How Does a Christian Have Contentment?

When I think about contentment in the world that we live in, I like to start with a picture. I picture a woman standing before the ocean. She is desperately thirsty and is holding a cup in her hand. She reaches down with that cup. She picks it up and she thinks, “If I just take a drink of this water, it will satisfy my thirst.”

Now, all of us know that if she drinks this, she will not only become increasingly thirsty, but if she keeps drinking, she is actually going to die.

The reality for us, as we think about it, is that the ocean is a good thing. It is wonderful to play in. It is wonderful to view, to sit beside, and to find ocean life and collect shells and all of these things. But it was never created to sustain us. This is what I find to be problematic when we look at people as they go into the world: they are trying to squeeze from the world what it was never intended to give.

When we keep going to the things of the world to satisfy our thirst, we are going to find ourselves increasingly thirsty because they were never created to satisfy that thirst. In fact, any time we try to satisfy an eternal thirst with a temporary item, we are going to find ourselves coming up short.

The one place that can give us an internal source of contentment and an internal sense of joy is Christ himself. He offers us himself. He says, “Come to me.” I love that passage in Isaiah 55 where he says, “Come to me, you who are thirsty. Come drink and come eat with me.” That same theme goes all the way to the book of Revelation. In the final chapter, he says to come and drink.

It is in Christ himself, this eternal fount. That is the place that we find contentment. It does not mean that we cannot enjoy the things of the world; that is what they are created for. They are for our enjoyment, but they can never satisfy us fully. So he offers us himself a much better feast, and that is where we find the ultimate contentment for our souls.