The Secret of Contentment

Cars, money, women, men, knowledge, relationships, careers, meaningful jobs, family – all of these things, which are not inherently bad (many of them inherently good, others indifferent) we use and we want so that we can be content, living a life where we feel alive. We look around at those people who have these things in plenty and we get jealous, comparing ourselves with them. This comparing can make us envious or depressed, because we also want to be content.

It may seem random – why is it that they get it all but I don’t? I work just as hard. Why is it that God blesses them but not me? Perhaps he doesn’t care about me. Perhaps he doesn’t love each person the same. Perhaps he doesn’t exist. Perhaps he does exist but couldn’t care less about anybody. Perhaps at the end of the day it’s just luck. Perhaps the best thing to do is tramp on others to get the contentment that I want. These are some of the things we think.

The surprising reality is that people who ‘have it all’ are not usually always happy. At best they are happy at least some of the time. But then the pressures of that career, the pressures of family, the pressures of maintaining wealth, the fears of losing all this stuff that everyone wants so dearly gets to them. Many a rich person has died bitter, angry, and unfulfilled.

If we believe in God at all and think him a tyrant for blessing some but not others, we ought to just take a step back and ask: did God ever promise to fulfill the American Dream? Was that ever in His agenda? Or was that an expectation we put on Him due to our culture and the prevailing philosophy of the world?

We have to be careful we’re not expecting God to do things for us He never promised He would. And we have to step back and think: If God did not promise to fulfill the American Dream, why not? Is it because he doesn’t care for our contentment? Or is it because He knows something we don’t? What if he cares about our contentment and joy so much that He promised something better than the American Dream? What if there is something else we’re supposed to be pursuing in this life? And if so, what is that something else?

In my own struggles with disappointment with God and asking Him these sorts of questions I have stumbled, or rather been led, into what I believe is the secret of contentment: God Himself. That statement might seem absurd or narrow or just plain boring to you. But I assure you it isn’t.

Most of us know that when Jesus died on the cross He took all of His sins upon us so that we would not be judged negatively for those sins; so that if we put our trust in Him then He will take our sins away and cast them into the Sea of Forgetfulness, because justice for those sins has already been carried out on Jesus.

But what does that mean for contentment? What does that mean for my joy? Well, it means two things:

1) I live with a clean conscience. A clean conscience is actually an amazing gift. No longer do I feel guilty about anything. And, best of all, I’m being shaped and formed by His Spirit living in me to stop doing those things that are against my conscience.

2) I now have access to a better gift than cars, women, or even family and relationships – the Presence of God, the source of all joy (Psalm 16:11).

God created joy and pleasure. Where He exists is where joy and pleasure exist to their utmost. Whether I have plenty or don’t, I have joy because I can have His presence. All I’ve got to do is ask for it and wait for Him, and He will come.

This is indeed the greater gift. While many a rich person has died unhappy, many a poor man hasn’t, such as a man like Francis of Assisi or many other such people who cast away the American Dream and sought a better Dream – the ongoing presence of God in their lives, in their heart, in their relationships, and in everything they do. The secret of contentment is this: God. And that is what God came to give us.

Sure, I know there is something called the Prosperity Gospel which has convinced many a Christian that God’s central purpose in everything is to fulfill the American Dream, hand things out to us like a supreme Father Christmas who gives gifts based on our performance and doesn’t know how to make us feel as if we’re truly happy but only knows how to put a temporary smile on our face through so-called blessing after blessing, until one day we die and we can’t take any of that stuff with us.

There is a greater Treasure out there to find, a Pearl of Great Price. That treasure is the secret of contentment and that treasure is the one we are to pursue all our days. (Matt 13: 44-46)

Let’s not look to others in a shade of green. We ought not to compare ourselves with others. We can have our own special relationship with God through Jesus. And I can promise you this: Joy will always come when one seeks God. So finally, we can have joy in our circumstances, which is God’s promise, rather than joy because of our circumstances.

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A Better Life: Not The Point

Last Sunday I preached at my church (Church on the Square) a message entitled Choose the Better Life or Choose the Better Hope.

Here it is for those who would like to download it -> 05 Feb 2011 – Choose a Better Life or Better Hope

(Right click and choose ‘save-target-as’ to download it rather than stream it.)

The world’s philosophies and everything we are taught in this world revolves around having a better life. Everything is about making our life better, getting what we want, making things better for ourselves.

But this isn’t just a problem in the world but also in the church. When we walk into a Christian bookstore the best-sellers are often the latest self-help book that centres on making our life better in some way.

