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December 12, 2018 - January 22, 2019
Epictetus wrote, “What harm is there while you are kissing your child to murmur softly, ‘Tomorrow you will die’?”
diminishing your love for others does not increase satisfaction but only undermines it.
it ultimately also hardens your heart and dehumanizes you.
We want something that nothing in this life can give us.
If we keep pursuing it in this world, it can make us driven, resentful, or self-hating.
the discontent—the feeling that nothing in the world fulfills our deepest longings—is actually a chemical response in the brain that helped our ancestors survive.
rather a disincentive for doing anything but getting high at parties. And surely this is realistic.
The evolutionary explanation of our constant discontent doesn’t seem to hold up.
Augustine
One of his lifelong projects became to discover why most people are so discontent and bereft of joy.
both a functional cause and an ultimate source.
The functional cause of our discontent is that our loves ...
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we are most fundamenta...
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by what w...
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Augustine believed all sin was ultimately a lack of love.
You are what you love.
also observed that the heart’s loves have an order to them, and that we often love less important things more and the more important things less. Therefore, the unhappiness and disorder of our lives are caused by the disorder of our loves.
The ultimate disordered love, however—and the ultimate source of our discontent—is failure to love the first thing first, the failure to love God supremely.
In his Confessions, Augustine prays to God: “For there is a joy that is not given to those who do not love you, but only to those who love you for your own sake. . . . This is happiness and there is no other. Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but theirs is not true joy. Nevertheless their will remains drawn towards some image of the true joy.”
The reason even the best possible worldly goods will not satisfy is because we were created for a degree of delight and fulfillment that they cannot produce.
“You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
We were made for God, and so nothing can give us the infinit...
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All things are precious, because all are beautiful, but what is more beautiful than He? Strong they are, but what is stronger than He? . . . If you seek for anything better, you will do wrong to Him and harm to yourself, by preferring to Him...
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If you love your children more than you love God, you will essentially rest your need for significance and security in them.
If you love anything more than God, you harm the object of your love, you harm yourself, you harm the world around you, and you end up deeply dissatisfied and discontent.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.37
The Augustinian analysis does justice to our experience.
the conundrum
Our surprisingly deep discontent leads us to lock our hearts onto things with profound intensity.
The ancients wisely taught that the only way to avoid unhappiness is to avoid th...
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However, we have seen the dangers of finding contentment through detachment.
the solution was not to love the things of life less but to love God more. The problem is not that you love your family or job too much but that you love God too little in relationship to them.
Instead infuse your heart with a sense of God’s love and incline your heart to love him in return.
The love of God can never be taken from you, and in his love, the Bible says, you live with loved ones forever.
Of course, not even the strongest believers love God perfectly, nor does anyone get close to doing so.
Instead of looking to the things of the world as the deepest source of your contentment, you can enjoy them for what they are.
But these things are not your source of safety and contentment. He is.
as Miroslav Volf puts it, “Attachment to God amplifies and deepens enjoyment of the world.”44 It does not diminish it.
Don’t love anything less; instead learn to love God more, and you will love other things with far more satisfaction.
Don’t stifle passionate love for anything; rather, redirect your greatest love toward God by loving him with your whole heart and loving him for himself, not just for what he can give you.45 Then, and only then, does the contentment start to come. That is the Christian view of satisfaction.
Even if this all makes sense to us, how do we actually know that love?
Love cannot be generated simply by an act of the will.
We must grasp and be gripped by the true story of God’s actual sacrificial, saving love for us in Jesus.
he does not just say, “I am the dispenser of the bread of life.” Rather, he says, “I am the bread of life”
The heart of the Christian faith is the simple Gospel message of sin and grace.
consider the two ways this message can bring about the love relationship with God, which solves the human dilemma.
First, the knowledge of our sin softens our hearts.
the love we owe God would be infinitely greater.
Second, the knowledge of his grace ignites our hearts.
When Jesus Christ says, “I am the bread of life. . . broken for you,” (John 6:35; Luke 22:19) he is saying: “I am God become breakable, killable, vulnerable. I die that you might live. I am broken so you can be whole.”
