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    Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment
    Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment
    Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment

    By Lydia Brownback

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    About this ebook

    This On-the-Go Devotional assures women that contentment is not some fleeting ideal but a reality that God enables them to live out daily.
    Any woman who buys into the lie of "You can have it all" or who thinks she can only be happy "if…" experiences an abiding frustration: what she wants remains just out of reach, always. No matter how good she has it, no matter how good the good times may get, there's always something missing. And ultimately, she misses out on happiness too.
    But God desires something far better and more lasting for his daughters. And he's delivered the secret in his Word, assuring women that real satisfaction is found in living for and longing for the right things. Those truths and promises are at the heart of this On-the-Go Devotional for women. Each lesson in Contentment is conveniently self-contained and comes complete with Scripture and a paragraph or two of teaching to direct women away from fleeting distractions and toward a true, enduring satisfaction.
    On-the-Go Devotionals
    "Skillful devotionals for those who face the challenge to 'fit it all in.' Biblically rigorous and deeply perceptive. Godly insights from a godly sister."
    Elyse Fitzpatrick, author of Because He Loves Me: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life
    "A ready resource for keeping our thinking focused on God himself. The devotionals helped me understand my fear or discontent and our Heavenly Father's provision."
    Barbara Hughes, author of Disciplines of a Godly Woman and, with her husband, Disciplines of a Godly Family
    "Lydia Brownback calls Christian women to lift their eyes upward and find security, rest, and peace in a sovereign God whose promises never fail!"
    Nancy Leigh DeMoss, author and Revive Our Hearts radio host
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCrossway Books
    Release dateMar 17, 2008
    ISBN9781433521393
    Contentment: A Godly Woman's Adornment
    Author

    Lydia Brownback

     Lydia Brownback (MAR, Westminster Theological Seminary) is the author of several books in addition to the Flourish Bible Study series, including the On-the-Go Devotionals for women; Finding God in My Loneliness; and Sing a New Song. She is a regular speaker at conferences and events and is passionate about teaching God's word. 

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    • 5/5
      This is a "On-the-Go" devotional book, but each short chapter is packed with the author's candid views on contentment, which are always taken from a verse(s) of scripture. I went back after reading this book and just pondered again on all the paragraphs and sentences I had underlined in the book as I read it. So many jewels of thought that calls on women to keep their eyes on our sovereign God, as He truly is our source of contentment. Highly recommend any books by this author.Just one of many quotes from her book: "We can be content with our lives exactly as they are today because God has promised he is always with us. Our problem really isn't that we need something we don't have; our problem is that we don't find God to be enough for us." Hebrews 13:5

    Book preview

    Contentment - Lydia Brownback

    the devotions

    Living in the Valley

    For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven . . . a time to break down, and a time to Fo build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; . . . a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; . . . a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

    ECCLESIASTES 3:1–8

    Laughter and tears, love and loss, work and play—such words sum up the rhythm of life. Most of us will pass through each of these seasons at one point or another, perhaps repeatedly, because they are God’s ordering for the human race in every age and time. But as we pass through some of these purposes, we do not feel much like singing about it as the Byrds did in 1965. We fight against the weeping, the mourning, the casting away, and the losing while striving to keep our lives entrenched in the laughter, the dancing, the embracing, and the peace.

    The fight is quite natural, of course. We all prefer the mountaintops to the valleys. But the God who has ordered life to flow in and out of such seasons is the same God who has provided for our contentment in every season. Contentment is possible not only on the mountaintops but in the valleys as well. How can we mourn or lose or weep with contentment? That seems totally contradictory. And indeed we cannot if our contentment hinges on getting out of the valley, because we have no control over the beginning or ending of the seasons that God appoints for each of us.

    Contentment in the valleys comes when we stop fighting so hard to climb out. God is the one who leads us into the valleys, and he will lead us back out in his time. God ordains valleys for our good; why else would a good and kind God allow them? Trusting God in our hard times is the way to contentment—not just trusting him to get us out, but trusting his goodness while we are still in them. If we will not trust him in the bad times, we are not going to trust him in the good times either. A friend of mine enjoyed a financially prosperous season a few years back, and she bought a beautiful home. Yet she wasn’t able to enjoy it, she said, because life is so good right now, but I know it can’t last. I’m always waiting for the axe to fall.

    Do we live like that, fighting so hard to stay on the peaks and to avoid the valleys? If so, we will never be happy in either place. However, if we will trust God in whichever place we find ourselves, we will know contentment whether the season is easy or hard. We will find peace in the hard times because a good Father is controlling them, and we will not be anxious in the good times because our happiness is not bound up in having to maintain them. Good times are designed to come and go, but contentment is designed to be constant for all who are in Christ.

    Could It Be Sin?

    Joshua said, "Alas, O Lord GOD, why have you brought

    this people over the Jordan at all, to give us into the hands

    of the Amorites, to destroy us? Would that we had been

    content to dwell beyond the Jordan!"

    JOSHUA 7:7

    Joshua knew better, of course. He knew that God had brought the Israelites into the Promised Land to bless them, not to destroy them. But he was frustrated because they had just lost what should have been an easy-to-win battle against the Amorites. What was God doing?

    We find ourselves in similar situations from time to time, and when we do, we, too, are baffled about what God is up to. We are careful to follow God’s ways, and we believe his promises, and yet our circumstances are just not working out. In the midst of his discouragement, Joshua wished he had never taken his preceding steps of risky faith. How much easier life was before! In the moment he forgets that life beyond the Jordan had been nothing but wilderness; his trust in God’s faithfulness and his joy in the Promised Land are obliterated by one defeat.

    Our contentment evaporates just as quickly when things go wrong in our lives. We begin to think back on an easier time, a time that, while perhaps not perfect, held a lot less pressure.

    For Joshua, the Promised Land was surely much nicer than the wilderness, but at least in the wilderness someone else—Moses—had been in charge. Now Joshua was leading the Israelites, and the weight of the Amorite defeat fell squarely on his shoulders. But God had a reason for the defeat, and rather than allowing Joshua to wallow in misery, he answered his cry. Get up! the Lord said. Why have you fallen on your face? Israel has sinned. . . . There are devoted things in your midst, O Israel. You cannot stand before your enemies until you take away the devoted things from among you (Josh. 7:10, 13). Unbeknownst to Joshua, an Israelite named Achan had failed to follow God’s express orders to destroy all the treasures, the devoted things, taken from their enemies in battle. Achan kept back a little of these riches for himself, and his secretive act was what had brought great trouble on the entire Israelite army.

    Could our present trial be the result of sin? If so, we won’t have to look far to find it. We don’t have to engage in endless speculation about what our sin might be; God is always willing to show us our sin. Sometimes, though, we refuse to see it, or we minimize it. Well, I am still struggling to give up that bad habit, but it’s such a little thing. How could that have anything to do with my difficulty? But God does not ask us to connect all the dots. He just asks us to be obedient. If there is a connection, God will make it, just like he did with Joshua. Maybe there is a connection between our unrepentant sin and our difficulty, and maybe not. The point isn’t to figure out if there is a connection and then to obey—it is simply to obey. We cannot rightly ask for or expect to be restored to a place of peace and to see God’s blessings on our lives if we are treating sin

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