Contentment … it’s one of the things that each one of us wants. But today, today we’re going to look at three of the things that can rob us of that contentment – girls, gold and glory.   GIRLS AND GUYS In the days when I was studying at Bible-college, a good many years ago now, the principal of the college was a man by the name of Barry Chant, and I remember quite distinctly he came down to the common area where we all gathered before lectures, and he announced that today was exactly fifty years since he’d started following Jesus. Fifty years! And the more I came to know him, as a teacher, as a colleague ultimately, and as a trusted counsellor and friend, I realised how much his life had been impacted by fifty years of walking with Jesus. The man has a maturity and a wisdom that are quite remarkable. I say that as a preface because I’m about to share with you something today that he shared with me all those years ago. We were studying in our various dreams of academia to become ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I recall one lecture where he talked about the three things that generally bring ministers unstuck. They’re really easy to remember because they all start with the letter G. Would you like to know what they are? ‘Girls, Gold and glory’. Pretty simple. Pretty powerful, and the more I think about it, those are the very same things that bring us unstuck in our search for contentment: Girls or (in the case of women) guys, gold, and glory. I want to kick off with the first one of those today because unless we get this girls/guys thing under control, then we’re not going to be content. And the whole subject of the boy/girl, man/woman relationship and intimacy thing isn’t an easy one to talk about in this day and age without sounding a bit anachronistic, because attitudes and lifestyles have changed a lot. See, these days, intimacy before marriage and indeed outside marriage is pretty much accepted in most societies as a fact of life. I think the current term is ‘Friends with benefits’, where people engage in casual sex to meet their physical needs without the emotional entanglement of an exclusive boy/girl relationship, and most couples who get married today have slept together before they get married. I heard a statistic the other day that fully thirty percent of married Australian men have visited a prostitute, not to mention the office affairs, unfaithfulness and marriage breakdowns arising out of those extramarital affairs. And as the world around us becomes more and more accepting of promiscuity as purely a lifestyle-choice, I start to find myself wondering: ‘Hang on a minute. Is it me that’s going crazy here? Am I the one who’s out-of-touch by believing that physical and sexual intimacy belongs inside a marriage, in this completely exclusive lifelong relationship between one man and one woman? Is the Biblical position on this still tenable in this day and age?’ Then I pinch myself, and I realise that what Jesus has to say is as applicable today as it was two thousand years ago because truth, His truth, is timeless, and this is what Jesus said when the religious leaders of the day came to ask Him about divorce. He said (Matthew 5:27-32): You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one of your members than your whole body to go into hell. It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce’, but I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife except for grounds of un-chastity causes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. That seems pretty harsh, doesn’t it? Pretty tough and rigid. If Jesus were alive today, they’d probably call Him an extreme conservative: A fundamentalist, but there’s a reason that Jesus takes this apparently hard-line, and that reason is that God created us male and female, in order that those of us who so choose can live in a lifelong intimate marriage as husband and wife. Plain and simple. Again, here’s what He said, quoting this time the first book in the Bible – the book of Genesis (Matthew 19:3-9): Some Pharisees came to Him to test Him and they asked Him, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’ And Jesus answered, ‘Have you not read that the One who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’, so they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate’.  They said to Him, ‘Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?’ And He said to them, ‘It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning, it was not so. And I say to you whoever divorces his wife, except for un-chastity, and marries another commits adultery’. The point is that we were created to be husband and wife and when we try to mess with that, when we try to break that, it doesn’t work. Our physiological drive to reproduce is a very strong one: Stronger in some than others, to be sure, but a strong one nevertheless. It’s a gift from God, and it’s a gift that is satisfied completely in the context of marriage, as God has always planned. You can’t be content chasing girls (or guys, as the case may be) outside marriage. It might seem fun at the time, and exciting and alluring – fabulous, but in the end, it leads to emptiness and to loss because sex without love is always empty. For me there is no one, there can never be anyone, as beautiful as my wife. She’s mine, and I’m hers. Exclusively. No exceptions; and in that, my friend, there is such great contentment. So, if you find your eye or your heart wandering, remember this: If you wander, you will never, ever be content … ever. GOLD They say that love makes the world go round, but so far as I can see, it seems to be money these days that makes the world go round or at least, it certainly makes our economies tick over. In fact, it seems to me that economies, governments and people at large, ordinary punters like you and me, are addicted to conspicuous consumption to fuel our own personal growth and wealth and status and luxury and what other people think about us, not to mention fuelling the holy grail of a prosperous nation: Economic growth. I really don’t think we even begin to realise how addicted many of us are to overconsumption: The next thing; the next dress; the next car; the next house, each one bigger and better and brighter and shinier than the last one. Noam Chomsky, who I know some people consider to be a rabid left-wing critic, says something that really resonates with me, as I look dispassionately at the multi-trillion-dollar advertising industry that bombards me constantly with the exhortation to spend up big. He says this: ‘All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is a constant pressure to make people feel that they’re helpless – that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions, and to consume’. Pretty much true, isn’t it? Advertising puts its finger on your feelings of inadequacy, in order to get you to purchase the thing that they say will make you feel adequate, even when that thing they’re selling us may not be all that good for us: Heart-healthy margarine when in fact, it’s more ...

Released on 9 Jan 2022