Download contentment: trusting god with our sexuality

CONTENTMENT: TRUSTING GOD WITH OUR SEXUALITY
Dan Claire
June 30, 2013
Deuteronomy 5:21; Psalm 37:1-11; Romans 12:9-21; John 2:1-11
This, the final message in our Love & Relationships series, comes full-circle back to where we
began. The story of the Bible is a love story, featuring the marriage of God and his people. All
human relationships of love and friendship derive their meaning from the biblical love story. All
human relationships also point toward its consummation.
The final scene in the Bible is the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, a wedding literally to end all
other weddings, when God's marriage to his people is finally consummated. All people, regardless
of marital status, regardless of sexual preference or history, regardless of gender, regardless of
nationality, or status, or affiliation, or IQ–all people are invited to participate in this great
wedding and become part of the family of God. Jesus, the Son of God, issues the invitation to all
the world. For all of us who believe in him, we can be certain of his love and his welcome when
that wonderful day finally comes. The Bible describes the church as the Bride of Christ and likens the present time to a period of
preparation for holy matrimony. Jesus is now at work, cleaning up his bride, so that she might be
spotless on her wedding day. Each week in our worship we remember: Christ has died, Christ is risen,
and Christ will come again, but he hasn't yet. The wedding to end all weddings is still in the future.
Until then, how shall we live?
COVETOUSNESS VS. CONTENTMENT
Back in the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments were an important part of the first
marriage vows between God and his people. After God rescued the Israelites from slavery, he and
they entered into a covenant relationship together. Like all marriage covenants, they made
promises to one another. The Ten Commandments represent the marriage promises Israel made
to God.
When you read through the Ten Commandments, there's a logic to them. The first four are
about loving God, the last six about loving your neighbor. And then you come to the tenth and
final commandment, which says, “And you shall not covet your neighbor's wife. And you shall not
desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, his ox, or his
donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.” Deuteronomy 5:21. Why does the prohibition against covetousness come last? Is it because it's least important? Not at
all. Rather, it wraps up the Ten Commandments by pointing us inward to evaluate our heart
attitudes toward God. Reading through the commandments, it’s easy to regard them superficially,
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like the rich young ruler when he met Jesus long ago. “I haven't murdered or committed adultery
or stolen.” However, when we come to the tenth commandment, it’s much more difficult to
maintain superficiality. The tenth commandment probes our hearts to ask whether we're truly
satisfied. Those who answer its question honestly will agree with Bruce Springsteen: "Everybody's
got a hungry heart." Regardless of sexual preference, regardless of sexual experience, young and
old, rich and poor, gay or straight, we're all restless with desire. Everybody's got a hungry heart.
Because of sin, we all desire what we cannot or should not have. Covetousness is a spiritual
disease. Although it revolves around very physical elements like sex and material goods, the core
issue is rebellion against God. Covetousness makes us unfaithful to the Lord.
St. James made this point when he warned the first Christians against covetousness. He wrote:
What causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war
within you? You desire and you do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain,
so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not
receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do
you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever
wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. (James 4:1-4)
In other words, covetousness is infidelity. It's a declaration of war against God. If you're a
Christian, then you're betrothed to the Lord. You've sworn your allegiance to him as your
sovereign king. What you have–and what you don't–is determined by his sovereign rule. If you
simply must have what he hasn't given you, then your only option is rebellion, i.e. going to war
against God in order to get what you want. You'll then break all the other commandments in
order to get your heart's desire.
But when you think about it, such rebellion is idiotic. When you go to war against God, you can't
win. And if God is good, and his intentions toward us are always good, then rebellion always
means fighting for what's bad for us. It's stupid.
Thankfully, our heavenly Father doesn't leave us without alternatives. Instead of abandoning us
to be consumed by sinful desires, the Lord encourages us to choose contentment instead of
covetousness. Contentment is the antithesis of covetousness, because instead of declaring war
against God, it draws us closer to him in relationship. Consider this exhortation from the last
chapter of Hebrews: “Be content with what you have, for God has said, ‘I will never leave you
nor forsake you'” (Heb 13:5). Contentment isn't isolated, individual satisfaction. Rather, it's
satisfaction with the Lord as our covenant partner, the one who will never leave us or forsake us.
Instead of grousing at him for what he hasn't provided, we can choose to be grateful.
Contentment is a forgotten virtue, what the Puritans described as "a rare jewel." It's time for us to
rediscover this rare jewel and bring it into the center of our life together as a Christian
community. We have to learn to be content instead of coveting. But how?
