The Struggle for Contentment

Good morning. Thank you all for being here on a Saturday morning when you'd probably rather be sleeping in. So I appreciate the effort. And I know everybody's a little bit tired, so we may take a break partway through and do jumping jacks. I don't know. We'll see how you all do. I'll count how many are sleeping. Last night, we looked at some glorious truths about God. Does anybody remember the four attributes we talked about? Sovereignty. Self-love. Self-sufficiency. Good job. I'm impressed. Good remembering. So it was, I found it gloriously encouraging to think about those things and I hope you did as well. So in this session we're gonna be looking at ourselves and the picture isn't quite so glorious. We're gonna be thinking a bit more about what's going on in our hearts and the many ways that we are tempted to be discontent and how we need to be aware of that and battle those sinful tendencies. Remember Thomas Watson's wise words that discontentment is universal and epidemic. It's something with which we all struggle in different times and in different ways. So let's begin at the beginning back to Genesis 3. You can follow along on your handout or turn in your Bible to Genesis 3. And we're going to read verses 1 through 7. Genesis 3. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, you shall not eat of any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman, you will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate and she also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate. Then the eyes of both were open and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. Now we don't know how long the man and the woman lived in the garden before this occurred, but we do know that however long it was, it was a glorious existence. Think of it, just walking closely with their creator God who provided all of their needs so generously. The sweet communion that they experienced with God and with each other. Think of relating to another human being without any sin. I mean it just, oh, how glorious it must have been. and how glorious it is to know that we look forward to that someday. So however long this time was, it was a glorious existence. Every need was met. They lived with profound beauty and peace and joy and health and wholeness. And then Satan came along as a serpent and deceived the woman and then the man into believing that obeying God leads to misery. That true happiness and fulfillment is found outside of God's will, not in it. Think of his leading question. Did God actually say just this kind of subtle undermining of God's authority? And then he directly contradicted God by telling the woman, you will not surely die. You won't do that. What God has told you is not true. That will not happen. It's for good reason that Satan is referred to as the deceiver. In Revelation 12.9, he is called the deceiver of the whole world. And in John 8.44, Jesus identifies him as the liar and the father of lies. And which is so interesting, you think just a few chapters later in John 14, where Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. So we see this contrast between truth and lies and deception. Satan's craftiness in tempting the woman led her to undergo a complete inversion, a paradigm shift. Before this, she had seen God rightly as providing, as generous, as loving, as everything that she needed, the focus of her life. But Satan tempted her to begin to see God as stingy, as withholding something good. Think of it, God had told the man and the woman everything, of everything you may eat. Except one tree, just that one tree. Everything else is yours. And Satan tempted her to begin to see that one thing as the most desirable thing. To begin to suspect God, to look at him with newly suspicious eyes that he was withholding something good from her. So Satan used one of his main tools, deception, to distort and even to reverse her understanding of good and evil. Just this complete shift from seeing God as good to God as less than good, as withholding something from her. She had seen the tree in the garden as harmful and destructive, as leading to death. That's what God had said. But now, she saw the tree as beneficial and life-producing, as good for food, as a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make her wise. And the tree probably was glorious. This is pre-fall creation. You could just imagine. Post-fall creation is beautiful. We're so grateful for the beauty of creation. Imagine pre-fall. It's remarkable to think about. But as she looked at this tree with newly suspicious eyes, she wanted it and she coveted that fruit, what was withheld from her. She believed Satan's lie that if she ate from the fruit of the tree, she would be like God. And isn't that just the heart of so much of our pride, so much of our discontentment? Each one of us wants to be our own God in charge of our lives, doing what we want in the way we want it. How frequently we need to remind ourselves that God is God and I am not. So Satan tempted Eve toward discontentment by leading her to question God's character, God's wisdom, his authority, and his generosity. And you know what? His message hasn't changed much over the centuries. He tempts us in similar ways over and over again. Recently, I'm trying to focus on the book of Psalms this year, and I was reading in Psalm 14.1 where it says, the fool says in his heart there is no God. And I began thinking about that because at least sometimes in our sin, in our discontent, we deny who God is, who God says he is, according to his word. And we recreate God in our own ideas, the way we want God to be or the way we think He ought to be. And when we do that, we're denying the true God of the Bible and we're being fools. We're just being fools. We want to be our own gods. We want life to operate according to our desires and preferences. So when we