Peace

Have you ever wondered why we are promised peace that “surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7 NKJV)? Why aren’t we just promised peace? Wouldn’t that be enough?

I was driving home from Atlanta yesterday and was really raging on the inside over some issues. As I was driving, I received an email note on my BlackBerry from a friend that said that for some reason the Holy Spirit had laid me on his heart and he was praying for me right then. (Side note – isn’t technology wonderful! I can be on the interstate in Georgia and instantly receive an encouraging word from a friend! I love it!). My friend was praying for peace. He didn’t know if I was even going through anything, but God told him to pray for peace for me and he obeyed.

I got off the interstate, sent a response, and after a short break I got going again. You know what? The rest of my drive was, yep, peaceful. The great thing was that I didn’t even realize it until I was almost home. I hadn’t thought about my situation much, and I certainly wasn’t raging anymore. God had answered his prayer.

So, how does that relate to Philippians 4:7? We love to quote that verse and tell people that are going through tough times that God is there and will grant us peace. But what about that second part. Let’s look into it…

First, we have to go back to verse 6. Simply put, in order to receive the peace we have to be praying. Even more we have to pray thankfully (see previous post). Once we are doing that, then we are promised peace. But not just any peace. It is 1) the peace of God, and 2) this peace will surpass all understanding.

So what is the “peace of God”? The Greek word peace here is eirene. The verb form of that word means “to join”. The peace part is certainly the traditional form of peace – no war, tranquility, etc. However, there is a deeper meaning to this word. To quote Strong it means “the tranquil state of a soul assured of its salvation through Christ, and so fearing nothing from God and content with its earthly lot, of whatsoever sort that is.” Wow. Read that again. Whatsoever sort of your earthly lot. That pretty much covers all the bases, and we are quick to point out how this relates to our physical well-being, but don’t gloss over that first part! You must first be assured of your salvation. That’s where the joining part comes in. You can never have the peace of God if you aren’t first joined with God through Christ. When you are joined with God, through Christ, you have nothing to fear because Christ already paid the price for you. So why would you be worried about stuff here on earth? You can only have peace if your eyes are fixed on God!

And what about the “surpasses all understanding” part? This Greek word nous refers to the ability to sense spiritual and divine things. It’s a “sixth sense” perception that allows one to recognize good and hate evil, and have the discernment to avoid the evil. We obtain the peace of God, first, by having a relationship with Him thorough Christ, and, second, by being in tune with everything that is good and right in this world and not focused on the bad.

So, if we are to focus on good things, what does that look like? Continue on to verse 8. We tend to separate these groups of verses, but they are all related. Paul gives us the formula by telling us how to hone this “sixth sense” by thinking on things that are noble, just, pure, lovely, and of good report. We won’t break those down here, but you get the idea. Paul goes on to tell the Philippians that if they think on these things, and model themselves after him, inferring that he thinks on these things, then he once again promises the peace of God.

What does that mean for us? My situation above is a perfect example. My peaceful rest of the ride home wasn’t necessarily divine intervention in the sense that God reached down into my brain and re-wired my thoughts (not that I’m limiting God!). What really happened was that I, with God’s help for sure, changed the focus of my thoughts. I no longer dwelled on what was bothering me, but I thought about other things, good things, and that brought me peace. What we have to do is make that a natural habit. We have to be so joined with God that we are only in tune to the good in our lives and not the bad. It has to become second nature, involuntary. Referring back to Strong, it has to be a function of our soul.

One final note. Nowhere in this passage does God say that He will supernaturally remove you from your circumstances, or will remove the circumstance from you. He doesn’t promise a solution, He promises peace. Why? How will we ever learn to rely on Him if we know that He will simply bail us out of our predicament? You see, we tend to run to these verses when things go wrong. What we forget is that this isn’t a balm, this is lifestyle! If we don’t allow this type of behavior to control us, we will always be a victim of our circumstances and we will never have relief from our misery. Paul even tells us in verse 7 that what happens when this becomes a lifestyle is that this peace of God will guard our hearts and minds. In other words, we will never have to fear discouragement again! This deep spiritual perception about things will take over and we will always think on the good things. My peaceful drive didn’t come because my situation changed. I still don’t have hope in that sense. But what I do have is the ability to remember what God has done for me, what good there is my life, and simply focus all of my attention on those things. Then, and only then, will I have the “peace of God which surpasses all understanding”.

P.S. – Thank you to Wayne Kinde for listening to the Holy Spirit and acting on it. You were the inspiration for this post, my friend.

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Disappointment

There are varying degrees of disappointment.

You go to the ice cream shop and they are all out of Rocky Road and you have to settle for Turtle Tracks. Disappointed? Of course you are.

