In fact, I recently heard that our president has plans to provide us with child care. Such politicians do not want people to be self-sufficient and independent of government help. No, they want government to function like a nanny so that the citizenry will be continually dependent on it. But God wants his people to be self-sufficient. The Greek word for contentment is autarkeia .
Auto means self and arkeia means sufficiency, so autarkeia means self-sufficiency.
Now, there is a difference between the self-sufficiency of the world and the contentment the Bible is speaking about. Buddhism teaches us that self-sufficiency is developed by suppressing all human desires. Stoicism of ancient times taught that people possessed an intrinsic ability to resist all external pressures and thus experience autarkeia , or self-sufficiency. It is the sufficiency of the Lord which is appropriated by God's people. In this study I would like to make three points from this text.