment strengthens me against suffering
Philippians 4:13, the famous power passage often seen on athletes’ eye-black, is a candidate for most-misused passage of Scripture. Its context changes its meaning dramatically:
I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:11-13, NLT)
The “everything” that Christ empowers Paul to do might include winning a football game; but Paul is obviously emphasizing something different. The power he finds in Jesus is the power to suffer well: to live on “almost nothing,” with an empty stomach, and with all the other forms of hardship and deprivation he endured as a minister of the gospel. The contentment he found in Jesus strengthened him against suffering.
That’s because Christianity has unique truths and resources that equip us to suffer. The center of our faith is a suffering Savior, who willingly endured physical, relational, and spiritual hardship for the sake of God’s glory and others’ good. He showed us that we don’t need external goods – wealth, comfort, popularity – to live a meaningful, happy life. If our internal, eternal life is stable, we become like the tree in Jeremiah’s poetic image:
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose trust is the Lord.
He is like a tree planted by water,
that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes,
for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jeremiah 17:7-8)
Christian contentment comes from our souls being grounded in an identity and hope that are eternal – they’re not subject to the “weather” of good fortune or bad. If our souls are satisfied by the grace of God and secured in the hope of eternal glory with him, then nothing we gain or lose here can change that. If that’s our most foundational identity, then suffering can shake us but not destroy us. Indeed, it becomes something God uses for our ultimate good. As Tim Keller, a pastor who fought cancer for years before it took his earthly life, wrote:
Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.
If suffering “drive[s] us like a nail deep into the love of God,” it can lead us into even greater contentment than we had before.