What's in the Jar?

Anybody NOT struggling with contentment?  I am confident that the Lord has  brought to the surface of all hearts and minds our areas of discontent.  What is your area?  No need to share here.  Kristi had us write down a particular area in which we are discontent and put it in a jar. I'll let you know in a bit how that turned out.

We began our discussion with 1 John 5:11, "And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son."   We also discussed the world's idea of contentment vs. the Biblical view.  And, as Kristi pointed out, we really can not have true contentment with out being in Christ, and walking with Him. 

After discussing the subtopics of the chapter we went on to have a meaningful discussion of the 4 questions on page 48:

So, why is our discontent so offensive to God?  To answer this, we first talked about what the "fruit" of a discontented heart looks like.  It is joyless, grumbling, unthankful and lacking trust.  We discussed the Israelites and how they forgot God's presence in their lives and how they exaggerated the past, instead of being content where God had them, even though they had God's presence in a pillar of fire!  But, Kristi gently reminded us that we too deal with discontent.  We may not have a pillar of fire to remind us of God's presence, but we have His Spirit, His church, elders, the written word etc. We have so much to remind us of God's faithful, loving, sovereign rule in our lives, but we still grumble and complain. 

Next question, "What are some specific ways in your life that you have seen your own discontent lead to other sins.  This is where we wrote down our answer and put it in the jar.  It is so helpful to see that at the root of most of our sin, if we really look deep, we can see discontent.  Often our discontent doesn't just stop at discontent, but spills out into our lives and on those around us.

Then we briefly discussed whether it is difficult to accept the Biblical truth that God ordains all things.  Kim made a great point. If we truly know who God is, it shouldn't be.  We all seemed to agree though that it is much more difficult in very painful situations because we view pain to be a bad thing. This is when Kristi read to us from Contentment by Lydia Brownback.  Here is the precious passage that she shared: 

"Contentment in the valleys comes when we stop fighting so hard to climb out.  God is the one who leads us into the valleys, and he will lead us back out in his time.  God ordains valleys for our good; why else would a good and kind God allow them?  Trusting God in our hard times is the way to contentment--- not just trusting him to get us out, but trusting his goodness while we are still in them.  If we will not trust him in the bad times, we are not going to trust him in the good times either...Do you live like that, fighting so hard to stay on the peaks and to avoid the valleys?  If so, we will never be happy in either place.  However, if we will trust God in whichever place we find ourselves, we will know contentment whether the season is easy or hard.  We will find peace in the hard times because a good Father is controlling them, and we will not be anxious in the good times because our happiness is not bound up in having to maintain them.  Good times are designed to come and go, but contentment is designed to be constant for all who are in Christ. "

Because God uses these valleys for our good, (Romans 8:28;31-32) we can really look at our areas of discontent as gifts.  And that is what Kristi pointed out.  The papers in the jar are really gifts from God.  Now, for His grace to see it this way!

Question number four lead us to a beautiful discussion about the people in our lives in whom we have seen, "the jewel of contentment".  What an encouragement of how God's work of contentment in our hearts can affect others.

Using a quote from page 39, Krist concluded that it, "boils down to this: trust and obey." And, we can't trust God if we don't know Him, just as it is very difficult to trust a stranger, since we don't know him.  So, we need to use the means of grace in our lives.  We need to know our God more.  And, we need to be content!