...from the desk of Rande Wayne Smith D.Min., Th.M., M.Div.

Battlegrounds - 2

THE MIRAGE OF CONTENTMENT

Philippians 4:10-13
In my life in union with the Lord it is a great joy to me that after so long a time you once more had the chance of showing that you care for me. I don’t mean that you had stopped caring for me – you just had no chance to show it. And I am not saying this because I feel neglected, for I have learned to be satisfied with what I have. I know what it is to be in need and what it is to have more than enough.
I have learned this secret, so that anywhere, at any time, I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have too much or too little. I have the strength to face all conditions by the power that Christ gives me.

May the Lord grant that we may engage in contemplating the mysteries of His Heavenly wisdom with really increasing devotion to His glory and our edification.  Amen.

What brings contentment to you? What would need to take place in your life for you to say, “I am content”?

For many people, the pursuit of contentment is realized only when they finally accumulate enough things.
Once they get enough money in the bank … a little bigger home … some social acceptance … then they will be content.

But all that stuff is just a mirage. You know what a mirage is? It’s an illusion. It’s something that we think is there, but when we arrive we discover it really isn’t.

Over the years I’ve had a number of discussions with people who believe that contentment is within their grasp … if they can just get that one more thing.

But then, when they get it, there always seems to be something else. I wonder, is contentment or satisfaction a mirage?

But 1st we need to get clear about just what contentment is.
Scripture talks about a healthy kind of contentment. Paul alludes to it in his own experience when he writes, “the one thing I do, however, is to forget what is behind me and do my best to reach what is ahead. So I run straight toward the goal in order to win the prize, which is God’s call through Christ Jesus to the life above.”

It’s seeing life as a race in which a person is always straining toward the finish line … Paul was always in process. He was continually growing, maturing, learning, and serving.

He was always pushing to improve. He possessed a good kind of discontentment … the kind that says, “I’m happy with my life so far, and I’m even more excited about what’s going to happen.”
But there’s a destructive kind of discontentment, and that’s what I’m going to talk about this morning because many people suffer from it.

It centers on the acquisition of things, of opportunities, of experiences. It’s the empty pursuit of a person who is self-centered … who always thinks that the road to contentment is paved with grabbing onto everything in sight.

Our culture tends to feed that instinct. Advertising bids us to buy bigger, better, more status-oriented, or youthful things. It’s constantly confronting us with reminders of what we don’t have or haven’t become. And then it dangles before us a product or an opportunity and implies that this is the “key” to contentment.
I pity the discontented person who has bought into that trap. I pity the man who is always wishing he’d married another woman … the woman who looks enviously at the homes and opportunities of other couples … the young person who wishes to be thinner, smarter, or more socially alert.

I am pained for the person, who is enslaved to money-making, or sex, or leisure activities … believing that real contentment is just around the corner.

The symptoms of the discontented person are many and varied. Let me give you a sample of some that mark the person who suffers from the problem of destructive discontentment.

Take the symptom of a critical spirit. We all know people like this.
And the clearest illustration in Scripture were the Hebrews who exited Egypt on their way to the Promised Land.

Remember that for several centuries, they and their ancestors had suffered under the oppression of the Egyptians. Toward the end, things had become unbearable. They felt the stinging whip, the ridicule, the wanton exploitation from people who would have rather seen them in pain than anything else.

Through God’s power and Moses’ leadership, the Hebrews found themselves on the road out of Egypt. It was a great day! “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!”

But take a look at these same people about 8 weeks later.
“There in the desert they all complained to Moses and Aaron and said to them, ‘We wish that the LORD had killed us in Egypt. There we could at least sit down and eat meat and as much other food as we wanted. But you have brought us out into this desert to starve us all to death.’”

That’s amazing … and typical. The person with a critical spirit can never be satisfied. Give them one thing, and they’re ready to demand another.

When God gave the Hebrews bread/manna to eat … they demanded meat. It was always one thing more.

We see that kind of thing in some families, among certain church members, and in places of employment.
These kinds of people are always ready to point up what’s missing. A husband is critical of his wife, a church member critical of the leadership, an employee of his/her boss.

Here were the Hebrews, and we’d think that they’d be ecstatic to be away from Egypt at any price. But they weren’t. It took only 8 or 9 weeks to forget how bad it was … never satisfied.

