The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment Is 400 Years Old and Still Hasn't Been Topped

Contentment is rare in me.

That is an uncomfortable sentence for a pastor to write, so let me say it carefully. I think about contentment a great deal. I pray about it. And it is still rare in me, which is roughly the most honest thing I can tell you about the state of my heart and my money. So when I say that the most useful book I have read on the subject is almost four hundred years old, hear it as testimony.

The book is The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment by Jeremiah Burroughs, a Puritan preacher in London in the 1640s. It is a series of sermons on a single verse, Philippians 4:11, where Paul says he has learned to be content in whatever situation he is in. Burroughs died in 1646; the sermons were gathered and published two years later, in 1648. The whole thing runs about two hundred pages. I read it last year, and I have been chewing on it since.

A four-century-old sermon series sounds like homework. I want to make the case that for a Canadian man lying awake doing math at 11pm, it is closer to a diagnosis.

A Definition That Reads You Back

Most modern books define contentment loosely and hurry on to techniques. Burroughs spends his opening chapters on the definition alone, and it is the best I have encountered. Christian contentment, he says, is "that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit" which freely submits to, and even delights in, God's wise and fatherly ordering of every condition.

Read that slowly, because every word is load-bearing. Inward, so it can be real while your circumstances are genuinely hard. Quiet, which Burroughs sets against the murmuring and fretting of a discontented heart. A frame of spirit, meaning a settled disposition you inhabit, rather than a mood that visits you when the numbers cooperate. And freely, which might be the most important one: this is a chosen posture toward a Father, worlds apart from the gritted-teeth resignation most of us practise and call acceptance. Burroughs even dares the word delight, taking pleasure in God's handling of your life at the very moments you would have handled it differently.

By the time Burroughs finishes defining the jewel, you know whether you own it. I did not enjoy finding that out. I commend the experience to you anyway.

He Treats Contentment as a Skilled Trade

The hinge of the whole book is a single word in Philippians 4:11: learned. Paul says he learned to be content, which means there was a time when he had not yet learned it, and a process by which he did. Burroughs picks this up and runs. He calls contentment an art and a mystery, language borrowed from the trade guilds of his day, where a mystery meant the skill of a craft passed from master to apprentice.

Contentment is a trade you apprentice in, and the apprenticeship is your actual life. The tight month is a lesson. The raise that somehow disappeared into the household within ninety days is a lesson. So is the season of plenty, which Paul says he also had to learn to handle, and which Burroughs takes just as seriously.

Then Burroughs hands over the trade secret, and it runs exactly opposite to every financial instinct we have. The world pursues contentment by addition: raise the income, grow the account, until the pile finally matches the desire. Burroughs says the Christian gets there by subtraction. You bring the desire down to meet what God has actually provided, and the moment the two lines touch, there contentment is. He is blunt that the addition project never terminates. Readers of this site have heard the same thing from me about the number that keeps moving; Burroughs was there first by centuries.

Run that against your own numbers. The itch for the bigger house quiets two ways: a bigger mortgage, or a smaller itch. Only one of those is on sale.

Burroughs also guards the doctrine from the misreading that would ruin it. Contentment, he insists, leaves full room for lawful work to better your condition. A man can be settled in God's disposal today and still ask for the raise, still build the emergency fund, still pray hard for the season to change. Paul himself, content in his chains, gladly received the help the Philippians sent. What the jewel removes is the fretting in between, the murmuring that fills the gap between here and whatever comes next. Trust God and be wise, four centuries early.

He Has Already Met You, and It Was 1645

The middle of the book is a long anatomy of murmuring, and this is where the old preacher becomes uncomfortably current. Burroughs catalogues the moves of a discontented heart one by one.

Comparing your portion with another man's. Rehearsing what you deserve. Telling yourself your case is different, that anyone in your circumstances would fret. Quietly downgrading every mercy you have already received to background noise. He wrote all of this by candlelight, and it reads like he has been listening to the inside of a commute in 2026.

Here is what finally landed for me, though. Our culture is so counter to contentment that it is tempting to blame the whole problem on the age we live in, the ads and the feeds most of all. Then I read Scripture and watch the Israelites, freshly walked through a parted sea, grumbling about the menu within weeks. Manna from the sky, and they murmured at it.

The wilderness generation had no ads and no feeds, and they murmured anyway. Discontent predates the materialist modern West by a few thousand years. Our culture amplifies the disease and monetizes it, and I have written about what that amplification does to a man's financial anxiety. But Burroughs knew, and Moses knew before him, that the root system is in the human heart. A book from 1648 can still read you because the thing it is reading has not changed.

Where the Old Book Shows Its Age

An honest review owes you the hard parts, and there are several.

The prose is from the 1640s. Sentences run long, the structure is repetitive in the way sermon series are, and Burroughs anatomizes at a length no modern editor would tolerate. He will make a point, subdivide it into seven branches, and preach each branch. If you push through it like a modern paperback you will stall by chapter three. Read it the way it was delivered: one chapter at a sitting, more devotional than download. Modernized editions and audio versions exist and are worth it if the period prose defeats you.

It also contains no financial mechanics whatsoever. Burroughs will not tell you what to do with your TFSA, and a man who needs a budget or a debt plan still needs one after the last page. This book works underneath all of that, on the heart that will be managing the money. Read it alongside the practical material rather than instead of it.

And one caution for the man carrying shame: Burroughs' talk of murmuring can land as scolding if you read it with a wounded ear. It is worth knowing that his contemporaries knew him as an unusually gentle, peaceable man in a bitter era, and the book's whole trajectory bends toward grace. He writes like a physician naming a disease he also carries, with no clipboard in his hands, and the last thing he reaches for is willpower.

Who Should Read It, and Who Should Wait

Read it if you are the man who is doing the responsible things and still cannot rest. The man whose accounts have grown while his peace has not. The mid-life man who has more than he ever planned to have and less quiet than he expected. This book was written for you, and it will keep resurfacing in your head at strange moments, usually mid-scroll. The young man just starting out could also do worse than to meet Burroughs before the market meets him.

Wait on it if you are brand new to Christian reading or in acute financial crisis. Start with Philippians itself, which is shorter and was also written from a hard place, and with the practical pieces that stabilize a crisis. The Rare Jewel is a deep well, and a man who is drowning needs a rope before he needs a well.

Getting a copy is easy. The book is long out of copyright, so free digital versions are everywhere, and inexpensive paperback editions have been continuously in print for decades. There is no affiliate link in this review because there is nothing here for me to earn. I just think you should read it.

The Verdict

Still hasn't been topped. I have read newer, easier books on contentment, and the honest comparison is a flashlight beside a lighthouse. Burroughs is harder to read and better to have read.

Here is the assignment shaped like a review: get a copy this week, free or a few dollars, and read one chapter a week through the fall. Thirteen chapters, one season. Let it work slowly, the way it was preached.

And notice, when you get there, where Burroughs finally lands. The learned secret of Philippians 4 was never self-mastery. Two verses later Paul names the source: he can do all things, contentment included, through the One who strengthens him. That is where the whole apprenticeship rests. The jewel comes as a gift, which is why no market has ever managed to price it.

Rare, and freely given.