The Old Testament is relevant for the Christian life because it is Christian Scripture. We are children of Abraham by faith, so the earlier covenants and redemptive acts of God are part of our history. We need the warnings and exhortations of the Old Testament. We need its songs and proverbs. We need to know about its prophets and kings. The Old Testament tells of saints before the cross, and they form a cloud of witnesses as we run the race after the cross.

The New Testament proclaims the arrival of the Messiah. With the coming of Jesus, God has kept Old Testament promises and prophecies. And with four Gospels, Acts, twenty-one letters, and Revelation, we have twenty-seven books pertaining to the advent of Christ and the mission of his church.
So let’s ask ourselves a question: how many Christian books are in the Bible? Only twenty-seven? No, not just twenty-seven. We do not have a Bible that’s divisible into Jewish and Christian books. Don’t think of the Old Testament as thirty-nine Jewish books and the New Testament as twenty-seven Christian books.
The whole Bible is Christian literature. Both the Old and New Testaments are for our discipleship. Followers of Jesus have sixty-six books because the Old Testament is Christian Scripture. Consider these seven truths:
First, the New Testament did not arise in a vacuum but within a theological and historical storyline that had been unfolding for many centuries. The New Testament is not beginning a new story from scratch. Rather, the New Testament is continuing the Old Testament story.
Second, the New Testament books are filled with Old Testament background. The teachings, parables, and miracles of Jesus are laden with this background. The titles, mission, and death of Christ must be understood in light of earlier Scripture. The New Testament authors use language of prophetic fulfillment that fuse their accounts with the Old Testament. As my friend Josh Philpot once said, “The single most important literature for understanding the New Testament is the Old Testament.”
Third, Jesus claimed that the Old Testament was about him.
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Christian contentment opposes despair. For the believer, there should never be a time when we believe there is no hope. God can always open the doors of heaven (2 Kings 7:2). In other words, just because we do not see a way out does not mean God’s hands are tied. There is no situation in the life of God’s child where he will fail to keep us. Even if we do not understand the affliction, he is doing greater things than we can ever imagine.

We may say we are fully content with God and that he is all we need, but we all wrestle with certain sinful attitudes and behaviors that communicate otherwise. They are characteristics incompatible with fulfillment in God, but there is hope. The more we grow in Christian contentment, the more these tendencies will lose their grip on us. To summarize Jeremiah Burroughs, here are eight things godly contentment opposes in our lives.
1. Murmuring and Complaining
When we see the people of God in the Old Testament complaining as they wander in the wilderness, it is because they are not content with God’s leadership. They have not found him to be enough and think they need more than he has provided to be satisfied. Christian contentment finds its complete satisfaction in God himself and is not compatible with murmuring and complaining.
2. Worry and Fret
Christian contentment and disordered anxiety are contradictory to each other. Anxiety is the result of not trusting the One who is in sovereign control of our lives. As Christians, we serve a God who has bought us with his blood and holds the whole world in his hands. He knows how to rescue the godly and bring them through the trials of this life to be with him forever. Christian contentment understands this and knows that any affliction allowed in their life by our sovereign God may appear to be dark clouds, but they are filled with deep mercy. This is why Scripture tells us to be anxious for nothing.
3. A Perplexed Spirit
We may be crushed but not perplexed. Whether providence has provided us with much or little, the believer does not need to run around confusedly. There is truth in the old cliché’, we do not need to know what tomorrow holds because we know who holds tomorrow. As we mature as Christians, it will become more and more evident how little we understand and can control our lives. But at the same time, we will trust more and more in the goodness of our heavenly Father.
4. Distraction from Obedience to God
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The situation has gotten more serious in that many Christians have bought into the idea that Pride is an identity—that what are rightly behaviors are considered to be identities. This is an assumption that may flow naturally from a Pelagian understanding of humanity, but not an orthodox, biblical one. Turning to the deep riches of historic Protestant doctrine, Roberts shows that sinful desire is itself sinful.

Identity is everywhere. We can hardly read an article in the news or watch a show on TV without encountering it. Identity defines our relationship to the world around us, to the other members of our society, and even to our own bodies. “This rapid rise in identity-thinking has caused a somewhat tense interaction with the Christian church,” says Matthew Roberts. “From the secular perspective, it has reinforced the assumption that Christians are just an irrelevance swept aside by the inrush of these new insights, featuring (if at all) as just one identity-group, and one for whom not much sympathy is spared. From Christians, it has been greeted with a combination of alarm at the outlandish new doctrines identity politics presents (gender fluidity in particular) and an assumption that there is a lot of new thinking for us to do to make sure that people of different identities are equally offered the gospel and (to a varying extent) included in the church.”
So what are Christians to do? How are we to think about modern notions of identity? That is the subject of Roberts’ new book Pride: Identity and the Worship of Self. “The conviction that underlies this book,” he explains, “is that, rather than being a new challenge to the Christian faith, the identity issue is, in fact, a very old one. Men have always identified themselves by their idols, and so the issue of identity is fundamentally one of idolatry.”
Key to understanding the book is his use of the word “Pride.” He does not use that word to communicate the opposite of humility, but as an umbrella term for the various identities more typically conveyed in the ever-changing acronym that begins with L and ends in +.
In the book’s first part, he explains that human beings are defined by worship—by what or who we worship. Created by God in the image of God to worship God, we fell into a state of sinfulness in which we will worship anything or everything in place of God. Yet our most basic and essential identity is defined by who we were made to worship. “Being images, our true identity is found in the God whose image we are, and whom we are made to love with all our heart and soul and strength. And so those who worship false gods, giving them the love due to the true God, cannot help but define themselves by those gods instead.” Not only that, but “individuals and peoples come to reflect the character of the (fictional) gods they worship. And integral to this is that individuals and peoples come to identify themselves by the gods they worship.”
This causes endless problems since “for all fallen human beings, there is a basic identity-conflict in play. We are one thing; we believe ourselves to be something else. We have a true identity, though we deny it and seek to suppress it; and we have a false identity, centred around our idols, which we cling to fiercely even though it diminishes our humanity.”
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