IF your name is Irene then you probably know it comes from the Greek eirene, which means peace. One of the aspects of the fruit of the Spirit is this eirene, so one of the characteristics of a believer will be peace. And, at the risk of sounding Eastern and mystical, it is inner peace that he or she will have. The fruit of the Spirit is an internal matter: all the aspects occur in our minds, in our hearts. And there's nothing particularly mystical about inner peace.
As we noted at the beginning of the last chapter, peace is the flip-side of joy on the coin of security. Peace is the more passive side of security. Whereas joy bubbles up and gives the sparkle to life in the Truth, peace provides a deeper, warmer glow of well-being. Peace is a product of security, and all the things we said about the need for God-given security in Chapter Seven apply equally here. Without God-given security there can be no true peace of mind. But there is more to peace than just security.
How many people have real peace in their lives? More to the point, how many even know what real peace is? No doubt most people have some idea of what constitutes peace for themselves. For some it's just the silence of being absolutely alone. For others it's a leisurely walk down an English country lane in early summer. Or maybe it's those precious moments when the children are finally in bed and asleep! Sitting on a riverbank with a fishing line draped in the water might be another person's peace. Alone with a favourite book, another's. You can doubtless add to the list with your own ideal scenario. And yet not one of these is real peace. None of them is the peace which the Scriptures speak of as part of the fruit of the Spirit.
One of the major problems of this age is stress. A high percentage of illness today is said to be stress-related. And those who aren't actually ill with it are troubled by it to some degree. The very word disease is a joining together of the two components dis and ease, meaning lack of ease, or stress.
We in the West live in a society that promotes stress. The consumer society is the treadmill society. There are benefits, of course, and no-one is hurrying to swap it for a Third World economy! But there is also a downside—and that is stress. You get on the treadmill of want, and you have to stay on it to keep all the things that the treadmill society convinces you are necessary for your happiness. The whole industry of advertising is geared to convincing you that you need more and better. The result is stress: chasing the dream that is never quite fulfilled, always over the next hill. Or realising the dream, only to discover that the grass may be greener but it still needs cutting!
If you get off the treadmill, you become a 'dropout' and the stress of survival can be even more acute. And if you do so well for yourself that you can afford to stand aside from the treadmill, there is even the stress of success to deal with! It's also likely that the stress of making it to the top will have taken such a heavy toll physically and mentally that you can't enjoy the fruits of it when you get them. Stress counselling for all levels of society is a growth industry.
This generation even chooses forms of relaxation that are stressful. People actually 'relax' (or so they kid themselves) by watching murder and mayhem in their living rooms on the small screen!
Real peace is, I believe, a rare commodity these days. But the lack of it can surely be no new phenomenon. We seem to think we have just invented stress. Imagine living in the days of Christ and Paul. The Roman Empire extended a degree of peace throughout its regions, but life was precarious and hard for many of its subjects. Slavery and rough justice were the order of the day for the lower end of society. Getting too close to a fickle and often monstrous Emperor was your reward for climbing to the top of it! It seems to me that there can have been very few, if any, stress-free periods of human history.
But how should believers react to such a world? Christian counselling is also a growth industry. In some ways life can seem harder for a believer than it is for an unbeliever. The believer has not only the same everyday stress to contend with as everybody else, he or she has the additional pressures of trying to live according to Christian precepts. Let's be honest: the majority of believers seem no less stress-free than other people. We get 'tetchy' and miserable at times. We even get angry and confrontational. We get frustrated and snappy. We get depressed, and we get other stress-related conditions.
And yet Christ distinctly said, to believers: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you." (John 14:27). The gospel which believers believe and preach is called "the gospel of peace". And Paul says to all believers: "let the peace of God rule in your hearts" (Col.3:15).
