Galatians 5:22 – Peace
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!”
You know what makes even less sense than joy during trials? (See yesterday’s post on joy…) Peace when your life is at constant risk. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul writes about a peace that goes beyond anything we can understand. And since he was in prison at the time and his life was often threatened, he ought to know a thing or two about it. I like to call it the peace that doesn’t make any sense.
Our brains are designed to scan for danger and avoid it at all costs. When something is going wrong that we feel could be a threat to us, we worry. It is a built-in alarm in our brains to signal us to run the other way. But as humans we have the power to override instinct, especially when the Holy Spirit dwells inside us. We can hold on to a greater truth that can stop the signal. Just like when you burn the morning toast and fan the smoke detector to silence the awful beeping, trusting God to override worry restores peace to our hearts.
We must continue to keep in mind the context of this chapter: the flesh and the Spirit are in a war and continually pull you in opposite directions. You can’t get closer to God by trying to follow a bunch of rules because you will fail (the flesh will get you every time). The only hope we have is to seek the Holy Spirit and allow him to guide our lives. We are transformed simply by being with him.
Here’s your freedom for today: peace does not come from somewhere deep inside yourself. Eternal peace, the kind that doesn’t make any sense, can only come from God himself. If you want to totally fail at finding peace, try to work harder at getting it. (That’s about as effective as rushing a lesson in patience, which we’ll talk about tomorrow.) Instead of thinking of peace as a feeling or state of mind, think of it as a place you can go inside the Holy Spirit. It is in this sacred space that we can be sheltered from the torrents bearing down on us in the outside world.