Life is Better When You’re Content

Next week we begin the Christmas season at Blue Oaks.

But today we close this series with a message on contentment… because contentment is really a better way to live.

I remember when my sister and I were kids, our parents would take us to McDonalds’s a couple times a month.

We always wanted the same meal — it was a combination of food and a little prize.

We didn’t care at all about the food. Sometimes we didn’t even eat the food.

All we wanted was the prize… even though it was a cheap little toy.

In a moment of marketing genius, the creative team at McDonald’s gave this particular meal a great name.

What’s the name?

Happy Meal!

It’s a happy meal.

My parents were not just buying Chicken McNuggets and french fries and a dinosaur stamp, they were buying us happiness.

I was convinced that I had a little McDonald’s-shaped vacuum in my soul that only a Happy Meal could fill.

My heart was restless until it found rest in a Happy Meal.

You know what the problem with the Happy Meal is?

The happy wears off. It doesn’t last.

A year after that Happy Meal I didn’t say to my parents:

“Mom, Dad, thank you for getting me that Happy Meal? Thanks to your wisdom and generosity. That Happy Meal has brought me so much joy and lasting contentment. I knew if I could just get that one Happy Meal, it would really make me a content person. Mom and Dad, you’re the best. Thanks!”

Now you would think kids would eventually catch onto this deal. You would think that at some time a child would say to himself or herself:

“You know, I keep getting these Happy Meals, and they don’t give me lasting contentment — lasting happiness — so I’m not going to be a sucker anymore. I’m not going to put myself through this again. I’m not going to set myself up for disappointment and frustration and discontentment one more time.”

But it never happens.

They keep buying Happy Meals… and they keep not working.

In fact, the only one that Happy Meals brings true happiness to is McDonald’s.

Do you ever wonder why Ronald McDonald wears that dumb grin on his face?

He sells over 1 billion happy meals per year. That’s about 3 million per day.

There are millions of little Happy Meal addicts, and he’s their junkie.

And of course, only a child would be so foolish, right? Only a kid would be so naïve as to think that contentment, that lasting satisfaction could be acquired through some kind of external acquisition.

See, the truth about human beings is when they grow up, they don’t get any smarter, their Happy Meals just get more expensive.

All day long we are bombarded by two messages:

One of them is that you are discontent… or you should be discontent.
And the other one is that contentment is only one Happy Meal away.

All day long we’re bombarded by these messages:

use me
buy me
try me
eat me
wear me
drive me
put me in your hair

…and you’ll be a content person.

Some of the smartest people in the world devote most of their working hours thinking of ways to convince you that contentment is just one purchase away.

They say, “You will be happy if you have…

A bigger house
A newer car
A higher income
A toner body
Better clothes
Whiter teeth
Fresher breath

The discontent that’s promoted to your body alone is staggering.

We can’t look at a screen without seeing an advertisement for something that will give us the kind of bodies we want.

But I’ll tell you what — the most powerful treadmill is the treadmill of discontentment.

You get on the treadmill of discontentment, you can run as fast as you can for as long as you want, and you will never reach satisfaction.

It will look like you’re getting close to it, and then it’s gone.

You’ll run harder, faster and longer and you will wear yourself out and you will never get anywhere.

Here’s the truth about the human race:

People are healthier… and cleaner… and richer… and smarter than they have ever been before.

We live longer lives, we eat better, we dress warmer, we work more efficiently, we have access to more stuff than at any time in the history of the human race.

But are we happier?

Have we become more content… or are we just cleaner, healthier, more efficient, sad people?

My guess is there’s a fair amount of discontentment in this room.

So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do a little mass confession of discontentment.

I’m going to ask you to raise your hand in a moment if in the past six months or so there has been any discontentment present in your life.

A basic way of revealing this is by complaining.

And for this, you may have complained to another person, or you may have just complained internally.

So… if in the last six months you have complained…

about your physical appearance
about your education
about your athletic ability
about your achievements… or lack of achievements
about your finances… or lack of finances
about how busy you are
about your spouse… or lack of a spouse
about your children… or lack of children
about your health
or your age
or your boss
or the weather
or traffic
or your inability to find a seat at Blue Oaks

If you’ve complained because there has been any discontentment in your life over the last six months, just raise your hand, would you? Just mass confession…

Wow, you’re a grumpy group of people.

Well, I want to take a moment to talk about what contentment is. Because if we don’t have clarity on that, we’re going to be chasing down the wrong road.

This is what the Apostle Paul wrote about contentment:

I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I 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. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:11-13)

It’s important to understand what the Apostle Paul means, because there are some things he did not mean that people sometimes confuse with contentment.

