Faith and Contentment
0 ratings
· 11 viewsHow to find joy and contentment in times of trial
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
This morning, we are finishing off our series from the book of Habakkuk by looking at how our faith in God leads to contentment and joy.
I hear, and my body trembles;
my lips quiver at the sound;
rottenness enters into my bones;
my legs tremble beneath me.
Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble
to come upon people who invade us.
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.
To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments.
One of the rarest attributes that you’ll find in people is a sense of deep contentment with their life. People may be content for a season or for periods of time but you rarely find individuals that remain content through the ups and downs of life and even through times of trial and turmoil. This is why contentment is considered the rare jewel of even the Christian life because few possess it. I think part of the reasons for this rarity is simply the fact that people don’t understand it and since they don’t understand it, they don’t pursue it or even desire it. However, we will see today that contentment is necessary in order to gain something that may be even more elusive which is joy in our lives. We are going to look at this passage in two main movements.
1. Faith that leads to contentment
2. Contentment that leads to joy.
Here at the end of Habakkuk, we see a man who is in great conflict, whose very soul is in turmoil because of what God is doing even to the point that his body is trembling at the thought. But at the same time, the prophet is resolved to wait quietly for the day of trouble. This represents one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith, how can you acknowledge your fears in the face of trials and tribulations, even do all you can to alleviate that suffering, but yet still remain content in your heart when things turn out for the worse. It’s abundantly clear that Habakkuk is preparing himself for the worst possible outcome as God’s judgment begins to draw near. Rightfully, he is afraid and some people have shared with me that these messages from Habakkuk have created some fear and that’s acutally okay because the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom as we read in the Proverbes.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
But fear of the Lord is just the beginning and certainly not the end of wisdom. We can’t stay there bu sometimes fear of God is needed to grow in faith and to deepen our desire to know Him and to acknolwedge His ways. Some of the spiritual immaturity that we see in the church today is rooted in the fact that we have very little reverential fear. We don’t stand in awe of who God is and what He is capable of doing. But until we first acknowledge the ways of God and understand who He is, it’s impossible for faith to rise up. Espeically the level of faith that leads to contenment.
The best Christian definition of contenment that I’ve found is from a old pastor by the name of Jeremy Burroughs and I’ve modified it a bit for our modern ears but essentially:
Contentment is the inward, quiet frame of spirit that freely submits to God and takes pleasure in God’s ways under any condition.
As you go through this process of questioning God, complaining to Him, and then having God answer those questions through his Word and Spirit, there is a point where you have to humbly submit yourself under His will. This is no easy task and not many Christians get to this point because it requires a great deal of faith.
As we have read and studied, the prophet Habakkuk went through this very same process but when he came to understand and accept the will of God, he was able to wait for the Lord in the quietness of his heart.
For God alone my soul waits in silence;
from him comes my salvation.
Habakkuk comes to this profound conclusion that no one can deliver him but the hand of God alone. He has come to a place where He has complete trust in the will of God even when the will of God brings trouble and suffering. This is what a mature faith looks like and it’s this type of faith that brings a sense of contenment when things are good but more importantly when things are bad. No matter how you slice things and maneuver your theology, you can’t avoid the fact that everything that happens in our world is under the control of God. Whether it be his permissive will, active will, sovereign will, whatever you want to label it theologically, it is still God’s will. We use these labels to make ourselves feel better about who we think God is but at the end of the day, everything that happens in our lives (good, bad, indifferent) is by God’s will alone.
I beleive one of the reasons why so many people are deconstructing their faith in this current climate is the fact that they simply cannot handle submitting themselves to the will of God. The will of God is easy to beleive in when things are going well but it’s not so easy to accept when life gets difficult. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus himself had his moment of fear and trembling before His God. As He considered the full weight of God’s wrath being poured out upon him on the cross, Jesus tried to think of someway to avoid the cost of following God’s will. If it be possible, let this cup pass from me. There is nothing wrong with our questioning of God in times of tribulation and that doesn’t necessarily negate our pursuit of contentment. We are human after all and God understands our fraility. What destroys our contentment is when we either don’t want to hear what God has to say or we willfully reject the truth of His word and rebel against Him. When Jesus comes to the conclusion that the cross is the will of God and that there is no other way, He simply states, “Not as I will but as you will.” This is what it means when we say the righteous live by faith. We will never stop trusting in the Lord our God even when He brings discipline, trials, tribulation into our lives.
There are some important lessons about contenment that we can pull out of from the life of Habakkuk.
Contentment is not opposed to a sense of suffering as long as it doesn’t lead to crippling discouragement. In fact, I worry about people who don’t have some degree of apprehension and sensible fear about where the world is headed. Groundless optimism is not the same thing as contenment. And we have to realize that people generally gravitate towards false notions of hope that are divorced from reality and separate from the will of God. True contentment comes from understanding God’s will as opposed to using superficial religion to justify our own will. Accepting the will of God is something that will put your faith to the test.
In the book of Jeremiah, God calls his servant to bring a difficult message to His people and in response they literally want to kill him. But the only thing that Jeremiah says is simply the reality of what is truly going on according to the will of God.
Then Jeremiah spoke to all the officials and all the people, saying, “The Lord sent me to prophesy against this house and this city all the words you have heard. Now therefore mend your ways and your deeds, and obey the voice of the Lord your God, and the Lord will relent of the disaster that he has pronounced against you.
