Peace

             Let the peace of Christ, to which you were indeed called in one body, rule in your hearts; and be thankful.  (Colossians 3:15)

I wish I could find the video I saw in which Dennis Prager discussed the call for unity. He told of sitting down with three pastors who were calling for unity in the Christian Church. Since he’s Jewish and an expert at friendly interviews, he can get away with seeming innocent. He asked one of the pastors if he planned to stop one of that church’s cultural distinctives with which the other pastors’ denominations rejected. The pastor said, “No.” When another of the pastors was asked if he intended to bring that practice into his congregation, the second pastor also said, “No.”

While I believe there can be unity around certain key beliefs and still allow diversity in others, the point is that calls for unity are generally devious ways to say, “Do what I tell you.”

And while the passage above mentions our being called to be one body, Paul makes it clear elsewhere that bodies are made up of different parts. We can be called in one body without having to do everything the same way. Diversity within unity, and unity within diversity. That’s not the main thought that this passage suggests this morning. Instead, it’s the connection of peace and thankfulness.

Yesterday’s reading in Renovation of the Heart was about peace. Dallas Willard describes peace as being willing to accept outcomes other than the one we prefer, with the same level of acceptance as the one we prefer. This requires that we have complete trust in God, knowing that He will do what is best for us. In other words, it requires unity with God. There can be no peace as long as we think we have the right to say, “No, Lord.”

Peace is hard. In the past, I’ve likened it to going down into a river. If we swim to a destination upstream, we must fight the current. If we try to swim directly across the river, we have to fight the current, effectively swimming upstream because the current would push us away from our destination. Even if we swim downstream, we are still rejecting what the river is doing. We’re declaring that the current is not acting strongly or quickly enough for us.  Even staying out of the water is fighting against the river, because it denies the river the opportunity to do to you what it does. Being at peace with the river is only possible if you give yourself over to the river.

This isn’t to suggest that we should allow any river to control us. There are good reasons to fight the current, but the point is that those times are times in which one is not at peace. There have been times when men have striven with God, and God has allowed them to win. But that hasn’t always been a good thing.

There’s another hard thing about peace. We have emotions. We have wills. Some years ago, I reached the conclusion that peace is, or peace requires, a flatline of emotions and will. A “flatline” indicates death, and that tends to be how I feel when I think I’m at peace.

David has taught me a little about this. When God told him that the first child born to David and Bathsheba would die, David spent several emotional days fasting and crying. His servants were afraid to tell him when the child died because they thought he’d be worse. Instead, he got up, bathed, and ate. I would not describe David as passive or as flatlining emotionally, but he had peace.

As we go through this Thanksgiving week, may we give thanks to Him who gives us peace, who meets our needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus, and who provided Him as the means by which there might be peace between us.