Contentment, Gratitude, and Joy | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

1:52 I stopped by a lemonade stand several weeks ago. It was several of our children in the church. They were five six and seven-year-olds, Lauren and Annabelle and five of their friends. And I'd gotten wind that they were putting on this lemonade stand, raising money for Do Good for Aaron. Now, Do Good for Aaron is a foundation that was started by Tom and Marcy Langhofer, members of our church, after the death of their daughter. You remember six years ago, Aaron Langhofer was shot and killed at First Fridays down in downtown Kansas City. And in the aftermath of that, her mom and dad said, we want to try to bring as much good as we can from the loss of our daughter. And so they started this foundation, and they've been doing amazing and great work. And the kids were going to raise money for this year's project with Do Good for Aaron. And it's through the Friends of Yates. And this is in Kansas City, Kansas. And it's a domestic violence shelter. And so these kids wanted to help with that. Now, every year in the fall, we give all of our children, today is that day where we give all of our kids in Sunday school at all of our locations, $5.

2:50 So every kid in Sunday school today is getting one of these envelopes. Inside the envelope is a $5 bill. So we give the kids these $5 and we tell them that we want them to do, I mean, clearly they could go spend the money on their own, but we want them to go out and to do as much good as they can with their $5. Our hope is that you as parents or grandparents will talk to your kids about this and that you'll go out and find ways to make a difference. So these kids, their parents knew this Sunday was coming up. And so they said, we're going to advance you the $5. And then those kids went out and they bought lemonade. And here's the lemonade stand that they were having in their neighborhood. And so I stopped by and it was a Saturday afternoon and they were having fun and there were all kinds of neighbors who'd stopped by. And in the end, they raised $1,550 for Friends of Aaron to help with domestic violence, to help particularly with children and their moms who were victims of domestic violence. And I asked them, so what are you going to do with the money?

3:44 And then their parents, they told me they were giving it to do good for Aaron and their parents wanted them to get a little more specific. Here it is. Take a listen. what are we buying with the money toys and books awesome that is so cool I'm so proud of you girls for doing this that is so awesome toys and books they're buying toys and books for children their age whose mommies had been hurt in their homes in order to help those children as they were staying in a domestic violence shelter I mean I just love that and I love the fact that these kids took what ended up being I think between the kids who came to our church maybe it's 15 or 20 dollars all together, bought lemonade and raised $1,550 to be able to help other children. That's what generosity looks like. And I can tell you they had great joy in their lives as a result of that. Now, today, we're going to talk about the power of generosity for just a minute, and then we want to move into contentment and gratitude.

4:37 So generosity acts as a vaccine or an antidote, we might say, to what some call affluenza. Affluenza sounds like influenza. It has to do with the allure of affluency. So we find ourselves, most of us have this internal heart disease, if you will, that leads us towards desiring more and more and more. Another word for affluenza is simply greed. Now, this is a great time to learn this lesson or to remember this lesson, the importance of vaccinating ourselves against affluenza, especially as this Friday is Black Friday. Now, this is the biggest shopping day of the year when you add together the online shopping and the physical shopping. It's the largest shopping day of the year. And then from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, Americans are expected to spend $127 billion, billion with a B, billion dollars on presents for other people as we're preparing for the Christmas holiday. And you know, of course, at this time, that by the time we get to Christmas this season, the experts are saying that we will spend almost a trillion dollars on Christmas presents in America.

5:42 I want you to think about that. a trillion dollars or nearly a trillion dollars on Christmas presents in America. Now I learned this week that something like five billion pounds of Christmas presents are going to end up in the city dumps in landfills across America. Forty percent are going to be returned and of that that are returned some of them will never make it back on the shelves and so some of it is going to be simply dumped in landfills. Now I got to tell you I love Christmas shopping. I don't love the shopping, but I love buying Christmas gifts for my family members. I enjoy Christmas. I enjoy exchanging gifts. It is a form of generosity, and it's a lot of fun for me. At the same time, I've often thought it strikes me as strange that for the holy day, the holiday in which we're celebrating the birth of Jesus, who was born in essence in a first century parking garage. He was born in the stable where the donkeys were kept, where his crib was an animal's feeding trough, and whose first words when he began to preach was that he came to bring good news to the poor that we spent a trillion dollars celebrating his birthday.

