BE CONTENT by T. E. Bowen

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 7, 1901

BE CONTENT

By T. E. Bowen

T. E. BOWEN

The world is restless. It is restless and discontented because it is covetous, selfish, and grasping. The more money men get, the more they want. True contentment can not be found outside of Christ. No man has learned the lesson truly, so as to say, with Paul, “For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,” unless he is a Christian. It may be God can use your want, your need, in one place to better serve Him, while in another, to abound might best please Him. That is His part, but ours is to be content whatever it may please Him to lead us through. Paul’s experience is recorded for our benefit: “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound; everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” This is a part of the Christian’s experience.

To be contented is not indolence nor laziness. It is life without corroding anxiety. It is as the running of machinery without the squeaking of friction. It is life with the hourly consciousness that God is at hand to provide temporal and spiritual necessities. God does not supply the earth with power enough to swing on her orbit through space for one, two, or five years ahead. He is in His temple, upholding it, second by second, hour by hour, as time passes. So, likewise, He is displeased to have His children lay up ahead a great store, as if fearful that He would leave them somewhere along the way. This reveals distrust. So He exhorts us: “Let your conversation [manner of life] be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for He [God] hath said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” Heb. 13:5.

Not only be content with the things God has given you, but be content with where He has stationed you. If you do not succeed in being contented where you now are, by making the best of the circumstances and surroundings, it is altogether likely you would succeed no better were you somewhere else. He who can so happily suit himself to his environments as to make that which might prove a discontentment, a source of contentment, both for himself and others, will prove a blessing anywhere, will be wanted anywhere, and at last such will be wanted to people the new earth. The discontented, the faultfinding, the murmurers, all fell in the wilderness, and it is said of them that they perished through “unbelief.”