say why this husband, or why this lack of husband, Why this job or lack of job? Why this home or this child or lack of child? Why this friendship? Why this relationship? Why these family members? Why this appearance? Why this gifting? If we listen to what was said in there, why don't I get to play the piano? I thought that was cute that that came up a couple of times. But there are so many temptations for us to be discontent. At the heart of each one of those, we're foolishly saying there is no God. We're denying the truth that God has revealed to us about himself. Redesigning God, thinking he's not good. He doesn't love me. He's not sovereign. He doesn't know better than I do. So much of our discontentment comes from thinking we know better than God does. We're denying what he says about himself. So let's turn to another passage that teaches us more about temptation and desires, 1 John 2. Remember what I said last night, discontentment is having what you don't want or wanting what you don't have. So let's think a bit about the desires of our hearts and read from 1 John 2, 15 to 17. Do you not love the world or the things in the world? If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions, is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. I think these verses are really helpful for us as we think about the desires of our heart. But we read here that we're not to love the world for two basic reasons. One, loving the world is incompatible with loving God. We see that in verse 15. And the things of the world are transient, while the things of God are eternal. The world and all that is in it is passing away, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. Now we look at these three descriptions of all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, desires of the eyes, pride and possession. And there's some overlap as we think about these categories, but I think it can serve us a bit if we think about each one for a moment separately. First let's think about desires of the flesh. Now, we tend to think of this in terms of sexual sin. That's, I think, what comes to our mind quickly when we think about desires of the flesh. And it includes that, but the meaning is broader. It relates to God-given appetites, but ones in which we want to satisfy in our own way. These are desires that rise up within us, things that God has built into us as he created us in his image, but desires that become too strong, too insistent, and things that we seek to meet in our own way, not according to God's way. One commentator says, living by the desires of the flesh is living a life dominated by the senses, by the senses, what we sense, what we feel. The second category of our desires is the lust of the eyes. So these are desires that come from outside of us, things that we see. How often can we see something we didn't even know existed? I've experienced this many times. I'll walk through a store or see something online that I didn't know existed and I like it and I want it and I've got to have it. You just go through that so quickly. You see something and you want it and you're discontent if you can't have it. We go through that process quickly. One commentator says, the lust of the eyes. I love this. He says, it's the tendency to be captivated by the outward show of things without inquiring into their real value. We just see something and want it without thinking about its real value. Now remember that phrase, real value. We'll come back to that. But here in both of these instances, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, we come just face to face with our tendency to look at the things that God gives without looking through them to see him as the giver and to love the gift more than the giver, to desire the gift more than the giver. Oh, how foolish we are to do that when God is the giver of so many good gifts and how he wants us to receive them is with gratitude, with thanksgiving, but holding the gift loosely, knowing that all gifts are from him and he has the right to give, to take away. We don't want to clutch onto his gifts, but we are so tempted to do that, to want him more than his gifts. So what we're talking about is really idolatry, isn't it? I like Elise Fitzpatrick's definition of idolatry. If you're willing to sin to obtain your goal, or if you sin when you don't get what you want, then your desire has taken God's place and you're functioning as an idolater. That just is really helpful for me as I think about ways in which my heart is not content. What is it that I want more than God himself? Lydia Brownback in her little devotional on contentment says this, the problem with using life's little pleasures as life's big escapes is that before long we come to depend on those pleasures. When we turn life's little pleasures into remedies for life's troubles, we're setting up idols in our heart, which actually push God aside. All idols are governed by the law of diminishing returns. The more we seek solace in our escape of choice, the farther from God we take ourselves and the more miserable we get. I certainly see that truth in my life. So I think here's a question we should ask ourselves frequently. What little pleasures of life am I using as a big escape? What desires of the flesh am I yielding to in an idolatrous way, a way that gives them too much importance? Desires aren't necessarily a bad thing unless it's for something wrong, for something wicked. But desires frequently become sinful when they become inordinate, when they become too strong. And when we begin to think we cannot be happy unless we have that thing. Back to Jeremiah Burroughs in his book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. He wrote this analogy. It's a little bit You know, a little bit awkward, but I hope you can follow along. I think it's a beautiful picture, excuse me, of what we're talking about. If you have