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An additional point is, that unholy anxiety is essentially ungodly, irreligious, unworthy of the position and the professions of a Christian man. “Take no thought,” no anxious thought, “saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the Gentiles seek.” Anxious thought, therefore, is the characteristic of heathenism, and must be excluded from the religion which is true. It is the spirit of the world, not the spirit which is of God. We see this clearly enough when we compare the amount of thought and care which we bestow upon our earthly interests with that which we devote to the interests which are spiritual and eternal. What anxiety we give ourselves about the future of our health, the future of our business, the future of our worldly position, the future of our children’s secular education, the future of their rank in society! Is it not ten times as great as that which we bestow upon our Christian consistency, our religious usefulness, our growth in grace? If we could hold the balance steadily, which would prove to be the preponderating scale? Our Lord puts the case in an indirect manner, no doubt; nevertheless, it is impossible to avoid the implied conclusion. That conclusion is this: “If you suffer yourself to be anxiously absorbed in earthly things, you rank yourself with ‘the Gentiles,’ to whom this world is all.” – Besides, such anxiety is ungodly because it is untrustful. Heathens, who cannot blind themselves to the fact that their gods leave them for the most part, if not entirely, to themselves, may be excused if they feel that there is room, yea even necessity, for anxious foreboding. But how different should it be with those who know the one living and true God, and who can recognize Him as their Father! Surely He may be trusted as knowing His children, recognizing their needs, loving them, and tenderly caring for them. Taking anxious thought implies the weakness, if not the extinction, of faith. – Moreover, its impiety is seen in the fact that it is a practical subordination of the spiritual to the secular. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” Let the most important things have the first attention. Give due scope to the higher aspirations of the soul, and the lower ones will shrink into their due proportions, and will take their proper place. God will give the earthly as it is needed to those who first seek the heavenly, and the true spirit of religion will make us rich by making us content.
To Christians this teaching, taking it as a whole, covers the entire ground of their secular life, and much more than that. Look at two or three samples of the cases to which it applies.
1. To personal secular positions. “What will the future be? Shall I live to be old? When I am old, shall I be provided for? Will health and strength be continued to me according to my years?” Leave that! Do your work to-day. For this you may have the needful strength from God. Do not trouble about anything further. Use prudently the means which God has put into your hands for providing for the future, and then commit their safe keeping to Him. If you have no such means, still trust. There are many promises on which you may implicitly and calmly rely.
2. “How about my children? Will they grow up to be manful, good, godly; a seed to serve the Lord, and a generation to call Him blessed; my comfort, my pride? Or will they take evil ways; prove, like so many more, vicious, ungodly, and bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave?” Leave that! Do your duty to your children to-day. Train them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Use a wise and godly forethought on their behalf. Pray for them. Instruct them. Set before them a Christian example. You may trust the rest with God, calmly and thankfully expecting the fulfilment of the words: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
3. “What about my religious future? If I make a Christian profession, shall I be able to live consistently with it? Shall I have strength to resist temptation? What if I should fall? Can I so live as not to dishonour the Church and the cause of Christ?” Leave that! Nurse your Christian graces to-day. Lay up spiritual strength in reserve. That is required by a wise forethought. But having done so, leave the rest. God will take care of it all. You may stedfastly trust that He will gloriously complete the work which He has graciously begun.
4. “My Christian work – what about that? Shall I be permitted to go on with it for a few years longer, and thus to have some opportunity of realizing my ambition as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ? Or shall I be called away comparatively early? And if so, what will become of all the plans and projects upon which I have expended so much thought and prayer and toil?” Leave that! Do your work to-day, and be not anxious about the rest. When to-day merges into to-morrow let the new to-day bring its own work with it, to be done in the day. Nothing more of solicitude than that is needful. You are not indispensable to God; nor are you essential to the work which by His will you are doing. If it be worth doing, and you be separated from it, He will find a suitable successor, or as many successors as the accomplishment of the work may require.
5. “How about the prosperity of the cause of Christ in the world? Will it go steadily forward, or will new and fiercer foes rise up against it?” Leave that! Do all you can for it whilst you are here, and entrust the rest, as you entrust your own work, to God. Do not hinder it by wasting time in forebodings which ought to be spent in service.