6:43 And one of the things I appreciate here at Resurrection is that we celebrate Christmas at Resurrection in a little bit different way. So we invite our members starting this week as you're heading towards Black Friday to begin thinking about the Christmas Eve offering. And we give away the entire Christmas Eve offering as many of you know. Last year, you gave $2.1 million in one night on Christmas Eve in order to benefit low-income children and their families. Half of it stays in the United States. For those in the Kansas City area, it stays here. For those of you who are in Mason, Ohio, it's going to go to projects in Mason, Ohio. So half of it stays locally, and then the other half goes internationally to benefit people who are in need. And I just want to show you a few pictures of recipients of last year's funds. So let's go put those on the screen, if you would. So these were projects in Malawi. This is a health project in Malawi. Go to the next one, and you'll find these are kids in a preschool. in South Africa.

7:35 The preschool's built around a trash dump where these families live. These are the boreholes. We built another 10 boreholes this last year as a result of the Christmas Eve offering providing clean drinking water for people in Africa. Here is another village that you lit up with solar light kits in Africa. Go to the next picture, and you're gonna see this is a classroom that you provided at Operation Breakthrough. You made this possible. You're remodeling this space and providing a classroom for more children to be able to go to preschool. This is our backpack ministry, at least one of the teams that helps with it, And you provided the stuff that goes in the backpacks to provide food for people over the weekends who are hungry otherwise here in Kansas City. And our food mobile, which you helped stock as a result of the Christmas Eve offering. And that's just six of the projects of like 25 that you funded through last year's Christmas Eve offering. Over the last, I don't know, 15 or 20 years that we've been giving away the Christmas Eve offering, 16 I think it is, you've given $24 million to benefit low-income children and their families in Kansas City and around the world.

8:33 And I want to mention one of the challenges we make to people is to consider giving an amount in the Christmas Eve offering equal to what you spend on your own family for Christmas. Now, that sounds impossible to some, and it is impossible for some. But for many, they give many times that amount. But our family, we do this. We add up everything we spent on our family, our extended family, and then we're going to give that amount in the Christmas Eve offering or more. That's part of our Christmas tradition now. And it adds meaning to our Christmas. and it vaccinates us against, I think, affluenza and greed. Now, I have to say that this idea of giving away the Christmas Eve offering was actually one that I took from a friend of mine, Mike Slaughter, who I think is worshiping at Resurrection Mason, Ohio right now, this Sunday. And he wrote a book a number of years ago called Christmas Is Not Your Birthday. And I just love the book and I love the title, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday. And he reminded his congregation at Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Ohio. He said, you know what?

9:26 we are so focused on buying all these presents, but we're really celebrating somebody else's birthday. And how should we rightly celebrate Jesus' birthday if it's not ministering to the poor and coming alongside them? And so for Mike, he spent years providing clean drinking water and other projects like that in the Sudan. And I really appreciate you, Mike. And thanks for sharing that idea with us here at Resurrection. You continue to have an impact far outside of Ohio by the work that you've done. Okay, so the issue that we're wrestling with is really not Christmas. That's simply how we celebrate it. It's simply a symptom of a deeper issue. The issue is discontentment. Discontentment. And our conviction is inside that if we just had a little bit more, we'd finally be happy. An entire book of the Old Testament was written dedicated to this problem. The book is Ecclesiastes. And traditionally, it was written by Solomon. The actually author of the book only He claims to be the teacher.

10:17 But here's part of what we read in chapter two. I refrained from nothing that my eyes desired. I refused my heart and no pleasure. But when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had worked so hard to achieve, I realized that it was pointless, a chasing after the wind. Now, when I think about this, you know, in our lives, we find this too. We find ourselves yearning for things. We desperately want to have something. And then it doesn't take very long until we're not very happy with it anymore. Scott talked about that in week one, where we talked about hedonic adaptation, that we feel like we gotta have this thing that's gonna make us happy, and then we get it, and a short time after we have it, we find ourselves searching for the next thing that we wanna have on our list. It just doesn't satisfy for very long. And in this, I think about a picture of this relentless search to have more and more and better and bigger and faster, and it reminds me of this little creature on the hamster wheel.