children and because you let your servants feed them and give them things, you perceive that your servants are stealing away the hearts of your children, you would hardly be able to bear it. You would be ready to send away such a servant. When the servant is gone, the child is at a great loss. It has not got the nurse, but the father or mother intends by sending the servant away that the affections of the child might run more strongly toward himself, toward the parent. And what loss is it to the child that the affections that ran in a rough channel before toward the servant run now towards the mother? So those affections that run toward the creature, God would have run toward himself so that he may be all in all to you here in this world. Don't you love that? God wants our affections to run toward himself above all the gifts that he gives us. Think of that, if you're a parent, think of that with your child. If you sense that your child's affections is more toward the gifts that you give than toward you yourself. That's what we do to God when we want the gifts too much or inappropriately. The third category in this passage is the pride of life. Now obviously this relates to the pride that so easily besets us when we think we're better than others in regards to wealth, rank, position, intelligence, possessions, whatever it may be, whatever tips us to try to outshine others and to focus on ourselves. But it also refers to what we might think of as self-condemnation. Both self-exaltation, making much of ourselves, and self-condemnation, thinking we're so terrible, are forms of pride. It's just this whole spectrum of pride, right? So whether you think, I am so great, or I am so terrible, you're thinking about yourself. And it's self-absorption, self-focus. And when I am focused on myself, whether thinking I'm so great or I'm so terrible, whatever way I may be tempted at the moment, I am not loving God and loving others as I ought. I am disobeying the two great commandments and focused on me. So as we think about growing in this area, the pride of life, how important it is for us to grow in desiring to see God exalted and not ourselves exalted. I think it's kind of an inverse proportion here, that as I just realized I'm just a creature living in dependence on the Lord, I want to be faithful and obedient and forgetting myself, just less about me, more and more of Christ, more and more wanting my life to be honoring to Him, caring less and less what people think and more and more what God thinks. This desire to grow and seeing God exalted and lifted high, not so much about me, just that self-forgetfulness. So we need to think about this temptation. I think it's something we're all prone to, to being self-absorbed, caring so much about what people think. Think about your conversations with people. Do you monopolize conversations? Do you emphasize you? Are you always talking about yourself? Are you a good listener? Do you show partiality toward others, as James warns against in chapter two? And we have a lot of new tools now for making much of self, for promoting ourselves. And we just need to be so careful about our heart motivation in all of this. I know that a lot of Aspects of social media and that kind of thing can be used for good to stay in touch. But we need to be careful about our heart motivation in these things. Am I posting this to make much of me? Am I posting this out of pride or out of insecurity? Is it about me? With this technology, it's important to ask ourselves some questions. Just because we can blog about our activities and send photos to hundreds of contacts, does that mean we should? Does it mean we should? How much time am I spending connecting with others? Time that might be better spent connecting with the people you live with, with housework, or with the Lord. As an older woman, I just implore you to be careful how you use your time and how you guard your heart against that sinful tendency that we all have to make much of ourselves and to promote ourselves. Our self-importance, our self-independence, we're all more prone to these things than we would like to admit. So what's the antidote to this pride of life, to making much of me? It is to intentionally cultivate dependence upon the Lord. Dependence. Bruce and I got married 40 years ago, and early in our marriage, I said to him, how would you like me to pray for you regularly? And he asked me to pray for him to grow in humble dependence. And I think that is a perfectly appropriate request for all of us. Humble before the Lord because he's God, and dependent upon him because we're his creature. He's creator, we're creature. He is Savior and Lord and we are redeemed sinner by his grace. So we need to cultivate humble dependence upon the Lord. One verse that I have found really helpful in fighting this temptation to make much of me is 1 Corinthians 4, 7. What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it? Remember what we said last night from Acts 17, every breath we take is a gift from God. So everything we have, excuse me, is gift. There's nothing we have that we've not been given. So why should we boast of it? God gives all good things to us. Another very helpful resource is Tim Keller's little booklet, The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. Do you know that book? Oh, I commend it so highly to you. Just a little booklet, you can read it in a short amount of time, but it is so helpful. And he borrows from C.S. Lewis in this book by telling us that we should not think more of ourselves or we should not think less of ourselves. We just need to think about ourselves less. The freedom, the beauty, the joy that comes from self-forgetfulness. So sorry. So if we're thinking clearly and rightly and truthfully, we recognize all we have is a gift from our gracious God, and we have nothing to boast about in ourselves. It's all of