6. “What of death – my own death? Shall I have grace enough to support me when the time comes?” Leave that! No doubt you will; but do not be anxious about it. To-day you are “the living;” be “the living to praise the Lord,” and trust the needs of your dying hour to Him.
The words of Christ recorded in these verses must have startled His hearers. They taught new truth concerning life, and, beautiful as they were, the truth they taught was strange. It would have been so strange as to be without weight, if He had not first taught equally new and equally beautiful truth concerning God. How does Christ here speak of God? “Your heavenly Father.” The heathen instructors had not taught that! Pharisees and Sadducees had not taught that! But Christ was now in the world; He had come forth from the Father, and He could say to men: “Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.” Thus the whole teaching of these verses on the subject of Providence and of Faith becomes plain and demonstrative. The great requirement is for us to love Him filially as He loves us paternally; and then, from that point, all is clear. We are dependent, but He will provide. There are present difficulties, and probably there will be future trials; but all takes the form of wise and holy discipline under His guiding and beneficent hand.
How do we arrive at the conviction of the Fatherhood of God? Sin stands in the way, and conscience craves something more than a mere authoritative announcement. Sin is the forfeiture of all claim to the Divine favour. What right have we to expect that His providence will be to us a providence of love? There is but one answer: to trust a God of providence, we must believe in a God of grace. Paul puts the whole philosophy of this in a single sentence: “He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” Our present subject, therefore, calls for the gospel, and cannot be completed without it. “Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” And, “If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?” But let us ever remember that we have higher wants than those of the body. The soul needs food, and God has supplied “the bread of life”; it needs raiment, and God has given to us the robe of righteousness wrought by Christ; it needs a home, and we have “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” With these provisions, then, shall we forecast the future with fear, or with hope? Which shall it be?
O holy trust! O endless sense of rest,
Like the beloved John,
To lay my head upon the Saviour’s breast,
And thus to Journey on!
XI.
CONTENTMENT
“Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.” – Philippians iv. 11-14.
My purpose is to define and to recommend the Christian virtue of contentment. I shall endeavour to show that its acquirement is a duty, and that its possession is a joy; but I shall also have to show that as a duty it is not practicable, and that as a joy it is not attainable, except on Christian grounds. I trust that all this will be made abundantly clear by the following observations.
I. Let us glance at the character of the man whose words are now before us. There is in the words the ring of a high moral tone which is irresistibly attractive. Yet the effect they produce upon us must depend very much upon the kind of man who wrote them, and the condition or conditions of life through which he had to pass.
We should be pained by such words as these if they came from the lips of a man whom the world would consider prosperous. When the conditions of a man’s life are easy and comfortable, to make a profession of contentment would be an abuse both of language and of sentiment. Such a case is not one for content, but for devout and hearty gratitude mingled with a sense of humiliation under the thought, which ought to be present to every such man, that he deserves no more than others, though God gives him more than many others possess.
We should think sadly of these words if they came from a stoical man. Contentment is not the listlessness of indifference. It is self-conscious, and finds in itself its own joy. Indifference is loss – deterioration. It implies the blunting of sensibility. The heart that is callous to grief is closed against gladness also.
We should pity the man who uttered these words from mere weakness of character, devoid of aspiration, enthusiasm, or resolve. In his case, content would be mere good-for-nothingness. The world is full of uncomplaining men and women who do not cry, not because they are content, but because they are spiritless, and consequently because they are crushed down and hopeless.
There are other circumstances which would disparage contentment. We will not mention them now; they will be suggested as we proceed.
Now Paul was every way the kind of man to give the noblest meaning to the words we are considering. His whole constitution, make, rendered him susceptible of the highest earthly enjoyment. Mentally, morally, and socially, he was prepared to accept and to appreciate the best that this world could offer to him. He had great powers of thought, reflection, imagination, and will. He had great tenderness and generosity of heart. Proofs abound that his social instincts were full of life and strength. He was pre-eminently a man to be touched by kindness or unkindness, by gratitude or ingratitude, by love or hatred.