We are not called to seek a better life but to seek and pursue a Better Hope – Jesus Himself. He is to be our treasure and our all in all. But often the pursuit of a Better Life is disguised in Christian lingo and hides behind good sounding things like having a better marriage, a solid family, etc. These things aren’t bad to want and God wants us to even have them, but when they become our core focus and desire they become our treasure, and we are commanded by God that He and He alone should be our treasure. If we treasure anything else we are in the area of idolatry.

And so He should be our treasure because actually there is no joy in this world that compares to Him. But we might not be able to agree with that statement until we’ve actually experienced Him for ourselves, until we have tasted and seen that He is good.

We need our eyes opened to see Him and glory in Him. When we chase after the Better Life our lives get aggravating and full of anxieties. We try hard to make things work, to find the latest formula for our life, and the Bible is not meant to be used as a book to give us the formula for a better life; rather, it’s there to open our eyes to see Jesus and rather have our hearts changed to seek the Better Hope. We were not created to bear the burden of making life work but rather created to enjoy God forever.

That’s what the sermon is about. Hope you enjoy! I’ve tried to fix the sound as it is quite soft but I’m not having much luck. So you might need to put it up a bit.

Work (Pt 2): Don’t Stop; Don’t Fret; Don’t Seek a Better Life

In Part One of this series we covered that God is the one who created WORK, and he called it good. One of the principle points around this I mentioned was:

If we were created to work, we must work, and in doing so we do one of the things we were made to do – regardless of what we are doing. So menial jobs carry a greater meaning. Also, the point of life is not to try and do whatever we can to stop working. We must work, despite our bank balance.

We tend to either be workaholics or idle busybodies. And both of them lead to anxiety while at the same time tend to become our habit because of anxiety.

We’re anxious about what people will think of our work, whether we’ll be a success or not, if people will call us a failure, whether our family will be proud, whether we are working hard enough to receive a good reward – and that reward is usually financial and often in an effort to stop working. If we could just crack this next big deal we may have enough money to quit this job, maybe retire, or maybe start our ‘dream job’, only to find years down the line that our dream job has also become a bit of a pain.

Psalm 127: 1 – 2

“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved in his sleep.”

The point of work is not to stop working. We must work regardless of our bank account. Sure, it’s nice to do something you really love, but if idleness is our goal then even what we love will become a pain to us. We must see work from God’s perspective – he created it, it’s a good thing and it can be a joy in our lives, regardless of what we’re doing. In this every kind of job carries a greater and more glorious meaning. We’re doing exactly what we were created to do – we’re working.

At the same time, we’re not called or created to fret and be anxious about our work. God is the one who prospers it, who makes something out of it. Unless He does, all of our labour – our rising up early, our staying up late – is in absolute vain. He needs to prosper it and there is no way we can make him prosper it. Hard work often pays off, but not always, and God doesn’t guarantee that He’ll reward hard work or even honest living. He guarantees that He’ll take care of you and I, and He guarantees that we’ll have joy in the hard times, but He does not guarantee financial prosperity – honest work is more likely to lead to prosperity in the long run than dishonest work, but even God does not guarantee that honest work will always lead to prosperity.

This may be hard to swallow, especially in our culture and even in Christian circles. We don’t want a poverty mindset, we say, and I’m not advocating one. But I’m simply saying that God has bigger things in mind.

The difference is in what it is we want. We either want the better life or we want the better hope. We’re either chasing after the riches of this world or we’re chasing after the Treasure of All – one who is worth more than all the riches of this world can offer – Jesus Christ. This God wants to give us, and if a tight pocket leads us to this Greater Treasure, well God is as good as He says He is then.

God sent manna from heaven to the Israelites. He took care of their needs. Manna day in and day out. Manna, manna, manna, and they got bored of it. So would you and I. See, we link the abundance of life God promises us to a life where there is always choice, always diversity, to keep us entertained and feeling happy. Lord, not manna today, but steak; Lord, not manna today, but apples. None of these are bad in themselves, but we want God to keep us entertained and keep the better life coming or we say He isn’t good. Meanwhile, he wants to lead us to a Better Treasure – the Greatest Treasure. We’ll expound on this in the next post.

Work (Pt 1): A New Approach

This is the first part in a little series of posts I’m going to do about WORK, the thing we do every day and spend most of our lives actually doing.

I hope it’s edifying. As far as I’m concerned the way we view work can really affect the joy in our lives. Work can bring us anxiety, fear, paranoia about our life going nowhere, foolish pride, and a whole host of things that hopefully I’ll cover effectively. Meanwhile, God intends for work to be a joy in our lives. That’s right, a joy. Regardless of what we’re doing.

That doesn’t mean work is meant to replace the joy in our lives — in other words, become our one and only joy. In fact, when it does, then the joy that it can bring us disappears under a layer of selfish ambitions, anxiety about what others think of our work, anxiety about our career, and anxiety whether our lives carry any meaning whatsoever.

