not as the world gives

Every Monday I get an e-mail from the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, called "Word for the Week," containing the musings of one of their staff members on a certain passage of Scripture. And every Monday when I get to work, I am refreshed and challenged by their words, which come from the overflow of lives laid down daily for the cause of Christ, saturated with the Holy Spirit, pursuing justice and mercy and a daily walk with our God in the midst of a world that cries out for redemption and healing! Here is this week's Word on the peace that passes understanding, a reminder that the peace we have through the Holy Spirit's work in our lives is not an escape from troubles, but a truth that roots us, more deeply than a feeling, in wholeness and security in God:
"The fruit of the Spirit is…peace," Gal.5:22. "My peace I give you," John 14:27.

‘Oh for a bit of peace and quiet’, we may say, troubled by fractious colleagues and sardine-tin commuter trains, or by squabbling children and cold-calling salespeople. Peace perhaps equates to space, time to breathe, respite from stress.

From stress, but also from grief, from fear, from suffering. ‘My heart is in anguish within me’, wrote the psalmist, ‘Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.’ And Keats, in his Ode to a Nightingale, grieving the death of a friend, longed to: Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget What thou among the leaves have never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret, Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.

So is peace simply escapism? Most people would also see it as something more positive – a feeling of contentment and well-being. Sometimes even the most successful people, having achieved all their material goals, still lament that peace has eluded them.

This is closer to the biblical concept of peace: the Hebrew word shalom implies wholeness, integrity, a harmony between the internal and the external. And Jesus made it plain that the peace he offered was special: ‘My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives’.
Jesus’ peace is not a mere feeling. It is based on truth, and appropriated by faith. ‘Being justified by faith, we have peace with God’ (Rom.5:1). The serenity of heart that the Spirit produces in us is rooted in the security of a healed relationship with God.

Unlike the world’s peace, the Spirit’s peace is independent of circumstances. Besieged by disappointment, grief, sickness, overwork, strife, injustice, we can daily hear the voice of Jesus: ‘In this world … trouble’, but ‘in me, peace’ (John 16:33).
(written by Helen Parry)

This is the kind of peace I long to see come to earth. A peace that is more than just the absence of war and oppression (although it also includes those things), but is an active restoration of wholeness in people, communities, and nations, and a reconciliation of those people to God. A peace that, while working to overcome pain, conflict, famine, nakedness, injustice, and war, establishes our lives solidly on the One in Whom we live and move and have our being, even in the midst of the troubles of this broken world. There is a peace that passes all understanding. May this peace that is much deeper than a feeling guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus this week, and may we join wholeheartedly in the Holy Spirit's work to bring that peace to all people!