A 2nd symptom is materialistic ambition. Again, a good Scriptural example is Lot, the nephew of Abraham.

Abraham and Lot, and all their families and servants and animals had been traveling together. Time came for them to separate, and Abraham gave Lot the choice of what land he would like.
Lot grabbed the best for himself; he thought the Jordan Valley would be absolutely perfect.

Lot didn’t care at all what would happen to Abraham. Business is business … even if it’s your uncle.

But the Jordan Valley wasn’t good enough for Lot. Soon he was living in Sodom. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. He had to become a town leader. And when God’s angels arrived a day or 2 before Sodom’s famous destruction, there was Lot “sitting at the city gate” … a place reserved for the judges of the city. Lot was never quite satisfied.

Lot isn’t unique. He is just like the man or woman who is always accumulating things.
The fancy term is … the psychology of acquisition. I see it in our neighborhood all the time. It’s parents who buy their children everything.

One child has a birthday, and they have a party. The next child has a birthday and a clown is invited to perform. The next child gets a pony to ride. The next child … there seems to be no limit.

The irony is that that child will probably turn on his/her parents in a few years accusing them of being too materialistic.

A 3rd symptom is jealously. Remember Saul, the handsome King of Israel? He had everything … everything that is except some applause that he heard David getting.
Of Saul it is said, “He was jealous and suspicious of David from that day on.” Saul reminds me of me. Even Pastors can fall into Saul’s problem. To be honest, all of us can.

Sometimes I listen to a famous Bible teacher hold an audience spellbound with his gifts and abilities, and I wish I could do that. A part of me, not made of God, wants to become defensive when I hear someone praise another Christian leader.

That kind of thing is found in almost all of us, and it has to be dealt with because it can turn into the sickness of discontentment.

It shows itself as jealousy. If only Saul could have rejoiced in the fact that the people liked David.
But he couldn’t, and the discontentment with the situation ultimately created the conditions which destroyed Saul.

Lust is another symptom of discontentment.

One of David’s sons was named, Amnon; and he had a beautiful ½ sister named Tamar. Well, Amnon began to fantasize and dream about possessing Tamar sexually. He allowed the idea to grab control of his mind until it was the preoccupation of each hour of the day.

Everything else was blotted out, and Amnon came to the point where he thought his life wasn’t worth living until he could have sexual relations with Tamar. He plotted and schemed.
You can read his unbelievable story in 2 Samuel 13 … and finally he got his wish.
The worst part of the whole account, which is nothing more than plain rape, is that the minute he was through he was filled with an overwhelming sense of distaste for her. Think of it … all that mental power spent on one action, and the instant it ends, he’s disgusted with her.

That describes the person who seeks lustful fulfillment in pornography, illicit affairs, or even prostitution. He keeps reaching out for the mirage of fulfillment, and goes away emptier than before.

We’re not far away from the similar symptom here of covetousness. If we’re looking for a Scriptural example, I don’t think there’s a better “coveter” in the O.T. than Ahab, a later king of Israel.
Having the entire kingdom, he wasn’t satisfied, which becomes obvious when he tries to acquire Naboth’s vineyard, and can’t. So what does he do?

Now this is the King mind you. He’s an adult, supposedly. He runs to his bedroom, throws himself on his bed, with his face against the wall, pouting and sulking, refusing to eat, because the one big “mirage” in his life can’t be achieved.

What appears again and again as a theme in these sample symptoms is the fact that those who try to find contentment by making themselves the center of the world are doomed to failure. What makes people this way?

I’m sure it began back in the Garden with Eve and Adam.
If you recreate the Garden scene in your mind for a moment, you’ll remember that everything there was good. That’s the same thing as saying that it was fulfilling and satisfying.

When God created us, He gave us capacities to appreciate, evaluate, and experience things on at least 4 levels … instinct, emotions, intellect, and spirit.

With the 1st 3 we sense things, we enjoy things, and we learn and create things. With the 4th … the level of the spirit … we evaluate things according to God’s laws and communicate with Him.

I admit that’s a pretty simplistic rundown of how we operate; but look how Eve responded when she was confronted by the Serpent in the Garden.
Scripture says that she made her response to his temptation on the 1st 3 levels of her life. “The woman saw how beautiful the tree was and how good its fruit would be to eat, and she thought how wonderful it would be to become wise.”