11:10 Take a look. And there he is. He just keeps running and running and running and running, and he keeps going faster and faster and faster and faster until finally he just finds himself completely exhausted. He can't do it anymore. And then this is what happens to him. And that's what it feels like in our lives sometimes, that we're on this hedonic hamster wheel and we just can't jump off. And we think, well, if we just get enough stuff, we'll find ourselves happy. And by the way, I remember when my kids were growing up at home and we get done with opening all the presents and it was like my kids were catatonic by the time they were done. There was no, that had lost a sense of joy is just too much, too much. You know, and that's how we often live in America. I was struck this week by reading a speech that President Jimmy Carter gave. It was the night before he was coming to Kansas City. So he gave this speech on July 14th, 1979. He'd be in Kansas City on July 15th. And this is what he said.

12:02 Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose. And I'm reminded when I read that quote of St. Augustine who said in the 4th century, or maybe it was the early 5th century, when he said, our lives, our hearts will constantly be restless. They'll be forever restless until they find their rest in God. Along these lines, I was struck by a question asked by a woman named Viola Walden some 50 years ago. And here was the question. She said, which tent will you live in? Now take a look at these two tents. Which tent will you live in? There is the tent of discontentment. And you can see just this person hoarding everything that they have. And then there's the tent of contentment where somebody has less and yet they find they actually have more.

12:58 So I'll just talk for just a moment about contentment. And I'd really like for you and me together to make this our goal in our lives. to be able to experience contentment in our lives. So I'm reminded, you know, contentment is the state of being satisfied. And Benjamin Franklin, it was, who said this, contentment makes poor men rich, but discontentment makes rich men poor. Contentment makes poor men rich, but discontentment makes rich men poor. Now, there are things in life that we're meant to be contented with, and then there are things in life we're not meant to be contented with. We're meant to have a holy discontent, right? I'm meant to be discontent with how much I love other people. I'm meant to be discontent with my generosity. I'm meant to be discontent with my spiritual life so that I'm constantly yearning to have a deeper walk with Christ. I'm meant to be discontent in how I give towards other people. I mean, there's a lot of things I'm meant to be discontent with, but there's a whole lot of things I'm meant to be content with.

13:52 So Scottish political philosopher Sir James McIntosh once said this, it is right to be contented with what we have, but not what we are. The challenge for many of us is that we are content with the wrong things and discontent with the wrong things. The writer of Hebrews captures this idea of contentment. In Hebrews 13, 5, he says, your way of life should be free from the love of money, and you should be content with what you have. But how do we find contentment? Now, I wrote a book a number of years ago called Enough, and one whole chapter is just devoted to this idea of becoming content, and I list about four different ways that you can cultivate contentment. I want to focus only on one of those, and that is the practice of gratitude. The giving thanks, expressing gratitude, cultivating gratitude in your heart is one way to vaccinate yourself against discontentment. So, by the way, is generosity.

14:45 All right, so as we think about this, the fundamental orientation of our lives in Scripture is meant to be a couple of things. One is, again, generosity. That's what we've been talking about for three weeks. The other is practicing gratitude. So we are meant to be grateful people. We're meant to look at everything in our lives, the world around us, and to recognize it's all a gift. You wake up in the morning. In fact, I challenge our congregation to pray five times a day. And you've heard me say this if you've been around the church any length of time. Five times a day. And you go, are you kidding me? How can I pray five times a day? I don't have time for that. And I always ask the question, how long does it take to say thank you? Because the fundamental basic message of prayer, the basic orientation of prayer and praise and worship is thank you. Just two words. Thank you. You wake up in the morning, get down on your knees. Thank you. You have breakfast. Thank you. Lunch. Thank you. Dinner. Thank you. You go to bed at night. Thank you. Right? This is meant to be the rhythm of our lives, a practice of gratitude. Now, in Scripture, we find gratitude along with generosity are two of the most basic impulses in the Christian life.

15:45 So gratitude recognizes that the blessings, first of all, it stops to see the blessings all around you. Right? There are so many things we can look at and say, well, I wish my life was better here or there. But you stop and you go, let me just focus on all the good things in life, in my life, in the world around me. And then when you do that, you realize that many of these, most of these, you had very little to do with, right? The sun that warms the planet, the water that, you know, the rain we've had here in Kansas City this week, you know, all of these things, the oxygen that we breathe, like you didn't create any of it. You just absorb it. Your very life actually was a gift from God and your parents. I mean, life is a gift. And we understand that, we know that, but sometimes we forget it. And the fundamental orientation of life is meant to be gratitude. So scripture calls us again and again to be grateful, to give thanks to God, to be thankful, as Paul says in Colossians. Be thankful, he says.