He did not mean that he had learned simply to accept the status quo throughout the world.

He’s not talking about being complacent.

Martin Luther King Jr was not called to be content about segregation or racial injustice.

The call to contentment is not a call to focus on my comfort regardless of poverty or injustice or evil in the world.

The call to contentment is not a call to apathy or resignation.

There are times in life when people who are content as the writers of Scripture refer to contentment and still experience sadness or grief or frustration or anger.

Let me define contentment with a question. Many of you have heard me say this before, so for you it’s a test, a little examination about contentment:

Who is more content… the person with seven million dollars or the person with seven children?

And the correct answer, of course, is the person with seven children… because they don’t want any more.

Contentment, okay real short definition:

Contentment is not being driven by wanting more.

Contentment is not being driven by wanting more.

It’s the experience of inner freedom, especially freedom from dissatisfaction, from out-of-balance appetites, from unfulfilled desires.

It’s freedom from that itch that says, “I’ve got to have it. I cannot live until I get what I don’t now have.”

As Paul uses it in Philippians — it’s confidence.

It’s the confidence that I can face any situation.

He says:

“I’ve learned the secret of being content in facing situations where I have a lot,” (and there are temptations to discontentment in that situation), “and where I have very little” (and there are temptations to discontentment in that situation).

“I’ve learned that I can face any of them,” he says, “through my relationship with Christ, who gives me strength.”

It’s the ability to live fully in the moment.

I don’t have to put my life on hold until I get something… or someone.

It’s closely related to simplicity — to a simple and focused life.

Alright, critical question:

If contentment is this wonderful thing, which it is, where does it come from?

How does it happen that people become content?

The conventional wisdom is, “You’ll be content when you satisfy your desires.”

So, for instance:

If only the right circumstances would fall into place
If you just had adequate financial resources
or the right home
or the possessions that your heart desires
or the job that would really satisfy you…

Then you would be content.

Or you’re in a season of life right now that’s just too demanding, too much strain and too much stress associated with it, so contentment is not possible to you today.

But someday next year, next decade, you will move into another season of life, and then it will be possible for you to be content.

Or you don’t have the right alignment of relationships in your life, you have too many difficult people in your life to be content.

But if the right people would come along and enter into your life, and if the wrong people would change… or die out of your life…

Some set of circumstances would make you content. And if you could just engineer them appropriately, then you could satisfy your desires.

It doesn’t work, people.

There is no set of circumstances that will bring lasting contentment to human beings.

And we just have to face that.

The trouble with the pursuit of Happy Meals is the happy always wears off.

The writers of Scripture address this kind of conventional wisdom.

In the book of Ecclesiastes, there’s a profound piece of wisdom that addresses the human condition today just as it did thousands of years ago when it was written:

Everyone’s toil is for their mouth, yet their appetite is never satisfied. (Ecclesiastes 6:7)

That is, people have this tendency to work to satisfy their appetites, yet the appetite is not satisfied.

People work and work and work to satisfy their appetite for pleasure… or for success… or for possessions… or for any number of things.

But there’s this cycle of appetites — the more you feed an appetite, the stronger it gets.

It’s the law of the appetite. The more you feed it, you think you’re going to satisfy it, but instead you kind of create this monster that is insatiable.

Contrast that with what the writers of Scripture say about contentment.

David says in his most famous Psalm — Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. (Psalm 23:1)

The language is a little archaic, but the idea is quite significant.

The idea is that because the Lord is a good shepherd and cares and provides for me, I can go through life as a joyful, grateful, contented person — I shall not want.

He’s saying — there’s another way to do life.

There is a good shepherd who knows what you need and who knows what you don’t need — who knows what would be good for you and who knows better than you do what will be bad for you.

This way is to put your life in his hands.

What would your life look like if instead of this endless chase for:

What do I need to buy?
What do I need to acquire?
How do I need to change?
What will bring me satisfaction?

You just said, “God, I’m just a sheep. You’re my shepherd. I shall not want. I shall not go through life in an endless frenzy of activity to try to get some external thing or achieve some kind of external circumstance that will bring soul satisfaction.”

You know what would be good for some of you? This is just a side not here.

It would be good if some of you go home and go through your closets and just find clutter and give it away.
Go through your rooms, go to the garage and find clutter and get rid of it.
Go through your calendar and find clutter and get rid of it.
Some of you are cluttered with financial commitments that are choking you. You’re making payments you can’t afford for things you don’t need. Get rid of them.

David says, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

I’m telling you, in a world of chronic discontent to go through life in contentment, not wanting, would be an oasis of sanity.

That’s why the Apostle Paul says, “I have learned to be content in all circumstances.”

Contentment is a learned skill.