On the other extreme, you are expecting something big and get next to nothing. It’s the classic ending to Christmas Vacation. Clark Griswold is expecting a huge Christmas bonus. He’s been planning on it, and has even started spending it. What did he get? Enrolled in the Jelly-of-the-Month Club. What follows can’t be repeated here, but suffice it to say after blowing his top, all Clark can lament is “Where’s the Tylenol?” Disappointed? Understatement of the century.

I had a disappointment last week. Our pastor is very fond of reminding us that when things go awry you will always speak out of the abundance of your heart (Luke 6:45). When you are faced with disappointment how you react shows a lot about your inward character. I must say I wasn’t very proud of myself this week.

It just seems that you can only take so much. Clark Griswold didn’t fly off the handle because this was his first disappointment. After a series of let-downs you just come to the tipping point, to borrow a marketing phrase. It’s the proverbial pressure cooker. It builds and builds and builds, and the whole time you are keeping your composure because you want to maintain the image that you have everything under control, but eventually it’s too much and the top blows right off and all that you had pent up inside you comes spewing out. Not a pretty picture.

Now, I’m not sure that in situations like this you are really showing your true colors. I mean, let’s face it, you did keep your composure all the other times you were disappointed. My question is how do you strike the balance? How do you express frustration without becoming a raving lunatic? Proverbs 29:11 says that “A fool vents all his feelings, but a wise man holds them back (NKJV)”. So what is the answer?

The Hebrew word for “feelings” in the above verse is ruwach and has the connotation of spirit or, better, wind. Even more specifically, air or gas. It also has the connotation of vain or empty. You guessed it. The fool here is a windbag, or as we would say “full of hot air”. The other key word in the verse is “all”. Another inference we can make from the word ruwach is an uncontrollable impulse. Therefore, the fool is one who, without thinking it through or being careful, opens his mouth and lets everything uncontrollably come out of his mouth. It’s the action, not the attitude. A fool can have the most sincere motivation, but no discernment, so they say the first thing that comes to mind and keeps going without thinking.

For the answer we have to take a look at the second part of the verse. The proverb doesn’t just tell us who not to model, but tells who we should model. It tells us that the wise man holds back his feelings. Isn’t that contrary to everything we have ever learned though? Doesn’t modern psychology tell us that we need that venting in order to keep from blowing our top like Clark Griswold at the end of the movie? That we need a confidant that we can share all these feelings with? I don’t think that is what the proverb is saying at all.

Shabach is the Hebrew word used for the phrase “holds them back”. This is the only time that it is translated this way. It is translated more times as “praise”. Other words it is translated into that are similar are “glory” and “triumph”. What can we learn from this? I believe it’s all about PMA – Positive Mental Attitude. Not in the look-in-the-mirror-and-tell-yourself-that-you-believe-in-yourself attitude. If that is what you are doing, you are looking the wrong direction. The praise, glory, and triumph the word shabach implies is directed toward God. One other way the word is translated is “still” (where the connotation for “keep it in” comes into play). What does that mean? I think it means that our hearts need to be directed to God in quiet praise. We soothe our hearts by constant thankfulness to God for everything we have.

Why do we blow our top? Because we are focused too much on what we didn’t get instead of what we have. I didn’t get what I wanted this week, but I got something. Thank God. I didn’t get anything, but I already have enough. Thank God. I was wronged for no reason, but I’m alive and healthy. Thank God. I’ve had the carpet under my life ripped from underneath me, but I have people around me to help me. Thank God. No matter what is happening we have to constantly remind ourselves that in Christ we have something.

If you have never been to a Seder Feast you need to go to one. The Passover Seder is a Jewish ritual that commemorates the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. During the Seder there is a section where praise is given to God for the favor He has shown us. There is a Hebrew word used in this section – dayenu. Dayenu means “it is sufficient”, or “it is enough”. Over and over again we are reminded that if God had only done one thing during the Exodus, it would have been enough. If God had only parted the sea, it would have been enough. If God only allowed the Jews to cross on dry land, it would have been enough. If God had only fed them manna, it would have been enough. All of these blessings are recounted as a way to show how God did abundantly more. But it’s the attitude to take notice of here. If God had only done one of these things, it would have been enough! Can you share that attitude? If God only gave you shelter, would it be enough? If God only gave you food for today, would it be enough? If God gave you a portion of what you were expecting (or thought you deserved), would it be enough? That is our problem – we constantly doubt our Heavenly Father who provides us everything, but somehow it’s still not enough for us!

If you want to know why you are constantly disappointed, and why every expectation you have is not met, look at your heart. Are you in constant quiet praise for what God has done for you, or are you constantly grumbling in your heart that you don’t have enough so that it eventually comes to a head and you erupt like a volcano? It is this kind of positive mental attitude that will keep you from disappointment. In this life, God has given you something. Rest in the fact that no matter what it is, it is enough.