16:39 Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, the psalmist says. His love endures forever. Now practicing gratitude leads to contentment in so many areas of my life. So I shared this story before. In fact, I share it every couple of years probably, but because to me, it's just such a basic fun story that illustrates this. So I bought a Mustang convertible in 2012, fall of 2012. It's the nicest car I ever bought. It was a Mustang convertible, GT, California Special, 420 horsepower. And I really enjoyed that car. But you know, two years later, three, four years later, I guess it was, they came out with a new model. When the new model came out, I started thinking to myself, you know what? It'd be kind of nice to have that new model of Mustang. And then every year since then, so now I've had it for 13 years, every year since then, they've improved upon the last model, you know, and this year I checked it out recently online, 480 horsepower. Mine has 420 horsepower. The new ones have 480 horsepower. Let me tell you, they sound really good compared to my Mustang. This is what they sound like.

17:38 I heard that online and I'm like, I got to have me one of those. I need that extra 60 horsepower. I need that sound coming out of my exhaust. And, you know, here's how I got over that. And so not that I'm never going to buy a new car, another new Mustang. I might somewhere down the road. But here's how I get over it each year is I stop and I look at my Mustang. And, you know, it's got some dings in it. And it's got some places where the carpet's, you know, wearing out. But I look and I go, you know what? You're still a good looking car. And I still enjoy driving you. And you know what? I'm just grateful that I have a chance to have this old car. It's only worth $10,000 if that probably today. But when I start giving thanks for what I have, I find that the need to have something more begins to diminish. I'm still grateful for you, my old black Mustang. Now, LaVonna and I have been married.

18:31 So this isn't just to do with stuff. This has to do with everything, right? LaVonna and I have been married for 43 years. each day since we got married, I have given thanks to God for every day. We've been married 15,877 days and at least 15,877 times, I've said somewhere in the morning, before I go to bed at night, when I wake up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom, I just stop and I go, thank you God for LaVon. I'm so grateful for her. And you know, today, it's usually about five or six times that I say that. So again, at every time I pray, almost every time I give thanks to God for the blessing of my wife. Now, I want you to imagine if either LaVon and I decided that instead of giving thanks for each other, we were going to focus on all the things that disappointed us about the other person. And I can tell you that there are things that frustrate us after 43 years of marriage. There are things that still irritate us that, you know, we're not the perfect spouses, either one of us. And so I'm pretty sure if we had spent the last 15,777 days thinking of all the things that disappointed us in the other or all the things we wish that that other person did better than they do, we wouldn't still be married today. There's something powerful about giving thanks for the blessings that you have as opposed to constantly focusing on the things you don't have. Now, you undoubtedly know some of the research on gratitude. So there's hundreds of studies that have been done by researchers. I mean, these are not Christians writing Christian books for Christian churches. These are researchers at secular universities. These are health officials, mental health officials. These are people who, National Institutes of Health, and they've done all these studies on gratitude. Robert Emmons is the one who's probably best known for this.

20:05 And this little chart comes from information from his studies. So here's part of what some of these studies have sounded. Grateful people on average give 20% more away. They have 13% fewer fights. People's income is roughly 7% higher when they are grateful, when they're grateful and they, as a result of their gratitude, find themselves happier. 20% more likely to get A grades when they're in school when people are expressing gratitude. Teens are 10 times less likely to start smoking when they have an attitude of gratitude. Gratitude, he found, is related to age. So for every 10 years, gratitude increases by 5%. So if you're older, you're meant to be not grumpier, but more grateful in life. Grateful people will have 10% fewer stress-related illnesses. They're going to be more physically fit and have a blood pressure that's lower by 12%. They have more satisfying relations and they're liked better by other people when they're grateful.

