Opening illustration: A Jewish man in Hungary went to his rabbi and complained, “Life is unbearable. There are nine of us living in one room. What can I do?” The rabbi answered, “Take your goat into the room with you.” The man was skeptical, but the rabbi insisted, “Do as I say and come back in a week.”
A week later the man returned looking more distressed than before. “We can’t stand it,” he told the rabbi. “The goat is filthy.” The rabbi said, “Go home and let the goat out, and come back in a week.” A week later the man returned, radiant, exclaiming, “Life is beautiful. We enjoy every minute of it now that there’s no goat - only the nine of us.” (Reader's Digest [12/81]) Contentment is more a matter of our perspective than of our circumstances, isn’t it!
But even among God’s people, true contentment is not common. The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs captured this fact by titling his book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. The philosopher, Immanuel Kant, saw this when he observed, “Give a man everything he wants, and at that moment, everything will not be everything” (cited by Richard Swenson, Margin [NavPress]).
Though rare, contentment is not just nice for believers. The participle implies a command: “Be[ing] content with what you have.” To grumble about our circumstances is to challenge the love and goodness of our heavenly Father. To be discontented implies that He has not provided us with what we need. Discontent was the sin of Israel in the wilderness. God had just miraculously delivered them from slavery in Egypt and He was miraculously meeting their needs, yet they grumbled about their hardships and threatened to return to Egypt.
Introduction: Just as the Hebrews were exhorted, we too are to grow in the knowledge of God and strive toward perfection, or Christian maturity. We are to lay aside anything in our life that hinders our course of running this race for our Lord, of living a life pleasing to Him. We are to serve God acceptably and diligently which is our reasonable service, while at the same time longing for His return and being prepared for that glorious meeting face-to-face with our Savior when our faith becomes sight, and our sure hope becomes a satisfied anticipation. Having therefore this great assurance, let us go forth praising God continuously, “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith,” and bring many more to the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Knowing that He is all we need and the One Who can fill every void in our life.
Why is it necessary to have Jesus?
1. To be CONTENT not COVETOUS (vs. 5-6)
The word “content” is the translation of arkeo “to be possessed of unfailing strength, to be strong, to suffice, to be enough,” finally, “to be satisfied, contented.” The underlying thought is that one should be satisfied with that which meets our need, and not desire a superfluity. The cognate noun of this verb is compounded with the personal pronoun “self” in Philippians 4:11 to mean “self-sufficient.” This latter word was used by the Stoics to express the favorite doctrine of the sect, that man should be sufficient to himself for all things, able by the power of his will to resist the shock of circumstance. Paul was self-sufficient because he was Christ-dependent. The word “content,” therefore, in our Hebrew passage means more than “satisfied.” It refers to the ability of the Christian dependent upon the Holy Spirit, to be independent of outward circumstances.
The world constantly seeks to make us feel discontented. All advertising, whether on TV, billboards, or in catalogs, is designed to make you think, “I need this product to be happy!” A PBS television program stated that the average American sees over a million commercials by age 20 (Randy Alcorn, The Treasure Principle [Multnomah Publishers]). I don’t know how they came up with that number, but it averages out to 137 per day, if you start at birth! Even a fraction of that many commercials has got to affect us! So we have to fight the influence of the world, or its swift cur-rent will sweep us downstream.
Contentment does not grow without cultivation and maintenance. You may be content in the Lord today, but tomorrow you could be tempted toward greed or envy. Contentment and greed are attitudes that start in your mind. To cultivate contentment, you’ve got to guard your thought life and constantly work at developing a biblical view of life, of material possessions, and of eternity. You have to avoid comparing yourself with others, recognizing that God is sovereign and that He has different purposes for different people. Perhaps He knows that if He entrusted more money to you, you would stop trusting Him and be spiritually ruined.
Contentment is cultivated by constantly pulling the weeds of greed. Henry Kissinger observed, “To Americans usually tragedy is wanting something very badly and not getting it. Many people have had to learn in their private lives, and nations have had to learn in their historical experience, that perhaps the worst form of tragedy is wanting something badly, getting it, and finding it empty” (cited by Swenson).
So, where do you begin to cultivate contentment that will never disappoint? You have to start in the right place – Jesus.
Illustration: Air and water are two entirely different elements or spheres, and it is impossible to have a vessel filled with air and water at the same time. One that is filled with air must have the air displaced in order to be filled with water. Similarly, if a man’s life is given over to the pursuit of material things, that life cannot then be filled with Jesus Christ. Until that love for material things is displaced, that life cannot and will not be filled with Jesus Christ. When a man gives himself to the pursuit of all that is involved in this world and makes its position and its material things his goal and his standard and the center of his life, he will not find the satisfaction that comes from making Jesus Christ the center of his life. To be content is the opposite of to be covetous, to be greedy, to be worldly, to be materialistic... The reason material things can never make a man content is that a man is never able to get enough of them to satisfy him ... Someone once asked John D. Rockefeller how much money is enough. He thought a moment and said, “Just a little more than one has.” The world’s wealthiest man has yet to say, “I have enough to be satisfied.” (Pentecost, J. D. The Joy of Living: A Study of Philippians. Kregel Publications)
2. To be able to EXEMPLIFY our FAITH (v. 7)
Remember your leaders, and follow their example. This one is a bit of a double edged sword because it assumes that our leaders are living blameless and holy lives, which is not always the case. So this piece of advice is also a bit of a warning to the leaders as well. It is an expected assumption and rightly so. But this does bring us back to the message of mutual love and support. By the way, this isn’t really about the clergy either. We have lots of leaders here in this parish we can look to (and those leaders should remember that people are looking to them).
