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Be Happy! Day 1

Be content

There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. ‘For whom am I toiling,’ he asked, ‘and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?’ This too is meaningless – a miserable business! Ecclesiastes 4.8

Over the last couple of years I have been watching the salvation of someone. And a wonderful thing it has been! It hasn’t happened in a rush. For someone with no Christian background at all to come to faith takes a long time, because it involves painstakingly turning every part of a life around. The Ark Royal doesn’t spin on a saucer.

So while I’ve been watching my friend become the person God has always planned him to be, I have had time to think about what it means to be saved by Jesus. I am embarrassed to confess that I used to talk about being saved without ever really thinking about what it is that Jesus actually saves us from. The Bible describes it in several ways – saved from oppression, from meaninglessness, from death, from sin. But the more I have thought about it, the more I have come to the conclusion that what this generation most needs to be saved from is discontent.

I don’t mean greed. We all know that the love of money is the root of all evil. It is one of those verses from the New Testament that is so well known that even people who don’t realize it comes from the Bible quote it. Rather, I mean discontent – the feeling that somehow the hand we have been dealt is not good enough. That restlessness for something better than what we’ve got – which is fine until it gets to the stage at which you can’t enjoy what you have got because of it. And sadly I see that in churches almost as much as I see it in shopping malls.

Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. 1 Timothy 6.6–10

The state of feeling ill at ease, and hankering after more, cannot possibly be how God intends his children to live. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most significant thing that God can do for this itchy, acquisitive generation is to make them glad to be alive. That is why I believe with all my heart in the salvation that Jesus can bring.

I’m not talking about being glad that we will be alive one day in heaven. I don’t tell my friends that the point of being saved is to get to heaven and say to yourself, ‘Ooh, I’m glad I’m dead!’ The transforming thing about the Good News is that, no matter what your circumstances are – in your finances, relationships, achievements – Jesus can bring you to a point at which you say, ‘Goodness, I’m glad to be alive!’ As St Paul put it twenty centuries ago, ‘As long as we have food and clothing, we can be content with that.’

Victorian preachers insisted that the secret of content was to accept the place that God had put you in the pecking order of society, and not fight against it. If you were poor, the best response was to get on with being poor without grumbling, and be as happy as you could. One of their favourite hymns included the words: ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at the gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’ Although children still sing ‘All things bright and beautiful’, no one sings that verse any more.

And of course, we don’t think like that about God any more. We have learnt a lot about God during the last 200 years. One of the things we have learnt is that God doesn’t want us to be content to leave some people in poverty while others get rich. The very opposite in fact! We should absolutely not be content to live in a comfortable country if that has come about at the cost of others being trapped in poverty. And surely God does not intend us to be apathetic, or content to let life drift by without attempting to improve ourselves.

So how do we know when to be content and when to agitate for something better?

True contentment is a real, active virtue. It is the power of getting out of any situation all there is in it. G. K. Chesterton, novelist, 1874–1936

Well … my friend Gary came round for coffee and we were talking about my plumbing. Over Christmas my kitchen sink had been draining unbearably slowly. I told Gary that I would probably put up with it for a week, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer I would pay for a plumber because I’m hopeless at DIY. Gary was adamant. ‘Don’t you dare! I’ll stand over you and make you sort it out yourself.’

And I did. Unscrewed all the wet, murky stuff! Cleared it! Saved a fortune! Felt triumphant!

It has really inspired me not to be content with my incompetence. Since then I’ve done a heap of work to improve my new flat – you should see the bathroom! So Gary and I have been discussing when it is right to be content, and when discontent should spur us on to make the world better. And it occurred to us that St Paul has already given us the answer. He wrote: ‘Godliness with contentment is great gain.’ That’s how you know! Does the content you are hankering after in life come alongside godliness?

The world is not enough. The family motto of Ian Fleming’s hero James Bond, translated from the Latin ‘Orbis non sufficit’, which was the motto of the real life eighteenth-century financier Sir Thomas Bond

You can practise that! Practise being content with a godly approach to life. Practise lying in bed at the end of the day reflecting on any good things that have happened, and register that they are part of the world that God has spread out before us. Practise looking at your lunch before you eat it, with all its colours and smells and tastes, and thank God that he conceived such a sensual world for us. Practise focusing on what you enjoy about people, thanking God that friendship and pleasure are possible in his good world. If you do that, God will make you a happier person.

Lord God, I have been so eager to do well. But now turn me into someone who is eager to do good. Amen.

If you don’t find content in godliness, there are plenty of people who will try to sell content to you. Many will persuasively tell you that you can find content in shiny, bleeping things. It starts with very young children who are offered content in hand-held, computerized, shiny, bleeping things. It escalates when adults are lured towards four-seater, shiny, bleeping things. Or four-ring-hob, shiny, bleeping things. But now as then, godliness with contentment is great gain.

I’m writing to persuade myself as much as anyone else. Last week I got new curtains in the living room. (I was given some money to write this book!) And those curtains are making me unbelievably happy. But do you know what the source of that happiness is? It’s not because they are new and shiny. It’s because I put that curtain pole up myself. Drilled it, screwed it … and it’s still up there! I keep going into the room to look at it and thank God. I am so content!

That’s what this book is going to be about for the next forty days. About me, my home, my friends, and our hope that living our lives in the company of the risen Jesus will give us authentic happiness.

I must confess that I have been asking myself, ‘Are people really going to be interested in my plumbing and my curtains?’ But actually, those are the realities of life to which Jesus can genuinely make a difference. Don’t be content just to let him change the way you pray on Sunday; expect him to change the way you live from Monday to Saturday. If you are going to turn the Ark Royal round, then the curtains and the plumbing will be turning round with the rest of the ship.

Shiny, bleeping things – or godliness with contentment. Your choice!

Be happy! Next time you have food in front of you, make a point of not saying grace – not in words anyway! Instead, look at what you are about to eat and drink, with its contrasting colours and textures, and anticipate the tastes that are on their way. Think about whether you are grateful for this. If you are, who are you grateful to?