And what was his experience? It was not the one-sided experience of a man who has known only one condition in life. On the contrary, he had been familiar with almost the highest and the lowest. On the one hand, he had enjoyed the love, and the tender, fervent gratitude, of many of his converts; and on the other hand, he could speak of the bad conduct, the ingratitude, and the vexatious opposition of others. He had the manifold sorrows of a martyr’s life of bonds, imprisonments, scourgings, and stonings, to which must be added the prospect of a martyr’s death. He was not a man of one kind of experience only, to which habit had accustomed him. He had known the terrible alternations of life, and had learned to be content under them all. “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”
Moreover, Paul was a man of prodigious activity. Contentment is easy to a sluggish nature, but it must have been a difficult acquirement to one in whom brain, heart, hands, and all the powers of life were continually on the move. Couple with this incessancy of action the loftiness and ardour of his aspirations. He was not only capable of an intense enthusiasm in any work which he took in hand, but his whole impulse was an energetic straining forward and upward.
These considerations give something of marvellousness to the contentment which the apostle here avows for himself; and they suggest that it must have rested on some underlying conviction – some established condition of soul which it is desirable for us to discover and identify.
The language he uses is in the utmost degree significant. There is no haste about it, nor is there any exaggeration. It is the expression of the result of a severe and protracted mental and moral training, under the influence of the Spirit of God. “I have learned.” The lesson has been a difficult one, but I have mastered it. “I have learned.” The “I” is emphatic. “Whether others have learned the lesson or not, I have learned it.” The apostle does not speak either hesitatingly or slightingly of his attainment. Thus, when he says, “I know both how to be abased, and how to abound,” he goes on to use a word which means, literally, “I have been taught the secret,” “I have been initiated into the mysteries” – both of satisfaction and of hunger, both of plenty and of want. Such language implies that his contentment was one which had not been easily acquired. He had not passed into it by a single step only. I do not suppose the process was a very slow one, but it was a process. The lesson had to be spelt out, word by word, often syllable by syllable, perhaps sometimes with tearful eyes and a bleeding heart. And so these words are a record of attainment such as this world cannot snatch. The man who could so speak of himself was in possession of the best knowledge. He had graduated and taken honours in the highest university.
II. The practical importance of this lesson of contentment must be obvious to all. Two considerations will enable us to see its importance clearly.
1. Our earthly life is a scene of change. No position is secured to any of us in this world, nor is it in the power of any of us to remain always, and safe from molestation, in a coveted state of action, or of existence, or of enjoyment. Some men never get into a state of positive happiness, and, in the experience of many, the transitions from high to low positions are startling, romantic, painful, mysterious. Events which men call accidents are constantly changing the aspects of things, and certainly the most marked characteristic of our life is vicissitude. This is a truth which is known and recognized by all, and possibly it is one which is felt acutely by not a few who are here at this time.
2. The changes to which we are exposed are temptations to disquietude of heart, and consequently to discontent. This is true in a peculiar sense of those who look only to the present world for satisfaction, but it is also true to a certain extent of the Christian. And why? Partly because he is seldom perfectly free from unworldliness of desire and of hope; partly because he does not always read aright the meaning of his discipline, and keep in mind the truth that because it is Divine it must be always wise and good; and partly because he looks too much to “second causes,” not only in disappointment and sorrow, but also in success and joy, forgetting the hand and the purpose of God.
So that a Christian who has passed through the numerous and various vicissitudes of life, and whose faith, like a tree in successive storms, has gained strength from every blast – whose hopes have brightened while the clouds of life were lowering, and whose experience by discipline has become enlightened, rich, and mature – is one of the noblest, though, alas! one of the rarest, sights in the world. Such a man was Paul in a pre-eminent degree. Reverses did not sour him. He had often to contend against the hostile hand of his fellow man, but persecution did not embitter him. He could retain through all his absorbing interest in the salvation of human souls and in the glory of God. His troubles did not shut him up in himself. He did not always talk about them, as though he wanted everybody to pity and help him; on the contrary, he was a peculiarly brave and joyful man. He looked upon joy not simply as a possibility, nor simply as a privilege, but as a duty, the neglect of which by a Christian was shameful. He knew that whatever of earthly good might slip away from him, or be snatched away, there was something immeasurably better which was his for ever – God, Christ, immortality, heaven. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?.. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
III. What has been said will help us to form a true idea of the state of mind which the apostle here avows for himself, and in doing so to avoid some mistakes. We have seen that contentment is neither stoicism, nor want of interest in life nor sluggishness of temperament, nor weakness of character. We further say, that Paul does not mean that he considers all conditions in life alike desirable, that there is nothing to choose between them, that it is altogether immaterial whether men be well or ill, strong or weak, rich or poor, high or low, masters or slaves. Paul was not insensible to the advantages of outward comfort, or to the disadvantages of poverty. Nor does he mean to teach that a Christian may not use all means which are intrinsically legitimate and right for improving his condition, in so far as he has those means at his command, or the possibility of obtaining them. What he means is that his happiness is not essentially dependent on external circumstances. An illustration of Solomon’s words, “A good man is satisfied from himself,” he carries within him everywhere the elements of his own well-being. So that being the man he is, being the man God has made him to be, being the man whom the Holy Spirit is fashioning by His grace, through the instrumentality of the discipline of life, with a hope that does not make him ashamed, because he has the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost given unto him – he is happy enough even in the midst of privations and difficulties. His contentment is not indifference to his work, but industrious fidelity. It is not the narcotizing of aspiration; for a man may ardently aspire, and yet be content until it is time to rise. Still less is it complacency with his own moral and spiritual condition, or with that of the world around him; for he says that he “forgets the things that are behind, and reaches forth to the things that are before,” and he “greatly longs after men in the bowels of Jesus Christ.” But with all his appreciation of life’s comforts, with all his aspirations after personal perfection, and with all his longings to be useful in his day, he is not disconcerted by difficulties and disadvantages; – he has learned in whatsoever state he is, therewith to be content.
