You’ve doubtless heard or even said these words before … for richer or for poorer.  In sickness and in health. Truth is, we face both good and bad in this life. And actually – it is possible to be content – no matter what our circumstances – but how?

Sometimes in life things aren’t quite right – a situation, a relationship, a job, a feeling, a concern. Something is not quite right and it gets us down. Pretty normal. But the question often is, well is that thing, that something, a thing or something that I can change or is it something that I should just accept? I think we have all heard that prayer, “Dear Lord, give me the peace to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

It’s a good prayer. If we just accept things that we can change, that’s silly, what a waste of a life, but if we spend all our energies trying to change something that we can’t change, that’s silly too. What a waste of effort. Sometimes we need real wisdom to know the difference.

There are a whole bunch of things in life we can change, have a think about them, our own attitude to things. Maybe we’re overweight and we need to eat differently and exercise. Maybe it’s a work/life balance, maybe it’s a career choice, maybe it’s the friends that we choose to hang around with who are getting us down. Maybe it’s how we spend our money, maybe it’s our debt levels.

There are a whole bunch of things in our lives that we can change and sometimes we try to abdicate from those. Sometimes we say, “Well I’m not in control of that, I can’t help how I spend my money. I saw this thing and I just wanted to buy it and now my credit card has got me into debt over my head, it’s not my fault.” Well, we can try to abdicate it but actually in those areas we are responsible.

On the other hand there are a whole bunch of things we can’t change. The past is number one. It doesn’t matter how much we wish we could undo what we did yesterday or the day before or last year, we can’t, the past is the past and I can’t change it and you can’t change it.

Sometimes we have sickness in our own bodies or friends and family and we live in a world where sickness happens and the last time I checked, one out of one of us is going to die unless Jesus comes back first. So sickness happens. Sometimes we wish we could change that other person, that difficult kid or that husband or wife or that person at work or the boss, we wish we could change them.

Get a revelation, we can’t change other people and yet we try and control those areas, we try to change other people, we try to ram things down their throat and that’s disastrous too. It’s just as disastrous as abdicating our responsibilities in the areas that we can change in life, so we do need wisdom – wisdom to approach the things that we don’t like that we can change, and the things that we don’t like that we can’t change, with a ‘right heart’ attitude.

We’re not meant to play the victim and we’re not meant to be a bull at a gate and I think that, that heart attitude that brings wisdom is a heart of contentment.

All this week, on the program, we’ve been looking at a letter from a very good friend of mine. He died a few years back, Paul the apostle, he wrote this letter in the first century AD. I call him a good friend because I’ve read his letters over and over again and the guy just flicks my switch, I just relate to this bloke Paul. Anyway this letter is called the Letter to the Church at Philippi, you can find it in the New Testament in the Bible. And Paul is in prison on death row.

He spent over a decade preaching at big rallies and planting Churches right across Asia Minor. And he finds himself on death row, just in the same way we sometimes, as we’ve been looking this week on the program, find ourselves in our own personal prisons. But we can do some stuff and we saw how he expresses concern for others, he gets the focus off himself, he has humility, he has rejoicing and today we’re going to look at his heart of contentment. If you missed any of those programs, go to our website www.adifferentperspective.org and you can order the CD’s or listen to the programs online.

Now let’s read to see what Paul writes about contentment because, I don’t know for me, for someone to be content on death row is kind of a bit bizarre. He was ultimately killed, he was executed we understand and yet he is sitting on death row expressing his heart of contentment. Let’s see what he writes, if you have a Bible you can grab it now or later, it’s in Philippians, Chapter 4, begins at verse 10. And here’s what he says:

I rejoice in the Lord greatly but now at last you (that is the people he is writing to in Philippi) have revived your concern for me, indeed you were concerned for me the whole time but you didn’t have the opportunity to show it. Not that I am really in need because I’ve learnt to be content with whatever I have. I know what it’s like not to have much and I know what it’s like to have lots, in fact, in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need ’cause you see, I can do anything through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4: 10-13)

Hmm, now here’s Paul writing a letter to his friends and Paul had real needs. He had need of money, of food and clothing because when you’re in jail in the first century it wasn’t a taxpayer funded exercise by and large. If you ate well in jail it’s because you were provided for by your friends and family. If you starved in jail it’s because you weren’t provided for by your friends and family. There were no prison uniforms, your friends and family had to provide you with clothes to wear and when it got cold, don’t imagine that there was double insulated glass in the windows. In the first century, when it got cold, if they didn’t give you blankets, your friends and family, you froze.

So Paul had real needs of money and food and clothing, not to mention moral support and prayer and just the concern of his friends. You know what it’s like when you’re on your own, it helps if other people care about you and there is Paul, no emails, weeks and months and he said, “You know something, I’ve discovered I can be content anywhere. I’m full to overflowing. For me, I have this relationship with Jesus.”

And I know what that’s like because before I had that relationship, my heart was never content. I needed recognition and money and wealth and status and jobs and career and my heart needed filling and it was never content. The things I could change, well I changed those with the wrong motivation, with greed. And the things I couldn’t, they would gnaw away at me like a cancer. I was never satisfied. I was never contented.

Today is a different story. Today I have a deep contentment in my heart, in my life, in my journey, in my family. Things are never perfect in life. There’s always things we’d like to change, some of them we can, some of them we can’t but I am happy with who I am and who I’m not and I am happy with what I have and what I don’t. And that’s not from me, that’s from God, that’s from Jesus. That deep security and contentment comes from him and now I can look at the world from a different perspective.

The things I can change, I look at them with right motives. This Ministry, what we’re doing right now, my motive is to let Jesus change your heart. That’s what it’s all about for me and the things I can’t, I have this gentle peace about. I pray, I leave them with God. There are some people in my life I’d love to see them change, some things in their lives. But I can’t change them so instead of reacting against them, instead of pulling them down and fighting with them and being angry with them like I used to, I just take it to the Lord and have a deep peace about them.

I could never have done that stuff by myself and you know, Paul on death row could never have expressed that sort of contentment by himself. He talked about love and concern for his friends, he talked about humility, he talked about rejoicing, he talked about contentment – on death row.

He had something that a lot of people on this planet don’t. He had a light, a candle burning in his heart, a fire, a flame, it was like a get out of jail free card and that card has a name – Jesus.