What is Contentment?

Our definition of contentment

In our last piece, we considered four partial pictures of contentment floating in the ether today:

1. Contentment is a feeling of satisfaction.

2. Contentment comes through self-acceptance.

3. Contentment comes through rejecting attachments and desires.

4. Contentment comes through self-mastery and self-sufficiency.

Each of those has some overlap with a Christian vision of contentment, but also miss some vital element. Christianity has a unique perspective on contentment that comes from what the Bible teaches about who God is, who we are, and how God acts in the world.

In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom describes her mother as physically active – always cooking, moving, and helping others in physical ways. But she becomes ill and gradually loses her ability to use her body. One might assume that loss would make her bitter; but Corrie writes:

It was astonishing, really, the quality of life she was able to lead in that crippled body, and watching her during the three years of her paralysis, I made another discovery about love. Mama’s love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us.

That ability to maintain joy and love through worsening circumstances is a perfect example of our definition of contentment:

Contentment is the joyful acceptance of God’s providence.

Joyful

Contentment is joyful. Like we discussed in the last piece, “joyful” doesn’t necessarily mean “feeling the emotion of happiness,” and it also doesn’t mean someone is always cheerful or putting on an optimistic front. The biblical vision is more nuanced. The apostle Paul describes his ministry team as “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10); joy can coexist with sorrow. Or see this vow of contentment from the prophet Habakkuk:

Though the fig tree should not blossom,
    nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
    and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
    and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
    I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
    he makes my feet like the deer's;
    he makes me tread on my high places. (Habakkuk 3:17-19, emphasis added)

Habakkuk is describing a famine – which in an agricultural society was a death sentence – and still vowing to rejoice in the Lord.

A joyful person commits to gratitude, worship, and love no matter their circumstances or emotions. They might experience sorrow, anger, or pain, and have times where those are their dominant emotional realities; but they won’t have long-term trends or patterns of bitterness, which is the opposite of joy.

Joni Eareckson Tada is a writer, speaker, and founder of Joni and Friends, a ministry that serve people with disabilities. Tada is quadriplegic, suffers chronic pain, and is now fighting cancer as well. She has many reasons to not be joyful; but in this video, she shares honestly and beautifully about the need to practice joy:

Acceptance

A content person also accepts their circumstances in the moment. They receive positive circumstances with gratitude and, to use the proverb, focusing on the bird in the hand instead of what might be in the bush. Our world struggles so much with materialism and envy that people with full bank accounts and beautiful houses can fume over their neighbor buying a new Tesla; a content person is so thankful for the good things in their life they have no hint of envy.

A content person accepts negative circumstances too. That doesn’t mean they like them: they might experience pain, sadness, or anger, and even lament or complain. It also doesn’t mean they won’t try to change the circumstances, as we’ll see in our next piece. But on a fundamental level, they receive the blessings and hardships they have with the spirit Paul expresses at the end of his “thorn in the flesh” experience:

 [God] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)

God’s providence

We quoted Corrie ten Boom’s Hiding Place at the beginning of this piece. The ten Booms were Dutch Christians in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation; they were arrested and sent to concentration camps for helping Jews escape from the city. Corrie obviously survived, but her father and sister died in the camps.

During Corrie’s presentations [about her experience] to audiences, she would often hold up the back side of a blue cloth of embroidery with hundreds of tangled threads hanging down from it. Many wondered if she was holding up the wrong side by mistake.

As she held up the messy side of the embroidery, she would ask, “Does God always grant us what we ask for in prayers? Not always. Sometimes He says, ‘No.’ That is because God knows what we do not know. Look at this piece of embroidery. The wrong side is chaos. But look at the beautiful picture on the other side – the right side.”

Triumphantly, she flipped the cloth over and revealed an extravagantly embroidered crown.¹

We all live on the messy side of the embroidery. But what ultimately sets the Christian vision of contentment apart from all others is trust in the being on the other side of it. We don’t believe that our circumstances come from fate, karma, or blind chance. They come to us from the hand of God, who is the loving Father of everyone who trusts in him.

The Heidelberg Catechism has my favorite summary of God’s providence and what it means:

Q 27. What do you understand by the providence of God?

A. God's providence is His almighty and ever-present power, whereby, as with His hand, He still upholds heaven and earth and all creatures, and so governs them that 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 His fatherly hand.

Q 28. What does it benefit us to know that God has created all things and still upholds them by His providence?

A. We can be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and with a view to the future we can have a firm confidence in our faithful God and Father that no creature shall separate us from His love; for all creatures are so completely in His hand that without His will they cannot so much as move. (emphasis added)

God is in control of all things, to the extent that everything that comes to me – whether it feels easy or hard, good or evil – comes from him. And if he is my perfect heavenly Father, then my circumstances are being delivered by a hand that loves me and wants what’s ultimately best for me, even if I can’t see it yet.

This is an imperfect analogy, but loving parents give their kids both things that seem like blessings and things that seem like hardship. Right now, we’re buying Christmas presents because we want to bless the socks off of our kids; and we’re also giving them homeschool exams and putting my son through a basketball league that eats more free time than he likes. They’ll be pumped about the presents; they don’t love the exams and the basketball league. But both are coming from love, because we know that both are ultimately good for them.

God’s providence and Jesus’ pattern

In the same way, the apostle Paul says:

We know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Romans 8:28-29)

God is preparing his children to be “conformed to the image of his Son” – to become like our perfect older Brother, Jesus. God has chosen to adopt us as his children and give us the same love and delight he has for his eternally begotten Son, which means he intends to bless our socks off, with appetizers in this life and an infinity-course meal in the new creation. We’re going to spend eternity delighting in and being delighted by the Creator and source of delight itself. 

But that’s not what Jesus’ earthly life looked like. When God’s eternally begotten Son came to this side of the embroidery, he experienced joy; but the pattern of his life was woven of serving and suffering. He lived in humility and poverty, spent his ministry serving people who rejected him, and died under God’s wrath against other people’s evil. These was God’s providence for his own beloved Son.

That pattern gives us hope when God’s providence seems hard. If Jesus himself was somehow “made perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2:10), we can trust that the hard things that come our way are shaping us into Jesus’ image. We don’t have to know how exactly that works; but we trust that we’re in the loving hands of our Father. And that trust helps us fight for contentment, whatever we may be experiencing.

1. From https://deeprootsathome.com/corrie-ten-booms-embroidery/