And peace being part of the fruit of the Spirit, it will also be a part of the well-rounded Christian character. So, why isn't it always? The obvious answer (which also happens to be the wrong answer) is that we're all different, and some cope better with life than others. Some are more capable of peace than others. How unfair, then, of Paul to say that peace will be a part of the true Christian character, when many can't manage it! (For that matter, what about longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, and the other parts of the fruit?) The Scriptures don't make allowance for our different personality types, do they, when it comes to the fruit of the Spirit? They hold up one version only of the true Christian character, with no options to allow for temperament. It may seem dreadfully unfair that habitually troubled souls are expected to exhibit peace, but the underlying message is that everyone is capable of it, no matter what their temperament, no matter what their circumstances. And that's a message of hope! It's possible for every believer to have peace.
Probably the biggest misconception about peace is that it all depends on circumstances. Too many people (believers among them) live with the illusion that their inner peace is totally dependent upon what goes on outside of them. For instance, they may wake up in the morning feeling okay, then the breakfast toast gets burned, or an unexpected bill hits the doormat, and their okay mood goes up in smoke, just like the toast. Their peace of mind is shattered. They get agitated. Something outside of them has taken away their inner peace. It's as if they had no control over what went on in their own head. I'm sure many people believe that to be the case, and they go through life as victims of everything that happens to them. Their peace is entirely dependent on good circumstances. That's not real peace. The peace that is of the fruit of the Spirit doesn't evaporate over a red hot temper!
If you are a believer and your peace is controlled by what happens to you, or how people treat you, or whether it's raining, then the peace you have is counterfeit. It is not the peace which is a part of the fruit of the Spirit. Remember that the qualities that make up the fruit of the Spirit become constants ingrained in the very character of the believer. They are part of him or her, having been nurtured in the heart of the believer by constant delight and meditation in the Spirit Word. He or she will naturally slip out of character once in a while under pressure, but it will be exactly that: out of character. Their normal state is peace.
Stephen was able to retain his inner peace, even while being stoned to death. He died with forgiveness for his killers on his lips. Habakkuk also qualifies as one of the heroes of peace:
"Though the fig-tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Saviour" (Hab 3:17,18 NIV).
It's beyond the comprehension of most people that Habakkuk could be untroubled amid all those serious problems. I'm sure this is what makes "the peace of God" the kind of peace "which passeth all understanding". And yet this is what God holds out to all. It's so radical that most people can never go right out on that limb and trust God as far as He invites us to trust Him. How different, and how remarkably peaceful our lives could be if we took to heart and practised exactly what the Bible recommends.
This is what Paul recommends through the Spirit. Weigh every word as you read it here from the New International Version. Dwell particularly on the words in bold.
"Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanks-giving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil.4:4-7).
That's the secret of real peace. It transcends our understanding. It goes beyond what is naturally reasonable for us to "rejoice in the Lord always"—to praise the Lord in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, knowing that God is in control. When we learn to praise God come rain or shine, we have found real peace. When we know and trust that our whole lives are ordered by God, we learn to see Him even in the 'bad' events, not only the good. To complain about the 'bad' is to complain about what God is doing to bring us closer to Him.
Can you seriously envisage losing your health, or your job, or your house, or your reputation, or even a close family member, and yet still trusting God enough to feel peaceful within? It doesn't seem possible, does it? And yet in truth it is. That's the place you get to when you "let the peace of God rule in your hearts." To trust that even in the direst circumstances God is working for your good—when you can't even pretend to see an ounce of good in what has happened, that is the acceptance of a peace which is beyond understanding. Of course calamity will cast us down, but it can't keep us down if we have eirene.
Real peace is practised by maintaining inner calm and absolute trust in God during the smaller everyday crises of life. The Bible tells us that "all things work together for good" for us, not that all things "are good". Some of those things working together for our good won't appear at all good in themselves. So even the 'bad' events that might make us 'go to pieces' must be viewed in the context of God guiding all the events in life to a good outcome. The truth of the matter is "there shall no evil happen to the just" (Prov.12:21).