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HOW DO WE LEARN CONTENTMENT? SEVEN PRINCIPLES
1. Contentment is active, not passive. We're confused about this because we associate
contentment with serenity. But if you know anything about gardening, you know that a place of
beauty and peace requires a lot of work to create and maintain. It's the same with
contentment. The energy we would otherwise put into rebellion is redirected into gratefulness as
we choose contentment instead of covetousness. Contentment is an active posture of love and
thankfulness to God for his sovereign care.
There are many passages in the Bible that talk about contentment. Every one of them describes
it this way, in terms of activity rather than passivity. Take, for example, Psalm 37. David says not
to let the world shape your desires. Rather, "delight yourself in the Lord." (Ps 37:4) It's a poetic
version of Romans 12:1-2, i.e. don't be conformed to this world, but be transformed, be renewed,
by delighting in the Lord. Contentment is active, not passive.
2. Contentment is not the absence of desire. Rather, it's a reorientation. We all have
many desires: money, sex, and power; peace, love and justice; food and drink; work, sleep and
play; etc. Your list may be different than mine. It doesn't matter. What's important is that none of
these desires, in and of themselves, is evil. The devil's in the details. Take sex, for example. A desire for sex isn't evil in and of itself. There's nothing wrong with
sexual desire, per se. What's wrong is wanting a sexual partner outside of holy matrimony. That's
the point when we begin to contemplate rebellion against God out of dissatisfaction with what
he's provided. But desire for sex within marriage is healthy, right and good. This is such an important point, because if we get this wrong, then it warps our whole conception
of God. If we think contentment is the absence of desire, then we begin to see God in the same
way–frozen, apathetic, indifferent, unfeeling. Yet the opposite is true. We're passionate people
because we're made in the image of God. We desire because he desires.
So contentment is not the absence of desire. Rather, it's a reorientation to wanting what God
wants. We need to see how passionate God is, what he's passionate about, and share with him in
his passions. We're in covenant with him, and that's what covenant partners do.
Back to Psalm 37:4. The complete verse says, "delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you
the desires of your heart." Here's how this works: through our relationship with God, in
delighting in him, we learn how to change the channel on our desires. Instead of desiring what
we cannot or should not have, we tune in on the Lord, remembering what Augustine said so long
ago, that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. We point our hearts toward him.
Delighting in the Lord, loving what he loves, reshapes our desires in godly ways. And then God
grants the desires of our hearts. 3
3. Christian worship is the very best weapon we have in our fight against
covetousness. Our desires are shaped by whatever we worship. If we worship technology, we
will hunger for it. If we worship sex, we'll hunger for it. As we give our hearts to God in worship,
we desire him and his kingdom more and more. Regular corporate worship and daily devotional
rhythms are essential for contentment. 4. We need the Holy Spirit to help us discern good desires from evil ones. Ask
yourself, "What is it that I want?" Then ask the Lord, "Why do I want this?" Why do you want
that beautiful home, or that promotion at work, or that new gadget? Ask the Lord to reveal your
motives, and to reshape your desires wherever is necessary. 5. The secret to contentment is discontentment. We've seen that contentment is
an active, reorientation of our desires. Apart from God, we don't want what he wants. We
prefer to have our own way, and in fact we tend to love what he hates and viceversa. But as we learn to delight in him, our tastes change. Not only do we
learn what God wants, we love it. And as we become increasingly content in
the Lord, we simultaneously become increasingly discontent with sin. It's
like the two ends of a compass needle. Usually the end that points north
is painted red, while the other end is black and pointing due south. Think
about contentment in the same way. As the compass of our hearts learns
to find true satisfaction in the Lord, there is an equal and opposite effect
as our hearts become increasingly dissatisfied with the pleasures of sin.
We're drawn to God and repulsed by sin.
Paul makes this clear in his letter to the Philippians when he talks about how he has learned
contentedness in all situations: "For I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I
know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have
learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through
him who strengthens me." (Phil. 4:11-13).
Before he says this, in the prior chapter he describes his discontentment. He strives to be free of
sin, "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the
goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." (Phil. 3:14). Paul's delight in the
Lord draws him forward into knowing God and away from the pleasures of sin. This is the secret
to contentment. It requires a simultaneous discontentment with sin.
