DAY 3 - Getting To The Calm Of It All

Philippians 4:10-13 (NIV) ¹⁰I rejoice greatly in the Lord that at last you have renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you have been concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it.¹¹I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. ¹²I 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. ¹³I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

How do we get to that place in our life where we are completely satisfied? Where we have enough money, enough comforts. Where there is no debt that is weighing us down. No agitating concern about money, no tensing of the stomach over getting everything done, no worry about how things are going to turn out, no irritation over something someone just did.

Do you have an image in your head of the place I am talking about? Do you have a hope in your heart for that place? Have you found it or have you given up that there really is such a place?

Paul said to the church in Philippi: I have learned to be content. He had arrived at that place even while under house arrest in Rome. He had found that place in Jesus Christ.

Contentment is not something we’re born with. It is not a special gift to a few special people. Contentment is learned when “it dawns on us.” Our education in contentment may require work and effort on our part but we do not control the results. Contentment happens. It comes to us as a gift from God rather than as a result of our hard work.

In an affluent society contentment is often a reality on the horizon that keeps moving further and further away. Affluence seems to rob us of the ability to be satisfied.

But poverty does not give contentment either. When our daily life is filled with the tangible concerns of having enough money contentment may seem to be a fantasy and talk about God is dismissed as “irrelevant to my real need.”

Paul’s contentment was not self-sufficiency, but a God sufficiency. Paul’s contentment came from learning to trust the love of Christ and the sovereignty of God in every circumstance.

I have the secret of contentment and it is that “I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” It is as if Paul is saying I don’t know how I am going to handle this, but I can. For I know I have resources I am not aware of. Help will come. Not necessarily the help I ask for, but the help I need. It will be given from God, and it will surprise me.

Contentment begins with a decision of confidence in God, based on what we have seen and known in Jesus Christ and is a decision of faith long before it is a total reality.

I can because Christ can, and Christ will.

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope August 30, 1998

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell Broyles