What Does the Bible Say About Contentment?

Blake Holmes: This morning you are in for a treat. You get to hear from one of my good friends and, quite frankly, someone I respect so much… I can think of few friends I respect as much as my friend Luke Friesen. Luke is a great friend, a great thinker, a trusted confidant, and a counselor to us on staff.

One of the things I love about my role is I get a chance to continually get to know many of you and those on our staff and get to introduce friends to one another. It's a joy to be able to do that. It's a joy for you to get to hear from Luke who is a man who lives what he says he believes, especially in the topic he's going to address this morning. So, I'm really excited for you to get to hear from my friend and learn from him. If you would, please welcome Luke Friesen.

Luke Friesen: Thanks, Blake. Good morning, Watermark. Like Blake said, I'm Luke Friesen. This is my first time to ever do something like this, so it's fun to be able to share that with you guys. I serve as Watermark's senior director of operations. I've been here a long time, roughly 16 years or so as a member, so I've known a lot of you from over those years, and I've been on staff for around 11 of those years.

I lead the operations department, which handles what I sometimes call the business side of the church, and I spent several years in management consulting before coming on staff, which has earned me the nickname around here of All-Business Friesen. You might wonder, "Why is a guy with the nickname All-Business the one who's giving the message on a Sunday?" I have not been to seminary, but I have been revering the Bible in my own life.

As God has been teaching me on this topic of contentment, he has given some things to me that I want to be able to share to you. It's probably going to feel a little different than a normal Sunday where we take one passage and wring every ounce of truth out of it. I'm going to bounce around a little bit as I share with you out of my personal story and out of my personal study. So, we'll cover a bunch of verses on this topic, and I think God is going to have something for you.

So, my family. My wife Chelsea and I have been here for about 10 years. We met a decade ago and got married eight years ago. We have two girls, Winnie and Brighton. That picture absolutely captures their vibe. It's from last fall. Winnie is 5 and Brighton is 3. It won't surprise you to hear that there are princess toys and princess things and princess songs all over our house. One of their favorite princesses right now is Ariel, the Little Mermaid. Winnie is a redhead, so that's not surprising.

You're probably familiar with this song Ariel sings where she talks about the whosits, the whatsits, the gadgets, and the gizmos. Then she says something that's kind of deep. She says, "Who cares? No big deal." And then, "I want more!" I see that desire for more in my kids, but even more, I see that desire in me. That song Ariel sings is about having a pretty good life and a whole bunch of stuff and then finding that it doesn't really satisfy.

I have a pretty good life, and I have a whole bunch of stuff, but I still see that discontentment in my own heart. So, as we talk about this, I want you to think of me as a fellow struggler. Not as a guy who's up here onstage having figured this thing out but someone who's looking to God for contentment every day, just like I'm going to tell you we need to.

I'm confident that every single one of you either has struggled or is struggling or will struggle at some point in your life with discontentment, because staying content is really hard. One of the reasons has to be where we live. You might find a struggle with discontentment as close as the Park Cities or NorthPark or maybe you collided with that struggle right here in the Watermark parking lot or the lobby this morning.

If that's not you, then we all have influencers encouraging us to buy the next latest and greatest thing. We all have social media feeds that give us the highlights of everybody else's life. I saw a report Gallup did this year where they said that in 2024, Americans' satisfaction with the way things are going in their personal life is near a record low. So, as a country, we are as discontent, personally, as we've ever been. This discontentment comes out in wanting to have something else or do something else or be someone else.

If you want to have something else, generally, it's things like wanting to have a little bit more money or a lot more money and the things it can buy. If you want to do something else, you might want to change your career, change your education, do something you find a little bit more fulfilling, and often make more money. If you want to be somebody else, at the deepest level, you might want to change something about who you are or the hand you've been dealt in life.

At various points in my life, I've been discontent with my body or with my personality. I've been discontent with my friendships and felt like I struggled to fit in from time to time. I've been discontent with my singleness. Both my brothers got married 10 years before I did, and I often wondered when it was going to be my turn to not be the seventh wheel in my family. As a married couple, my wife and I have experienced the pain and discontentment of miscarriage as we've tried to grow our family.

There are a million opportunities to be discontent, because life isn't perfect. For me, today, this looks like struggling with things like the age and size of my house and the fact that both of our cars are 12 years old. The budget we live on means we say no to things we might otherwise like to do. What I don't want to do, though, is present a sense of false piety to you and make it sound like we're struggling to make ends meet, because that's definitely not the case. We have everything we need and more.

