Contentment E-Book

Lydia Brownback

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: On-the-Go Devotionals
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 115

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

This On-the-Go Devotional assures women that contentment is not some fleeting ideal but a reality that God enables them to live out daily. Any woman who buys into the lie of "You can have it all" or who thinks she can only be happy "if…" experiences an abiding frustration: what she wants remains just out of reach, always. No matter how good she has it, no matter how good the good times may get, there's always something missing. And ultimately, she misses out on happiness too. But God desires something far better and more lasting for his daughters. And he's delivered the secret in his Word, assuring women that real satisfaction is found in living for and longing for the right things. Those truths and promises are at the heart of this On-the-Go Devotional for women. Each lesson in Contentment is conveniently self-contained and comes complete with Scripture and a paragraph or two of teaching to direct women away from fleeting distractions and toward a true, enduring satisfaction. On-the-Go Devotionals "Skillful devotionals for those who face the challenge to 'fit it all in.' Biblically rigorous and deeply perceptive. Godly insights from a godly sister." Elyse Fitzpatrick, author of Because He Loves Me: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life "A ready resource for keeping our thinking focused on God himself. The devotionals helped me understand my fear or discontent and our Heavenly Father's provision." Barbara Hughes, author of Disciplines of a Godly Woman and, with her husband, Disciplines of a Godly Family "Lydia Brownback calls Christian women to lift their eyes upward and find security, rest, and peace in a sovereign God whose promises never fail!" Nancy Leigh DeMoss, author and Revive Our Hearts radio host

Leseprobe

Contentment

Copyright © 2008 by Lydia Brownback

Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Jon McGrath

Cover illustration: iStock

First printing, 2008

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version®.Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NKJV are from The Holy Bible: The New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

Italics in biblical quotes indicate emphasis added.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brownback, Lydia, 1963– Contentment : a godly woman’s adornment / Lydia Brownback. p. cm. — (On-the-go devotionals ; #2) Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-1-58134-958-0 (tpb)

1. Christian women—Religious life. 2. Contentment—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title. II. Series. BV4527.B765 2008 248.8'43—dc22

2007044603

VP 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

With gratitude to God for a season like no other: Renee Blackburn Tom Blackburn Mark Brown Tim Humeniuk Karen Montgomery Lore Ritscher Susan Russack Steve Schmidt James Stoudt

Contents

Introduction

The Devotions

Living in the Valley

Could It Be Sin?

Today, Not Tomorrow or Yesterday

The Good Old Days

I Can’t . . . I Won’t!

My Share

At Any Cost?

Cravings and Camels

Contentment Is a Choice

There’s No Place Like Home

The Happy Face of Hannah

Rachel Repeats

It’s All in Your Mind

When the Thorns Pierce

Taking the Edge Off

A Woman’s Pearls

Triumph in Tragedy

Safe, Secure, and Totally Bored

What We Ask For

Dreams Come True

Settling Down

Lingering Looks

Made Ready for Anything

Let’s Not Kid Ourselves

Our Vital Need for Hope

Going Without

A Sinful Swap

Satisfaction Guaranteed

Filled to the Full

Hungry Hearts

Serving and Sitting

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Introduction

You can have it all, so don’t settle for less.” That is what a he we are told. So we spend ourselves on life, liberty, and the e pursuit of happiness. Realization of the American dream—the Western dream—lies at our fingertips. But that is largely the problem—so much of what we want remains just out of reach. We can touch it, but we cannot get our hands around it. And sometimes we do get hold of it, but we are not any happier. There is always something we still don’t have. So we pour our lives into acquiring that one next thing. “Then I’ll be happy,” we say. But we are always saying that, because there is always just one more thing.

Our unhappiness does not spring from what we lack. It springs from our desire for what we lack. We crave love, beauty, and comfort. We crave independence and peaceful surroundings. We crave self-esteem. We crave the smooth rhythm of a balanced life—a little of this, a bit of that, but not too much of either. We are unhappy because we have come to expect such things, living as we do in a society that advocates personal rights, autonomy, and prosperity above all else.

We refuse to accept that our prosperity isn’t going to make us happy, and for all of our rights, autonomy is just an illusion. Consider how we react when a storm comes and the electricity goes out. We cannot curl our hair or microwave our Lean Cuisines or click through the channels of DIRECTV. How happy are we then? But people in underdeveloped countries—those without rights or prosperity—are not unhappy when the power goes out, largely because they have spent much of their lives functioning with no electricity at all. They don’t fret about limp hair. They don’t sit around bored for lack of Lifetime TV. And they enjoy the little food they have with no hang-ups about high fructose levels and excessive carbohydrates.

But just as prosperity does not lock in happiness, awful circumstances don’t have to lock it out. Do we believe that? Most of us don’t when we are faced with unwanted singleness, an unhappy marriage, infertility, financial hardship, broken relationships, terminal illness, or regret. In such circumstances we can’t imagine anything but unhappiness. What choice do we have? We do have a choice, actually. We can be happy, not necessarily in the American way, but in the biblical way. It is all a matter of what we live for. If we live for the good times, even those given to us by God, we will never find happiness because seasons of wilderness, waiting, and withholding are just as much, if not more, a part of life on this earth as seasons of ease and peace.