This is an interesting verse because it speaks of those leaders who had gone to be with the Lord, as the language here in our text is in the past tense. It speaks of remembering those who spoke the word and also considering the outcome of their way of life. That could also be translated, considering the end of their life.
The writer encourages us in this radical, countercultural, un-American way of life by calling us to remember and imitate our leaders who lived by this kind of faith in Christ's promises. It also speaks of their faithfulness to the very end. These leaders spoke the word of God to these Christians. They were committed to God's word in a way where they taught it, they preached it, and they lived it. They understood that it is the word of God which is used of the Holy Spirit to change the hearts of people and to encourage them to walk in the ways of the Lord. Unfortunately, in today’s world and Church, the word of God has taken a back seat to the wisdom of man.
It takes strength. It takes strength to love. It takes strength to risk ourselves with strangers. It takes strength to take the suffering of prisoners into your life, when you may have enough of your own. It takes strength to keep your marriage vows when the going gets rough and it is not the way you dreamed it would be. It takes strength to turn away from the promises of money. And that strength is what today's text is about. Where to get it and how to keep it? And the answers are not new, just newly stated.
Illustration: Faith is the foot of the soul by which it can march along the road of the commandments. When missionary John Paton was translating the Scripture for the South Sea islanders, he was unable to find a word in their vocabulary for the concept of believing, trusting, or having faith. He had no idea how he would convey that to them. One day while he was in his hut translating, a native came running up the stairs into Paton's study and flopped in a chair, exhausted. He said to Paton, “It’s so good to rest my whole weight in this chair.”
John Paton had his word: Faith is resting your whole weight on God. That word went into the translation of their New Testament and helped bring that civilization of natives to Christ. Believing is putting your whole weight on God. If God said it, then it’s true, and we’re to believe it.
3. To be able to stand on FIRM FOUNDATION (vs. 8-9)
Hebrews 13:8 seems out of context, but I believe the author put it here in a somewhat abrupt manner to make a point: A. Godly teachers come and go, but Jesus Christ remains the same forever (Hebrews 13:8). That is the point when the verse is joined to the previous context. Sometimes people become so enamored with some godly man or his teaching that they are devastated when that man dies. The author is not diminishing the value of sound teachers, but he is saying that after the teachers die, Jesus Christ remains solid, steady, and unchanging. It also relates to the following context, in the sense that the unchanging Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for our sins is the perpetual antidote to false teaching.
False teaching has existed in every age, but as Peter writes '... there will be false teachers among you ...' (2 Peter 2:1). It seems that some Christians are more gullible than others regarding false teaching and Christians in our age seem particularly gullible. Many Christians in our time willingly follow whoever claims to be a believer in Jesus Christ, regardless if this person's teaching is contrary to Scripture or not. What does this say about our faith? It says that many of us have been 'carried away by varied and strange teachings.' What a tragedy this is. We need to be careful because some of the false teaching, that we encounter, is not obvious. In fact, those promoting it will often point out verses that support their teaching. It is like counterfeit money. We need to be discerning in order to recognize the counterfeit, because although it looks good, it is worth absolutely nothing.
The love of money and the rejection of sound doctrine - these will be two great, deadly forces against the church in the coming years. And what a gift it is that the Bible so clearly warns us - and not just warns us, but helps us. And not just by giving negative threats, but by giving precious and very great promises.
The solution to both greed and heresy is this: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. What once was true about Christ always will be true about Christ, so you don't need or want new doctrine. And what was once satisfying about Christ will always be satisfying about Christ, so you don't need or want money as the way to lasting happiness. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever - the same truth and the same treasure. Receive him and be free.
Illustration: Bill Irwin, who is blind, has a talking computer he uses to study the Bible. He’s had a few chuckles over some of the pronunciations. “For a long time,” Bill says, “the computer pronounced Holy Bible as ‘holly bibble’ until I figured out how to modify it.”
But there was one thing Bill couldn’t change. The computer uses the Spanish pronunciation for Jesus Christ - HEYsus Krist. “The programmer is Hispanic,” Bill told me with a smile, “and he made sure that HEYsus Krist cannot be altered.”
I like that. It reminds me that among the things in life that can be changed to suit my taste, one remains tamper-resistant - I can’t change Jesus.
When life is unsettled, I gain great comfort from the Bible’s affirmation that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). But the statement is also a stern rebuke to my tendency to try to modify the words and character of Christ when I don’t like what He says. How easy it is to forget that I came to Christ longing for Him to transform me, not the other way around!
Praise God that His Word and His love are perfect and unchanging. And praise Him too that in His love He is working to change me. (Our Daily Bread, David C. McCasland)
Application: God hammers home the assurance that there are no circumstances, ever or anywhere, in which He abandons His children. Even when His saints go through horrible persecution or tortuous deaths, He is there with them and uses the trial to take them to be with Him in heaven for all eternity. The reality of that comforting truth enables us to be content in all circumstances. Our money, our health, or our loved ones may all be taken, but God Himself re-mains! Having God is all that we need for contentment and our every need. With God behind you and His arms beneath you, you can face whatever is before you.