his grace. A few years ago, my husband was speaking somewhere and he sent a text to our daughters and to me and he said, everything went well, capital B-G-G. And we were all like, B-G-G, what does that mean? Finally figured out, by God's grace. So that has become one of our family's common B-G-G. You're free to use that if you would like. But everything is by God's grace, B-G-G. So as we think about these desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life, They can relate to wanting things that we shouldn't want, that are wrong for us to want, or wanting things that we should want, but wanting them too much, and being proud of things that we have, being falsely proud because it's all a gift of God. So many temptations I think that we have toward discontentment combine these three urges, and they all contribute to our discontentment. But I want to point out one more thing at the end of this passage. At the end of verse 15, John uses the phrase, the love of the Father, rather than the love of God. He could have said the love of God. He said the love of the Father. And I love that reminder right there at that point of, ooh, feeling convicted about the desires of my heart. He reminds us of the personal relationship that we have with God, that he is our loving Father. just a few verses later in 1 John 3.1, see what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. And so we are. What a precious relationship this is. We are adopted daughters of the King. Oh, that should take our breath away and just frame the way we think about all the things of this world. We have this intimate, safe, and protective relationship with our Father. And this relationship is harmed, it's diminished, if we don't fight against our sinful tendency to love the things of the world. Don't you see that in your own heart? When you are increasingly enamored with things of this world, your love for the Lord grows cold. And conversely, when you're growing in your love for the Lord, your love for his word and for his ways, the things of the world do, as the hymn says, they do grow strangely dim. So let us be Christian women who are engaged in recognizing and battling these desires and doing what we can to nurture our love for the Lord and what we need to do to diminish our desires that could be inappropriate or just inordinate. So it comes down to our hearts, doesn't it? What do I want more than I want God himself? We need to be alert and aware of circumstances that tempt each of us to want things too much and to be too focused on ourselves. And we'll talk more about some of those things this afternoon. There's one more passage I want to look at that talks about just the depths of our sin in the area of discontentment. James 4, verses 1 to 4, James 4. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." Here we see again this dichotomy. Loving God, loving the world. If we're doing this, we're not doing this. We have to really examine our hearts regularly and be aware of ways in which our hearts are drawn toward things of this world. These verses express such strong truth about the strength of our desires. They talk about coveting, which leads to fighting, quarreling, spiritual adultery. This is serious. Covening is defined as to desire inordinately or without due regard for the rights of others. Inordinate means not within proper limits, immoderate, excessive. In other words, wanting something too much, wanting something too much. The root cause of these struggles is the desire for more of what is not rightly ours. And we compete with others for the same things. And this leads to quarrels and fights and murder and even war. So the words that are used in this passage I think can help us with kind of a grid to run our thoughts through. What is it that I desire and don't have? What is raising up my passion within me? Why am I feeling quarrelsome? What am I fighting against? So when we discern sinful passions within us, we can think through these questions. What is it that I want? Or what is it that I want too much? What am I giving too much weight to? James is explaining in clear terms that we are faced with a choice. Will we submit to God's will, to what he gives and to what he withholds? Will we trust His wisdom and His power and His love? Or will we aim to satisfy our own desires for the pleasures of this world as we choose? Do we want to please God or please ourselves? Is the prayer of our hearts Thy will be done or my desires be satisfied my way. These are questions we need to ask ourselves regularly because our hearts are so prone toward wanting what we want. My daughter Bethany was just telling me about training four-year-old Ainsley and she said she just has to learn you don't get what you want. I said yes we all do. 63 and I'm still learning that. So I hope it's clear to all of you that we need to have our desires transformed by the Lord. Just to remake our hearts, refashion our hearts so that we want what we ought to want and according to the way that we ought to want it. We need to grow in desiring the right thing to the right extent, to grow in loving what God commands, and in believing what He promises. And we are dependent upon God's Spirit to do this work within us. This is, I think, a good summary of the sanctification process that God is doing within us. The work that the Holy Spirit is doing to make us more like Christ and just to be transformed from the inside out. We need to have our hearts, our souls, our very desires transformed and remade by Him that we desire His will above our own. And we can't do this Himself. God gives grace to transform our desires. He gives us the will to change and he empowers us. I love the phrase grace-driven effort. I think I got that from D.A. Carson. And it's this work that we are to be engaged in, but we are engaged because God gives us the will and the desire and the ability. We work because God works in us. A helpful verse is 1 Corinthians 15.10, but by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me is not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. We work because of God's grace. BGG. I have on your handout a quote from David Powelson in the book Dynamics of Biblical Change, where he talks about having our desires reshaped. And I love this. Parentheses. If you haven't read any David Powelson, read him. Absolutely brilliantly insightful. He writes this, the cravings of the human heart can be changed. God would have us long for him instead. To make us truly human, God must change what we want. For we must learn to want the things Jesus wanted. The human life is a great paradox. Those who die to self find self. If I crave happiness, I will receive misery. If I crave to be loved, I will receive rejection. If I crave significance, I will receive futility. If I crave control, I will receive chaos. If I crave reputation, I will receive humiliation. But if I long for God and His wisdom, I will receive God and His wisdom, and along the way, sooner or later, I will also receive happiness, love, meaning, order, and glory. Isn't that a beautiful summation of having our hearts transformed, our desires transformed by God's Spirit? One way our desires need to be transformed is just by having them diminished, just that we want less. Jeremiah Burroughs said, the way to be rich is not by increasing wealth, but by diminishing our desires. Isn't that good? Isn't that true? Just diminishing our desires. Now a contented man is satisfied with his circumstances, is satisfied that his circumstances are for the present the best circumstances. So he comes to this contentment by way of subtraction and not addition. And that's such a helpful thing. We need to ask ourselves, what do I need to subtract from my desires? How can I diminish my inordinate desires? Perhaps you've had the experience of being around an older person who has walked with the Lord for many years and is experiencing the diminishment that comes with age, but they are so content. Life has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller, but their desires are correspondingly just at rest and at peace with what God has brought into their lives. Have you seen that? I have one remaining aunt, Aunt Lola, and she's a remarkable woman. She has lived with a lot of physical problems, survived the death of two husbands, rebellious children, just had a really difficult life. She's in her mid-90s now, and a couple of years ago, my sister Joyce and I were driving up the California and Oregon, and we stopped to visit Aunt Lola. And I hadn't seen her for several years, and she had really aged. She was very bent over. walking with a walker. She had moved into a little one-room place, a care facility. Her life was much diminished from the previous time that I had seen her. But as she welcomed us and was taking us into her room and all bent over, she just said, life just doesn't get any better than this. And we went, oh, I think Joyce and I were so convicted because we'd probably just been complaining in the car about something, you know, we were probably very discontent. And here she was, diminished circumstances, but content, content, just rejoicing in the Lord as she had done for years. It was a very convicting moment. Okay. This afternoon we're going to talk about ways to cultivate contentment. And we need to take this battle seriously. There are a number of ways that discontentment manifests itself. Nancy DeMoss Wolgamoose says, discontentment is no small sin. It becomes the doorway, the pathway, the entranceway into other sins. I see that as being true in my own life. But before we end this session, I want to share with you a few ways in which I have struggled and continue to struggle with contentment, ways in which I am sinfully discontent. One example was a situation years ago that I think some of you might relate to. Oh, this was many years ago. Bruce and I had been married for 13 years, so 27 years ago. And we had lived in Oregon, and in Washington, and California, and Minnesota. And God kindly moved us back to Portland, Oregon, my hometown. And I was so thrilled. I love Portland passionately. All the years that I was growing up, people told me, you should work for the Chamber of Commerce, because I just, I love to sell Portland. I just, I loved it. And the mountains, and the waterfalls, and the beaches, and the flowers, and the hill, I just, I love it all. And most of our extended family live on the West Coast, and so it's just wonderful after being in Minnesota, Minnesota, we moved back to the Northwest. And I thought, well this, God has given me the desires of my heart. We will live and die in Oregon. And Bruce was teaching at the seminary of our home denomination, and we were just set for life. We were attending the church that I grew up in, and I was taking our daughters to story hour at the downtown Portland library, which is probably my favorite building in the world. We had vacations along the Oregon coast. Life just couldn't get better. However, God had different plans, and the seminary at which Bruce was teaching ran out of money, and he was the most recently hired, so the first fired. I could not believe it. God, really? We're finally exactly where we need to be, with the people we need to be, and you're going to take us away again. So there were a lot of ups and downs in all of that process, but it came to a point where The seminary came up with some money, so Bruce was sitting there with two contracts on his desk. He could stay at that seminary, which he knew I really, really, really wanted to do, or he could move to a different school near Chicago. which he knew I did not want to do, but he was increasingly convinced God wanted us to move there. It was a hard struggle for me. Hard. Really, God, I have to leave Oregon. I have to leave my parents. My parents were getting older, and their friends would come up to me and say, how can you leave your parents? I'm like, well, what do you want me to do? Divorce my husband? I don't know. What am I supposed to do? So we went through quite a process. And it was just a huge struggle for me to believe that this was God's will. And even if it was God's will for Bruce, how could it possibly be God's will for me? And I had to do some serious thinking and praying about what submission meant. Both submission to my husband, which I'm commanded in scripture to do, and Beyond that, kind of looking through that, ultimately, submission to God. God is God, and I am not. So after several months of struggle, God did begin to change my heart, and I began to embrace this move as a good thing. But that day that Bruce had the two contracts on his desk, and he came home and told me he signed the contract for Trinity, it was just amazing. I was so grateful because right at that moment, God just began to really change my heart. Now perhaps you've had a situation like that in your life. Maybe you've moved around a lot. And I do think Big moves like that are difficult for us as women because we're so relational. And if we're married, oftentimes we move because of a job opportunity for our husbands. And you move somewhere and they go off to work at their new job and enjoying it and happy and all that. And you're just sitting at home going, I don't even know where Trader Joe's is. Where are things? I don't have any friends. I don't know anybody. It's so lonely for us as women. Can you relate to any of that? I think moves are hard for us women. But as I have lived more years and learned more about God's sovereign rule in my life, I realize more clearly that where I live doesn't matter. Where I live really doesn't matter. I think it, I meant to look this up, I think it's in the King James where Paul says, I have learned to be content in whatever state I am. And I know he's not referring to state, but I still find comfort in that. Even if I'm not in Oregon, I've learned to be content. But where I live doesn't matter. How I live matters a lot. Following him wherever he leads, faithfully trusting him, that's what matters. That's what matters. I do not belong to myself. I don't have rights over the details of my life. I'm twice owned by him. He created me, he redeemed me. I am his to go where he leads. Now around this time when we were still in Oregon and I didn't want to leave, God so kindly had me come across a prayer that really convicted and directed my heart and I copied it in my Bible and I read it a lot. You may be familiar with the story of John and Betty Stamm who were missionaries to China. And when the communists took over in 1949, they were martyred, they were beheaded. But during her college years, Betty Stamm wrote this prayer out. It's on your handout. Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept thy will for my life. I give myself, my life, my all utterly to thee to be thine forever. Feel me and seal me with thy Holy Spirit. Use me as thou wilt. Send me where thou wilt. Work out thy whole will in my life at any cost, now and forever. That is a beautiful expression of a heart that is submissive to God's will and ways. That's where I want my heart to be. Just to live in submission and obedience to God, whatever, whatever He has for me. Being at Southern Seminary, we hear from a lot of students who will say something like, well, when we're done here, we're moving back home. We're going to go back. I heard a statistic. It's a very high percentage of the number of pastors who live within 300 miles of their mother-in-law. Isn't that interesting? We're going back home to mama. You just hear this a lot. I will hear things like, well, we can never go overseas, we can never take our grandchildren away from their grandparents. When I hear that, I try to gently remind these people, we're not our own. We're bought with a price, the precious blood of Jesus, and we are to go wherever he leads, no matter what. We are his to do as he wills. And we need to remember that God's will and ways are always best. All the time, for all of us. And we need to help each other remember that. Lisa has over her fireplace the C.H. Spurgeon quote that I love. Remember this, had any other condition been better for you than the one in which you are, divine love would have put you there. God knows best. And we are to follow wherever he leads. When you can't see his plan, when you don't see his hand at work on your behalf, return to what you do know about his character, who he is, and his purposes. One thing that I find so comforting is to remember this, that God is sanctifying his church, the Bride of Christ. He's preparing us all for that day, the marriage supper of the Lamb. God is making his bride beautiful, holy, and blameless, and radiant, and submissive, and filled with joy. And on that day, all the waiting, all the sadness, all the moves, all the goodbyes, all the loss, the grief of this life will pale. He knows best what will prepare each one of us for that day. We all have areas of sin and pride and self-reliance, some that we see and some that we don't see, but He is at work to transform us, to remove those sins from us. God is so wise in the way that He is refining us and preparing us for eternity. So if you're in a difficult time of waiting or hard circumstances in your life, and if you aren't right now, you probably will be soon, pray that God will help you to trust Him, even when you can't necessarily see what He is doing. I think John Piper says something like, in any situation God is doing 10,000 things that we do not know and cannot see. He is always at work behind the scenes and we can trust him for what he is doing. And may we help each other focus on God's faithful and steadfast character and his true and eternal purposes. All