Happiness, or contentment, comes from where we look and what we believe, not from what we have. In determining how to think and feel about our lives, we tend to create separate categories for happiness and contentment. In our mental hierarchy we put happiness at the top. Happiness, to our way of thinking, is the pinnacle. Happiness is when we get the things we have dreamed of and when life goes our way. Contentment, so we think, is secondary. We see it as the consolation emotion we must settle for when actual happi- ness is lacking. “I’m not really happy with the way things are, but I’m content for now.” Yet contentment and happiness are one and the same if we understand these words from a biblical perspective and orient our lives there.

That is what we will do as we work through God’s Word together. As we look at what he says to us, we’ll discover that he wants our contentment—our happiness—even more than we do, even in the hard times. He is not withholding it from us; we do that to ourselves. Happiness really is at our fingertips.

the devotions

Living in the Valley

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven . . . a time to break down, and a time to Fo build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; . . . a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; . . . a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

ECCLESIASTES 3:1–8

Laughter and tears, love and loss, work and play—such words sum up the rhythm of life. Most of us will pass through each of these seasons at one point or another, perhaps repeatedly, because they are God’s ordering for the human race in every age and time. But as we pass through some of these purposes, we do not feel much like singing about it as the Byrds did in 1965. We fight against the weeping, the mourning, the casting away, and the losing while striving to keep our lives entrenched in the laughter, the dancing, the embracing, and the peace.

The fight is quite natural, of course. We all prefer the mountaintops to the valleys. But the God who has ordered life to flow in and out of such seasons is the same God who has provided for our contentment in every season. Contentment is possible not only on the mountaintops but in the valleys as well. How can we mourn or lose or weep with contentment? That seems totally contradictory. And indeed we cannot if our contentment hinges on getting out of the valley, because we have no control over the beginning or ending of the seasons that God appoints for each of us.

Contentment in the valleys comes when we stop fighting so hard to climb out. God is the one who leads us into the valleys, and he will lead us back out in his time. God ordains valleys for our good; why else would a good and kind God allow them? Trusting God in our hard times is the way to contentment—not just trusting him to get us out, but trusting his goodness while we are still in them. If we will not trust him in the bad times, we are not going to trust him in the good times either. A friend of mine enjoyed a financially prosperous season a few years back, and she bought a beautiful home. Yet she wasn’t able to enjoy it, she said, because “life is so good right now, but I know it can’t last. I’m always waiting for the axe to fall.”

Do we live like that, fighting so hard to stay on the peaks and to avoid the valleys? If so, we will never be happy in either place. However, if we will trust God in whichever place we find ourselves, we will know contentment whether the season is easy or hard. We will find peace in the hard times because a good Father is controlling them, and we will not be anxious in the good times because our happiness is not bound up in having to maintain them. Good times are designed to come and go, but contentment is designed to be constant for all who are in Christ.

Could It Be Sin?

Joshua said, “Alas, O Lord GOD, why have you brought this people over the Jordan at all, to give us into the hands of the Amorites, to destroy us? Would that we had been content to dwell beyond the Jordan!”

JOSHUA 7:7

Joshua knew better, of course. He knew that God had brought the Israelites into the Promised Land to bless them, not to destroy them. But he was frustrated because they had just lost what should have been an easy-to-win battle against the Amorites. What was God doing?

We find ourselves in similar situations from time to time, and when we do, we, too, are baffled about what God is up to. We are careful to follow God’s ways, and we believe his promises, and yet our circumstances are just not working out. In the midst of his discouragement, Joshua wished he had never taken his preceding steps of risky faith. How much easier life was before! In the moment he forgets that life beyond the Jordan had been nothing but wilderness; his trust in God’s faithfulness and his joy in the Promised Land are obliterated by one defeat.

Our contentment evaporates just as quickly when things go wrong in our lives. We begin to think back on an easier time, a time that, while perhaps not perfect, held a lot less pressure.

For Joshua, the Promised Land was surely much nicer than the wilderness, but at least in the wilderness someone else—Moses—had been in charge. Now Joshua was leading the Israelites, and the weight of the Amorite defeat fell squarely on his shoulders. But God had a reason for the defeat, and rather than allowing Joshua to wallow in misery, he answered his cry. “Get up!” the Lord said. “Why have you fallen on your face? Israel has sinned. . . . There are devoted things in your midst, O Israel. You cannot stand before your enemies until you take away the devoted things from among you” (Josh. 7:10, 13). Unbeknownst to Joshua, an Israelite named Achan had failed to follow God’s express orders to destroy all the treasures, the “devoted things,” taken from their enemies in battle. Achan kept back a little of these riches for himself, and his secretive act was what had brought great trouble on the entire Israelite army.

Could our present trial be the result of sin? If so, we won’t have to look far to find it. We don’t have to engage in endless speculation about what our sin might be; God is always willing to show us our sin. Sometimes, though, we refuse to see it, or we minimize it. “Well, I am still struggling to give up that bad habit, but it’s such a little thing. How could that have anything to do with my difficulty?” But God does not ask us to connect all the dots. He just asks us to be obedient. If there is a connection, God will make it, just like he did with Joshua. Maybe there is a connection between our unrepentant sin and our difficulty, and maybe not. The point isn’t to figure out if there is a connection and then to obey—it is simply to obey. We cannot rightly ask for or expect to be restored to a place of peace and to see God’s blessings on our lives if we are treating sin lightly.

Are you finding your circumstances frustrating right now? If so, God has a good reason. Perhaps it is his way of getting you to deal with your sin. Rather than turning back to an easier time in your life, turn to God and examine your heart. He will gladly show you sin that you may be harboring. He showed Joshua, and Joshua purged out the wrong with no delay. Afterward victory against the Amorites came easily.

Today, Not Tomorrow or Yesterday