Tag Archives: contentment

Beatitude = Profound Contentment

9 Jun

Inflation

This is not monopoly money. It is a genuine 100-billion-dollar banknote issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in 2008.

At the height of the country’s hyperinflation, this staggering sum was just enough to buy a loaf of bread and a pint of milk …. provided you ran to the store. If you waited too long, the currency would devalue so rapidly that you would leave with bread, the milk priced far out of reach.

The modern use of the word “bless” has undergone its own hyperinflation. 

  • After a sneeze: “Achoo!” — “Bless you.”
  • When someone makes a tiny mistake: “Aw, bless him, he tried.”
  • Condescension: “Well, bless your heart.”
  • Responding to mild inconvenience: “Bless you, that sounds exhausting.”
  • Thanking someone for something trivial: “Bless you for bringing napkins.”
  • Celebrity acceptance speeches: “God has really blessed me with this award.”
  • Athletes after winning: “Feeling blessed.”
  • Prosperity language: “We’re blessed with a new SUV.”
  • Hashtags: “#blessed” attached to luxury vacations or gym selfies.
  • End of a letter, instead of sincerely: “Blessings to you and yours.”
  • Clichés: “Have a blessed day.” 
  • Humorous idioms: “Bless this mess” on home décor signs.
  • CondesenscIon: “Bless your little heart.”
  • Pity mixed with affection: “Bless him, he doesn’t understand.”
  • Irony: “Oh, bless…” meaning “you poor fool.”

When a word is used to mean everything, it ultimately means nothing.

Gold 

Gold on the other hand, increases in value The idea of blessing involves the bestowment of divine favor and the conferring of divine benefits. It means enjoying everything that God bestows on those He adopts into His family, including all the benefits of belonging to His royal family. A modern rendering of this idea would be an exclamation: “Oh, the supreme bliss of…!”. (The verb is absent in the original Greek, so it is acceptable grammatically, to read them as exclamations.)

Fools Gold

What!?

Whoever heard of the poor in spirit, the meek, or the persecuted as partakers of supreme bliss?. Our culture is the exact opposite: “Kick, bite, scratch, revile” and “look after #1”. 

For them, these exclamations are found in stained glass windows, where an obscure saint with a mournful face has a weird, otherworldly spotlight on his head. 

Platinum

The nature of this bliss is supreme because it is independent of prosperity and outward circumstance. It has to do with character and the Kingdom that is within—the rule of God over your anger, selfishness, greed, and hatred. It is the growth of character into Christlikeness, experiencing the love and life of Christ, who even in agony maintained communion with His Father. This bliss is not food and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

The Hebrew Foundation: Ashrei

Jesus was steeped in the Psalms and very likely had Psalm 1 in mind. It opens with “Blessed! (here the verb is missing and it is probably an exclamation). “Blessed!  This  man!” it is not expressing a religious wish or a prayer for a blessing to be bestowed. It is not a wishful thought, it is a treadmill in a gymn. The Hebrew word is ashrei, an objective declaration of a state of being. “Blessed! This is what rightly ordered, flourishing human life looks like: His delight is in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night. He comes through this relentless practice to resemble a tree planted by streams of water, yielding fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.

The Greek Translation: Makarioi

The Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, they chose the word makarioi to capture ashrei. They bypassed terms that merely mean “praised” or “well-spoken of” or “happy”. In ancient Greek culture, Makarios described a distinct state of deep well-being and fullness of life. It was the word used to describe the gods, who were untouched by ordinary human misery or the shifting winds of circumstance. 

An Unshakable Joy

Because this bliss is supreme, no one and not a single thing can rob us of it. Worldly happiness promotes concern, trouble, and dissatisfaction based on greed and envy. The Beatitudes are not only independent of circumstances, the hardest circumstances actually fuel the bright flame of bliss. We see this in the martyrs, like Perpetua who exclaimed that her execution was her “coronation”. A village of Anabaptist  believers were roped around a stake, waiting for the licking flames to execute them, when a man galloped up and shouted “Wait! I too am one of them!” Then he leapt into the ring of fire.

Here and Now

Furthermore, this bliss is present. There is no sense of “suffer now and be rewarded later”; it is here and now that we enjoy it. These are not spiritual smelling salts for dying saints, but a kick in the pants to exhibit the life of Christ in fellowship with Him in everyday, trying circumstances.

EMT OR HEART SURGEON

Ultimately, this defines the word “Christian”. A Christian is one who is full of bliss. How is this possible? All my natural instincts run contrary to this. It is critical to grasp that Jesus is not prescribing these things as if through sheer will we could live up to them. He is describing people who are in a relationship with Him. He is not performing an angioplasty to clear clogged arteries, He is offering a heart transplant. 

From this new heart a butterfly begins to emerge. Then it spreads its wings and experiences true freedom; freedom from the angst that defines our age.

The Presence of God

The contemporary world measures a “blessed life” almost exclusively by visible, external metrics:

  • Comfort and physical health;
  • Wealth and material success;
  • Influence and social admiration.

Jesus shifts the focus from circumstance to functional alignment. He defines this well-being by how an entity relates to its design:

  • A compass needle is functional when it points north;
  • A train operates correctly when it remains on the tracks;
  • A branch flourishes when it remains joined to the vine.