20:58 And overall, positive emotions like gratitude can add up to seven years to your life, right? There is something very powerful about cultivating an attitude of gratitude. By the way, this weekend at Church of the Resurrection at all of our in-person locations, and if you're worshiping with us online or on TV and you reach out to us at core.org slash next, we'll send you one of these if we have any left after the weekend. And that is our gratitude journal. We did this about six or seven years ago, and I really love the practice. This is our Advent gratitude journal. So what we want you to do, it's a lined little book. It's got about 60 pages in it. And we would like for you either in the morning or at night, I do mine at night, I write a little note. In mind, I write a letter to God. Dear God, I am so grateful for these things today. And I named three things. And the research all says, if you're naming three things that you're grateful for every day, you're gonna find all of these benefits begin to accrue to you. And so we're gonna write you, We're gonna ask you to try this for the next, well, through the season of Advent.

21:54 So all the way from now, Thanksgiving, through Christmas, we're gonna really, to the end of the year, you got enough pages to go to January 1st to write, you can write a letter to God saying thank you, or you can just say, these are the things I'm thankful for today, just a little short journal entry. It takes you no more than two or three minutes max to write down three things that you're grateful for. And they may be things that you personally experience or things you see in the world around you, but write down three things that you're grateful for. And again, this is in fulfillment of what scripture teaches us again and again, that we are to give thanks to God for he is good. His love endures forever. See what happens if you try this every day for the next 30 or 40 days, giving thanks to God for, or just writing things you're thankful for, whether you give thanks to God or not. Maybe you're an atheist or agnostic and you're just kind of tuning in today. I want to encourage you to try this idea of being grateful for 30 or 40 straight days and see what impact it begins to have on you. All right, so gratitude makes a difference in how we face everything.

22:51 It improves the quality of our lives. It changes the quality of our relationships. It improves the depth and the spirituality of our life with Christ. And it also acts, really, gratitude acts to cultivate contentment. Contentment and gratitude and generosity work to counteract this constant appeal or need for more. So when I think about this, this gratitude also helps us in the face of adversity. And I've seen this in so many ways at so many different times. So I think about Paul writing his first letter in the New Testament was probably 1 Thessalonians. And he writes to a little church of people who'd been harassed and persecuted for their faith. They'd lost several loved ones already in the congregation. So Paul has to address death in the midst of that too, as people were grieving. So there's sadness and harassment and grief. And yet in the midst of that, he writes these words, give thanks in every situation, because this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

23:46 I wonder if you'd say that out loud with me. Let's just read it together. Give thanks in every situation because this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. When you're frustrated at work, give thanks in every situation because this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. When you're facing battles with your health, give thanks in every situation because this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. When you're struggling with depression or anxiety, give thanks in every situation because this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. When you're not sure how you're gonna make it through, give thanks in every situation because this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Listen, you're not giving thanks for the hardship. You're not giving thanks because your boss is a jerk. You're not giving thanks because you have health problems. You're not giving thanks because you're depressed or anxious right now. You are in the middle of that depression or anxiety or the health crisis or whatever you're facing. You are looking for the good in life and you're giving thanks in those circumstances. You're giving thanks to God because this is God's will in Christ Jesus for you.

24:45 Now, I also remember when things are really hard, you're giving thanks because you know that God walks with you through the hard times, through the hardship, even through the valley of the shadow of death. He walks with you. In the middle of the storms, he walks with you. You're giving thanks because he is the God who redeems and forces good to come from suffering and pain. I visited one of our members a week ago. This was a week ago Saturday. And I went to the rehab hospital near KU. he had received he'd just gotten back from mayo where he had brain surgery he had um he was facing a really challenging prognosis a difficult diagnosis and a challenging prognosis a hard thing to be facing and as i sat at the rehab hospital with me he told me that there was a song that he kept listening to over and over and over again it's one of my favorite christian songs it was written by casting crowns or recorded by casting crowns and he would listen to it again and again. And the song begins with these words. I was sure by now, God, you would have reached down and wiped our tears away, stepped in to save the day. And once again, I say amen. And it's still raining. But as the thunder rolls, I barely hear your whisper through the rain. I'm with you. And as your mercy falls, I'll raise my hands and praise the God who gives and takes away. And then this is the refrain. Take a listen.

26:14 I praise you in the storm. I'll give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for me. And with tears in his eyes, he was describing what it felt like when he would listen to that song again and again and he would praise God in the storms of this diagnosis and the frightening prognosis. I wanna invite you to remember to give thanks to God in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus and what you find is it strengthens you and helps you and inoculates you and saves you and rescues you.