But I've found that's the thing about discontentment. Logically, I know I shouldn't be discontent, but somehow it still finds a way into my heart. I wonder if you can relate to that. The area I find myself most struggling right now to be content, though, is the future. How are things going to turn out for my family and me, and are they going to turn out the way I want them to? This was what I found myself processing when I was processing this invitation to come on staff at Watermark about 12 years ago.

I had been seven years as a corporate performance improvement consultant, so going into full-time ministry was going to be a dramatically different concept. On one hand, this sounded totally crazy. I was making great money at work, doing a job I enjoyed, and I felt like I was making an impact. I'd been leading and serving in the young adult ministry, The Porch, here at Watermark for several years. So I thought, "Why would I mess with a good thing?"

On the other hand, though, I happen to be a third-generation missionary kid and pastor's kid on both sides of my family, so it might have been a little inescapable. Both sets of grandparents were full-time missionaries overseas for decades. My folks did church planting in Japan for 20 years. That's where I was born. That's where I grew up. I lived there until I was 15.

So, the idea, the concept, of ministry wasn't crazy at all. It was just never something I had personally felt called to do. In college I studied business. I went to grad school and studied business then found the most interesting, lucrative job I could find, and was rocking and rolling with that. As I was processing what felt like a massive decision to leave all that behind, at least for a season, the final sticking point, candidly, was the money.

It wasn't really that I wanted Watermark to pay me more; it's just that I had to reckon with the long-term consequences or the long-term implications or the opportunity costs of what, at the time, was a six-figure pay cut from consulting to ministry. I was single at the time. It was before Chelsea and I met, but I found myself asking about the future and being discontent thinking about the future.

I was asking God questions like, "If I get married and have kids, is my wife going to have to work full-time to make ends meet? Will I be able to buy a house for my family? Will we have to buy everything used? Will our cars always be 20 years old? Will we be able to vacation? How am I going to pay for weddings? Is retirement a pipe dream?" I had this list of "What about this, God? What about that, God? What about this?"

The Lord really met me in that wrestling. The confirmation I got so clearly from him was this: "Trust me to provide what you need when you need it." That's a truth straight from Matthew 6 where Jesus says, *"Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? *

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink' or 'What shall we wear?' For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."

It came down, ultimately, to if I was going to trust God with my future and with my future family's future. I made one of the best decisions of my life in choosing to come on staff here about 12 years ago. I'm not the only one who has done this. I get to lead an incredible department of servants. The operations team is things like finance, IT, software development, HR, facilities, security…all the behind-the-scenes stuff that you all generally don't consider or think about.

These are highly competent professionals. We don't have interns back there. They are people who can make more money out there in the marketplace but choose to steward their gifts here at this mission because they believe in what God is doing in this local body and they care. They've chosen contentment. I am so grateful. If any of you are sitting in the room, I just want to express to you how grateful I am for the fact that you're doing that. We are all really grateful for you.

They've chosen contentment. It doesn't mean they don't struggle with discontentment from time to time, just like anybody else. For me, personally, some of those "What about…?" questions from several years ago are still unanswered, still open, but I know the Lord is going to answer those questions in the right time and in his way.

The Bible doesn't tell us it's an automatic sin to want stuff we don't have. What you want, why you want it, and how you go about getting it all makes a difference. Today, what we're talking about is when wanting more leads us to make an idol out of having more. Tim Keller said this in his book Counterfeit Gods: "What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and your imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give." The problem isn't really having stuff. The problem is believing that having that stuff is going to be what makes us happy.

The Bible helps us understand why we look to anything other than God for our contentment. The first reason is that our eyes will always want more. Proverbs 27:20 says, "Death and Destruction are never satisfied, and neither are human eyes." We're discontent just because death and destruction consume everything in their path. A part of us, our eyes, is always going to want to consume more. It's part of the human condition.

A couple of weeks ago, TA talked about money, and he said money can never permanently satisfy. He gave these examples of some of the most famous and wealthy people to ever have been here on earth having everything and yet still being discontent. You might say, "I'm not trying to be Solomon or Rockefeller," some of the names he referenced. "I just want to make a decent salary."

