TRUE SATISFACTION

Philippians 4:10-13

Sunday, October 15, 2006

We’ve spent these days so far of the 33 Days of Stewardship talking about proper relationships. We’ve talked about the proper relationship between you and your stuff—that you own it rather than your stuff owning you. We’ve also talked about the proper relationship between you and God—that God is the Owner and you and I are just the stewards. We are blessed today by the women of the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League as they’ve sort of offered themselves as living examples of these truths—they do live sacrificially, dedicating their time and talent and treasure to the work the Lord has in mind.

As we listen to the Apostle Paul in his words to the Philippians, we have another example of someone who has learned to live sacrificially—someone who has learned the right relationship between himself and his stuff; between himself and God. Paul adds something to our discussion today, though. He writes to the Philippians—and to us—adding the idea of living in a right relationship with our circumstances.

You’ve no doubt spoken with someone who, when you asked how they were doing, said something like, “Well, okay, I guess…under the circumstances.” How do you live with respect to your circumstances? Do you live as some do, as victims of the circumstances? Do you live “under the circumstances?” Or, with Paul, are you bold to live through your circumstances?

Paul writes to the Romans that as we live in Christ, we are more than conquerors—we can walk confidently through our circumstances because we follow Christ. Paul talks about contentment—a word with which his audience was well-acquainted. It was a virtue to the Greeks, but Paul redefines the word and fills it with Christ. As we consider this word, “contentment,” filled with Christ, we pray the Holy Spirit will lead us to know true satisfaction.

Are you ever satisfied? For the Apostle Paul, he knows that by himself, he is not satisfied. True satisfaction comes from outside of him—it comes from God.

To make his point, Paul will often start with a word or an idea that is familiar in the Greek world and then, reach down deep into that word, grab its tail and pull it inside out and fill what’s left with Jesus. We live in a culture that began with the Greeks, so Paul is directing his efforts our way. What does it mean to be content? What is true satisfaction to you?

As I said, the Greek mind understood “contentment” as a virtue. They understood it to mean “self-sufficiency.” A person’s goal was to reach a point at which they needed nothing from the world around them—and gave nothing. You would be totally self-contained, self-complete. There are two problems that arise with seeking this goal.

The first is that a person seeking self-completion ends up alone. You reach a point in this quest for self-sufficiency where you “touch no one and no one touches” you—to borrow lyrics from Simon and Garfunkel. John Donne declares that no man is an island and those who seek this virtue disagree. This is not a condition many enjoy—loneliness.

The other side of self-sufficiency is the hunger that drives us towards it. The Greeks counted it a virtue as it was something to be sought and not often achieved. The hunger to have drives us and satisfying that hunger consumes us. Our hunger-driven culture would suck us into its vortex: you buy a house and immediately, your neighbors’ houses look bigger and nicer. You buy your first car—mine was a 1966 Ford Mustang—but then you park it next to the brand-new SUV, and it doesn’t look as shiny. You finally get that job you’ve wanted, and then notice the “corner office” is two doors down. When we are driven by hunger to have, it’s never enough.

Against this, Paul describes contentment not as self-sufficiency, but as “Christ-sufficiency.” Our sufficiency is in Christ, he says elsewhere. David writes boldly in Psalm 23 that, the Lord “is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want.” We have what we need in Christ.

Living Christ-sufficient lives, we live by faith, trusting Him for what we need. We know our God to merciful in Christ, so when we hear He is Creator and Owner of Creation; we understand He works through His Creation to give us what we need. We trust in His mercy.

Living with our sufficiency in Christ, we trust not only that everything we need for this body and live is overseen by our God. Everything we need—even those things which according to our humanity we wouldn’t count, like forgiveness—is provided in Christ. You and I trust in His love, knowing the story of that love—that Jesus came to be Savior. We look at the cross and see that our hunger to have—which has its root in our selfishness and sin—has been nailed there with Jesus. He died our death to set us free from bondage to that master. We look inside the empty tomb and count His resurrection as proof that our lives of want are gone, replaced with that new life of sufficiency in Christ. We can with the hymn writer cry out, “It is enough! My Jesus Liveth Still!” Actually, the hymn translates as “I am Content!” This is true satisfaction in Christ-sufficiency.

