p>1 Timothy 6:6-10
6 – Godliness with contentment is great gain.
7 – For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.
8 – But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that.
9 – People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.
10 – For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.
Hebrews 13:
5 – Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”
6 – So we say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”
Philippians 4:11-13
11 – I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.
12 – I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
13 – I can do everything through Him Who gives me strength.
This is the Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.
I think that of all the movies I’ve ever seen the one that made me laugh the most is that old classic “docu-comedy” entitled: The Gods Must Be Crazy. I love that movie! For those of you who haven’t seen it let me give you a quick summary of the plot. It’s the fictional story of a remote tribe of pygmies who live deep within the continent of Africa. They’re completely isolated from the modern world.
But in spite of their lack of modern conveniences, the people of this particular tribe have a good life. They have plenty of food and clothing and shelter. They are physically healthy and enjoy good relationships with each other. In fact if I had to describe this particular people group with one word. I would say they were content, very content. Their basic needs were met and that was enough for them.
Well, one day the pilot of a small plane, flying unseen above the clouds, finishes drinking his coke and throws the empty bottle out the window. It lands unbroken in the soft sand right at the feet of one of this group’s tribal leaders as he’s out hunting. Now this man has never seen glass before, much less a bottle, so he’s very curious and he takes this thing that he considers to be a gift from the gods back to his tribe. The people examine this amazing thing and decide to call it “hard water” and very soon they discover it to be very useful. It’s good for drinking from of course, but they also use it to mash vegetables and fruits and roll dough plus they discover that it’s great for cleaning the skins of animals.
Well, in a short period of time the bottle becomes very popular. Everyone in the tribe wants to use this labor-saving tool in their daily tasks and before long these people are no longer content because of course there is only one bottle. Fights and arguments break out in this tribe that used to enjoy loving relationships. In fact, the bottle itself is used as a weapon in this dispute.
To make a long story short, this chunk of “hard water” from the “gods” causes so much trouble that the tribal leader who found it decides that it is a gift that must be returned. He thinks the gods must have been crazy to give it to him in the first place and he sets off on a long journey to throw the bottle off the edge of the world so life in his tribe can return to normal.
Now this is a funny movie, but I think it also serves as an illustration of a very serious issue that we face in our culture here in the United States. You see, just like this little tribe, we constantly deal with problems that stem from the discontent that comes with covetousness. It’s just as James 4:2 says, “We want something but don’t get it. We kill and covet but we cannot have what we want so we quarrel and fight.” (James 4:2)
In my mind this verse describes us to a tee because most of the problems in our culture stem from covetous discontent-our wanting more and more and more things. One way to view this is to think of discontent as a deadly disease, because that’s what it is. Think of it: when discontent strikes, a fine running three-year-old car becomes an embarrassment that must be replaced by something with style.
Discontent can turn a subdivision home that we once loved into something we suddenly consider to be substandard, utterly unacceptable. On HGTV we see something better and think it’s time to re-finance the house and call in the custom contractors.
When “infected” by this disease, people have been known to actually “hallucinate” and believe they have absolutely nothing to wear even though their closets are full of clothing. And we need to understand this is a disease that affects rich and poor alike. If you doubt that then look up the statistics that tell about people who load up half a dozen credit cards with unnecessary consumer debt, or the people who spend their last dollar buying a lottery ticket or the ones who gamble away their unemployment checks in casinos.
You know when newscasters told us that Hurricane Katrina might just destroy the waterfront casinos on the gulf I thought, “Great!” because gambling hurts people, especially the poor! But the fact is lower income and middle income people catch the disease of discontentedness just as easily as those in upper brackets.
And not only does this ailment destroy once healthy credit ratings-and eat away at the financial resources of rich and poor alike-discontent can also devastate our emotional stability. Marty Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and he conducted a study of depression. He found that there has been a sharp increase of this particular mental illness since World War II. In fact, his statistics show that people born after 1945 are ten times more likely to suffer depression than people born earlier.
And that seems strange to me; it doesn’t make sense because in our day and age we have so many more possessions and conveniences, things that make life so much more comfortable than it was back then. But that’s what his study has shown. Having more and more things that supposedly make life easier seems to almost increase the risk of this mental malady.