6. Contentment works. Again, contentment is not the absence of desire. It's a reorientation of
our desires such that we no longer delight in the brokenness of sin, but instead we delight in the
Lord. The more contented we become in him, the more discontented we become with our
broken world. It's this push-pull dynamic, delighting in the Lord and discontent with the present
world, that puts us to work. It compels us to serve God as ambassadors of his better world. The
more we delight in the Lord, the more we want to see our world delighting in him too. 4
This is what Paul is talking about with all the antitheses in Romans 12:9-21. "Abhor what is evil;
hold fast to what is good…. Don't be proud, rather associate with the lowly…. Don't repay evil
for evil, rather as much as possible live peaceably with all…. In short, don't be overcome by evil,
but overcome evil with good." In other words, delighting in the Lord compels us to active
ministry in the pattern of Jesus. We live as he lived, for the glory of God and the good of the
world. Choosing contentment means getting to work as a disciple of Jesus.
By the way, living this way is just common sense. Nature abhors a vacuum. As Jesus taught, we
cannot be content with sweeping our hearts clean of one demon, just to make room for others.
Wherever we eliminate sin from our lives, we'll have to replace it with virtuous activity, otherwise
our covetousness will return with even more forcefulness than before. 7. Bitterness is the enemy of contentment. For committed Christians, the greatest threat
to our contentment is not evil desires, per se. Rather, it's wanting good things that God in his
mysterious providence hasn't provided. We cry out to the Lord for something good, he doesn't
give us the answer that we want, and bitterness takes hold of our hearts. Like a corrosive acid, it
burns away any delight we might otherwise have in the Lord. In past weeks we've talked about how marriage and procreation are two good and godly desires,
but not desires that God universally grants. I don't understand why, but sometimes he doesn't
provide that long-desired spouse or baby. It's such a painful and difficult place to be, but it doesn't
mean that you can't delight yourself in the Lord. The Psalms are filled with the songs of believers
who expressed their grief and disappointment to God without giving themselves over to
bitterness. Delighting yourself in the Lord doesn't mean that you always have a happy heart. It
does mean, however, that you still trust in his goodness toward you.
I know of a missionary couple, Paul and Rebecca, who are friends of some very good friends of
mine. Years ago Rebecca had a terrible accident in which her neck was broken, resulting in her
becoming a quadriplegic. Now, while they do have nursing assistance at different times, her
husband is her primary care-giver. Paul wakes her up every morning at 7 and takes her out into
the garden in her wheelchair so that she can have her devotions. Dinner usually happens around
her bed. Obviously, this isn't what they were expecting when they got married, and it has been
very, very hard. Countless times they've cried out to the Lord for her to be healed, and thus far
God hasn't granted this good desire. Yet instead of becoming bitter, they've chosen to be
thankful, with Ps 27:13 as their theme: "I remain confident of this, that I will see the goodness of
the Lord in the land of the living." They share their story freely, and through it they give hope to
many other people who struggle to see God's goodness in the midst of unmet expectations.
We all know people who are bitter because God hasn't granted them their good desires. Each
situation is a tragedy. Don't let this be your story. Jesus is the key. Our stories must first be about
him. As long as we keep him in focus, bitterness will never take root. 5
LOOK TO JESUS AS THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
It’s appropriate to conclude this message and this series with a reminder about the centrality of
Christ, based on the wedding in Cana (John 2). Knowing what we know about the overall
storyline of the Bible, it was highly symbolic for Jesus to begin his public ministry at a wedding
gone wrong, in a culture where running out of wine was the equivalent of forgetting the wedding
cake. The host was embarrassed, everyone else felt the awkwardness.
Of course, it wasn’t the end of the world. One might argue that this wouldn’t have been the best
use of time and resources for the savior of the universe. But doing so misses the point of this
story, and the whole story of the Bible: that Jesus is the life of the party.
It was just another wedding until Jesus showed up. Seizing the moment, Jesus transformed six
enormous stone water jars into wine. Not cheap wine, mind you, but vintage, imported,
expensive stuff, roughly 750 bottles! Jesus literally became the life of the party, bringing with him
a foretaste of happily ever after. It took some time, but eventually they ran out of the good stuff in Cana. It might have taken
weeks or months to finish it, but sooner or later the jars ran dry. It was, after all, only a foretaste
of good things yet to come. But Jesus never runs dry. Married, single, divorced, gay, straight,
young or old, rich or poor, whatever your circumstances, Jesus is the key to your contentment.
Bring him into the center of your life, and the true good stuff–the love of Christ–will never run
out. Before you know it, that great day will come when we meet him face to face, for the great
consummation of God and his people. All of Jesus' people will be there, for a wedding feast that
never ends, where the good stuff will never run dry. I hope you’ll join us there too. A true happily
ever after, with Jesus at the very center of the good life.
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