I read a survey recently that said people in Dallas today think they need to make just over 100 grand a year to be happy. I remember what it's like to think that way and feel that way. That may, depending on your situation, feel like a lot or it may not feel like very much to you. When I was getting my MBA down in College Station in 2005, I remember when AT&T came to campus and were pitching their management rotation program for upcoming graduates.

At the time, they were paying $85,000 a year, which in 2024 dollars is about 140 grand. I remember leaning over to a classmate when they were making this pitch and saying, "Can you imagine what it would be like to make 85 grand a year?" I just couldn't even conceive of making that much money. I was 23 at the time. Then I started in consulting not long after and ended up making more than that my first year and every year thereafter.

The funny thing about it was every year during raise or bonus season, the amount I had made the previous year quickly felt like not enough, and I even felt like I started to deserve more. My eyes were not satisfied even with a great salary. So, I can tell you from personal experience and from God's Word that 100 grand isn't going to be the thing that makes you happy.

Maybe, though, it's not income for you. Maybe the appetite of your eyes comes out in how many Amazon packages show up on your porch each week or how many times you click the "buy" button on the Instagram ad algorithm that was just the right thing at the right time. My last impulse buy (full disclosure) was mosquito zappers. I have Prime. I'm not throwing shade. Stuff shows up on our porch all the time too.

What I've learned is your eyes will never be satisfied by anything you earn, anything you buy, or anything you do. The problem with that is discontentment doesn't just stop at your eyes; discontentment enters your heart. I draw this idea from the book of Job. If you're familiar with the account of Job, you know he had it all and then lost it all. As he's processing this with some of his friends… He's unpacking it, and he's kind of making the case that he's innocent and didn't deserve what God had done to him.

So, he goes through this list of things and says, "If I had done these things, then I would have been guilty and deserving of this judgment." He goes through a list like this where he says, "If I had lusted after a woman or if I had denied justice for my servants or if I'd been stingy with the poor or if I had rejoiced in my great wealth or if I had trusted in gold, then I would be guilty of this sin." Then he says in Job 31, "If my heart had been led by my eyes, that would have been wicked, a sin to be judged." If his heart had been led by his eyes.

What the Bible means by the heart is it's the core of our being. It's the center of our intellectual life, the center of our emotional life, and it's also the decision center where we make choices based out of our desires. So, if you're not careful, your eyes will lead your heart. Because Scripture tells us our eyes are never satisfied… If the core of who you are is led by a part of you that is never satisfied, then you will never be content.

So, I'd encourage you to ask yourself how you are feeding and leading your heart through your eyes. This matters because a discontent heart affects every part of your life. Proverbs 4:23 tells us everything we do flows from the heart. If your heart is discontent, that's going to flow out into your friendships, into your family, into your job, into your leisure, and into how you handle your money. You're going to be discontent in everything.

The number-one way I've seen this play out in my life, personally, is through the trap of comparison. Comparison can take you from grateful to grumbling like that, because somebody else is always going to have it better in some way. When I see that… When you see that, that somebody else has it better than you, your eyes are going to tell your heart you deserve that thing too. Part of the challenge with comparison, though, is that situations are relative.

The Bible does not give us an absolute standard of how much is too much and how much a believer can have. We see examples in Scripture of poor Christians being faithful. We see examples of Christians who are wealthy being faithful. We've said several times throughout this series that we want to be firm where the Bible is firm and flexible where the Bible is flexible. On this standard of living idea, there's some flex in Scripture.

Chelsea and I bought a fixer-upper several years ago, and we've been working hard on it since about 2018. I'm handy enough to be dangerous, and she happens to run an interior design firm, so we are never short of ideas. She's really good at her job, but when your job is to make other people's houses beautiful, it's hard not to look at your own house and just see its flaws.

Our house does everything we need it to, 1968 bathrooms and all. In fact, one time several years ago a friend came over, and as he walked inside… We had just finished part of our renovation. He walked in and said, "How does it feel to live in my dream house?" I was like, "Wow!" Not long after that, Chelsea and I hosted a Japanese exchange student from Japan. His name is Ken. He had never been to the States before. He was a high schooler.

He shows up at DFW airport. I think, "Oh, you've never been to Texas. I'd better get into character." So I show up at DFW airport with cowboy boots, Wranglers, pearl snaps, cowboy hat, and a big ol' belt buckle. "Howdy, Ken. Welcome to Texas." This Japanese kid walks off the jet bridge. What Ken did not know (because I love surprises, I left this out) was that I grew up in Japan. So, we get into my truck. We're driving to our house, and about halfway down 635, mid-sentence, I switch into Japanese.

