This is the third in a series of short conversations between Pastor Chris Peters and Director of Women’s Ministries Laura Dougherty on Jeremiah Burroughs’ The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment. You can watch the first two videos here and here.
Laura puts a direct question to Pastor Chris in this conversation: what has pursuing contentment actually looked like in your own life?
Pastor Chris points to something Burroughs calls the school of Christ, the idea that contentment is learned rather than inherited. You encounter it in the ordinary situations of daily life, in the small frustrations and the larger losses, and those become the classroom.
For Pastor Chris, one of those classrooms was an early morning workout group he’d been part of for about a year and a half. It was a demanding routine, and he was one of the older guys in the group. More than just a workout, it had become a space for Bible study and building relationships with the men there. Then last summer, during a session, he dislocated a shoulder, an old injury from high school that hadn’t caused trouble in fifteen years. Just doing jumping jacks. The injury required surgery and sidelined him from the group.
It was discouraging in a way that went beyond the physical. He had been investing in those relationships and that community, and suddenly he couldn’t be there. The question that follows that kind of loss, “Why would this happen?”, is exactly the kind of question Burroughs wrote for. His answer isn’t to minimize the difficulty but to locate it within something larger: God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition, even the ones that don’t make sense in the moment.
Burroughs defines Christian contentment as “that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.” The school of Christ is where that frame of spirit gets formed.
Follow along each week as Pastor Chris and Laura continue the conversation.
