The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (VII)
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Tim Challies Tim Challies' Blog - Updated Aug 06, 2009
After a week’s absence (based on a week’s vacation) I am back today with the next chapter (Chapter 7) of Jeremiah Burroughs’ The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. The topic for this reading is “The Excellence of Contentment.” I do trust that many of you continue to read the book with me.
Summary
Every week I feel the need to begin with an expression of my affection for this book. Today will be no different! What a great book this is. There, I said it again.In this chapter Burroughs seeks to teach how contentment is an excellent virtue and an excellent fruit of the Spirit. He offers ten points:
By contentment we come to give God the worship that is due to him. He says “You worship God more by [contentment] than when you come to hear a sermon, or spend half an hour, or an hour, in prayer, or when you come to receive a sacrament.” “It is but one side of a Christian to endeavor to do what pleases God; you must as well endeavor to be pleased with what God does, and so you will come to be a complete Christian when you can do both.”
There is a great deal of strength of grace in contentment. “It is an argument of a gracious magnitude of spirit, that whatsoever befalls it, yet it is not always whining and complaining as others do, but it goes on in its way and course, and blesses God, and keeps in a constant tenor whatever befalls it. Such things as cause others to be dejected and fretted and vexed, and take away all the comfort of their lives make no alteration at all in the spirits of these men and women. This, I say, is a sign of a great deal of strength of grace.” How beautiful is contentment? “There is no work which God has made-the sun, moon, stars and all the world-in which so much of the glory of God appears as in a man who lives quietly in the midst of adversity.”
By contentment the soul is fitted to receive mercy and to do service. “If we would be vessels to receive God’s mercy, and would have the Lord pour his mercy into us, we must have quiet, still hearts. We must not have hearts hurrying up and down in trouble, discontent and vexing, but still and quiet hearts, if we receive mercy from the Lord.” He uses a universal metaphor: “If a child throws and kicks up and down for a thing, you do not give it him when he cries so, but first you will have the child quiet. Even though, perhaps, you intend him to have what he cries for, you will not give it him till he is quiet, and comes, and stands still before you, and is contented without it, and then you will give it him.”
As contentment makes fit to receive mercy, so fit to do service. “When the Lord has any great work for one of his servants to do, usually he first quiets their spirits, he brings their spirits into a quiet, sweet frame, to be contented with anything, and then he sets them about employment.”
Contentment delivers us from an abundance of temptations. “The Devil,” Burroughs says, “loves to fish in troubled waters.” Thus if we are content, we are better able to resist the Devil. “If a man is contented to be in a low condition, and to go meanly clothed if God sees fit, such a one is shot-free, you mighty say, from thousands of temptations of the Devil, that prevail against others to the damning of their souls.”
Another excellence is the abundant comforts in a man’s life that contentment will bring. “Contentment will make a man’s life exceedingly sweet and comfortable, nothing more so than the grace of contentment.”
Contentment draws comfort from those things we do not really possess. How can this be? “Certainly our contentment does not consist in getting the thing we desire, but in God’s fashioning our spirits to our conditions.” “There is more comfort even in the grace of contentment than there is in any possessions whatsoever; a man has more comfort in being content without a thing, than he can have in the thing that he in a discontented way desires.”
Contentment is a great blessing of God upon the soul. Quite simply, God extends special blessing to those who are content in him.
Those who are content may expect reward from God, that God will give them the good of all the things which they are contented to be without. This one was particularly interesting to me as its implications are incredibly far-reaching. Burroughs says, “There is such and such a mercy which you think would be very pleasant to you if you had it; but can you bring your heart to submit to God in it? Then you shall have the blessing of the mercy one way or another; if you do not have the thing itself, you shall have it made up one way or another; you will have a bill of exchange to receive something in lieu of it.”
By contentment the soul comes to an excellence near to God himself, yea, the nearest possible. “A contented man is a self-sufficient man, and what is the great glory of God, but to be happy and self-sufficient in himself? Indeed, he is said to be all-sufficient, but that is only a further addition of the word ‘all’, rather than of any matter, for to be sufficient is all-sufficient.”
There is a lot to chew on in this chapter and an unusual number of quotable phrases. I look forward to reading this chapter’s “opposite” next week as we look to the evils of a murmuring spirit.
