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Contentment in Christ (Philippians 4:10-23)
When I was in college one of our theology professors asked us to journal three times a week for the entire semester. Journaling is a great practice. However, when college students see it as an assignment and not a spiritually beneficial practice like I and a few of my friends did, they tend procrastinate. Then they try to write a whole semester’s worth of journal entries in a week.
Because the professor wanted us to take the assignment seriously, he gave us the option of stapling shut an entry if we didn’t want him to read it because it was personal. My friends used the provision of privacy to cheat the system. They would take old papers and staple them shut so it would look like a journal entry and
they would get credit. Convinced I was above them, I was going to treat the assignment authentically and not take short cuts (I clearly wasn’t looking back, but I thought I was at the time).
Inevitably, I ran out of ideas trying to come up with a few dozen journal entries in a few days. So, I wrote an entry about how I was disappointed that my friends were cheating the system. At the end of the semester we got our journals back and the only comment on my entire journal was from my professor. He commented about my disappointment in my classmates and then said, “Be careful of comparison.” I was confused and angry at the time, but as I matured in my relationship with Christ his insight began to make sense to me.
This is what Paul lays out for us as he closes his letter. He tells us in Chapter 4, verses 12 and 13, that he knows how to be content and will prevail in all situations through Christ who gives him strength. Paul can do this because he understood something that I didn’t years ago: it is more important to keep our eyes focused on Christ than on what is going on around us.
In Chapter 1, he says “For me to live is Christ and to Die is gain.” In Chapter 2, he reminds us that Christ was focused on the will of his father and humbled himself in obedience to do the will of God. In Chapter 3, Paul says “I count everything as loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord”. A few verses earlier in chapter 4, Paul tells us to think about that which is “true, honorable, just, pure, lovely commendable,” and when we do that, “The God of peace will be with us.”
Paul didn’t just stumble into the contentment that he talks about in the last part of chapter 4. He developed the skill by choosing to focus on Christ, instead of the situations and circumstances around him. In Matthew 14, Peter walks on water but then he began to sink when he started focusing on the circumstances around him. Matthew records this moment in v. 30, when he writes, “But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
We are currently going through a season of life where it is very easy to get distracted by the circumstances around us. Paul tells us it is possible to find contentment and peace in all situations by remaining focused on one person, and that is Christ Jesus our Lord. Always remembering that God is in control, and as Paul says in 4:19, “will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”
Adam Deering
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