At Peace With It, Until Sunday

There is a man who is genuinely fine, and who stops being fine for about four hours every week, and the four hours are on a Sunday.

Picture him. He is fifty one. He maintains heating systems for a housing association. He has done it for nineteen years and he is unusually good at it, and he likes the driving between jobs and he likes the older tenants and he has no complaints about his life at all.

He is not resigned. This is not a man who has given up on something. He genuinely has a settled peace about his work, and it took him about fifteen years to get there, and it is real.

And then most Sundays, somewhere around eleven o'clock, something happens.

It is never a whole sermon about it. It is a phrase. A passing reference to living for something bigger. A prayer for the ones who feel stuck in the ordinary. A line, delivered warmly, about how God has more for you than this.

And he goes home restless.

By Tuesday it has usually worn off. By the following Sunday it comes back.

And here is what he has never said to anybody, and it is the reason this is the last article on this site.

He is not sure whether the restlessness is God, or whether it is a room full of well meaning people accidentally taking something from a man who did not need it taken.

Paul says he had to learn it

There is a sentence in Philippians that people quote constantly and almost nobody reads as a claim about acquisition.

Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. (Philippians 4:11, King James Version)

I have learned.

Not I have always been. Not I naturally am. Learned, which means there was a time when he was not, and a process by which he became so.

Which makes contentment an achievement rather than a temperament, and an achievement is not something a person should be talked out of by a passing phrase on a Sunday morning.

You have acquired something rather than settled for something, and Philippians 4 has a man saying I have learned rather than I have always felt (Philippians 4:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who did that teaching over the fifteen years it took.

And the next verse makes it plainer still.

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. (Philippians 4:12)

I am instructed. That is a word about training, the kind used for being initiated into something through experience.

He is describing a skill. Not a mood, and not a resignation, and not a lowering of expectation. A learned capacity, arrived at through a long time in different conditions.

You have been instructed in something rather than worn down into it, and Philippians 4:12 uses a word about training and initiation (Philippians 4:12), and the Spirit of God is the one who has been doing that training in a man in a van for nineteen years.

Great gain

There is a line in First Timothy that puts a value on it, and the value is startling.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. (1 Timothy 6:6)

Great gain.

That is commercial language. It is the word for profit, for a surplus, for having come out ahead. And it is being applied to godliness together with contentment.

Which means that what this man has, and has been quietly apologizing for since about eleven o'clock this morning, is described in Scripture as a profit rather than as a plateau.

You are holding something the letter calls great gain, and 1 Timothy 6 uses commercial language about godliness with contentment (1 Timothy 6:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man value a thing he has been taught to be faintly embarrassed about.

And note what it is paired with. Godliness with contentment. The two together. Not godliness with ambition, and not godliness with restlessness, and not godliness with a sense that there must be something more.

You are not missing an ingredient, and 1 Timothy 6:6 puts godliness and contentment together and calls the pair the gain (1 Timothy 6:6), and the Spirit of God is the one who assembled both of them in a man over nineteen years.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could be turned into a weapon against a church, and it must not be.

This is not saying preachers should stop calling people to more. Some people in that room genuinely are settling, out of fear, and they need what is being said.

It is also not saying that restlessness is always false. Sometimes God does move somebody and the restlessness is real and precedes a change.

What it is saying is narrower and firmer. A general call addressed to a room lands differently on the man who is settling out of fear and on the man who has learned contentment over fifteen years, and only one of those two needs it, and the other one has been picking up something that was not sent to him.

And plainly: if the restlessness has become something heavier, if it does not lift on a Tuesday any more, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is not a Sunday problem. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. That is not a failure of faith.

You are not being told to stop listening, and Philippians 4 describes a learned state rather than an argument against anybody preaching (Philippians 4:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man which sentence in a room was actually addressed to him.