You Can Be Consistently Peaceful

In a world jam-packed full of death, frustration, difficulties, unfair situations, stress, and sin, you can be consistently peaceful. Maybe your finances are messed up. Maybe your relationships are less than God's best. Maybe your work is beating you up. Maybe you are always longing for something else to make you happy, and it doesn't, or can't. Regardless of your situation you can live in peace.

I'm confident of this, but I don't fully comprehend it. I've seen the effects that this principle has in my life, but I want to get better at it. Just so you know, we all struggle at this from time to time.

The ancient prophet Isaiah said, " You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You" (Isaiah 26:3). Our mind is a battlefield. It is filled each day with thoughts that we are tempted to think that can destroy our peace. As A.W. Tozer once said, "I can lose the fellowship of God and sense of His presence and a sense of spirituality by just thinking wrong." Our thoughts can either help us go up or go down. They either help us connect to God or alienate us from him. I'm not saying that every second you need to be thinking about a passage of scripture. Instead, what I'm saying is to try to fix our minds on him just as Isaiah says. For example, I am a Marketing Director for a Creative Agency. I spend much of my day focused on generating sales and growing our business. While I do believe that I should seek to the best of my ability to keep my mind fixed on him, I don't think that it is wrong for me to think about how to grow our business. However, it would be wrong if I were to "worship" our business and not offer any time to God. Or if my thoughts were in any other way sinful, they could possibly generate a feeling of alienation from God.

Like I said, we all at times struggle with this. God knows our struggle. In fact, he can relate. He doesn't have long-term memory failure. He sent Jesus who is empathetic with our temptations. So, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9) and, "Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13b, 14). In other words, you confess - he'll forgive - you forget & keep pressing on. You can do it. I believe in you.

It really is possible to experience more peace. God will guard your heart and mind, but you must be wise about what thoughts stay inside. No matter what you are experiencing you can have peace.