It is an inner ability, acquired over time through practice, much in the same way as people develop the ability to make jump shots or play the piano.

Contentment is not a result of circumstances. It is the result of a certain way of living.

It’s an inside job.

“I have learned,” Paul says, “to be a content person.”

In the time we have left, I want to give you a few things that people who learn to be content learn to do along the way.

I’ll talk about three of them.

The first one is this:

People on the road to contentment ruthlessly establish realistic expectations.

This is critical.

Now we approach events in our lives with what might be called hidden expectations.

We guess about what the payoff is going to be. And we set ourselves up, very often when we do this, for discontentment.

I know a guy who desperately wanted a job, and his expectation was it would meet his every need for meaning and status and joy.

And he dreamed about it and even prayed for it and pinned his hopes on it, and then when he finally got it, it was an enormous disappointment because he was expecting it to do things that no job could ever do.

I know someone who recently went on a vacation to a place where he had very warm memories because he had gone there as a child, and so he was now taking his family.

This place was two thousand miles away from where he lived. He traveled there and back in a week-and-a-half — he went there with his wife and three children under the age of five.

Now his expectation level was that it was going to be this kind of golden experience like he had when he was a child.

And because the expectation level was set at such an unrealistic level, it created this tremendous disappointment for him.

The key on this one, a key deal when it comes to contentment is this word: Reality.

Reality.

You know, reality is just unavoidable. That’s why they call it reality.

And you have to embrace it.
You have to live in reality.

I’ll give you a little formula for contentment.

Contentment = Reality – Expectations

Say your going home for the holidays, and you have a history of conflict in your family, and it’s deep-rooted.

And you say to yourself, “This time it’s going to be different. This time, as if by magic, it’s all going to be smooth sailing, and we’re going to go from dysfunctional to peaceful harmony in an instant.”

You set yourself up for deep discontentment, because if the reality is going to be about a four, but you make your expectations like a ten, then your contentment factor is going to be a negative six.

You have to set your expectations in the ballpark of reality. This is simply part of wise living in the world.

Now this is not to say you just become resigned about life or take the attitude that nothing and no one will ever change. Or become a passive victim.

There’s the old prayer known as the Serenity Prayer, “God grant me the courage to change what can be changed, and the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

And that’s just a huge one for expectations.

Okay, so that’s the first thing — ruthlessly establish realistic expectations.

Second thing…

People on the road to contentment learn to cultivate gratitude.

Cultivate gratitude for what you have. In particular, practice gratitude for less-than-perfect gifts.

Practice gratitude for less-than-perfect gifts.

And there are many verses about this in the Bible.

Here’s one in Ephesians 5:

Always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:20)

In other words, cultivate gratitude.

Cultivate gratitude even for things that aren’t perfect.

Into your life at various times will come gifts. They will always be imperfect gifts.

The people and the experiences that come into your life will never match perfection.

And if you wait for them to be perfect before you practice gratitude, you will never practice gratitude at all.

You must learn to celebrate imperfect gifts and to cultivate wonder and thankfulness for them, because the truth is we just learn to take stuff for granted when the fact is all of life comes to us as a gift.

You can’t control the fact that you’re going to wake up in the morning.

When your eyes open up in the morning, they will do so because God has given you a gift.
And the sun will come up because God is giving us a gift.

And wise people learn to cultivate and practice gratitude for them.

Some of you here are married, and you just need to accept the fact that you’re married to an imperfect person.

And you need to go to someone in this room after this service and say, “I’m grateful I’m married to you, and here’s why.”

Some of you are not married, and you need to go to someone in this room after this service and say, “I’m grateful that I’m not married to you, and here’s why.”

Contented people have a large capacity for gratitude and wonder.

Contented people have a large capacity for gratitude and wonder… and that’s no accident. They’ve learned it.

Some of you are here today and you’re deeply discontent about some people in your life:

People that are your friends.
People that are your family.
People that don’t measure up to what your expectations are for them.

They’re not smart enough.
They’re not attractive enough.
They’re not healthy enough.
They’re not nice enough.

Now they may fall far short in a lot of those categories, but they have some gift. They have some gift to give you.

And in the midst of your struggle in that relationship, don’t forget the gift.

You know, the truth about life is that it’s hard and it’s painful… but it’s also good.

Underneath it all, it’s a good thing.

To be alive is a good thing.

And people who learn the secret of contentment are people that cultivate gratitude.

Alright, so the first thing has to do with realistic expectations.

The second thing has to do with just cultivating the practice of gratitude. Learn to practice it in small things, simple things, imperfect things.

Think about yourself as one in training to be grateful.

And then the third thing is this, and this gets right to the heart of it.

