Peace of God
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Introduction
Introduction
This morning as we come to the end of Philippians, we are going to prepare for the Easter season by looking at what it means to have the peace of God in our hearts. We all know that our world has changed dramatically over the last two years with the pandemic, the social unrest around the world, and now the war in the Ukraine. But not only has the world changed but all of us have been changed as well. We are not the same people that entered into the pandemic and each of us have carried the impact of the past two years in different ways. There is a seriousness to life, that most of us are not accustomed to. We certainly don’t laugh as freely and it’s difficult to be joyful. For many, there is a weariness not just from the busyness of work and life, but from carrying the mental and emotional burdens of the past two years. And if we are honest with ourselves, some of us are still stuck in fear even as the dangers of Covid are subsiding. Given all of these factors, it’s not hard to see why depression and anxiety are on the increase and truth be told, we are all probably experiencing varying degrees of mental and emotional pain. This may come in the form of burnout, general fatigue, a sense of malaise, or just a lack of excitement for life but at the root of all these problems is a soul that is not at rest. And this is exactly the reason why we need to pursue God’s peace. If we are going to be healed and made whole again, it will not happen apart from this supernatural peace that God promises to those who trust in Him. With that in mind, let’s turn to our passage for today.
Bible Passage
Bible Passage
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
In these few verses, we see three truths that will help us overcome our anxiety and experience the deep healing of God’s peace at work in us and in our church.
Joy is the result of God’s peace
Anxiety is the enemy of God’s peace
Prayer is the path to God’s peace
As an introduction to the subject of God’s peace, I want us to make sure that we are all on the same page and have the same definition of the concept of peace. In our language, peace simply means the absence of conflict, whether that be internal or external. From that perspective, the western idea of peace is more or less a neutral concept but the Jewish idea of peace is decidedly positive. For Paul, who shared the same Jewish heritage as Jesus, the peace of God was understood along the lines of the Jewish concept of shalom. The idea of shalom includes the absence of conflict but it also encompasses so much more. The shalom of God literally means wholeness, being made complete, having a sense of well-being and harmony. Shalom was seen as a gift of God’s grace and a sign of God’s blessing over your life. It’s not difficult to see why someone who has this peace would then naturally be a joyful person. For this reason, joy and peace are often linked together in the Scriptures because you cannot have true joy unless your soul finds its rest in the peace of God.
To our modern ears, Paul’s command for us to rejoice always seems to be out of touch, impossible, irrelevent, and even simplistic. It seems unreasonable from the secular perspective but the Scriptures tell us that rejoicing in all circumstances is the most reasonable thing that we can do. We may want to lament and to process and to grieve and to sit in our pain because that seems like the most authentic thing to do. But the question is where are you going with that? Are you allowing God to turn your mourning into laughter, your sorrow into joy, or are you just being buried under the weight of your own reflections and contemplation. Given all of this time to ourselves and the isolation of the past two years, it’s no wonder that there is an increased interest in the contemplative movement but the dangers of an imbalanced practice of contemplation is that it only goes deeper inward and that is often a journey into the abyss. Thomas Merton, the famous Catholic monk who was the face of modern contemplation battled his entire life with insecurity, fear, and depression. Everything he wrote seemed so good, that is until you balanced it out with his life story. In the end, all of his introspection didn’t work because he didn’t have the right end goal in mind which is the joy that all Christians are meant to experience deep within their hearts no matter the dire circumstances of life.
When we consider the situation of the Christians living at this time in history, we know that life was not easy. There was the threat of persecution and being imprisoned for the faith that was a distinct possibility. We know that cities like Philippi became very hostile towards believers and mobs were ready to attack Christians leaders like Paul and Silas. We also know that there was the danger of false teachers coming into the church and leading people away from the truth. On top of that, perhaps because of all the pressure that the church was under, there was growing conflict and division some members of the congregation as we saw last week. And though their problems may be different from the ones that we are currently facing in our lives, the tendency to become anxious in the face of life’s difficulties is a common response across the human spectrum, independent of time and culture. It seems only natural that we should worry and become cautious and even give into our anxious thoughts when it feels like we surrounded by this constant danger. In our minds, this seems like the most reasonable reaction to everything that is going on. And that would be one of the greatest lies that the enemy of our souls wants us to believe. Anxiety is the enemy of God’s peace because our anxiety and God’s peace cannot coexist in our hearts and minds.
What’s interesting is that we all know that worrying and being anxious about things outside of our control doesn’t help but we continue to worry because it doesn’t dawn on us that God’s peace is acutually the help that we need. In fact, we see clearly in the Scriptures that the peace of God is essential to overcoming the trials and hardships of life. Before Jesus was arrested and crucified, knowing that His disciples would find themselves in great turmoil, He leaves them with this indispensable gift:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
You might be asking yourself how does this peace that Jesus gives help us as the world is falling apart around us. Well, not only does peace lead to joy, together peace and joy produce a distinctly Christian perspective on life: hope that is centered on the person and promise of God. Paul describes this connection in the book of Romans.