27:10 in your heart, it changes things when you give thanks to God. I want to begin to wrap this up. I want to share a word about Warren Buffett. You may know that Warren Buffett is 95 years old and he's retiring at the end of this year. Can you imagine working until you were 95? There he is right there, retiring at the end of this year. You may know that Warren Buffett has lived in the same house in Omaha, Nebraska for 40 years. So this is the man who would be the richest man in the world had he not started giving away billions. He's given away $60 billion already, and he still has $130 billion left. And that $60 billion that he's given away would be worth $100 billion if he'd kept it all those years. And so here's a man who's living in a house that's about the same size as many of you in the area, about a five-mile radius of this church, and of maybe the same value as some of you live in in your homes. And, you know, when he became the wealthiest man in the world, he didn't decide that he needed 10 more homes.

28:08 He decided he liked his home just fine. Can you imagine how hard that must have been not to buy into what the world says that he should be living in this fabulous mansion somewhere in Florida or California with a beachfront? I mean, all the things now. I think he does actually have another house somewhere else, a vacation home. He has two houses, I believe. But I was thinking about that, and I thought, what does it take to be able to decide that you're going to be content as opposed to living in the tent of discontentment? I think about some of the things that I read this week so Ryan Reed one of our members here at Resurrection sent me a couple of weeks ago Warren Buffett's Thanksgiving letter so he wrote a Thanksgiving letter to shareholders because he's not doing his annual shareholders report anymore he wrote his letter to his shareholders and part of what he was doing was reinforcing the fact that he believed in his successor and knew that that person was going to do a great job part of what he was explaining was why he was getting rid of some of his stock and he didn't want anybody to panic He was getting rid of some of his stock because he was giving it to his children's foundations.

29:08 And he'd given them marching orders to do as much good as they could with the money that he was giving them. I think again to our children getting their $5. This is what he was doing with his kids. Of course, his kids are in their 70s also now. But he said, you know, you don't have to be perfect, but I want you to do everything you can with this money to make a difference in the world. They'd already been doing this for some time. But this is, you know, this is how he defines success. And then I love what he said here. He says in this letter, he says, Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity, or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless, but also priceless. And whether you're religious or not, it's hard to beat the golden rule as a guide to behavior. By the way, when I think about our children who are getting their $5 and what they do with it, those little girls, 5, 6, and 7, who have their lemonade stand, and I think about Warren Buffett, I see the same thing and that's Jesus' parable of the talents where he talks about a certain king, which of course represents God, that the certain king gave to his servants a certain amount of resources or wealth, talents and these talents were quantities or sums of gold or silver and he gave these to them and they were huge sums and the expectation was that they would use them to do the work of the king while the king was in a foreign country.

30:27 So the king leaves and when he comes back, he finds one had doubled what he had been given. And this symbolizes the idea of being, you know, taking what you've been given and using it. In this case, really spiritually, the message is for the glory of God. And the second person had a little bit less they were given, but they doubled that. They used it. And the king was proud of them, said, you know, well done, good and faithful servants. And then the third one just buried the town in the ground. And the king was not happy with that person because they failed to understand what they were supposed to do with what they had. These little girls understood what they were gonna do. They were gonna make a difference. And Warren Buffett had figured this out a long time ago, that he didn't need more and more and more, and that what he was supposed to do was have, you know, as positive an impact as he could on the world around him. At one point in an interview, Buffett was asked about the simplicity of his life. And I love that. He says, would 10 homes make me happier? And the answer was obviously no.

31:22 And then he continued, possessions possess you. And the implication was that you don't want to be possessed by your possessions, but to make sure you possess them and then use them well. And then finally, I love this. He said, I don't like a $100 meal as well as a hamburger from McDonald's. All right, I wanna ask you again. Which tent do you wanna live in?

31:44 Do you wanna live your life in the tent of discontentment or do you wanna live your life in the tent of contentment? Do you wanna continue on the hamster wheel of acquisition, constantly yearning for more, desperately trying to have more and your retirement savings and the possessions that you have and the way you work your job so you can just, if you can just get a little bit more, you'll finally be happy and then find yourself completely exhausted? Or are you able to say at some point, you know, I think I have enough. And the capacity to do that comes when we decide that we're going to give thanks in all circumstances. We're going to give thanks in every circumstance because this is God's will for us in Christ Jesus. My dream and hope for you as your pastor here at Church of the Resurrection is that you would be people who learn to cultivate contentment, who see that as a value, that you want to be contented, which means that you're going to be cultivating gratitude in your lives.

