Contentment

In Philippians 4:11, the Apostle Paul says, ‘I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.’

Perhaps you read those words with a wry smile. Maybe you are thinking to yourself, ‘Well, he doesn’t have my mother-in-law’ or, ‘He doesn’t have my cancer’. Or, ‘He doesn’t live on my sink estate.’ Or perhaps, ‘He’s not in lockdown 2 with a virus blowing around.’

How might Paul respond to a riposte of this kind?

Well, for a start, he may well point out that he is writing these very words from lockdown. He was in prison when he wrote them - so much is clear from the letter itself. Despite that, it has been described as ‘the epistle of joy’ and one writer has said that ‘it doesn’t even have the whiff of a prison about it.’ There is not a trace of self-pity.

Commentators are not sure where he was at the time of writing, because he had sustained periods of imprisonment at Caesarea and Rome, and may have been imprisoned in Ephesus. And in 2 Corinthians 11:23 he begins a detailed description of what he had suffered for the sake of the gospel: ‘…far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death...’

So Paul was not writing as a tourist on a sun-kissed beach in Cyprus, or as an academic in his ivory tower, but from the perspective of someone who had suffered - and would continue to suffer - more privations than most people are ever called upon to endure.

So what may be said about Paul’s statement?

First, it is worth noting that he said he had learned to be content. It was not something that came naturally to him. Perhaps he had gone through times when he wanted to protest to God about what he was suffering. Maybe he sometimes wondered why, when he had devoted his life to God’s service, he was having to endure so much. It may be that he cried out to God as the psalmists often did in times of distress and hardship. He clearly had to work things through in his mind, perhaps many times over.

We can’t expect to be any different.

Second, he goes on to identify the source of his learned contentment. It wasn’t some form of Stoicism. No, he says (Philippians 4:13) ‘I can do all things through him who strengthens me.’ His external circumstances no longer disturbed his internal contentment, because of the strength given to him by God.

Thirdly, the ultimate example for us is Christ himself. Coming back to Philippians, this time at 2:5:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

We live in an age of entitlement. People consider themselves entitled to everything - to have their say (no matter how foolish what they say may be) - entitled to hear no contrary opinion, entitled to be affirmed, and so on. And it is very hard to prevent some of this rubbing off on to us. What few realise is that contentment and a sense of entitlement just bounce off each other. For every drop of entitlement that enters our mind, a drop of contentment of equal volume is displaced. Someone with an inflated sense of entitlement will never be content, because that feeling of entitlement will never be satisfied.

A colleague of mine died recently, barely a year after he retired. I attended his funeral remotely by video and noticed that two of the eulogies used the same word: They said that he had been denied the retirement that he ‘deserved’. That is the language of entitlement. Gratitude for the years he had enjoyed was displaced by resentment for the years he had not.

This is one of the reasons why for the believer, it is vital to do as Paul exhorted the church at Rome in Romans 12:2: ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.’ The renewed mind does not have a sense of entitlement. It understands that the establishment of the kingdom of God is at the price of suffering. It lives in the light of the fact that although the new creation was inaugurated at the resurrection, it has not yet been consummated.

This is why Paul was able to advise Timothy that, ‘Godliness with contentment is great gain…if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content’ (1 Timothy 6:6-8).