Let’s start at the beginning: where work comes from.

God Said It Was Good

God began creation by working. He is the first worker, the first one who worked. And it looks like He took great joy in what He did. Genesis 1 and 2 shows a joyful God who takes pleasure in His work – creation. He calls creation ‘good’ a number of times. Then he creates man and takes pleasure in man as well. He rests on the ‘seventh day’ to indicate that work, too, is not all there is. There is also rest and just enjoying the fruits of labour. The seventh day obviously points towards many other things as well, but for the purpose of this blog we’ll stick to this for now.

On the sixth day, when man was created, God tells man to work.

Genesis 1: 28 – 31
And God blessed them [man]. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Genesis 2: 5 – 8
When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground… then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

Man was created to work the earth – to take care of it, nurture it, and subdue it. It’s only after the Fall of Man (Gen 3) that work becomes a curse, when it now becomes something of a toil. Gen 3:17 says the ground is cursed and in painful toil we will eat of it, all the days of our lives.

Work was never meant to be a toil, but it is now. However, there is hope. We were created to work and it was a blessing only when we were in fellowship with God. In Jesus Christ, God has restored our fellowship to Himself, meaning that there is a restoration (a salvation) of what we were originally intended to be. Part of this is a restoration of work, where work itself is redeemed in a way. What God gives us is His joy within the work, so that we can undergo the toil and labour of it with a joy still in our hearts.

This has a number of implications, which we’ll look into deeper as we go along.

(1) If God created work, it must be good. If we were created to work, we must work, and in doing so we do one of the things we were made to do – regardless of what we are doing. So menial jobs carry a greater meaning. Also, the point of life is not to try and do whatever we can to stop working. We must work, despite our bank balance.
(2) Work will always be a toil – regardless of what we’re doing. The idea that work can bring us the ultimate joy, purpose and adventure we seek in life is a myth. Work is unable to do that for us.
(3) We needn’t be anxious because God is the one who supplies our needs. He is the redeemer, redeeming our work from its futility and making something out of it.

Work is not our primary purpose and it never was our primary purpose. Knowing God is. But yet we were created to work, so work is a natural thing, it’s part of what man is about, and we don’t work to stop working – we work for many other reasons, which we’ll cover in this series.

Some of these points above may seem contradictory but we’ll iron out the contradictions as we go along. Hopefully, future posts will be shorter too!

ALIVE: How to Enjoy Living e-Book Now Available

The e-Book version of ALIVE: How to Enjoy Living is now available at lulu.com

The point of life is to enjoy it. But so few of us do. ALIVE is about finding where true joy really lies, where contentment can be found. It affirms the idea that the quest for joy and pleasure is the quest of life, but that these are found in the places no one taught us to look.

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Get the eBook here for only $4.00 (about R30).

A Kindle-specific version and the print version will be available shortly on Amazon. So watch this space for that.

A list of all the devices the eBook will work with can be found here. Since the book is in PDF format it’ll work on the Kindle or pretty much any handheld device, but as mentioned above a Kindle-specific version is in the works so that it can be downloaded from Amazon’s store from the Kindle.

My other book Single will soon also be available in the same formats, now revised and up to date.

How Ambition Makes Me a Bad Friend

I have this issue with ambition that I regularly struggle with. You see, I want to go places, do things, live my life! So in an effort to get there I ignore the here. I look to the future, a thing that the world says I must do, but by doing I so largely ignore the present.

This is known as unhealthy ambition. And it makes me a very bad friend and son to my folks. This is because it gets me to always work towards the goal. For me, the goal is to become a full time novelist. So I’m working at my writing career from all angles to get there, so that one day I’ll “have the time to spend with those I love.”

The problem is that that time will never come. I mean, I know one day I’ll be a full time novelist, but what makes me think I’ll then have the time to spend with those I love? I have to keep my career going then.

Most of us work our lives away so we can enjoy our retirement. But when our retirement comes it’s short lived because our health, and our relationships, suffered so much in the process.

What we really all want is joy, peace, love and a bit of adventure. At least that’s how it is for me. And I can have that all pretty easily by just looking for it in the right place.

For the Kingdom of Heaven is a treasure hidden in a field. God is the source of real joy. That’s where I need to go looking for it. But why do I get sidetracked so easily, and so miss the very thing I’m looking for?

Rather I keep chasing after fleeting dreams which, even though they may be good in themselves, are tainted by this unhealthy ambition to get me there.

I’m know my experience is not unique. If you’re like me, let’s look to God as the source of our joy and hope and let our ultimate ambition be to truly know Him.