I said [speaks Japanese], which is basically, "Surprise! I speak your language." He was so surprised. He was so shocked. I love doing that, by the way. I do that any chance I can. The second time Ken was shocked was when he got to our house. We live in a 3BR/2BA in Richardson. Totally average, but to him, growing up in urban Japan in a tiny apartment, it felt like a castle is what he told me.

Over the years, as I've struggled to be content off and on with various parts of my house, it has helped me remember that I live in somebody else's dream castle. So, as you think about your struggles with contentment, whatever they are, it's worth asking what standards you are comparing yourself to, what people you are comparing yourself to, and if that is biblical, because where comparison is present, contentment evaporates.

Up to this point, I've talked about why it's so hard to be content, but, thankfully, God doesn't leave us there. The Bible tells us exactly what we need to do to be content. I think we need to start by reframing contentment for the Christian from a "have to" to a "get to." As Christians, we don't have to be content; we get to be content. You might have to unlearn some of what you've thought about contentment and relearn what God says about it. So, here are four biblical principles I'd like to share, what God has been teaching me about being content.

1. Lead your heart with truth, not your eyes' lies. We talked about how your eyes certainly can lead your heart, but they don't have to. We get to play a little bit of defense here. We get to play some offense here. I'm going to come back to Proverbs 4:23, because playing defense is guarding what's coming into your heart, and Proverbs 4:23 says, "Above all else, guard your heart…" We know why it's so important: because everything we do flows out of it.

Part of being mindful of the messages that are coming into your heart is guarding it. Who or what is telling you that you need anything besides Jesus to be content? The next step, once you've identified those messages, is to take steps to keep them from showing up at your heart's door in the first place. Maybe, like me, you need to unsubscribe from some of those daily deals emails that were in my inbox all the time. I'd see stuff I didn't even need but was 60 percent off, and I'd be tempted to buy it.

Maybe you need to look at what you're following on social media and the magazines, books, and websites you visit or maybe you need to evaluate your close friendships. Then, when you find yourself being tempted to be discontent… The Bible says we can take those thoughts captive through the power of Christ. That's what 2 Corinthians 10:5 talks about. When you see those messages show up, you can ask Jesus for help with that.

But you're not stuck playing defense. We get to play a little bit of offense too, which is fun. Ephesians 6 tells us that as part of the armor of God, we have the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. It also happens to be an offensive weapon. You can guard your mind and heart by injecting God's truth into your mind and meditating on it and using it when those temptations come.

One of the verses that has helped me the most in my own fight for contentment is 1 Timothy 6:6-8. It says, "But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content." That has helped me keep perspective a lot over the years.

2. Thank God for what you have, and then ask him for what you need. So much of discontentment comes from comparing what we don't have that others do have instead of being grateful for the stuff we do have. First Thessalonians 5:18 says, "…give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." Philippians 4:6 tells us, "…do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God."

Something I've learned in preparing for this message is if you're going to teach about contentment, you'd better buckle up to be tempted to be discontent. Chelsea and I were having a conversation the other night after our kids went to sleep about several areas we found ourselves wanting more. I went to bed, and I woke up the next morning for my quiet time and saw these notes she had taped up all over the house.

One said, "Thank you for our amazing house and beautiful yard. I'm grateful." Another said, "Thank you for our kids. I'm beyond blessed by them. I'm grateful for the kids we have." A third said, "Thank you for my car. It's honestly a great car, and I love it. I see God's kindness in it." Something I'm grateful for is a wife who fears the Lord and points me toward Jesus.

I would encourage you to itemize the blessings in your life. Not just material…physical, relational, spiritual, mental, and emotional. Write those down. Think about them. Put them in front of your heart. As you do that, as you thank God for them, that is planting seeds of contentment that God will grow. After you've thanked him, you can absolutely ask God for what you need and even for what you want, frankly. Jesus tells us we are to pray for our daily bread. That's just what we need on a day-in and day-out basis, but Jesus goes on to say this about asking for good gifts.

In Matthew 7:9-11, he says, "Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" You can trust God to provide what you need when you really need it. So often, God goes way above and beyond that to give us good gifts from a loving Father.