Further proof of this is Seligman’s discovery that on the whole you don’t find much depression as we know it in non-Westernized cultures before they were modernized. Most primitive cultures show almost no cases of depression. For example, in this study one simple society-the Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania-showed depression occurring at roughly one fifth the rate it occurs among the people of Baltimore, MD.
Part of his explanation for all this is his belief that most people in our culture are caught up in the middle of almost complete self-centeredness. Their discontented state causes them to be focused on getting what they want and this leads to unhappiness and un-fulfillment, because, you see, the more we have the more we want and the more unhappy we become. Discontent is an endless cycle that gets us nothing but more misery. When we’re infected we’re like dogs chasing their tails. I mean, no matter how many clothes or cars or gadgets we gain, no matter how big our houses become, or how full our closets are, we still find fulfillment and joy alluding us.
Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 6:9 that we read a moment ago hit the nail on the head because the pursuit of things causes us nothing but emptiness and grief. People who want to get rich really do fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.
This is not a new disease; in fact Adam and Eve suffered from it. They had everything they could want in the Garden of Eden but contentment was still a stranger. Remember? This is what the serpent capitalized on. He led the first couple to believe that they would never be happy or content unless they had the one thing God forbade them. So, the very first sin wasn’t violence. It wasn’t lust. It wasn’t substance abuse or blasphemy or murder or lying or stealing or even gossip. It was discontent.
This morning as we continue our crossing as a church family I want us to learn how to treat this sickness that plagues so many of us, this nearly irresistible mental compulsion to try and get more than we need. I want us to go to God’s Word for help in putting this way of thinking behind us so we can cross over from covetousness to contentment, from depression to joy, from striving to get to straining to give.
And you know the fact is so many times our ability to give to God is hampered by our discontent. You see, discontentment makes us think we need more than we do. And in the process it eats up our income and keeps us from giving to eternal purposes. It keeps us from crossing over to become the kind of generous, giving, faith-filled people that God calls us to be.
Let’s begin by defining our goal, the mental attitude we’re trying to cross over to. So, what exactly is contentment? Nancy Beach, one of the teaching pastors at Willow Creek defines it like this. She says,
“Godly contentment simply means that we choose to be at peace no matter what…it means that we continue to obey God and follow Him working diligently and giving generously.”
And then, in his book, Authentic Faith, Gary Thomas puts it this way. He says,
“Contentment is nothing more than ‘soul rest.’ It is satisfaction, peace, assurance, and a sense of well-being that is cultivated by pursuing the right things. Instead of more power, more money, more pleasure, and more control, …we seek an ‘abundance’ of grace and peace…contentment is the opposite of striving, aching, restlessness, and worry.”
Well Thomas and Beach give us a good start-but let’s go a little deeper here by looking at two basic facts we need to grasp in order to understand contentment.
(A) First, it is an internal disposition. Contentment is a mind set.
In other words, it has nothing to do with external possessions or circumstances. It has nothing to do with how much you have or don’t have. In fact, the very word “contentment” in the Greek meant to be independent or self-sufficient.
People used this word in Bible times to convey the fact that they didn’t need anything outside of themselves to be happy. They didn’t need things to be satisfied in life. Their happiness was independent of things. And they were right. We don’t really need anything by way of material possessions to give us a “joy-buzz” because true contentment comes from within. As Bill Hybels says, “Contentment has more to do with focus than finances.”
John Rosemond is a nationally syndicated columnist. He’s also a family psychologist and he wrote several years ago about the epidemic of boredom in our culture among suburban affluent American kids. Rosemond say he’s taken three informal polls on the subject. He does a lot of traveling internationally and whenever he’s in a foreign culture he’ll ask parents, “Do your kids complain abut boredom?” and without exception he’s always been told “No.” He says that not only has he been told, “no,” but parents in other cultures look at him with incredulity, like, “Boredom and kids? What are you talking about? Those two things don’t go together.”
The second poll he’s take is among parents who raised their kids in the ’40s and ’50s, parents who are the age of my parent’s. He asked, “When you were raising your kids, did you hear them complain about boredom?” The response typical of that generation of parents was “Rarely…like on rainy days when they couldn’t go outside to play.”
In his third survey he asked adults his age, mid-40s, “How many toys did you have growing up?” Their answers ranged from zero to 10. In fact, typically what he heard was, “Toys? We took a cardboard box and made something out of it.” Rosemond says that in contrast, statistics say that today the typical American child five years of age has accumulated 250 toys. When you stop to think that a five-year-old has only lived for 260 weeks, 250 toys is almost one per week. And even with all that stuff they’re still bored.
