Peace- Positive Influence Trait #3 - Walking By Faith #31days2021

“I’ve Got the peace that passes understanding down in my heart! Where? Down in My heart! Where? Down in my heart to stay.”

This words echo in my heart as I sit here contemplating peace. These are the words of a Sunday school song that I sang as a small child and that I taught my kiddos when they were little as well. So many times we say we want World peace- or a peaceful home. But let’s be honest we live in a pretty chaotic world and our homes can be just as chaotic- and I’m not just talking busy. Busy doesn’t equal chaos. Chaos is defined as complete disorder and confusion. There have been times in our lives when we have lived in complete chaos. BUT just because our circumstances can be chaotic, it doesn’t mean we have to be. The world sees our peace in the middle of the chaos….and they want it AND that can be a HUGE influence.

But as I thought about it I had to ask myself what really keeps peace in the middle of chaos. Because even though the world we know is going crazy around us and even though we feel like we are spinning out of control we can have peace…..The Peace of God is what separates followers of Jesus Christ from the rest of the world.

So how do we get this Peace that passes all understanding?

Amazingly, we have to look no further than the book of Philippians for the answer!!! (I must confess when I started studying Philippians I had no idea that we would be camped there for the majority of this writing series).

^{⁶Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. ⁷Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.} Philippians 4:6-7 NLT

Let’s break it down

First off we have a two fold command

Do not worry about ANYTHING
INSTEAD Pray about EVERYTHING

I just love it when the Bible tells us how to replace a problem- it gives us an alternative to combat the sin that is going on in our hearts. BUT it doesn’t just leave it at pray. it tells us how to pray.

Tell Him what you need
AND Thank him for all he has done.

You really do need both steps here. You need to converse with God about what is wrong. BE HONEST. God wants us to communicate with him. He wants to know our hearts and what is weighing on them. He wants us to trust him with that. It’s an act of faith. AND then he wants us to recall and thank him for his past faithfulness. THIS IS HUGE. This is the very reason I choose to do a thankfulness challenge here on my blog every week. Because I know I need to be reminded of God’s faithfulness and goodness.

In verse 7 we are given a promise

THEN you will experience God’s Peace. (It exceeds anything we can understand) And Then the verse says what that peace will do for us….His peace will guard our hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

What does this mean?

When we practice the Release (giving God all of our worries) and Remembrance (recalling and thanking God for all he has done) we experience the peace of God …..and that protects our hearts and minds from the effects of the chaos around us.

It’s easy to fret.

It’s easy to spend our days obsessing over things we cannot control. We live in a fear and worry induced society….Money, family, marriage, work, kids, home, animals, weather, COVID..Yep I went there. Loss of our freedoms (yep I went there too) Our health, our car, our world, the list goes on and on and on…..and each one f those has a million different things to fret over . Our days become filled with “what ifs”. Because our sight is turned inward . To quote Mary Poppins “we can’t see past the ends of our own noses”. We miss all that God is doing around us.

Story Time

I am only going to use this example loosely because it will be used more in depth in a few days in another blog post. BUT I have used this example before and for those who are new here I will give you a brief run down.

In December of 2020 I found myself in and out of the hospital in the worst excruciating pain I have ever experienced. I had two medical procedures (one an emergency). I was CONSTANTLY told “You are a very special case” and “we have never seen anything quite like this before”. Life felt so incredibly out of control and I spent most of December not knowing if I would wake up and need to go back to the hospital.

Low and behold there were lots of other things going on in my body that I had no idea was happening.

During December though as I found myself in the emergency room for the last time and one of the Doctors I had seen regularly came to visit me and see why I was there.. He clearly had looked at my chart before coming into my room. This was the absolute worst I had been in the 3 weeks since that nightmare started. The morphine wasn’t doing a whole lot. H e walked into the room and patted my foot. He told me what was going on…used those phrases agin. And we joked about all that was going on.

I was told that I had to have this procedure done. He used those phrases AGAIN and left. I was taken up to the OR and prepped.

The next morning this same doctor came to visit . I felt great- for the first time in a month. But just prior to him coming in the nurse had come in and flatly dropped a bomb shell. He walked in and I said ” we need to talk”. We talked about the incredible]y scary thing the nurse had said (he was frustrated she said anything). We talked about a few other things and then as he left He patted my foot again and he said ” You are amazing- I have never net anyone who has faced this type of trauma with such a good attitude”. He said that he has seen many other people be angry and rude and frustrated and I met it with a smile.

What he didn’t see…

He didn’t see the countless hours of tears and frustration welling up in my heart. I was at a point with the pain that I felt like I was going lose my mind. I had a handful friends that I could REALLY share my heart with and I knew they were praying for me. And in between moments of counting the tiles on the ceiling in my ER room or hospital room I prayed…about everything. Every little piece of the puzzle that didn’t make sense, every pain, every question, every concern, every what if….and then I thanked God for answering prayers from the day before and the hour before and the minutes before this moment. I had been working to build a life of gratitude for sometime before this. And despite all of the chaos swirling around me I found peace

Practice

In the months to follow the extremes from this experience prepared my heart for the anxiety and PTSD that would come. It was a vicious cycle for 9 months. Just because I had put Philippians 4:6-7 into practice didn’t mean that the anxiety and worry and fretting didn’t come again and again and again. It meant that when it did come my heart and mind were well equipped for the battle. So when my heart started racing in the middle of the night I could pray and sing and thank God for all of the needs he has met in the last year. My heart and my mind were GUARDED. JUST LIKE THE VERSE PROMISED!

Now it’s Your turn

How can you put these verses into practice? One of the most important things I have found is to have at least one person to remind you of these truths- who can ask you to recall how God has been faithful in the past!