3. Be faithful with what God has entrusted to you. Part of being faithful is to view yourself as a steward. That's kind of a Christian term. Psalm 24:1 says, "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it…" God owns everything, and what we think belongs to us doesn't actually belong to us but to God instead. I heard my favorite definition of stewardship probably 10 years ago, give or take, on this stage when the Christian author Randy Alcorn came and spoke here at Watermark.

He said when it comes to Christian stewardship, think of yourself like God's FedEx guy. The FedEx guy's job is not to take the packages that are entrusted to him home for his own use but to deliver them and direct them where the owner wants them to go. In the context of our own lives, our job is not to keep all the stuff God has entrusted to us for ourselves, but instead, to view our role as stewarding them, directing them toward where God wants to take them.

Another part of faithfulness is to choose to live within your means. Proverbs 21:20 says, "The wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down." Proverbs 13:7 says, "One person pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth." To live within your means is not spending all you have or beyond what you have.

Growing up on the mission field, I had a lot of practice at this. I remember my parents showed us what they did with their money every month. They would cash their paycheck. They had a series of envelopes laid out on the table. Each one had the name of a category written on it…gas, groceries, eating out, et cetera. They would put cash in each of those envelopes at the beginning of the month. They would spend out of those envelopes using cash.

The beauty of that system is once the envelope is empty, that's all you have. You either wait until the next month or you have to draw money from another envelope and transfer it over. That's how they chose to live within their means. They taught me that we didn't have to have a lot of money to be content. Missionaries are not rolling in the dough, but we never lacked for anything.

We ate out once a month. We got most of our clothes and toys and books at this annual missionary swap meet in Tokyo. We never felt like we lacked for anything. My parents chose their priorities wisely, they embraced their limits, and they taught us about the principle of delayed gratification.

My wife and I draw on that example all the time as we make the decisions every month that allow us to live within our means. For a lot of you, living within your means is going to involve asking a question like, "Can we afford this?" For some of you in this room, you get a harder question, which is, "We can afford this, but should we?"

Being faithful with what God has entrusted to you also means being generous with what you have. Acts 20:35 tells us, "…remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" Generosity is one of the most powerful antidotes to discontentment, because it takes our eyes off of ourselves and what we lack and puts them on God and on others.

For you, this might mean being generous to the work of God here at Watermark or at many other worthy Christian organizations or it might mean being generous with the people you know in your life. I have so many examples from growing up on the mission field of how people blessed us, but several recent ones come to mind that involve this body, for the most part.

A few years ago, my old truck was approaching 200,000 miles on it, and I was starting to wonder, "I don't have a new truck saved for, so what am I going to do as this thing starts to wear down?" I got a call out of the blue from an old roommate. We lived together down in Houston for a couple of years.

He said, "Luke, do you need a truck?" I said, "I have a truck." He said, "No. You misunderstand me. Do you need a truck?" I said, "Well, sure, I guess." He had a truck that was a couple of years newer than mine. It had half the miles. He said, "I don't really need this thing anymore, and I felt God tell me to be generous to your family." That's the truck I drive today.

Over the years here at Watermark, so many of you have blessed us. One Watermark family, when I was single and had just joined staff, let me live with them for free for three years. We kind of started this thing with no lease, no agreement, and every few months I'd be like, "Is this still working? Are we cool? I mean, I've kind of been freeloading for a while." They were like, "Yeah, we're great. We know you're adjusting to a new salary here on staff." I'm so grateful for that.

We've had couples in our Community Group bless us like crazy. One couple sold us one of their cars at an incredibly below market rate just to bless us, and that's what Chelsea drives today. We've had other Community Group members lend us one of their cars for five months while my truck was in the shop after rats chewed through the wiring harness. That was brutal. Then, when we had all of these recent storms and the power outages, our house was affected by that, and yet another couple in our Community Group let our whole crew crash with them at their house.

With all of these people, the common denominator is they viewed their stuff as God's stuff, and that's what freed them up to be generous with it. Now with that truck I have, I love tossing people the keys. "This is God's truck. Go for it. This thing was a gift. Don't wreck it, but this thing was a gift." Being faithful also means to be rich in good works instead of trying to get rich. This is straight out of 1 Timothy 6:17-19 where Paul tells Timothy:

"As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life."