Well, all this goes to show that contentment doesn’t come from having more and more stuff, whether it be toys or cars or clothes or homes. No, contentment comes from within. It is an internal disposition. It’s a mind set.
(B) Second, to make this crossing we need to realize that contentment is learned.
As any new mother will tell you, we are not born contented nor do we gravitate instinctively toward contentment because it is a virtue that has to be learned. Do you remember Paul’s words? “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
If we were to go to Paul and ask him to teach us this secret I think he’d begin by telling us that there’s a lot to learn, that gaining contentment can be a long educational process. He’d direct us to the Scriptures, pointing to several lessons we need to learn in order to graduate from the school of contentment.
Now, we don’t have time this morning for a lengthy study-we can’t get our “degree” in contentment in a half hour-but we do have time for what you might call a look at the “Cliff Notes.” So let’s do that; let’s condense it all down and look at three basic principles that we need to understand in order to cross over from covetousness to contentment. And the first is this:
(1) To be content in life we need to correct our expectations.
Several years back a writer named Landon Jones wrote a book titled, Great Expectations-America and the Baby Boom Generation. In this book Jones drives home the fact that my generation is a generation of “over-expecters.” We grew up expecting to have an affordable college education, a high-paying job, a nice home in the suburbs, great health care, thriving children, two cars, great annual vacations, and security for retirement years. We grew up believing we deserved happiness. We think we are entitled to it.
These expectations were fueled in part by our parents who had struggled in life and wanted the best for us, but largely by the world of television and advertising, the ever-expanding media that has constantly, relentlessly painted a picture of the future that we decided we deserved.
Did you know that by the age of 21 the average baby boomer had seen over 300,000 commercial messages? And they all carried basically the same assumption, and here it is: “Personal gratification is the goal of life.” Think of it. What did McDonalds tell us? “You deserve a break today!” Burger King’s message was, “Have it your way.” In commercials like this we’ve been told over and over and over again that the world revolves around us. So is it any wonder that we expect so much?! Well, thanks to this bombardment of “expect to be happy messages,” my generation, and to an even greater extent the generations that have followed, are deeply disappointed by unmet expectations. Life hasn’t turned out like the commercials say that it should. We haven’t had the breaks we were told we deserved. We haven’t always had it our way in life, so we’re discontented.
C. S. Lewis tells a story about how our expectations affect our contentment and I want to “modernize” it a bit. Let’s divide the sanctuary in half. You people on my right listen up. We’re not going home today.
There will be buses to pick you up as you exit the church and take you to the airport where you will be flown in a chartered jet to the Four Seasons Hotel at Wailea. It is located on one of Hawaii’s best beaches, on the sunny, southwest shore of the island of Maui. I checked the internet and here’s how this award-winning resort is described. It’s a “…gracious blend of Hawaiian elegance and tranquility.” Can you picture it in your mind’s eye? Let me help. “Luxurious accommodations, ocean-side dining, and a wide range of activities (including three championship golf courses, tennis, water-sports, and a complimentary ‘Kids For All Seasons’ program) combine to provide the perfect escape. The brand new Spa, Games Room, and pools with cabana seating are all set amidst lush gardens and azure Pacific vistas. It is little wonder indeed that this resort hotel was named #1 Tropical Resort in the World twice in the past six years and has received an AAA Five Diamond Award for each of the past fourteen years. Picture that in your mind. You’ll be sleeping in this amazing resort tonight! Does that sound good or what!?
Okay, the rest of you, those sitting on my left: you’re not going home either and buses will pick you up as well but they’re different from the others. You see, your buses have bars on the windows. Armed guards patrol the aisles because tonight you will sleep in a cell at the state prison in Hagerstown. The mattresses are thin and so are the blankets. The thermostat is always set at 60. Showers are public and the water is cold. Your roommates will be convicted felons and the food is lousy. Does everyone on my left have a mental image of your destination? Ready to go?
Now what would happen if before you exited the building to get on our buses I were to say, “Hey-none of us are going on either of the trips I just described. We’re all going on a trip but we’re all going to the same destination. We’re going to stay at the Comfort Inn that’s on the corner of Shady Grove Road and Rockville Pike.” How would you feel? Well, the people on my right would be disgusted. I mean the Comfort Inn is clean and the beds are sufficient but you were expecting Maui! You were expecting to look out your window and see the Pacific Ocean, not the county dump. You were expecting to see surfers gliding down the waves, not people sitting in rush hour traffic on Shady Grove Road.
