p. 12 | Christian Contentment by Theodore L. Cuyler

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 1, 1902

Christian Contentment

By Theodore L. Cuyler

Contentment

CHRISTIAN contentment is the cheerful acquiescence of the soul to the will of God in all conditions and under all weathers. It is the habit of the mind, just as faith is the habit of a healthy Christian, and benevolence is the habit of a philanthropist. Like faith, it grows by practice; and like faith, it is learned from God’s Word, and is matured by experience. The great, brave apostle learned it where he learned Christ, and he learned it from Christ, and in a pretty severe and costly school.

Like every precious thing, we must pay the price for it; and, like most precious things, it is quite too rare, and the thoroughly contented people are in the minority. It is not every young minister who is satisfied to preach Jesus to a hundred new settlers in a frontier log church, or to a few hundred poor children in the mission school of the slums; yet, unless he is willing to be right there and to do just that thing, his Master will sooner put him down lower than say, “Come up higher.”

We may overrate this grace, but it seems to us that genuine contentment, that is ready to let God have his own way, to let God put us where he chooses, even though the furnace be hot, is more scarce than it ought to be. He has attained to it who has learned to say, under disappointments the most bitter, and under trials which give the last turn to the screw and make the blood start, “Thy will, O God, be done!”

This style of contentment is not reserved for sublime occasions; it is visible in all the little unnumbered events of everyday life. It is patient not only under death strokes, but under petty vexations and wounding words and neglects; it does not worry over hard seats or boring visitors or stupid servants or a crying child. It manages to be happy in a small house when it cannot afford a three-story mansion. So rich is it in God’s promises and the sweet smiles of the Master and a good title to heaven, that it does not mind wearing a coarse coat and trudging on foot toward the better country. It wears the herb called “heart’s-ease” in its bosom; it finds a cool spring to drink of in the lowliest vales of life, and catches grand outlooks from the summit of every steep hill it climbs. As it treads along its patient path, it chants John Bunyan’s quaint, simple song:—

“I am content with what I have, Little be it or much; And, Lord, contentment still I crave, Because thou blessest such; Fullness to me a burthen is As I go on a pilgrimage. Here little and hereafter bliss Is best from age to age.”

— Theodore L. Cuyler, D. D.