Living these new lives, content in Christ’s sufficiency means that true satisfaction is a work of the Holy Spirit. Again, we part company with the Greeks and so our modern cultural understandings. The Greek philosophers saw contentment as a virtue, as I’ve said before. Virtues were achieved by hard work. Personal discipline of body and mind was required to achieve such a state of contentment. We still meet people who share similar ideas—that if you follow these 12 Steps or read this book or live this way, you will reach contentment. Do you see the problem? This sufficiency doesn’t get past our selves. If it remains a work of the human heart or human spirit, it will never be reached—we get in our own path.

As he writes to the Philippians, Paul understands this contentment and the life that finds true satisfaction as a fruit of the work of the Holy Spirit—not the human spirit. You and I don’t get there by trying real hard; we get it as a gift of God. This true satisfaction expresses itself with a confidence that looks through circumstances.

Take David for an example of this confidence. I mentioned Psalm 23 earlier. Those words are familiar, but do you know when David wrote them? He didn’t write them as a youth, living safely in his father’s house, watching over his father’s sheep. He didn’t write them as King David, living comfortably in the palace in Jerusalem.

He wrote them in the wilderness, on the run for his life from King Saul. David wrote these words about having no want as he had nothing—he only had a promise from God as he lived in caves and ran for his life. True satisfaction gives birth to this kind of confidence as a fruit of the Holy Spirit working in our hearts to trust our Shepherd God with our lives.

You and I receive this same confidence from the same Holy Spirit. We live with a promise from God in Christ. We know that our eternity is taken care of, so we can live through the moments—the circumstances—as more than conquerors through Christ who loves us. You and I are able to look beyond our selves and our needs and our moments to see God keeping His promise to work everything to the good He has in mind for us. Looking beyond our moment to see heaven, we can also look through our circumstances to the needs of others. Living lives of true satisfaction, we can live for others.

We spoke before of that friend who lived as a victim of circumstances—lived “under the circumstances.” That person, while sad, has much in common with the way those ancient Greeks lived. The Greek lived in fear of his circumstances. He lived in fear of his gods—they might act capriciously or spitefully or they might not act at all. He spent his life offering sacrifices to a whole spectrum of gods, trying to placate them, so that he could just get through the day. Cover your assets and get through the day. This is not a life of contentment or satisfaction, it is a life lived to survive; it is a life lived in fear.

You and I don’t live that way. Living Christ-sufficient lives, we hear Jesus say that He has come that we might have life and have it abundantly. This is not Jesus promising us all the stuff we want. It is Jesus promising us He has taken care of what we need. We know that God is merciful and that He works for us to meet our needs in His Creation. He provides and sustains us with a system that yields food to eat and so forth. We don’t live in fear of God, we live grateful to Him.

This gratitude leads to a response as we live Christ-sufficient lives. Confident of God’s love and provision in Christ, we can share out of our abundance. We have the LWML ladies as an example of this behavior. Paul gives us the Philippians as an example to consider as we consider what abundant living looks like.

The Philippians gave Paul support out of what they had. Confident of the sufficiency of God’s provision and living in true satisfaction in Christ, they became instruments of God’s provision for Paul. They turned over their resources and themselves to God for service to Paul and the Gospel. As you heard, so do the LWML ladies. What about you and me? How can we live such a life of service out of our abundance?

You will be receiving mail from Mount Olive this next week. In it you will find our annual Time and Talent Survey. Please prayerfully consider how you can share of your time and of your gifts to give to others and to the ministry here at Mount Olive. You will also find a pledge card and a copy of our proposed Ministry Allocation Plan—the budget—for 2007. You can demonstrate that your sufficiency is in Christ as you prayerfully consider how to allocate your financial resources to ministry here and through Mount Olive.

As you make your decisions you will be doing two things. No, one is not giving to the budget. The first is that you will make a statement that you are confident in the Lord’s provision—that you live a Christ-sufficient life. The second is that you will be making a witness to the culture around you that lives to have stuff and lives in fear of circumstances. You will say to that world, “I am not afraid. I am content! My sufficiency is in Christ.”