Church letter for August
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
We were created to be content, and if you were to ask most Christians, should you be content, the answer would probably be yes. It is no doubt something that we desire to be and yet so many of us find it elusive. C.S. Lewis stated that the presence of an unsatisfied longing indicated that we were created to be satisfied by something from another world.[1] The key to contentment is to recognise that its source is God.
God is one in his essence or being, yet at the same time, God exists in three distinct, coequal, and coeternal persons who glorify and enjoy one another. God is completely independent. God does not need anything or anyone. He is self-sufficient. The ground of his existence is in himself and, unlike human beings, does not depend on anything outside of himself. Coupled with this God is love, and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been in a loving relationship from eternity past. In his independence and love, God has always been content. God did not create human beings because something was lacking in himself, or because he was restless, lonely, or somehow discontented. When God created, he did so not out of lack, but out of abundance. It was out of the overflow of Trinitarian love that he brought creation and in particular humanity to existence.
Any attempt of ours to understand contentment must then begin with God. As the only uncreated being, he is the only one who is not dependent on someone or something else for his contentment. He is entirely self-sufficient and entirely loving, and as such, he alone is eligible to be the source of any true and lasting contentment.
How can we human beings be content? It is not in our possessions, not in our wealth, not in our work, our good health, or even in our relationships with one another. Ultimately our contentment comes because God welcomes us into his joy. We become partakers of Trinitarian delight. This is what Jesus prayed for in his High Priestly prayer: ‘Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one… I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them.’ (John 17:11, 13 NIVUK). This is what prompted John to write, ‘We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete.’ (1 John 1:3-4).
This joy that leads to our contentment is unlike any worldly joy; it is supernatural, it is divine, it is as C.S. Lewis observed ‘from another world’. The ‘full measure’ of this joy is ‘complete’ as we fellowship in the joy of the contented God.
It is God’s desire that we know and experience the contentment that only truly comes from the overflowing joy of God’s love in himself and for us. The supreme way God has demonstrated his love, and that he is for us, is by sending his Son, in whom our contentment takes root and flourishes.
As Christians, we say that we are saved by Christ alone, but so often we seek happiness, identity, purpose, and contentment elsewhere. Yet everything we need and everything we lack is found in Christ. When we truly grasp and experience this truth it changes everything, our contentment rests in the all-sufficient Christ, and it does so in three ways.
First, we can be content because the all-sufficient Christ is always with us in whatever we experience. As the writer of Hebrews says, ‘…be content with what you have, because God has said ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ (Hebrews 13:5). Secondly, we are in the all-sufficient Christ, which means we are united to Christ. The union of Christ with his people is a legal and a spiritual union. Legally, we stand on Christ’s merit, and spiritually we enjoy communion with the triune God by his incarnation, and through faith. And thirdly, the all-sufficient Christ is in us. We have the privilege of Christ living in us (Galatians 2:20), along with the Father and the Holy Spirit (John 14:17, 20, 23).
True contentment is found in the heart of God and is what God created us to have. Christ died so that we can be content, and this is the privilege of those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And my prayer is for all of us to be content as we trust in the God who is content.
In Christian love,
Barry Robinson
Regional Pastor for Southern England, the Midlands and Wales
[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, page 26.