Contentment and Motivation

2Co 12:9-10

And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness." Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. (10) Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

How do we live whole heartedly in contentment and at the same time find motivation for doing the will of the Lord on earth?
If I just look at my own life, I have used anger, fear, injustice, pride; all as spiritual motivations. I have lead people into action based on needs, social conditions and fear of what might happen if “a certain choice was made.” I have been maturing more and more away from a Christianity that is based on human idealism and fear, and I have been growing in a Christianity that is increasingly motivated by love and membership in the body of Christ.
I must admit that in America it is hard to give a call to action based on loving obedience to the Lord. We tend to like hype, triumphalism and even the fear of evil as our basic motivations. O, sure we use the words love and obey, but the inner reality of hearing the obeying the Lord is suspect. I found a great many people who liked me when I told them just to read the Bible and do what it says. When I started telling people to be patient and seek the Lord himself for direction, people got angry with me. It seems that our culture is agreeable to obedience to what we read in Scripture, but not very agreeable to the leading of the Holy Spirit, trusting the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth and living by faith and not works. Why is it that “Bible only” people have so much passion to do and to have you do, the parts of scripture they like? Why do they avoid the parts they don’t like. I have had a man yell at me about not doing evangelism right after he admitted that he, in no way, was going to submit or obey those in authority over him. I felt it was like listening to the man who cheated his boss at work pray wrath down on that boss for not allowing him to be a well paid lazy cheating liar.
Paul, in the above passage was content. He was not content because that is the right and good thing to be. He was content for the sake of Christ. I feel like Paul was content being aggressive in evangelism and exorcism, content in jail and while preaching, content on a forced fast and while feasting; because Paul sought to do all things to glorify Christ Jesus. Paul was not seeking to have or build a ministry, he was a minister. Paul was not trying to get a following, he was content following God.
If I were to address the issue of the elections and contentment from the historical Christian perspective and the current persecuted church perspective; we would call the people of God to do nothing based on anger, fear or outward perspectives. We would call the body of Christ to seek the Lord and trust Him fully. We would fast and pray, not for the election so much as the whole hearted obedience of the body of Christ. In this hour what we need is more humility, not more protests.

I would like to see America turned more toward the things of God. But maybe what is needed for that to happen is that God needs a people in America that are fully His. What if the issue is not the government or the darkness of this age, but the lack of light. Just last week I saw the Religion and Ethics show that contained a slot given to the worlds largest church is Seoul South Korea. The link is http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-27-2012/worlds-biggest-congregation/10162/
On a given day this church, which has planted a large number of other church has over 20,000 people attend. Their membership is over 800,000. They live in a “non-Christian nation with a “non-Christian” government. But is seems to me that the Kingdom of God has been advancing quite nicely. What if we in America became content with almost everything around us so that we might totally live for the glory of God? What if we were not know for what we are against, but who and what we are for? What if in our weakness to change the nation we became infused with God’s strength and found that in our weakness we are made strong? What if our obedience was a greater thing that sacrifice?