But the people on my left though, you would be ecstatic because you were expecting prison!
Well, do you begin to understand this first basic lesson? In case you missed it, here it is: In life contentment is directly related to expectations. C. S. Lewis put it this way, “If you think of this world as a place intended simply for your happiness, you find it quite intolerable. Think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.”
You see to be content our expectations need to be in line with reality. And as Christians we need to remember that the basic reality is this is a fallen world. People get sick here. People lose their jobs here. People get hurt here. People die here. And Christians aren’t exempt; even we go through these difficult times. We shouldn’t be surprised because Jesus told us it would be like this. He told us to expect hardship and pain. He told us we would face tough times, and wouldn’t always have everything we want. But remember He also told us that this fallen world is a temporary world. As Lewis says, this is just the training grounds. This is where we prepare for the real world by accepting Jesus as Savior and learning to follow Him as Lord, spending our temporary lives furthering His eternal purposes.
The next world-the real world-is an eternal world. It’s a place where we can expect no suffering or pain. It will be wonderful literally beyond our wildest dreams. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him.”
Well, this understanding, this corrected expectation, helps us to be content even amidst the pain of living in this fallen and flawed world, because our expectations match reality.
(2) And the second lesson in our “Cliff Notes” study builds on this first one because to cross over to contentment we must also learn to correct our thinking.
Paul refers to this lesson in Romans 12:2. Do you remember those familiar words? Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
I like Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of this verse. He words it like this:
“Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God; you’ll be changed from the inside out. Unlike the culture around you always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you and develops a well-formed maturity in you.”
Paul is warning us here that our minds are going to be influenced and transformed. That’s a given. They will be transformed by the philosophies of this fallen, temporary world or by the Spirit of God. It’s our choice. We will think and act and live according to the world’s messages of consumerism and materialism and get get get, or according to the principles found in God’s Word.
In his classic book The Freedom of Simplicity, Richard Foster writes that the Madison Avenue hucksters are working day and night to get us to choose the former as they try to squeeze us into their mold. And he’s right. Under the influence of the adversary they’ve launched a concerted effort to capture our minds and the minds of our children.
Well, to be content we need to break free of this “thingsification” mind set and join what Foster refers to as “the joyful, happy revolt against the propaganda machine.”
How do we do this? How do we correct our thinking? How can we counter the flawed messages we are constantly pounded with? Well, the main way to do this is by meditating on and then living according to the written Word of God. You see the Bible says the world’s way of thinking is wrong. It says that our net worth and self worth have nothing to do with one another, that our value is not based on our valuables, that joy is not to be found in accumulating material things.
So to correct the world’s philosophy we need to internalize Scripture. Think of it as an anti-virus program that we install in our minds. Internalize Scripture, especially those verses that remind us that the longings of our souls will never be fully satisfied by striving for more of the things of this world.
And verses like this are easy to find, because God’s Word has more to say about how to deal with money and material possessions, than any other issue. For example in Ecclesiastes 1:14 King Solomon-a guy who had accumulated all the things the world has to give-says that doing so, striving for more, is very foolish. He says, “All the things that are done under the sun are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Another verse to program into your mind is Luke 12:15 where Jesus said, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” If we memorize and meditate of verses like these two we’ll begin to correct the world’s way of thinking-and realize that there is so much more to life than things. We’ll begin to see that it’s foolish to spend your days accumulating stuff that will never satisfy.
Here’s another one. Ecclesiastes 5:12 says, “The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep.” This text and others like it will also help clear our thinking. It will help us realize that having more things, especially expensive things, also means we have more things to worry about.
You know, our van is eight years old. It’s got dents and dings all over it. I mean it works great but it doesn’t look as great as it did back in 1998 when we drove it off the lot. Back then when it was dentless, brand spanking new, and back then I worried where I parked it. I worried about it getting stolen. I worried about it losing its value. When hail storms came I fretted about potential damage. Stains on the carpet meant I hurriedly got the spot remover.
Well, these days I don’t worry about my van that much. I mean, I take care of it, maintain it, keep the oil changed, etc., but frets about dents and depreciation, even car theft, things like this don’t keep me up at night.
