Ask any reader of the Puritans about The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment, and they will tell you what it teaches: how to keep a quiet heart when life is hard. When money is short, when health fails, when providence takes away what we love — Burroughs shows the soul how to rest in God.
But there is a second half to Burroughs on contentment that almost no living reader has seen. It answers a question we are far less used to asking: can you keep a quiet, holy heart when life is good?
The Verse After the Famous One
The Rare Jewel is built on Philippians 4:11 — "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." Burroughs preached eleven sermons on it. But Paul's next breath, in verse 12, opens a second front:
"I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need."
— Philippians 4:12
Paul says he has learned two arts, not one. He knows how to be abased — how to go without. But he also knows how to abound — and he speaks of that, too, as something that must be learned, an instruction he had to be taught. Burroughs did not miss it. When he had finished his sermons on being content in want, he took up the very next clause and preached the sequel.
"The Trouble That Is in a Prosperous Condition"
Those sermons — three of them, preached to his congregation at Stepney — were later gathered under the title The Art of Improving a Full and Prosperous Condition for the Glory of God. In them Burroughs turns the whole subject on its head. We assume that affliction is the danger and prosperity is the reward. Burroughs warns that abundance has a peril all its own — what he bluntly calls "the trouble that is in a prosperous condition."
A full estate, he shows, can quietly do to a soul what no affliction could: dull its hunger for God, feed its pride, loosen its hold on eternity, and turn gifts into idols. To abound to God's glory — to hold wealth, comfort, and success with an open and grateful hand, without being spoiled by them — is, Burroughs argues, the rarer and in some ways the harder of the two lessons. Many a Christian who bore poverty well has been ruined by plenty.
He preached these sermons as the express continuation of the contentment series — reminding his hearers, as he began, that "you may remember the last day we finished the Doctrine of Christian Contentment." For Burroughs, contentment in want and contentment in abundance were two sides of one grace, and Philippians 4:11–12 was a single lesson in two parts.
Why You've Probably Never Read Them
If these sermons are so striking, why are they so little known? Because for most of their history they have been printed apart from the Rare Jewel. The eleven sermons on contentment in want appeared on their own in 1648 and have been reprinted ever since. The sermons on abundance were first collected separately, in a 1675 volume called Four Useful Discourses, and they have almost never traveled with the book they were meant to complete.
The result is that generations of readers have known only half of Burroughs on contentment — the half about hardship — and have never met his searching, countercultural word to the comfortable and the prosperous. For a modern, affluent readership, it may be the half we most need to hear.
And a Third Word: Contentment in Extremity
There is even a third piece to the picture. Bound with the 1649 edition of the Rare Jewel was a separate sermon by Burroughs on Exodus 14:13 — "Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord" — Moses' word to Israel trapped between Pharaoh's army and the sea. It is a sermon on contentment in the worst extremity, when there is no way forward and no way back and nothing to do but stand still and trust God to act. Like the prosperity sermons, it dropped out of the later editions, and it appears in no modern reprint of the Rare Jewel.
Taken together, the three make Burroughs' teaching on the contented heart complete: contentment in want, contentment in abundance, and contentment in extremity — a quiet heart in every condition God can send.
The Whole of Burroughs, in One Volume
The Old Glory Press edition of The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment was made to gather all of it in one place. Part One is the complete Rare Jewel — the eleven sermons on Philippians 4:11. Part Two restores the three sermons on contentment in abundance (Philippians 4:12), printed as Burroughs preached them at Stepney. And an Appendix recovers the Exodus 14:13 sermon on standing still to see God's salvation. It is, so far as we know, the most complete Rare Jewel in print.
Read the Whole of Burroughs on Contentment
The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment — the complete sermons on contentment in want and in abundance, with a sermon found in no modern edition. Newly typeset and gently modernized by Old Glory Press.