All Those Sins are Washed Away

One of the hardest things to believe in Christianity is that, quite simply, all our sins are forgiven and washed away through simply asking God to forgive us.

We complicate this endlessly. But the Bible is emphatic — our sins are washed away by the blood of the Lamb.

If they are washed away when you become a Christian, they are washed away as you live as a Christian.

Listen to this: THEY ARE WASHED AWAY. If you sin and sin and sin and sin constantly, doing the same thing, these are WASHED AWAY by the Blood of the Lamb. You can sin now and ask for forgiveness and then sin in the next moment and then ask for forgiveness. God doesn’t count your sins, He washes them away. We count them. He doesn’t. When God looks at you He sees you as righteous because you are in Christ.

Your sins are washed away. Washed away, washed away, washed away.

It’s so hard to really believe it, isn’t it? We want to constantly add conditions. Are you sorry enough for your sins? Are you determined to stop doing them? Did you repent properly? Did you do all the acts of penance correctly?

The promise is that Jesus washes away our sins if we ask. It’s really simple. When I first decided to believe in Christ I asked God to forgive me of my sins and he did so. I didn’t have to worry about all this other stuff. I simply repented and that was that. Why should I have to worry about it now?

His mercies are new each morning. His steadfast love never fails. (Lamentations 3:22, 23.)

Knowledge and Philosophy Could Never Lead to Joy Themselves

Over the years I’ve learned a lot about philosophy and theology. And, although there are others that know more than me (of course), I could tell you a few things, I’m sure.

I could tell you about Spinoza, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Epicurus, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Descartes and a couple of other famous names.

I could tell you about existentialism, nihilism, mysticism, atheism, empiricism, rationalism, post-modernism, modernism, pre-modernism and more. I could tell you a bit of Eastern Philosophy and Indian Philosophy too, and so the list goes on.

I could tell you some things about theology too – eschatology, soteriology, ecclesiology, emergent theology (and the mix bag it is), methodism, anglicanism, roman catholicism, pentecostalism, fundamentalism, whatever you’d care to discuss.

And of course, there are those out there who could tell you far more if you wanted.

I’m no expert, but I know enough about all this stuff to know how darn interesting it all is and what a delight it is to know stuff and have high-convoluted ideas of how the Universe works and the mystery it all is. It’s a delight to be so darn knowledgeable isn’t it? To come up with some new bright idea. To know ideas. To be one-up on the rest.

Yet, it’s all worthless at the end of the day isn’t it? Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. (1 Cor 8: 1-2.) Even if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and have a faith that can move mountains – but I have not love – I am nothing. (1 Cor 13:2.)

But even love can just become another philosophy to many. We’ve all heard the wishy-washy philosophies centred around ‘love’. The 60’s introduced some new definition of ‘love’ that had more to do with sex and lip-service than actual love, such as laying down your life for your friends.

I’ve heard lots of new agers talk about love too but it’s just a wonderful philosophy to many of them. I’ve seen Christians do the same. “You know Ryan, it’s all about love. It really is.” Take a sip of their tea. “Now, let me tell you about that girl (whoever), boy she really grates me…” (and the gossip continues).

God is love but love is not God. Philosophy and knowledge cannot save. It can’t bring life. It never seems to achieve the desire of our hearts to be in fellowship with the Creator. It delights the mind, yes, but it can never delight the heart. The joy of knowledge is fleeting, and so we need more. Study more. Read more. Look for the next big idea. This has been my experience and I know I’m not alone.

Knowledge may be there to help our hearts, because the heart is where it’s at. But we don’t treat it that way. We make it the point, when it isn’t the point.

But there is another joy… a lasting joy… one that sticks with you through good times and bad times. The joy that does speak to our hearts, as uncomfortable and difficult as this Joy is. For it is far easier to fill and mold the mind than let the heart be molded and filled by someone else. It’s far easier to study than to trust.

It is the Creator’s own joy. The only way to get life is to get it from the one who gives it – the Creator. God Himself. By trusting Him, completely. By giving Him our hearts.

Happy Beyond Description

Thanks to a tweet from John Piper, I picked this up at Ray Ortland’s blog and had to share. I really liked it.

In 1851 a group of British missionaries to Tierra del Fuego was forced to winter in the bitter cold while they waited for their supply ship to arrive. It came too late. They all died of cold and starvation. On Good Friday, April 18th, Richard Williams, a surgeon and Methodist lay preacher, wrote in his journal, “Poor and weak though we are, our abode is a very Bethel to our souls [Genesis 28:10-19], and God we feel and know is here.” On Wednesday, May 7th, he wrote, “Should anything prevent my ever adding to this, let all my beloved ones at home rest assured that I was happy beyond description when I wrote these lines and would not have changed situations with any man living.”

“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” John 14:23