Godliness with Contentment

In keeping with the expositional nature of our weekly sermon format, we are quite predictably in chapter 6 of 1 Timothy verses 6-8.  Although a powerful message from beginning to end, most of my thinking before, during and after the sermon centered around the single sentence of verse 6 - "But godliness with contentment is great gain."

The starting point of course is that the Bible is Truth - beginning to end the same, same Holy Spirit inspiring, equally efficacious.  Therefore we need look no further than the text itself to derive great benefit.  We are told quite simply that great gain is available - it can be had.  How?  By way of godliness with contentment.  Godliness has been Paul's theme throughout 1 Timothy and some of the ways to train to that end have been discussed in previous posts and are equally plain.  We have here that godliness with (or alongside, or joined together with, or acting simultaneously with) contentment.

Godliness has been defined as: "A right attitude and response toward the true Creator God."
Contement has been defined as: "Satisfaction with what we have and with what we don't have."

So, we train to be godly and learn to be content - that is to say we train to have a right attitude and response toward the true Creator God and learn to be satisfied with what we have and with what we don't have - and that is great gain.  Easy to understand and end of story, right.  Well, yes and no.  That is definately enough to be of great benefit.  At the very least we can strive toward godliness and in being content.  But no in that we can see deeper the same Truth without contradicting or losing the plainness of it.

As believers (well, reformed believers at least) we are substance dualists, which are two big words that mean we subsist in two forms - soul and body, spiritual and physical, eternal and temporal.  Some additional thought into those two forms will have us agreeing with C.S. Lewis that we are a soul and we have a body.  That is to say it would be a mistake for us to misunderstand our nature and believe ourselves to be finite fleshly human beings that happen to have a soul.  If that were the case, then we might be dissuaded by fine-sounding arguments relative to abortion (infanticide) and when the physical life actually begins as if that is the real point of concern for disciples of Christ.  From Genesis 1 we know that God created man in His image, that He breathed life into man and that man has an eternal destination.  We would only entertain notions of life beginning with the physical if we were to neglect or forget that transcendent Truth about mankind.  But I digress, as many more misunderstandings besides infanticide stem from the same misunderstanding.  The point here is that as created beings created in the image of our Creator and existing forever, we are a soul and we have our temporary fleshly form for a while.

So what does that have to do with godliness and contentment?  Well, if we are a soul and have a body, then our focus will be on the eternal, the spritual, the soulish nature first and foremost.  Aren't we told over and over in Scripture that this is the case?  In Romans 12:1-2 alone that our minds need to be renewed to know God's will and that our bodies should be offered as living sacrifices as spiritual acts of worship.  Our manish nature must legitimately be addressed (if we don't eat and drink we will surely die a physical death) but must be made subservient to the soulish nature.  We "beat or bodies" and "deny ourselves" such that we live with focus upon, and pursue with delight that which edifies our soulishness, even if it be to the detriment of our manishness (many times intentionally so).

I have been making a case in the positive for this deeper understanding of the same Truth, so let me present a completed negative formulation, then end with the positive formulation to which end we are to strive:

To be discontent with our temporal circumstances is to prioritize our manishness and suppress our soulishness; to prioritize the temporal over and above the eternal; to choose as more important the physical instead of the spiritual; to misunderstand our very nature and to travel down the wide, well traveled path away from Truth and Life and is to lose much.

To pursue godliness with a desire that God be glorified in all things and with a desire that we be transformed into the likeness of Christ, while resting on the knowledge that God is Sovereign and the promises that the One True God has made toward working all things out for our good (whether immediately evident to us or not) according to His will (which may or may not align with our prayers and petitions) and providing for all our needs, and therefore being satisfied with whatever material things that may be credited to our earthly account whether great or small and seeing those material things as blessings given to us to manage well and to bless others in abundance is to rightly understand our nature and to walk the narrow Way, in Truth and Life and is to gain much.