32:40 And in the process of doing that, you're going to remember that the order in which we use our resources starts with giving. By the way, I was thinking about this this week. You know, we gave these boxes to our children last week, and they said on them, give, save, and spend. And, you know, in the world, what we find is the order of these is generally spend. And if you have anything left, save a little bit and then give. And if you meet with a financial planner, most of them are gonna say, well, start with saving and then spend. And then if you have anything left, you have, you know, you give. But here's what the Bible teaches us. We start with giving. We start with generosity. We put those first things first. That's like what we were made for. And then we save enough so that we can, you know, take care of ourselves when we're older, but we don't want to make our 401k an idol. And then we spend in a way that honors God, blesses others, and allows us to enjoy the life that God has given to us.

33:35 And when we do that, and that's only possible, again, when we're cultivating contentment, and we cultivate contentment by giving thanks in all circumstances, what we find is the life that God intended for us to have. And that's my hope and prayer for you. I wanna end with two last things that are really important. One of those is just to say, again, thank you for your generosity and to encourage you to be thinking about the candlelight Christmas Eve offering because we're gonna change the world together this year like we have each year in the past. I wanna encourage you to think about as you're doing your shopping on Black Friday, hey, don't forget to set aside maybe a little simpler this year at Christmas. Let's make sure that we're giving to people who really need it. That's a great way to celebrate Christmas and to find more meaning in your Christmas. And the second is, if you are a part of this church family and you have yet to return your Commemba card, I want to encourage you to do that today. So if you're in person, you have a commitment card with you. If you're online, you can go to core.org slash next and you can click the link and you can give that way.

34:30 If you are a part of another congregation and you tune into us, we'd love to have your support here, but we really want you to support your local congregation. So that's your priority. But again, if you're a part of the church and you've not done it, I want to encourage you to do that this week because returning your commitment card is a sign. It's a sign of your commitment to God. It's a sign of giving thanks in all circumstances. It's a sign of putting God first. It's a sign of what really matters in your life. And I was reminded of that a week ago Friday. A week ago Friday, Pat Harlan passed away. She and her husband, Ron, have been ushers. Pat has helped in our reading programs. They've been members of the church for 11 years. This is a picture of them. Two really delightful people. I love these people. And Pat passed away last Friday. And in the morning, the family was there with Ron. And in the afternoon, I stopped by on the way to church. and the family left. They wanted him to be able to rest.

35:22 But before he'd laid down, he was still up. I stopped by and stepped inside. We had a chance to visit and celebrate, you know, the years that they'd been married together, their love for each other, to give thanks to God for her life, to give thanks even in these circumstances, right? In the midst of his grief, to give thanks to God for the blessings of his wife and the life that they'd shared together. And then we prayed together. And before I left, he said, Pastor, I just want you to know, last Sunday, we were worshiping online because she couldn't come to church anymore. And he said, before the service was over with, Pat turned to me and said, now, don't you forget to get our commitment card turned in this week. And he said, on Tuesday of this week, or maybe it was Wednesday, he said, I left the house for just a little while and took my card and I mailed it at the mailbox, took it to the mailbox in order to be able to do what Pat really wanted to make sure we had done. Because you see, for Pat and for Ron, turning in their commitment card was one expression of their gratitude to God, one way of investing in God's work that God was doing through our congregation, one way of saying, God, you matter to us more than anything else.

36:23 I wanna encourage you today. I wanna encourage you to get off the hamster wheel. I wanna encourage you to get out of the tent of discontent and to move to the tent of contentment. I wanna encourage you to be people who give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. And I wanna encourage you to move from spend, save, and give to give, save, and spend and see if it doesn't make a difference in your life. Would you pray with me? God, how grateful we are to you for all of your blessings. We realize that every day is a gift from you. We realize that in the midst of the storms, you are still with us. You walk with us and through the storms with us. And you, oh Lord, are capable of bringing from hardship and pain and adversity something good and beautiful. And you promised us that even the worst thing is never the last thing. Help us to be people whose lives are defined by generosity.

37:19 Help us to put you first in our spending, in our priorities. Help us to be generous towards other people. And Lord, help us to cultivate contentment in our hearts and to cultivate gratitude as a way of life. In Jesus' name.