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
It seems like an obvious statement but without joy and peace, you cannot have hope and if you are struggling with feelings of hopelessness, it’s rooted in the fact that something is keeping you from the peace of God. In our passage, we can see that one of the main barriers to experiencing God’s peace in our lives is the anxiety that so many of us struggle with, including myself. The negative impact of anxiety has been well documented in medical research and through the behavioral sciences. Let me run down just a few of these symptoms:
Anxiety has been known to produce physical ailments such as headaches, stomach problems, high blood, increased risk of heart attacks and strokes
Prolonged periods of anxiety can alter your immune system, leaving you vulnerable to a host of illnesses. Studies show that if you have a significant number of stressors in a given time such as death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job, family drama, your chance of having a major sickness in then next year dramatically increases. It is safe to say that we have all had a number of stressors in our lives over the last two yearsand the I think we will begin to see the physical effects of that in the years to come.
Some of the immediate warning signs of chronic anxiety is a loss of energy that ultimately results in a lack of productivity or inefficiency in the way we handle life. Little things that we were able to deal with easily for some reason trigger deep negative emotions.
And because anxiety makes us emotionally thin, it has an impact on our relationships. We are less patient, more critical, quick to anger, easily frustrated, ready to judge or to blame, and unable to remain calm in the face of disagreement. And more and more, I am convinced that anxiety is something that can be transferred from one person to another. When a person comes into a room stressed and on edge, that person’s anxiety can quickly become your own.
But the most damaging effects of anxiety is what it does to our mind and heart. In terms of the mind, it leaves us unable to focus our thoughts because we are worried about so many different things that may or may not happen and so many permutations and possible outcomes. Many times, the wisest decisions come by keeping things simple but an anxious mind is unable to do that. Every decision becomes this grueling fight to overcome indecision because there is so much apprehension and confusion in the mind.
In the end, if anxiety takes a deep enough root, it will rob you of your joy. Anyone who worries continually or who continually feels overwhelmed by life is a person who has less hope and is less capable of appreciating or enjoying pleasurable moments. There always seems to be a problem lurking in the back of his mind or deep in his soul. If you don’t have joy in your heart, life then becomes very difficult. One of the complaints that I wrestled with during my time here in the city was why everything had to be so hard. Simple things like taking the kids to school, finding parking, riding the bus, trying to have normal enjoyable conversations all seemed to take so much work.
I’ve never considered myself to be an anxious person that is until I moved back to the Bay Area. There is something about the social, spiritual, and economic atmosphere of the Bay Area that seems to create anxiety in people. The mixture of extremely ambitious people, with the high cost of living, relational isolation, hypersensitivity to every political and social issue, along with a very secular and materialistic view of life becomes the perfect breeding grounds for anxiety. And because we live in this ocean of anxiety, we are often unable to discern that we are even anxious at all. That’s essentially what happened to me about 5 years when I had what my doctor’s diagnosed as a panic attack. Having experienced it first hand, I know that there was much more to that than just a matter of mental health. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and I could not collect my thoughts. I literally felt like I was losing my mind and that Satan was trying to fill me thougths with evil. And odd thing is, I wasn’t overly stressed that week nor was there anything particularly wrong in the church or in my family. The enemy just took advantage of the lack of peace in my mind and heart. And therein lies the danger, without even realizing it, the enemy of our soul can use our own emotions against us and fills those places where the peace of God was meant to occupy, with fear, confusion, anger, and lies.
As we read in verse 7, it’s the peace of God that guards our hearts and minds meaning without his peace, our hearts and minds are exposed and defenseless to all the lies, deception, and fear that is found in this world. We also see very clearly that the only way to have the peace of God is through a life of prayer. In the parallel passage out of 1 Thessalonians, that essenitally repeats what Paul states at the end of Phiippians, we read:
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
A life of prayer is the will of God for you and yet we struggle with, we doubt if it’s worth it, or even it it works at all. This is why, prayer meetings are always the least attended meetings in the American church. And if the church doesn’t pray and if her leaders don’t pray, then you have a bunch of anxious people making decisions not from a place of peace but from the perspective of the human will which so easily is clouded by fear and confusion. And you might be saying to yourself, I’ve prayed in the past and I didn’t receive this supernatural peace that the Bible speaks of. And my question to you would be, then did you pray correctly? When you look at verse 5- 6, you’ll see the apostle Paul writes something very significant about the prayer life of the believer, the type of prayer life that overcomes anxiety and worry.
Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Prayer is not some magic bullet that gets rid of our anxieties. In fact, sometimes the way we pray can actually lead to even greater worry. If your prayer life is just about supplication and making requests to God, it may result in more anxiety because now on top of everything else, now you are worried about whether or not God will answer your prayers. You’ll notice that there is a qualifier to our supplication before God and that is to make these requests with thanksgiving. And you might be wondering further, why do I need to give thanks even before God’s answers my prayers. The answer is simple: making your supplications with gratitude is a sign of your trust in the Lord. Furthermore, prayer and supplication are separated out because there are so many different types of prayers besides the ones where we go through our needs. There are prayers of intercession where we pray for the needs of others, there are warfare prayers that bring us victory in the spiritual realm, there are prayers of declaration, and prayers of adoration. But no matter the type of prayer, the effectiveness of any prayer is dependent on the nearness of God. Do your prayers draw you into the reality of God’s loving presence and remind you of the He is closer to you than you could imagine. (If you have never experienced in your times of prayer, you have never prayed at all.) And it is this trust in the nearness of God that gives us the strength to overcome all our worries and fears. Many times our anxieties are rooted in the enemy’s lies that God is distant and uninterested in your problems and that is the furthest thing from the truth.
Conclusion
Conclusion
God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way,
though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah
Come, behold the works of the Lord,
how he has brought desolations on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the chariots with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God.
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!”
The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah