Contentment Is a Choice

Are You Content?

"Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.'” —Hebrews 13:5

Are you content with what you have—with your calling in life, your marital status, your income bracket, your home?

Most of us must admit there are times and seasons when we really struggle to accept how God has ordered our lives. A little shift here, and bit of tweaking there, we think, and we’d be content. So we strive at the tweaking, but in the process we find that new things to adjust keep cropping up. So forward we go, pouring our energy into changing what we can because we believe happiness lies in settling things just so.

But contentment won’t be found in changing the things we don’t like about our lives, which is what the author of Hebrews is telling us. In his words we find why contentment is possible, even when we lack our heart’s desires. We can be content with our lives exactly as they are today because God has promised he is always with us. Our problem really isn’t that we need something we don’t have; our problem is that we don’t find God to be enough for us.

We can be content with our lives exactly as they are today because God has promised he is always with us.

Look Away From the Things of This Life

Many of us can’t even comprehend how God can meet us in our empty places and satisfy us fully. We are open to the idea, but we just don’t see how it’s possible. Sometimes we get a wrong idea about how God satisfies us. He doesn’t come to us on our terms, taking the role of a surrogate for the things or the relationships we lack. He comes in place of those things, giving us something even better. The whole reason we can’t resonate with the words of Hebrews 13:5 is that we are bound up in the things of this life and our desires for them. If we would just look away from those, we would find that God delights to fill up our empty places with joy, peace, guidance, love, security, and communion with him through his Spirit. Once we get a taste of that, we find that it is no second-best consolation prize. We will find it to be better, richer, fuller than any earthly relationship or material blessing.

Contentment

Lydia Brownback

Buying into the lie of "I can only be happy if..." guarantees a frustrated existence. But God desires something far better for his daughters. This convenient On-the-Go Devotional will direct you away from empty distractions and toward what you really long for: a satisfaction that never fades.

We can find this for ourselves by guarding against focusing overly much on what this world offers. We can—and should—certainly enjoy the material things God gives us, but only if we hold them loosely. It is the love of this world’s blessings, the focus on getting them, that is the problem, not the blessings themselves.

We don’t need anything more than what we have right now, today, in order to be content. The Bible says so; therefore it must be true. The choice is ours.

This article is adapted from Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment by Lydia Brownback.

Lydia Brownback (MAR, Westminster Theological Seminary) is the author of several books in addition to the Flourish Bible Study series, including the On-the-Go Devotionals for women; Finding God in My Loneliness; and Sing a New Song. She is a regular speaker at conferences and events and is passionate about teaching God's word.