I share this to illustrate the truth that the world’s teaching that to have peace we need more stuff is a flawed way of thinking because the more stuff we have the less peace we experience. Stuff just gives us something to worry about thieves breaking in to steal or moth and rust corrupting.
Nancy Beach tells about a group of people at Willow Creek who meet for breakfast every week. They are all wealthy people by the world’s standards but they are Christians, and they meet to help each other continue to think correctly about their possessions. They look to the Scripture and hold each other accountable by honestly talking about their wealth and the temptations and problems that come with it. They call themselves “The Bruised Camels,” a name they take from Jesus’ warning in Mark’s gospel that it would be harder for a rich person-someone who strives to gain more and more.-harder for a rich person like this to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle. These “bruised camels” meet to help each other continue to correct their thinking so they can be content.
(3) And then the last basic lesson we need to learn to make this crossing is to correct our desires.
In other words, we reign in our yearning for more and more by denying ourselves, by learning to say “no” to the temptation to possess things. Here’s a practical way to do this. Go to Tysons or Potomac Mills or one of the huge shopping malls around here and don’t purchase anything. Whenever you’re tempted tell yourself “no.” Remind yourself that you really don’t need that i-pod or that dress. Say, “It’s really great, but I don’t need it to be content.”
Foster suggests that we even go through our homes and find possessions that we really value and ask: “Am I growing too attached to this object? Is it becoming a treasure to me?” The Lord may challenge us to deny ourselves by giving that object away to someone who really needs it or to sell it and give the money to the poor, advice that He once gave a young man who was too attached to his things.
Another way to deny yourself and correct your desires is to give away some of your precious time. Give a week’s vacation to go on a mission trip in a third world country.
Here’s another idea. Take a day each week to fast. Deny yourself of food on that day and when hunger pains hit, let that remind you to pray for the millions of people in this world who are almost always hungry. Let that experience prompt you to deny your desires for more by giving to help them.
Someone once said, “There are ten rules for getting rid of the discontentment blues: Go out and do something for someone else and repeat it nine times” and that’s good advice. Give to others; give a Saturday to work at the Manna Food Bank, or help chaperone a youth retreat but deny yourself!
You know, we are eternal beings. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God has, “…set eternity in the hearts of men.” And because He has the truth it is only eternal things make us content. I mean the things that give us to most complete satisfaction are eternal things, like giving to others whether it be our Christian witness or our financial resources or our time. When we strive to get contentment by accumulating temporary earthly things, it just doesn’t satisfy. It’s like a hungry man trying to fill his stomach with a candy bar when he really needs a square meal.
So, to be genuinely content we need to change our desires and goals so that we teach ourselves to work for things that really last.
A few weeks ago Rick Warren was once again on the cover of Christianity Today and the article inside told of his work in Rwanda and South Africa. I don’t know if you realize this but his book, The Purpose Driven Life is the best-selling new book in the world since 2003. People all over the world have bought more than 26 million copies. This of course made the Warrens very wealthy but they didn’t hoard their money. They gave it to eternal purposes. A look at their most recent “bank statement” would tell us that Warren stopped taking a paycheck from his church. In fact he repaid 25 years of salary to the church that he founded in 1980. He and his wife also created three charitable foundations and started “reverse tithing” meaning they live on 10 percent of their income and give away 90 percent.
And then they began to work with the people of Rwanda-helping an entire nation to become purpose-driven. They also ministered in South Africa to the people suffering and dying of AIDS. In fact, true to form, Warren has developed an acronym to describe the kinds of ministry he’s doing with all his money. He’s used the word “PEACE”:
- P – Plant new churches or partner with existing one.
- E – Equip pastors and leaders
- A – Assist the poor
- C – Care for the sick
- E- Educate the next generation.
And reading this story about all this giving, well, I sense a greater joy in Rick Warren and his wife-a deep contentment-a genuine peace because they have correct desires. Their innermost longings are to further God’s eternal kingdom, not to pad their personal pocketbooks, not to build huge homes.
And the wonderful truth is you don’t have to have millions to experience that kind of peace and joy and satisfaction. Just give what you have of your time and talents and money to further God’s kingdom and you’ll make the crossing from covetousness to contentment. Do this and you’ll be just as happy and content as the Warrens. As Gary Thomas says, “Soul rest is found in only one place: seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness.”