Being Content

Perfect Peace

Listen to what people talk about long enough, and you’ll find that most people desire peace. Not just the beauty-pageant “I would wish for world peace” kind of longing, but a yearning for peace from the hustle and bustle of life – a break from the little and the big travesties that are part of this journey, a temporary hold on things going wrong in exchange for some uninterrupted calm.

Yet despite this innate desire for peace, no human being as ever developed a system or a method for creating and sustaining it. Peace is an elusive ideal – that few experience and yet we all pursue. This is why the promise of Isaiah 26:3a is so amazing. The words say “You [God]  keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.” In other words, for the Christian, peace is not something we obtained, but a place where God fixes us. He holds us there; as we trust in Him, He promises that He will plant us in peace. This doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to us or that things won’t go wrong (God promises that we will have troubles – see John 16:33), but it means that our lives will be characterized by peaceful hearts, because God will rule them. He will grant us tranquility of mind, as we rest in Him.

No human invention or institution can ever promise perfect peace, even though countless have tried and failed. But God can. May we each be held in His perfect peace as we increasingly rely on Him.

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Hope

Cast Off


Sailing away often sounds appealing to me. In fact, in one of my all-time favorite books, A Severe Mercy, has an entire section recounting the adventures at see that the author and his young wife experienced. It sounded romantic, not just in that “boy meets girl and falls in love type of way”, but in the “life is an adventure and should be experienced and not just lived” type of way. The sea seemed like a world without care. Once that boat pushed off from the dock, all the troubles were cast away too.

The analogy seems apt because the Bible says that “perfect love casts off fear” (I John 1:18, NKJV). While this verse is oft-quoted, it is only recently that I have begun thinking about the action verb associated with it. In my minds eye, I think I considered the verse to be saying, “perfect love supplants fear” or “perfect love is greater than fear.” But neither of these are in fact what God’s Word contains. It says “perfect love casts off fear.” Just like the boat pulls up anchor, casts off, and sails into the open sea, perfect love does away with the weight of fear. It not merely overrules it, it repels it entirely.

This is a concept difficult to grasp because fear, anxiety and worry is so embedded into our day-to-day life. From worrying that we won’t arrive on time, to fearing that we won’t be able to pay our bills, we are consumed with that which we can’t control. Love, and the rest that comes from God’s perfect love, renders this fear ridiculous. Just as the anchor has no place on a boat that’s sailing on the open sea, fear has no place in a life redeemed by God’s love. For if God’s love has overarching prevalence in our life, then it is absurd to be afraid of all that’s less than it

Casting off for the blue skies and tranquil waters is promised as the pathway to peace. Real peace comes from casting off fear and trusting in Christ’s love.

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