How does the real peace described above compare with the peace you feel inside yourself? There is a certain level of peace of mind that being in the Truth affords us, that doesn't go all the way to real peace. There is what I call The Gap that we can fall into if we don't watch our step.
On one side of The Gap there is a mind filled with trouble and confusion, a mind devoid of spiritual relaxation, called the natural mind. On the other side of The Gap there is a mind filled with real peace, called the spiritual mind. In the middle, in The Gap itself, there is a no-man's land where neither true peace nor real confusion reigns. And this is where you might easily get stuck. It's easy to get stuck here because it gives the illusion of being the real peace that we seek. But the absence of war is not necessarily peace.
Peace of mind may seem like a passive quality in many respects, but that does not mean it is negative. Peace is not simply the absence of war. It is a quality in its own right which actually replaces conflict within us. You may not feel especially troubled in your mind about the way your life is going, you may even be pretty happy about it, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have the real peace of mind that comes from God.
The absence of war is not always peace. Just think of the state that existed between the Americans and the Russians after the Second World War and up to the late 1980s. They weren't at war, but neither by any stretch of the imagination were they at peace! Someone came up with the term cold war to describe the peace that was not peace. One cynic has described peace as a period of cheating between two periods of fighting. And you and I know that even at an inter-personal level when someone takes a dislike to us for whatever reason, they may not physically or verbally abuse us but their conduct towards us can hardly be described as peace.
It's possible to have your own personal inner cold war in progress. This is what happens when you're part way between war and peace: when you're not overtly troubled, and seem quite at peace with yourself and with God, but it doesn't take an awful lot for hostility to come shooting to the surface, or for doubt and complaint to start circulating inside. This is what it's like to be in The Gap. It's not sufficient for us simply to move away from being troubled in mind, easily provoked and downcast; we have to move right across The Gap to a positive state of peace. It's not enough simply to "resist the devil and he will flee from you"; we also have to "draw near to God and he will draw near to you" (James 4:7,8 RAV).
Sometimes we "resist the devil" but we don't "draw near to God" in the process. We move into The Gap instead. We allow the pendulum to stop in the middle, at the lowest point, instead of letting the momentum of resistance to evil carry us right over to God.
Observe yourself the next time you resist the urge to do something un-Christian, like responding rudely to the rudeness of a colleague at work. Test to see what you feel. Does it leave you feeling frustrated, impotent, and secretly wishing you had reacted angrily? Or, just as bad, does it give you a glow of self-satisfaction that tells you how much better you are than that rude person? Both these reactions are Gap reactions. Anyone with real peace inside will actually be thankful for the experience and "count it all joy". For them it will be as much a part of God's hand in their lives as the early morning sunshine (or rain!) that greeted them when they stepped out of the house that morning.
Take the Joseph point of view about the events in your life. There's no record of him moaning about the cruel treatment he had from his brothers, or from Potiphar's wife. What he went through was enough to make anyone bitter. But he simply said, "God meant it for good." Joseph knew real peace of mind. He may have been in prison undeservedly, but he wasn't in The Gap.
To be reminded of God every time something goes wrong for you, however trivial, is a perfect way to stay focused on the Truth. It's during the little daily 'disasters' we most need to remember God. And this is a sure way to overcome that tendency we all have to complain about the things God is doing to help us strengthen our characters in readiness for the Kingdom of God. Every complaint about our lot is a criticism of God. And we are supposed to be praising God, not criticising Him! Seeing a reminder of God in each little 'set-back' of the day is what I call spiritual judo. Because the trick of judo is that you use your opponent's strength against him. You use his own body weight and motion to accomplish what you want to do with him! If you can learn to see the hand of God in things which would normally defeat you, you will have mastered the art of spiritual judo.
