To Live Is Christ to Die Is Gain

by Matt Chandler

He took Philippians 1:21 and put skin on it: “To live is Christ, and to die is gain.”

Anxious Christians are bad advertisements for the God of all comfort.

But when we pray, we are “worrying” at God.

This is why Martin Luther says, “Pray, and let God worry.”

Thanksgiving and worry can’t occupy the same space. Thanksgiving is worry’s kryptonite. You can’t worry if you’re giving thanks.

John Piper says that the intellect exists to throw logs into the furnace of our affections for God. And because Paul is anything but unhelpful, he immediately gives us instructions on how to guard our minds in Christ Jesus.

Because the reality is, these circumstances we like to call “extreme” happen to more of us more often than we like to admit.

Paul has adopted the revolutionary position that he has no needs.

If Christ is all, and if he has Christ, then he really has no needs.

We live in a world where there is more to do than there has ever been in the history of mankind. There are more things to see, more places to go, and easier means to get there. We live in the most entertained world that humanity has ever experienced, and yet most of us are bored out of our minds and frustrated.

Contentment is not natural. We have to learn it, and there are two ways we can do that learning.

We learn contentment both intellectually and experimentally

There are two different ideas here.

One is that Paul is learning in the intellectual sense; he is learning the rules of contentment.

Paul can read and learn contentment from what he sees in the Scriptures. He can see in the Bible that God is better than food or shelter. He learns that God is better than life. Most of us, actually, learn contentment primarily that way.

have learned the secret.” Now he’s talking about learning in the experiential sense. He has, by experience, learned the lesson he knew intellectually.

but contentment means being satisfied not with the gifts but with the Giver.

This is why Gary Thomas calls contentment a “discipline.” It’s

Her words, however, revealed a spirit that was getting more hungry, not less: “What’s next?” she asked, with a slightly desperate edge to her voice.

there’s never enough excitement to quiet the human heart.

And of course the true test of our satisfaction with Christ is not simply our contentment with “more” but our contentment with “less.”

true contentment is not in any way related to circumstances. True contentment is tuned to the deeper