Contentment

 

 It was a wonderful weekend celebrating with friends and family the milestone of the church turning a century old this year. Having the church services outside this weekend was amazing. It reminded me of years past when different holiness groups held a thing called camp meetings, where people would gather underneath tents to hear preaching and to pray for a revival and an out pouring of the Holy Spirit.  Sunday morning, we had the pleasure of hearing Nathan Rasmussen provide the message and his preaching passage was from 1 Timothy 1:15. There were a couple things that caught my eye.

  The first one is that if any church or movement is going to start, it takes an act of faith. I will be honest, it can be easier to jump on a train that is moving rather than to get that train in motion. A big part of this is because faith often takes risk and when we take risk, we could fall flat on our face and fail. I don’t know anyone who likes to fail, but some of the life lessons that we remember the most is because we failed somehow. We only truly fail if we don’t learn anything or put what we learned into practice.

  The other aspect to risk and faith is that there is a good risk and there is also stupid risk. I can have all the faith that I can run a marathon, but my faith will ground me and not go run I that marathon tomorrow. Our faith should encourage us to continue to strive in what God has revealed to us already and who He has created us to be. God gave us a brain and the Holy Spirit and we need to implement them both. 

  My second observation that there is an element of contentment to our faith. There are two people we need to look at contentment. The first one is wisdom from the Apostle Paul and he proclaimed that he was contend when all of his needs were met and when he had nothing. Being content means that we trust in God to provide what we need when we need it. When we trust God, we trust Him for who He is and not so much what He provides us. Just a reminder Jesus didn’t die so that we can get a new vehicle or live comfortably. When we live comfortably, we don’t trust God as often as we should and we become complacent. 

  The second person we need to look at is King Solomon. He was one of the wisest people to ever live and he wrote three books of the Bible. He got to a point in his life where he had everything and he still wasn’t content. He ended up taking some wives and making alliances with people that he shouldn’t have and it got him in trouble. How often when we are not content with God, we go on rabbit trails and we get ourselves in trouble. We end up trying to find things to satisfy us and it doesn’t work. We end up depressed and eventually will claim that everything is meaningless. 

 

  I will close with this. In Africa, there has been a thirty percent increase of people who identify as Christian over the last decade and here in the West, there has been a fourteen percent decline of people who identify as a Christian during the same time period. So here is my question, in the West, especially here in America, we have the freedom to worship whatever deity we please along with going through a drive thru to get our six dollar coffee and a pastry to go to work or said worship service. In Africa, not only do they face persecution, but one could loose their life because of their faith in Jesus. Maybe we need to be content in who God is and not so much what He can do for us and our faith is us stepping out in response to who God is. Here are two things to ponder, do we only follow God or are Christians because of the benefits or are we Christians because God is God and He also is holy and just?  To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, God isn’t safe but He is good. So how many of us would rather serve a safe God rather that a good and perfect God?

Grace and Peace

Tom Boustead