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Doha, Qatar

Qatar is in Saudi Arabia. It kind of looks like Michigan without the thumb. Why do I bring this up? If you look at our ClustrMap, we have a little red dot there. This might be the most exotic place we get a dot so I thought I would share the reason why!

Mark Sears is one of the geniuses behind eBible.com (also linked to the left, and if you haven't used it yet, I consider it to be the best internet-based Bible program out there). I met him through Thomas Nelson. He has a company called Godspeed Computing and lives in Canada, outside of Calgary. His wife works for the University of Calgary and they are living in Qatar for three months while she works for the UoC over there. I have a lot of respect for Mark as an internet guru, and consider Mark a friend. If you are so inclined you can follow his adventure in the Middle East over at MarkSears.com.

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The Winter of My Blog Discontent

Well, it is October already. Only three months left in the year. Fall is on its way (although you couldn’t tell by temperatures here in the South) and Christmas decorations are already on sale. Once again time has slipped by and we haven’t put anything meaningful on our blog. If it weren’t for these occasional laments on not writing, we’d barely have anything on here at all!

The fundamental issue is that there is too much “regular” life going on and not enough (at least in our mind) “blog-worthy” life going on. People ask how it’s going and I tell them that that I wish something was happening so that I could say that something was happening! Life is fairly routine right now, and routine doesn’t make for good story. Oh, I’m sure that I could come up with some sort of political rant, or some other pithy observation but even the ol’ writing juices haven’t been flowing lately.

As a matter of fact, life lately has been a day-to-day trudge through the snow. Not particularly difficult, but slow and mundane nonetheless. You walk and walk and walk and the landscape doesn’t change much, and when you look back the wind has erased most of your tracks so it’s hard to even recall where you’ve been.

Sure every now and then you have this epiphany and realize that life is passing you by and you need to do something, but that moment usually comes while you are driving, or otherwise occupied, and by the time you get to where you are going and reality kicks in you soon forget all about it.

Don’t take any of this as complaining. Life could be bad. There are many people that have overwhelming circumstances that consume their time. Me? I’m just ADD and can’t seem to make the time to do those things that I want to do. As our pastor recently taught, sin and procrastination are definitely kissing cousins. Like Paul said – the things I want to do I don’t do, but things I don’t want to do that is what I end up doing. Sure I want to post something on the blog, but the reality is that I am consumed by everything else. The “everything else” ranges from essential things like work, to the non-essential things like watching the Cowboys on a Sunday afternoon (although those things could arguably both be considered essential, I have to draw the line at what pays the bills and what doesn’t. Too bad.).

You would think that with 5 years of time and life management experience under my belt at Franklin Covey I would be better at this, but like the old saying goes those who can’t do, teach. I could tell you all the principles of prioritizing, but putting those things into practice is quite another accomplishment.

So, here we are again at yet another milestone in the year and unless you have talked with Melinda on the phone recently you are no closer to us than you were a year ago. Shame on us! The quick and simple is this:

• Scott is very happy in his new position at Thomas Nelson. He has had the chance to work with a lot of great people on the front lines of ministry. If there was one thing he would like to improve it would be in the area of new business. What Nelson Ministry Services does is the best-kept secret in the industry and more people need to know about it

• Melinda has enjoyed some time off over the summer and then started a new job at the beginning of September. One of the biggest reasons she is working is that she is taking early childhood education classes and they are paid for as long as she is working in a pre-school environment. She is working at a pre-school in a local church and loves having a lot less pressure. She also has a great schedule that allows her to be home in the afternoons with the girls, which is a huge blessing.

• Jessica is almost half-way done with the 6th grade and continues to grow into a (even more) beautiful young lady. Everyone at the school loves having her there and enjoy being around her. The challenge we face is that this is her last year at Bill Rice Christian Academy. Where they used to go through the 12th grade, they made the decision to stop at 6th. We now have to start looking for a new school – one that holds similar values as Bill Rice, but won’t break the bank!

• Anna is getting so big it’s unimaginable. It’s tough to look at her like a 10 year old, but she’s growing up. To be honest we have really been struggling with Anna’s behavior lately and we (Melinda) is working hard to get her on an even keel. She is on a balanced calendar school schedule (“year round”) and is currently on her three-week break. That has been a God-send for everyone (especially for her teachers). Pray that we can discover what it is that is triggering her outbursts and that we can moderate her behavior.

Well, there you have it. As you can see nothing spectacular, but a lot of stuff to keep us busy. We will continue with a random post just to keep you coming back to see something, but will also continue to aspire to more. In the meantime, enjoy this fall season and see if you can find how many places in your neck of the woods that have Halloween and Christmas decorations right next to each other.

P.S. - We need more red dots on out map to the left! Tell everyone you know to at least look at our blog! Thanks!

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