The Logic of Contentment

Though thanksgiving is to be a regular part of our worship and gratitude is to mark our character, I find a day set aside each year for thanksgiving to be extremely helpful. Contentedness just doesn’t come naturally for a lot of us.

Even the great apostle Paul had to "learn" contentment. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that "[Paul] came to a place of understanding as a result of sheer experience of the dealing of God with him. He had to learn, and experience teaches us all." God places His children in the school of experience that we may learn to be content.

"But," says Lloyd-Jones, "it was not to be experience alone. Paul had come to learn this great truth by working out a great argument." And then Lloyd-Jones proceeds to give the "steps of the argument" or what he also calls "the apostle’s logic" or what I am calling "the logic of contentment."

Here is the logic of contentment from the pen of Lloyd-Jones. I find it helpful and trust that you will too.

1. Conditions are always changing, therefore I must obviously not be dependent upon conditions.
2. What matters supremely and vitally is my soul and my relationship to God--that is the first thing.
3. God is concerned about me as my Father, and nothing happens to me apart from God. Even the very hairs of my head are all numbered. I must never forget that.
4. God’s will and God’s ways are a great mystery, but I know that whatever He wills or permits is of necessity for my good.
5. Every situation in life is the unfolding of some manifestation of God’s love and goodness. Therefore my business is to look for this peculiar manifestation of God’s goodness and kindness and to be prepared for surprises and blessings because "His ways are not my ways, neither his thoughts my thoughts." What, for example, is the great lesson that Paul learned in the matter of the thorn in the flesh? It is that: "When I am weak then am I strong." Paul was taught through physical weakness this manifestation of God’s grace.
6. I must regard circumstances and conditions, not in and of themselves therefore, but as a part of God’s dealings with me in the work of perfecting my soul and bringing me to final perfection.
7. Whatever my conditions may be at this present moment they are only temporary, they are only passing, and they can never rob me of the joy and the glory that ultimately await me with Christ. (D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure (Eerdmans, 1965), pp 284-5)

Never easy or automatic, yet, viewed through these lenses of logic, contentment just makes sense.
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"....for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content." --Philippians 4:11

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