For you, this might mean serving here at Watermark or at one of our many ministry partners across the city. There's always a need for more volunteers. It also means viewing your job not just as this rung up on the career ladder toward wealth but as an opportunity to serve people and to leverage your influence for Christ in whatever spheres you have.

I can't think of a better example of faithfulness in my own life than my grandparents and my parents. Both sets of grandparents were overseas missionaries for decades. My grandfather Al Platt ran a mission organization here in town for several years. My parents were missionaries in Japan for 20 years, and then after we moved to the States in the late 90s, my dad took a job as a pastor up in Kansas. He retired from that recently. He's an elder on that church team now, and he's actually preaching there this morning. It's really fun to be able to do that together.

They took hold of that which is truly life, thinking back to my example of my grandparents. They all went to be with Jesus several years ago, and I know when they met him, they heard, "Well done, good and faithful servant." I promise you they have no regrets about having invested everything they had in life to serve the Lord instead of trying to make themselves rich.

This is what Paul was talking about. We're going to talk about Philippians 3 and 4 in a second. While my grandparents were alive, they lived out what I think is the fourth and most important principle from the Bible on how to be content.

4. Get your contentment from Jesus. I had lunch with my friend Mark (he's a member here) several months ago, and we were talking about contentment. He said for Christians, when we struggle with contentment, the issue isn't so much that we want a million dollars or the boat or the lake house or whatever that thing is that we want. The issue is we don't see Jesus as being worth a trillion dollars.

If you have the right perspective on your relationship with Christ, and you have something that's worth a trillion dollars, then the million-dollar thing gets in its proper place as something that, frankly, just isn't all that important. This is what Paul is talking about in Philippians 3:8 where he says everything he had he considered a loss compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ as his Lord. He goes on to say this in Philippians 4:11-13:

"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 [Christ] who gives me strength."

If you have Philippians 4:13 on your coffee cup and you're using this to power you through marathon training or training to dunk a basketball, or whatever your stretch goal is, that is not what that verse is for. The thing we can do through Christ who gives us strength is to be content. This contentment is not "set it and forget it." You're not going to be content the rest of your life. Remember, your eyes are always going to want more.

You can't magically expect God to grant you contentment for the rest of your life, but you can ask him every day, as he tells us to pray for our daily needs. "God, would you help me to be content today as I leave church? God, would you help me to be content tomorrow?" Every day has enough problems for its own, so pray for contentment on a daily basis. Contentment is not "set it and forget it."

It's also not natural at all. It is not natural to be content. Paul had to learn it. It didn't come naturally to him either. He learned contentment as the Lord sustained him through being whipped, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, constantly in danger, sleepless, hungry, thirsty, cold, and exposed. Then he also had to learn contentment when he had plenty, because there's a lesson there, too, of how to be content when you have more than enough.

What Paul found was the secret to his contentment was to find it not in his circumstances but in his relationship with Jesus. I think this applies to you, however you struggle with contentment, whether it's wanting to have something more or do something else or to be someone else. The secret to lasting contentment is that it's supernatural and is found only in Jesus Christ.

I came across an extended quote that really resonated with me in summing up the struggle and the solution of Christian contentment. It's from a Scottish Baptist minister from about 200 years ago named Alexander Maclaren. Part of it is going to feel about 200 years old, but I'm going to read it for you, because it really resonated with my heart. This is what he said.

"The great reason why life is troubled and restless lies not without, but within. It is not our changing circumstances, but our unregulated desires, that rob us of peace. The very emotion of desire disturbs us; wishes make us unquiet; and when a whole heart, full of varying, sometimes contradictory longings, is boiling within a man, how can he but tremble and quiver? Unbridled and varying wishes, then, are the worst enemies of our repose.

And, still further, they destroy tranquility by putting us at the mercy of externals. Whatsoever we make necessary for our contentment, we make lord of our happiness. By our eager desires we give perishable things supreme power over us, and so intertwine our being with theirs, that the blow which destroys them lets out our lifeblood. And, therefore, we are ever disturbed by apprehensions and shaken by fears. We tie ourselves to these outward possessions, as alpine travelers to their guides, and so, when they slip on the icy slopes, their fall is our death.

He who desires fleeting joys is sure to be restless always, and to be disappointed at the last. For, even at the best, the heart which depends for peace on the continuance of things subjected to a thousand accidents, can only know quietness by forcibly closing its eyes against the inevitable; and, even at the best, such a course must end on the whole in failure. Disappointment is the law for all earthly desires; for appetite increases with indulgence, and as it increases, satisfaction decreases. Possession brings indifference.