We must guard ourselves, however, from applying this example of contentment to troubles of our own making. God entrusts every man, more or less, with the means of blessing himself, and of maintaining his own honour among his fellow men. But by sin, or by mistakes of conduct arising from a culpable carelessness, we may lose our position of advantage; and when we do so, we are not entitled to the comfort arising from the thought that, as all events are in God’s hands, we must just take things as they come, and be satisfied! The sin which has brought mischief must be deplored; its consequences must be accepted as a Divine correction, and Divine help must be sought so that the chastisement may be sanctified. And if on the lower ground we become less worldly, holier, and more Christ-like, God will have the greater glory and will give the deeper peace.
IV. And now for the secret of the apostle’s contentment, and the lessons that we are to learn therefrom for ourselves. Paul says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.” The language is peculiar; what does it mean? It means that, in whatsoever condition he might be, he had Christ for a Helper and a Friend; that Christ’s companionship with him was constant, full, tender; that His sympathy was great, minute, comprehensive, cheering, exalting, all-sufficient. So complete was his identification with Christ that he tells these Philippians that living or dying he was Christ’s. But how did this come about? Once he persecuted the Christ whom he now glorifies. And even now his happiness has nothing of the miraculous in it. It does not belong to him merely as an apostle, or in the same way as his “inspiration” or other special, supernatural gifts with which he is endowed. It is the work of God’s grace – grace imparted to him through the same channels along which it may come to us. The secret is this: Paul was a Christian – a converted, regenerated man, a believer in Christ, under the influence of the Holy Ghost; and the result was accomplished by such simple means as faith and hope and prayer.
Paul had felt, as we all feel, that there is in man a soul as well as a body, an eternal life as well as a temporal. He had also felt, as we all feel, that he was a sinner, condemned and hopeless before that holy law which he had broken, and the judgment of which he must one day meet. But, in obedience to the message of the gospel, he had accepted Christ as his Saviour, through whom he had received the forgiveness of sins, Divine sonship, and sanctifying grace. So that he had to regard himself as henceforth under training for heaven, the training administered by a Divine hand. He knew that the present life, with all its changes, was the thing that was wanted for his spiritual education, that nothing was accidental, that no changes were chances, and that all changes made up one great organized system of discipline, in which “all things were working together for good.” Thus he could cherish in his heart a contentment which would cover all his experiences. There are ills which certain men can bear patiently, but a Christian contentment learns to bear all ills cheerfully; unmurmuring and acquiescent when sorrows multiply, and when mercies one by one are taken away.
This contentment under Christian conditions is a duty, not perhaps of very easy attainment – Paul himself does not say that it is that – but it is a duty, as being the natural fruit of faith and trust. Every Christian should be able to say:
I will not cloud the present with the past,
Nor borrow shadows from a future sky:
’Tis in the present that my lot is cast,
And ever will be through eternity.
“Sufficient to the day the present ill,”
Was kindly utter’d by a heavenly Voice,
And one inspired to tell his Master’s will
Hath bid us alway in the Lord rejoice.
