Topic: Catching Contentment – Our Daily Bread 20 March 2023
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Catching Contentment
Bible in a Year:
- Joshua 4–6
- Luke 1:1–20
I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content.
Psalm 131:2
Today’s Scripture & Insight:Psalm 131
In a psychiatrist’s advice column, he responded to a reader named Brenda, who lamented that her ambitious pursuits had left her discontented. His words were blunt. Humans aren’t designed to be happy, he said, “only to survive and reproduce.” We’re cursed to chase the “teasing and elusive butterfly” of contentment, he added, “not always to capture it.”
I wonder how Brenda felt reading the psychiatrist’s nihilistic words and how different she may have felt had she read Psalm 131 instead. In its words, David gives us a guided reflection on how to find contentment. He begins in a posture of humility, putting his kingly ambitions aside, and while wrestling life’s big questions is important, he puts those aside too (v. 1). Then he quiets his heart before God (v. 2), entrusting the future into His hands (v. 3). The result is beautiful: “like a weaned child with its mother,” he says, “I am content” (v. 2).
In a broken world like ours, contentment will at times feel elusive. In Philippians 4:11–13, the apostle Paul said contentment is something to be learned. But if we believe we’re only designed to “survive and reproduce,” contentment will surely be an uncatchable butterfly. David shows us another way: catching contentment through quietly resting in God’s presence.
Reflect & Pray
When do you most feel content? How could you set aside unhurried time to be quietly present with God today?
Dear God, I rest in You, the deepest well of my truest contentment.
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