Each of your earthly joys fills but a part of your being, and all the other ravenous longings either come shrieking at the gate of the soul's palace, like a mob yelling for bread, or are starved into silence; but either way there is disquiet. And then, if a man has fixed his happiness on anything lower than the stars, less stable than the heavens, less sufficient than God, there does come, sooner or later, a time when it passes from him, or he from it.

If, then, our desires are, in their very exercise, a disturbance, and in their very fruition prophesy disappointment…what shall we do for rest? Dear brethren! there is but one answer—'Delight thyself in the Lord.' These eager desires, transfer to Him; on Him let the affections fix and fasten; make Him the end of your longings, the food of your spirits.

This is the purest, highest form of religious emotion—when we can say, 'Whom have I but Thee? Possessing Thee I desire none beside.' And this glad longing for God is the cure for all the feverish unrest of desires unfulfilled, as well as for the fear of loss and sorrow. Quietness fills the soul which delights in the Lord, and its hunger is as blessed and as peaceful as its satisfaction."

If you're here and you haven't trusted Jesus and you have no way of experiencing the kind of contentment he's talking about, you're all in the first part of that quote. You can't experience that peace. Your closet or your garage or your bank account might be pretty full, but you know a part of your heart is always going to be empty. You can't vacation your way to contentment. You can't work your way to contentment.

You can't eat your way to contentment. You can't starve your way to contentment. You can't save your way to contentment, and you sure can't spend your way to contentment. You're so valuable, but your value has nothing to do with your net worth. So, Jesus is extending an invitation if you don't know him. It's an invitation not to just trust him with your future and your soul but, today, to satisfy you in a way you can't even imagine in your life here on earth.

What you have to do is confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, and you will be saved. Your new life in Christ can start today. But if you're here and you're a Christian, and you haven't really experienced the kind of contentment in Christ that Maclaren is talking about, that Scripture talks about, I get it.

I trusted Christ when I was 8 years old. My parents caught me stealing money from my mom's purse. In the moment, I knew I was a sinner, that I needed a Savior. I felt the weight of my sin, and I trusted Christ that day. I'm sure of it. But then, as I went through life, I believed the lie for a long time that God got progressively more and more and more disappointed with me as I sinned my way through life. I even got to the point where I felt like I was faking most of my faith in my 20s.

I would look at other people who trusted Christ more recently, and I envied them, because it felt like, to me, they'd gotten all their sinning done and out of the way first, and then they had this massive do-over button in the form of trusting Christ, and then it was just up and to the right from there. I thought, "After I trusted Jesus, I've just kept sinning. Where is my fresh start? Where is my clean slate?"

I was on a retreat in grad school, and the Lord used a Ben Stuart message to convict me and remind me that because of the gospel, which I had believed as an 8-year-old, all of my sins, past, present, and future, were paid for. My slate was permanently clean, and I didn't have to hide this secret sin. I didn't have to fake contentment in Christ. I didn't have to fake these parts of my faith.

So, that night I confessed, I repented of some secret sin, and I experienced God's grace in a way I never had before. I've never been the same. You might need to confess that you've never really looked to Jesus for your contentment. You might need to repent from the fact that you've been faking parts of your faith like I was. You know how Jesus would respond to that honesty. He would say, "I welcome that. Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest."

Jesus came to save us from trying to find contentment in anything other than him, to forgive us when we fail to do so, and to give us a sense of satisfaction and peace that goes beyond anything we could ever imagine. You may relate to one of my favorite prayers in all of Scripture. It comes from Mark 9:24. This dad brought what felt like an impossible need to Jesus, and he said, "If you can do something…"

Jesus responded to the man and said, "If? All things are possible for those who believe." The man cried out to Jesus, "I believe, but help my unbelief!" That's a really honest prayer you can pray today too. "Jesus, I believe that you are the source of contentment. I know I'm supposed to find it in you. I believe, but help my unbelief." The amazing thing is he will. Let's pray.

God, I thank you for teaching us through your Word today. We confess that we look to so many things other than you for contentment. God, I pray that you would help us to uncover the areas where we don't fully trust you to provide. Lord, we believe. Would you please help our unbelief? Thank you that because of the gospel you strengthen us to be content in any and every circumstance. Amen.