The Art of Divine Contentment

by Thomas Watson

• “Discontent is to the soul, as disease is to the body.”
• “It is our work to cast care, and it is God’s work to take care.”
• God has bestowed upon us the great faculty of memory (the Scribe of the Soul as Aristotle styles it) and yet, how soon do we forget the sacred truths of God. We remember injuries—this is to fill a precious cabinet with dung—but we are apt to forget three things: our faults, our friends, and our instructions.
• There are in Religion two things, Credenda and Facienda, and both are against nature:
• 1. Credenda, matters of faith: as, for a man to be justified by the righteousness of another; to become a fool that he may be wise; to save all by losing all; this is against nature.
• 2. Facienda, matters of practice; as:
• Self-denial – for a man to deny his own wisdom, and see himself blind; his own will and have it melted into the will of God; plucking out the right eye, beheading and crucifying that sin which is the favourite, and lies nearest the heart; this is against nature and therefore must be learned.
• Self-examination – for a man to take his heart, as a watch all in pieces; to set up a spiritual inquisition, or court of conscience, and traverse things in his own soul; to take David’s candle and lantern, and search for sin; nay, as judge, to pass sentence upon himself; this is against nature, and will not easily be attained without learning.
• When a stone ascends, it is not a natural motion, but a violent; the motion of the soul heaven-word is a violent motion, it must be learned; flesh and blood is not skilled in these things; Nature can no more cast out nature that Satan can cast out Satan. The gospel is full of jewels, but they are locked up from sense and reason. The angels in heaven are searching into these sacred depths. Let us beg the Spirit of God to teach us.
• A gracious spirit is a contented spirit.
• It is a hard lesson. Some angels in heaven had not learned it; they were not contented, though their estate was very glorious, yet they were still soaring aloft, and aimed at something higher (Jude 6). Our first parents, clothed with the white robe of innocency in paradise, had not learned to be content; they had aspiring hearts, and thinking their human nature too low and homespun, would be crowned with deity, and be as Gods. Though they had the choice of all the trees in the garden, yet none would content them but the tree of knowledge. If then this lesson were so hard to learn in innocency, how hard shall we find it, who are clogged with corruption!