What the people want to hear is that God will deliver them without suffering, any consequence from their sin and so they gather religious leaders that will say the words they want to hear even when it is completely groundless and contains little truth. Fact of the matter is, many times in life, sorrow precedes joy, mourning comes before laughter. The prophets were not just harbingers of bad news because they were just really pessimistic but they were the ultimate realists. Sometimes you need to go through the battle and take your medicine but in the end, God will grant you healing and victory. The prophet Jeremiah later goes on to give the people of God this timeless word of hope and encouragement.
Thus says the Lord:
“The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness;
when Israel sought for rest,
the Lord appeared to him from far away.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
2. Contentment is not opposed to our questioning of God as long as it doesn’t lead to rebelliong against God. God does not want your blind allegiance nor your blind faith. A person who is maturing in their faith is able to ask the right questions about themselves and about God. And the thing is, unless you are spending enough time in prayer and in meditation on the Scriptures and connected to a faithful community of Spirit-filled, Bible beleiving Christians, you cannot hear from God and you will be left alone to answer your own questions. Left to our own devices, we tend to listen to an echo chamber of voices that give us what we want to hear. If we entertain our questions about God too much, it can lead to rebellion or what millenials call deconstructing. Deconstruction of your faith with no plans to reconstruct what you have torn down is simply rebellion against God. On the other hand, if you don’t ask any questions and try to live as if nothing is wrong is equally dangerous. The person that is super optimistic about life may look like they have faith but many times it’s not really faith in God. People can mistakenly put faith in themselves, on their own resilience, on their wealth, their own ability to control the circumstances of life. It’s relatively easy to have faith in these things that are seen especially for those who have much but then again that is not really faith.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Sometimes faith leads us to great victory and we rejoice in the testimonies of people
who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight.
But that’s only half the story of faith because we read a few verses down that:
Hebrews 11:36–38 (ESV)
Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— of whom the world was not worthy—
We don’t often rejoice in the testimonies of faith that lead to great loss but as these verses point out, the world is not worthy of such people who have this level of faith. There are too many Christians who try to live their lives so that can be counted worthy by the world, so that the world can applaud their good works and see their virtue. So the world can see just how progressive we are. God, on the other hand, is looking for those who will remain faithful to Him through good and bad, through victory and loss, through times of plenty and times of want. He wants those who have faith that cannot be bought by the applause of this world.
And that is exactly what we see in the life of Habakkuk. In verse 17, we see the resolution of Habakkuk that his faith and the contentment that it brings is not dependent on any outside circumstance. It is a quiet, internal, fortitude found deep with the soul of those who truly trust in the will of God.
Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
Figs, vines, and olives represent everything that is luxurious in the Ancient Middle Eastern world. Fields, flocks and herds represent the things that are a necessity to simply make a living. And what Habakkuk is saying so poetically is summarized in the NT by the apostle Paul.
Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
3. Contenment is not opposed to abundance as long it is not dependent on it.
As Christians, we don’t willingly look for suffering and poverty. As a pastor, I did not take a vow of poverty as you can probably tell by where I live. To go down the road of naked asceticism is a dangerous path to legalism and a works based righteousness. I don’t see anything wrong with beleivers who live in abundance, who have more than enough but all the more your have to recognize the danger that these material blessings pose to the soul. Are you content because you have so much or are you truly content in God alone? And the only way to answer that question is to look deep within your own heart and answer honestly the followinng question: Would I be just as content if I had nothing? If the comforts of my life were stripped from me?
Again this doesn’t mean that you can’t struggle with loss or question the will of God but after God has answered, can you recieve it and be content in it. The answer to this question represents the litmus test on whether or not you have the right type of contenment as opposed to the general contentment that is found even in non-believers. Jeremy Burrough describes this type of contentment in this way.
When a Christian is content in the right way, the quiet comes more from the disposition of his own heart than from any external argument or from the possession of anything in the world.
We all know that contentment that comes from external factors is short-lived and that’s ultimately how you know whether or not, you have the peace of God that surpasses understanding. It is mind-boggling to think about being content even when your life has been stripped down to a bare minimum. But anyone who has been on a mission trip to the developing world can readily see that Christians who seem to have so little often possess the one thing that eludes those who live in wealth, they possess a contenment that leads to joy. One of the symptoms of a soul that has become darkened by sin is the inability to be content and be joyous even when you have more than enough. Sadly, I do see that quite a bit here in the Bay Area. There seems to be never enough even though there always more than enough.
Conclusion
Conclusion
4. Contentment is not opposed to ambition as long as one rejoices in the gifts that God has already provided, namely the gift of eternal life and salvation. A lack of contentment even when it seems like you have everything points to a heart that cannot be fulfilled because it has rejected the one thing that can actually satisfy it. For the Christian, our sense of contentment comies from the wellspring of a soul that is secure in its salvation. Some of us have ceased to drink from the water that Christ came to give us, the water that will quench all our thirst and which wells up in our souls so that it becomes a spring that leads to eternal life. We can find temporary joy in a job well donebut joy that lasts comes from the fact that we are content with the most important things, our salvation.
In the gospels, we see Jesus sending out his disciples to do God’s work and they come back excited becasue they have seen people healed of their sickness and set free from their demons and they are thrilled by their success. And after they come, Jesus acknowledges their success and the work they have accomplished for God’s kingdom but then he reminds them where their true comes from, it doesn’t come from their success or their accomplishments even in ministry but their joy comes from the fact that their names are written in heaven.
And he said to them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
This is the very realization that Habakkuk comes to, no matter what, I will rejoice in my salvation. The only thing that can create deep contentment and lasting joy in our soul is knowing that has God loved with an everlasting love and has saved us through His Son.