Most Bibles versions use the word ‘I have learned” and that suggests a process. When we are younger we enter the lessons of God and my first experience of a degree of contentment was on a long trip to India and Nepal. I was there six months. Part of the time I was in the company of other brothers in the Lord. I recall that I had at least twenty-two internal flights and numerous train and bus journeys. Anyone who knows India will realize at least a bit what this means. I crossed the country from east to west and north to south. Lots of meetings with lots of new people and lots of lessons too. I had purchased a thirty-inch Globetrotter case. I remember it was that size! It had no wheels. I do not recall wheeled cases being around in those days anyway.
I had with me the usual necessary clothing, Bible, Young’s Concordance, mosquito net, a sheet sleeping bag, string and a knife and a flashlight. I was traveling quite light; I had a shoulder bag too, yes, all the things for a journey like that. Many things stick in my mind about that trip but among them the occasion when I was alone for one week in a place called Kozencherry in Kerala. A weeks meetings, they were very large meetings and in the afternoon and evening each day. I was shown to my room when I arrived. It was attached to a large church and contained an Indian string bed; they call them charpoy’s. I was told that someone would bring me my breakfast and lunch meal and so on. These were my quarters. My first job was to clean the dust away, rig up my mosquito net, get rid of the spiders and make myself as comfortable as I could and so the week unfolded. Quiet days with the meetings and the Tiffin carrier bringing my meals on time. A pump to get some water to wash and that was it. I look back on the whole trip and my greatest shock was returning to Exeter in the UK, my home place. There was so much plenty, so much to choose from, and so much to excite the appetites. It was reverse culture shock. I had brushed with contentment in India, at least on a superficial level and it was a great blessing. We live in a world that excites our appetites. Advertising is always endeavoring to foster a discontentment in us. We must have this or that or we will never be satisfied. The atmosphere is pervaded with this acquisitive spirit and it afflicts us in the churches too, there is a thin line between spiritual aspirations that are appropriate and those that are the fruit of personal and corporate frustrations with the status quo in our particular church and our personal experience. We must learn in all our states to be content. The devil mounts great assaults upon our souls.
Fiery darts of discontent come flying at us and heart contentment is a great shield to douse the fire of those darts. Part of the art of contentment is accepting the basic ordinariness that is a portion of our humanity. To be free from artifice and the dominating idea of the need of a program, in short, to live happily in that which God has allotted to us at this time, to receive this moment, this day from Him with thankfulness will be a formidable weapon against the driving covetousness pervading our world. Christians can become profoundly contented, but it needs to be learned in the nitty gritty of life. If they are being crushed with criticisms they can find contentment in the fact that God will vindicate them if He so chooses for He is the first cause of all, not their critics. If they are in want of something they can find contentment in knowing that God can supply if He so chooses. It is easy for Him but He knows best. Goliath was a loud, large and discouraging enemy. The young man David whose faith was in the Lord was a match for him though. He took five stones from the brook and smote the giant who had brought despair and one of those stones did the job. I am certain that contentment of soul is a stone that can smite and silence him, putting him down into the dust. Jesus said that we would possess our souls in patience and patience is linked with contentment. Patience is a stone made smooth in the midst of the difficulties; persecutions and tribulations that Jesus said would be coming to His people.
Soul contentment means that we have come to rest in the reality that it is God Who has ordered our circumstances. Have you noticed how difficulties and adversity can affect two men so differently? In one, who is profoundly discontented that very discontent seems to feed the pain inherent in the difficulty and he becomes enflamed, bitter and swollen with rage. However, the other man, who is learning to be content in him that very contentment he enjoys as He rests in God’s disposing of his affairs, quenches the flaming arrow. He is not infected with any poison but the arrow proves to be a blessing. Let us learn God’s lessons of contentment, let it nestle in our hearts. Shakespeare mentions in Hamlet ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Stones of difficulty flying at us, stones nestling in the devils sling, arrows shot at us from his bow. But, our hearts can be a sling in which the stones made smooth are to be found amongst which contentment is one and with this stone and others the enemy shall be felled.
