{"id":1337,"date":"2019-10-22T09:59:10","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T14:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/?p=1337"},"modified":"2019-10-22T09:59:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-22T14:59:13","slug":"contentment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/?p=1337","title":{"rendered":"Contentment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Peyton Reed is a sophomore at the University of Alabama. He is from Madison, AL and is majoring in computer science.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In our world today, there are qualities that people\nassociate with Christianity and its believers. We are expected to be kind,\nfaithful, and passionate for Christ. Evil actions and thoughts are supposed to\nhave no place in our lives. Consequently, God commands us to carry ourselves in\na way that if sin were to be factor in our life, it would be an anomaly in our\nown perception and in the eyes of others. While writing to Timothy, Paul says, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ…\u201d <\/p>

(1 Timothy 6:13)<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

To put it simply, Christians are to live above reproach.\nThankfully for us, God tells us just how to do that. In the concluding parts of\nRomans 12, Paul writes about the true marks of a Christian. He explains what\nseparates Christians from the world by defining the characteristics of a\ndisciple. He instructs for love to be genuine and to hate what is evil. Those\ntraits are mentioned immediately which gestures toward the importance that we\nlive in such a manner. Throughout the rest of the of the chapter Paul discusses\ntopics such as proactiveness, being rejoiceful, and how to live peaceably with\nothers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

            Specifically,\nin verse 12 Paul writes, \u201cRejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be\nconstant in prayer.\u201d When considering how to live a life above reproach, I\nbelieve it is impossible to ignore this verse. The central idea that comes from\nverse 12 is that we are to be content. Paul writes about true contentment in 1\nTimothy 6:6-10 when he says,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If we are living in a way that is constantly seeking for\nmore, the path we walk down is in direct conflict with God\u2019s will and leads\nonly to destruction. Paul chooses money as something to represent what we often\nreach for instead of God, but the desires can and will be different for every\nperson. Whether it\u2019s a job, a college degree, a relationship, or popularity, we\nlove to convince ourselves that something is missing from our lives, but we\nmust realize that the presence of God in our life means we are missing nothing.\nThen to truly be content, it is imperative to place value on what is right in front\nof us. Paul does exactly this when he mentions how he will be content with\nsimply food and clothing. To any human, having food and clothing is the bare\nminimum so Paul encourages Timothy to be pleased with just that. Look around at\nwhat surrounds you. There\u2019s a university you attend that prepares you for the\nrest of your life. There\u2019s a job that provides for yourself and your family.\nThere are friends that share the same faith as you. There\u2019s a building that you\nworship in. To put it into perspective, compare our basics to Paul\u2019s basics. If\nwe don\u2019t live with true contentment, then our ability to live a life free from\nsin will be greatly reduced. We can twist the temptations any way we want but a\nstrong relationship with God is the only option to living above reproach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

            When we\nreflect on contentment, we always think of our relationship with material\npossessions. Let\u2019s consider the question of are we content in our spiritual\nlives? Most people who are discontent in a worldly sense are then content spiritually.\nBeing content spiritually is the mindset of a lukewarm Christian. How can we\nshift our discontentment to our spiritual lives and be content in a\nmaterialistic perspective? After all, being discontent with our spiritual life\nis how we incite an earnest desire for a rich relationship with God.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our world today, there are qualities that people associate with Christianity and its believers. We are expected to be kind, faithful, and passionate for Christ. Evil actions and thoughts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-student-blogs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8LSHf-lz","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1337"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1342,"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1337\/revisions\/1342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tide4christ.ua.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}