What happened to the 4th level? The level of true evaluation? It wasn’t consulted. God was left out.

From that point forward, life got tough; as human beings have tried to live on 3 of the 4 levels God created us with … our instinct, our emotions, and our intellect.

The problem is that while the combination of the 3 is often reasonably dependable, they’re not reliable enough to keep us in touch with God.
The spiritual mechanism is ignored … and satisfaction/contentment is a spiritual experience. You cannot experience contentment … a spiritual reality … on the lower 3 levels.

We become like the famous sinkholes in TX and FL. Holes in the ground suddenly appear, and any attempt to fill them up is futile. Thousands of tons of dirt and gravel are poured into them, but the hole reappears the next morning.

Life can be like that when we’re out of touch with God. We keep trying to instinctively, emotionally, and intellectually fill the sinkhole of our spirit, but we can’t.

Practically speaking, that’s what happened to the man we call the rich fool in the N.T.
He thought he had filled the “sinkhole” of his life when his crops brought forth a fantastic harvest. He was ready to settle back. “I’ve reached the mirage,” he thought. “I’ll load up my safety barns and sit back and reap and have a ball. I’m finally content.” But that night his life was over.

You can’t center the world on yourself and expect to be content.

Paul deals with this when he writes to Timothy. He warns about people who are trying to fill their “sinkhole” with money. “For the love of money is a source of all kinds of evil.” (Money isn’t the source; the love of it is.) “Some have been so eager to have it that they have wandered away from the faith and have broken their hearts with many sorrows.”
What’s Paul saying? That people living on the lower 3 levels are discontented and always will be.

Well, is there hope for the discontented person? Yes! And it begins with Paul’s words to the Philippians. And you need to remember that he’s writing these words from a jail cell, “I have learned to be satisfied with what I have.” He says, “I have learned this secret, so that anywhere, at any time, I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have too much or too little.”

Paul’s saying that satisfaction and contentment are learned experiences. They come when a person decides he/she will be content. Contentment does not come from changing external things but the internal. That’s important.
Paul writes, “May you always be joyful in your union with the Lord. I say it again: rejoice!”

Implicit in that statement is the centering of our attitudes and values on God. Scripture clearly teaches that the secret to a contented life happens when a person has made the deliberate decision to reactivate their spirit by coming to faith in Jesus Christ.

God’s alteration of our internal life makes it possible for our inner spirits to begin to enjoy life and peace.

And a life of contentment leads us to want to serve others. That’s a Christ-like desire. Getting our mind onto the interests of others makes sense, in this whole contentment process.
A counselor receives a successful businessman into his office. They talk for an hour about the man’s terrible struggle with boredom and dissatisfaction. He’s at the top of his company, earning adequate income; he’s successful and powerful.

Why is he bored? The counselor thinks he has an answer. He suggests that the man leave the office, walk the streets until he finds someone with a need. When he has discerned the need, he should provide the necessary help.

At 1st the businessman is indignant. He had certainly expected more expert advice than that. But he decides to give it a try. A few blocks of walking brings him to the waiting room of the Greyhound bus station. Off in one corner he sees an elderly woman, obviously in distress.
Some minutes of conversation reveal that she has lost her purse, has no money … not even a dime, and has traveled hundreds of miles to reach her destination. No one knows where she is.

The businessman hails a cab, takes her to the suburban home where she was supposed to go, and makes sure that she’s safely received. As he returns to the city in the back of the taxi, he suddenly realizes that he has not felt this satisfied with life for a long time.

Those few moments absorbed in another’s problems helped him forget his boredom. Servanthood really works. The human “sinkhole” is filled by emptying his life, not grabbing onto every potential piece of contentment. Why hadn’t he learned that before?
We need never be dissatisfied. It’s a sickness, and the sooner we face the symptoms and the healing process, the sooner we can reach the level of life God intended for us … contentment.

It starts with our relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ. And it ends with our becoming like Him.

In the meantime, there’s sweet satisfaction; there’s contentment. And that’s what we all want and desperately need. It’s no mirage.

What brings contentment to you? What would need to take place in your life for you to say, “I am content”? You now have the answer.
 

MARANA THA