right, really quickly, I'm going to talk about two ongoing struggles for me to be content. One is time. I am a time-oriented person. I have a theory that people are either time-oriented or money-oriented. And time people like me will spend money to save time. Many people, like my husband, will spend time to save money. So, for instance, there's a plumbing problem, I think, called the plumber. Bruce thinks, I'm going to fix it. I'm like, oh no, your time is worth more than that. So, that's one of our differences, and some of you may relate to those things. But I love time. I love to read books on time management and I love to figure out how to be more efficient and how to make the best use of time. One of the classes we have in the Seminary Wives Institute is called Redeeming the Time and I co-teach it. It's so much fun. Just fun, fun, fun. But I am tempted to think of my time as my time. But I am learning that God's to-do list for me might be very different than mine. I'm learning to see that interruptions that come into my life are what he has planned for me. And I am learning to embrace those and receive those with less resistance and resentment. And I am learning to view people as more important than projects, because I just want to get my list crossed off. I'm one of those that will write things down I've already done to cross it off. Okay, I'm glad I'm not the only one. But I'm learning to trust God's sovereignty in the area of my days and what happens, what I get done, what I don't get done, what he has for me to do. It's a struggle, but I've seen how he has grown and made me more flexible, more go with the flow. That's another acronym we have in our family is GWTF, going with the flow. You might want to adopt that one. We like those. My second ongoing struggle, just area of discontentment, is in the area of food. I just really love food. And there are times when I'm eating in moderation and with health and, you know, feeling spirit rot self-control. And there are times when I am eating because I'm lonely or I want companionship, or I want comfort, or I'm stressed at times when I'm just eating in sinful discontentment. This is something that God is working in me. Even just in the last few weeks, the Lord has had me come across some things that have been very convicting, and I'm excited because I feel like God is working to change my heart. But I also think this is a struggle that I'm going to have probably all of my life. So I'm striving to fight this by memorizing appropriate scripture and by being accountable to a friend, by praying regularly that God will help me love him more and love food less. But I need help. I need help in learning contentment in the area of food. So I need to come back again and again to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And to be reminded that my worth is not in what I own or in what I eat. My worth is found in Jesus Christ alone and that is my true identity. So I just wanted to end. I know we're out of time. I just want to end with that reminder of the gospel that a line from one of my favorite songs says, because the sinless Savior died, my sinful soul is counted free, and God the just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me. I love that summary of the gospel. It's something that I remind myself of regularly. And so B.B. Warfield says, there's nothing in us or done by us at any stage of our earthly development because of which we are acceptable to God. We can't do anything or be anything to be made acceptable to God. We must always be accepted for Christ's sake or we will not be accepted at all. This is not true only when we believe, it is just as true after we believe. It will continue to be true as long as we live. It is always on Jesus' blood and righteousness alone that we can rest. So I wanted to end with that reminder because as we think this afternoon about ways to cultivate contentment, contentment isn't something that we could just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and just learn to be content and maybe then God will be pleased. Now contentment, true biblical contentment, is the fruit of the gospel. It's not the root of our salvation. It is work that God is doing within us as he transforms our very desires. It is God who's working in us, giving us the desire to obey, the ability to obey. And we will not obey perfectly until we see Christ and are transformed into His image. When we see Him, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. But we are on this trajectory of being sanctified by God, by His Spirit. So let's be encouraged, be encouraged. And I just pray that the Spirit will be at work in each one of us to open our minds and our hearts to ways in which, areas in which we need to repent. Turn from areas of discontentment and to lay our sins on Jesus who has defeated the power and paid the penalty of our sin. So let's close with prayer. Father, we do thank you and praise you for Jesus Christ. We thank you for his all-sufficient death on the cross and for his rising again in victory. That is our only hope. Our eyes are fixed on Christ and on the cross. And we pray, Lord, as we grow in knowing and loving and trusting in Christ, that by your spirit and by your word, you will be at work to transform our hearts, that we may want what we ought to want. We may have strength from you to resist things we ought not to want. and that we would want things in accordance with their value. Help us not to want things too much. Help us to be aware of what our hearts are getting discontent and quarrelsome and not at rest in Christ. Help us have eyes to see ways in which we want your gifts more than we want you yourself. Lord, we're so completely dependent upon you to do this work, so we pray that you would do it, and we will give you praise and thanksgiving as we see you transform our hearts. In Christ's name we pray, amen.