We flourish when we are rightly aligned with our Creator.

Biblical blessedness is not the absence of suffering; it is the presence of God.

Series: Introduction to Profound Contentment

1 Hologram https://progressingpeople.wordpress.com/2026/05/21/the-beatitudes-becoming-the-hologram/ Becoming the Hologram

2 Illusion https://progressingpeople.blog/2026/06/02/beatitude-profound-contentment/

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Choose Contentment Over Un-Happy-Mess

5 Feb

I find that I have no control over my feelings – I have no idea where they come from, am bewildered by their intensity and dismayed by the turmoil they can promote. Like prowling predators, say a grizzly bear in my attic, emerging to ambush me when I least expect it.

Choice

What I have learned though, is that I can choose what to do with them.

I can focus on them, nurture them and wallow in them. That makes them determinative of my mood, and that in turn controls my reactions to life in general spilling over into behavior. They are in control, they are the landscape in which I live, I am trapped as a victim.

Or I can choose to take control. I do this by examining them and deciding if they are valid. By that I mean, if they are a reflection of unrealistic expectations, harsh self-judgement, embarrassment, shame, or  …   ?They invite me to remain mired in them, trapped by them, controlled by them, but I can evaluate them and decide that they belong in the rearview mirror, not filling the windshield of my life. By weighing them up I can decide they are not worth entertaining.

Acceptance

By acknowledging them, examining them and recognizing them I find I am able to sigh deeply, and then view them as helpful because they have given me insight and I can take what I learned about myself and then walk into the future with a new confidence and maturity. Happiness is in this sense a choice. I cannot control how and when the emotions arise, but I can choose to change my point of view about them. Then something significant occurs –  that elusive thing called happiness is no longer all consuming. (Generally happiness is realized in retrospect, I experience it when I reflect afterwards on a happy event or interaction.) 

A Human Becoming – not a Human Being

The remarkable thing is that I then experience contentment. Contented with who I am, joyful that I am a human becoming who learns from the past; expects more misery in future learning experiences, but know it is part of the rounding out of my personality. Also, it enables me to be sensitive to the moods of those around me. Contentment is a learned state of joyful acceptance, happiness is a yo-yo of conflicting misery. Contentment promotes wholeness, replacing woundedness.

Perspective is essential to every problem: it resituates us and reveals the way ahead,

Instead

How do I escape the quicksand of all encompassing sorrow or anxiety or sadness? A train heading to a washed out bridge needs the switch thrown that will change its track to a safe siding called Contentment. “Stop it!” as a command adds to the stress because like an endless looping video it will not cease. Paul writes in Philippians 4 “Do not worry about anything.” As a blunt command it is cruel, because I then add the worry that I cannot stop worrying to the worry intensifying its terror. He finishes the thought, “Instead .. by prayer, with thanksgiving, make your request known.” Do something else instead. “Instead” is the switch that changes the track of the train.

Prayer with Thanksgiving

Prayer captures the practice that focuses on the worship God. So, I immediately set the problem to one side and engage fully in contemplating God.

He is our Creator: “Try to realize what this means—the Lord is God! He made us—we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Go through his open gates with great thanksgiving; enter his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name.  For the Lord is always good. He is always loving and kind, and his faithfulness goes on and on to each succeeding generation.” (ps 100:3-5)

He is our Savior: “…. as I worship, giving thanks to you for all your loving-kindness and your faithfulness, for your promises are backed by all the honor of your name. When I pray, you answer me and encourage me by giving me the strength I need.” Psalm 138:3

He is a Redeemer: “For you know what was paid to set you free from the worthless manner of life …. It was not something that can be destroyed, such as silver or gold;  it was the costly sacrifice of Christ, who was like a lamb without defect or flaw.” 1 Peter 1:18-19. ” “But the LORD says, Do not cling to events of the past

  or dwell on what happened long ago.
19 Watch for the new thing I am going to do.

 It is happening already—you can see it now!
I will make a road through the wilderness
    and give you streams of water there.” Isaiah 43:18-19

He is our Companion. In Psalm 23 replace the personal pronouns with my name. “The Lord is Anton’s shepherd. Anton shall not want.” And so on. Be astonished by this! “He prepares a banquet for Anton,
    He welcomes Anton as an honored guest
    and fills Anton’s cup to the brim.”

Let the astonished delight be expressed in thanks giving.

Request, not Demand

Now make a request, not a demand. Only now, and not before prayer and thanksgiving, do I make a request. It is a request, not a panic stricken screaming demand. And in the light of the prayer, my request may be more like desire for a closer walk with the Shepherd rather than an outright deliverance from the situation; a yearning to let the peace that floods my being with contentment be mirrored in the situation as a testimony to His Living Presence, or asking for wisdom in the fulness of the Holy Spirit. So it it becomes a dynamic process that is like the heavy flywheel of an engine, it keeps momentum going even when the engine is idling.

Practice Makes Contentment

Paul says, and I affirm, it is a state of consciousness that is learned through practice. Just as a skill is obtained through an apprenticeship, so must we practice this dynamic of “Instead”. Every time some emotion disturbs you, determine that you will immediately set the circumstance aside, contemplate God with thanksgiving, and request His Shepherding. Ultimately it will become your reflex action, but only if you take the first faltering steps and make progress through continued practice.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,