Contentment and Satisfaction

How I praise the Lord that you are concerned about me again. I know you have always been concerned for me, but you didn’t have the chance to help me. Not that I was ever in need, for I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little.
Philippians 4:10-12

For a long time I found this passage out of Philippians to be perhaps the most frustrating in all of Scripture. My frustration was not because I doubted Paul's sincerity or honesty but because he seems to be implying that learning unconditional contentment is possible for any of us. Looking at my own life and the world around me, unconditional contentment seemed impossible. There was and is a lot of good in my life but there's plenty of bad too. That Paul was able to look past the fallen world and his own fallen state was all well and good for him but for the rest of us, who are not the giants of the faith he was, it seems an impossibility.

But I couldn't write the verse off that easily. I believe that all of Scripture is authoritative and divinely inspired. Therefore I could not ignore what God was using Paul to say. It was a paradox I could not resolve and so, for a long time, I remained frustrated.

Over the past several years God has led me back to this verse again and again, showing it to me in a new light and teaching me what Paul really meant when he spoke of this sort of contentment. Since that journey began, I've become convinced that the way to resolve this paradox is to realize that there is a significant difference between contentment and satisfaction.

We tend to use the two words as synonyms but they are not. Contentment is about acceptance and finding joy in the moment. Contentment does not demand perfection, it accepts everything as it is and where it is. It recognizes that because God works all for good for those who love Him, it is possible to find true joy in a fallen world. It is possible to be at peace even the most horrible of circumstances because we can trust in the goodness of God.

But yet, there is a hunger God has placed deep inside of all of us that will not be satisfied by this fallen world. We were not designed for the world around us but for Eden. Though our minds have forgotten it, there is a place in our hearts that has not. We attempt to meet this need in a million fallen ways but none of them does the trick.

In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis writes "Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

A big part of my journey has been realizing just how much God cares for my heart's desires and wants to work in my life through them. We tend to think of desire as a bad thing but it is not bad, only fallen. God redeems it, as C.S. Lewis points out, by causing us to desire more than we could ever imagine. Even many of our desires that appear evil are actually good at the core. Is the man who enters into an affair's core desire for easy sex or is it for the joy, comfort and adventure to be found in life with God? The reason the affair doesn't work, or works only temporarily, is because he is trying to satisfy the deep desires of his heart in a way that can never come close to fulfilling his true want. His sin comes not from desiring but from desiring too little, by attempting to be satisfied by less than he was made for.

We must remember that we are dealing with an infinite God. Do we really believe that we can desire anything so much that He could not satisfy?

It is important to realize that contentment and satisfaction are not opposed to each other but work hand in hand to accomplish God's plan for us. Until you have come to a place of acceptance with life and the world around you, God cannot draw you into the deep life He has for you. Without contentment we'll still busy ourselves trying to make life work on our terms and satisfy ourselves through the world around us. Contentment is really a surrender of our deep desires to God so that they may be satisfied in Him.

On the other hand, until we recognize that God cares for our desires and that we can trust Him to satisfy us, we have no reason to be content. God placed those deep desires in our hearts and they're not going away. Until we surrender them to Him and allow Him to redeem them, they will forever be a roadblock standing in the way of our contentment.

Contentment and satisfaction are what allow us to be in the world but not of it. Contentment lets us be at peace and find joy so long as we live on Earth. Our deep desires are what draw us home to the Father. Without the first we shall live our lives in this fallen world miserable and depressed. Without the second we shall become too comfortable in a place that God never intended as our final destination. God wants to use both of them to restore us to the creation He intended us to be. I pray that we can open up our hearts and let Him.