When you think about what it is you’re going to invest your life in —

People on the road to contentment stake their lives on that which can satisfy the soul.

Don’t blow your one and only life chasing after a Happy Meal that cannot make you happy.

Jesus put it like this, in the gospel of Matthew, chapter 6.

Jesus is talking about what you do with your life, and this is what He says:

So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:31-33)

These other things will fall into place.

You see, contentment is not the kind of thing that can be acquired directly. There’s a kind of paradox to contentment.

Contentment is the by-product of a certain kind of living.

And the only people who are truly content are people whose ultimate aim in life is something bigger than mere contentment.

Some of you have a big hole in your life.

Some of you are single, and you long for a partner to share life with, and you see other couples together walking hand-in-hand, and there’s a kind of an ache inside of you and you wonder, “Why doesn’t God give me what I want so much?”

Some of you are here today and more than anything in the world you would like the gift of a child. And yet that gift doesn’t come. And it seems like every place you go there are baby strollers… and videos of cute little kids… and carseats… and a thousand reminders of what you don’t have.

And to make it worse, you hear people who are parents complaining about how they’re inconvenienced and how burdensome and demanding parenting is, and you think to yourself, “I’d give anything in the world to be burdened like that. Why is it that God gives those gifts to people who don’t want them or complain about them and doesn’t give them to me?”

Some of you are here today and you’re physically challenged, and you live in a world where physical perfection is what’s lifted up.

Some of you are in chronic pain of one sort or another.

Some of you have suffered deep disappointment that’s beyond your ability to control… and you need to hear this.

Paul does not speak about contentment lightly.
Paul is not being glib.
Paul is not one of those guys who just kind of hydroplanes over life and has no difficult situations to face.

When Paul says “every situation,” he knows what he’s talking about.

He’s been hungry.
He’s been alone.
He has been stoned, whipped and beaten with rods.
He has been mocked, lied about, ridiculed and undermined.

As he writes these words, almost certainly he writes them in prison.
He writes them from chains.
He writes them as he faces the possibility of death, which one day became a reality for him.

So how is it that he is able to say that he knows what it is to be content?

It’s because the aim of his life is something bigger than just being content.

It’s because the aim of his life is not just a lifestyle of comfort and convenience.

The aim of his life is to know God and to know God’s kind of life and become God’s kind of person.

And he has discovered that is the one thing that can satisfy the human soul.

So whether he has a lot or a little, whether his circumstances are easy or hard have just become kind of irrelevant to Paul, because he’s found something better, something that matters.

So his life is not about what he does or does not possess or what he does or does not achieve.

His attention is fastened elsewhere, and things just line up in the right way, and what’s trivial feels trivial to him.

He has come to understand that what human beings ultimately crave is the eternal.

What you crave cannot be satisfied by any human circumstance or relationship or job or possession or title.

It can’t, because you are an eternal being, created to live for all time and beyond with God.

You were created to know love and joy, and no little prize in a plastic wrapper will do that for you.

And over and over and over the writers of Scripture say this.

I’ll give you one of my favorite passages about this:

Isaiah 55, it’s from the Old Testament, written a long time ago. This is what the prophet writes:

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. (Isaiah 55:1-2)

No low-sodium, high-protein, sugar-free, fat-free paleo food in this verse. Eat what is good!

The prophet is trying to picture to the people of his day — what is it that contentment looks like?

And so he lays it out. He says, “Don’t waste your money on Happy Meals that cannot make you happy.”

And he says a few lines later the central verse of this passage. He says in verse 6:

Seek the Lord while he may be found. (Isaiah 55:6)

Stake your life on what alone can satisfy the human soul.

C. S. Lewis put it like this:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Scriptures [rewards like this one] it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mudpies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Those are words to put on the tombstone of a world that chases its whole life long after Happy Meals — not a world that desires too much, but that settles for too little.

We are far too easily pleased.

Blue Oaks, don’t be too easily pleased.

A small group was meeting… and there was a guy there who didn’t know God… and he said, “I want to know God. Would you pray for me?”

And one of the guys in the group prayed, he prayed that this guy would lean back, fall back into the arms of God and find contentment for his soul.

And I hope you’ve done that. And if you haven’t, I hope you’ll do it.

Now I want to give you a few moments to think about next steps for you.

I want to invite you to think about what are the Happy Meals that you have been chasing after for a while.

And isn’t it time that you purposed in your heart that you’re going to pursue that which alone can bring true contentment to the human soul?

Paul says, “I have learned the secret of being content in any circumstance I face. I can face anything through Christ, who gives me strength.”

And so can you.

Alright, lets pray together as the worship team comes to lead us in a closing song.