Seeing God in even the 'bad' events of our lives is not being critical of God. We are simply acknowledging that God's hand is in our whole lives. When things go wrong, press the praise button, not the panic button. It sounds radical I know, but a revised attitude to problems, and a recognition of God in all of your life changes your life for the better. It brings real peace. "Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good" (Rom.12:21). Paul wrote that in the context of recompensing "to no man evil for evil" and in the context of "avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath." He surely didn't mean that we should walk away from injustice fuming inside, and stressed-out. That's what we do when we're stuck in The Gap. God's way is infinitely better. As Paul said in an earlier verse in that same chapter of Romans: "Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." The practical outcome of all this is peace. All that God commands us to do is for our own benefit.
We show our love of God by keeping His commands. "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous" (1 John 5:3). What we discover when we keep those commands is that God is showing His love to us through them. In the keeping of the commands we will find all that we could possibly want for ourselves that is truly good for us. God isn't just telling us to do what He wants in order to gain some selfish pleasure from having power over us, like some earthly tyrant who wants his every whim obeyed, or else.
"God is love." And because He is love, the things He commands us actually enable us to experience that love. God created us, and He knows exactly what we most need to function well, and His commandments are designed to give us exactly that in the keeping of them. "He that getteth wisdom loveth his own soul" (Prov.19:8). So if you want what is truly best for yourself, be wise to what God asks of you.
The same can also be said of the commandments of Christ. Christ said, "If ye love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). But he might equally have said: "If you want to see my love for you, keep my commandments."
Perfect inner peace is obtained by finding the will of God through delight and meditation in His Word, trusting in the Lord with all your heart, leaning not towards your own understanding, and in all your ways acknowledging Him so that He can direct your paths (to paraphrase Proverbs 3:5-6). Nothing can destroy a peace which is governed by this Biblical approach to life.
The Laodicean condition is an excellent example of "The Gap". The members of the Church at Laodicea were told that they were lukewarm (Rev.3:16), neither hot nor cold in their attitudes to the Truth, and to Christ. But it's not so much in this that they showed a Gap mentality, but rather in the fact that they were described as naked. They thought they were splendidly clothed. They were "rich, and increased with goods and had need of nothing," in their own eyes. But Christ knew them better than they knew themselves, and said, "thou art... poor, and blind, and naked" (Rev.3:17). So, what could they do about that? The answer to nakedness is, of course, to put on some clothes. Which is exactly what Christ told them to do: "white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear."
What sort of clothes were these? Not actual material clothes, of course, because Revelation is a book of sign and symbol. The nakedness of the Laodiceans wasn't physical nakedness; it was spiritual. So, what sort of clothes did they need? I believe that the answer to that is to be found in Paul's letter to the Colossians. Significantly, this letter was also sent to the Laodiceans at Paul's request: "And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans..." (Col.4:16). I'm certain that when Christ mentioned, in Revelation, the nakedness of the Laodiceans, and their need to put on some sort of spiritual clothing, he was harking back to Paul's earlier letter to the Colossians, which also applied to them.
In Colossians 3 Paul mentions all the items of spiritual clothing that believers should put on:
"Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on charity [love: agape] which is the bond of perfectness. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful" (Col.3:12-15).
(Pause for a moment here, before we carry on talking about spiritual clothing. Notice that these verses are a restatement of most, if not all the aspects of the fruit of the Spirit. And notice particularly that love is described in verse fourteen as the thing to be put on "above all these things" and that it is the "bond of perfectness"—not only because it unites brethren and sisters in Christ, but also because it unites all the aspects of the fruit within itself).
These 'clothes' in Colossians 3 are the equivalent of the white raiment that Christ wanted the Laodiceans to put on in Revelation 3. They are the spiritual clothing (fruit of the Spirit, in fact!) that will cover their spiritual nakedness.
But we should not miss the fact that Paul also tells believers in that same chapter of Colossians what clothes they need to put off before they can put on the spiritual attire: Having already (v.5) told them to put off sexual immorality, he goes on to say:
"But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not to one another..." (Col 3:8,9).
Let's turn the spotlight upon ourselves for a moment, before we consider again the Laodiceans. How would you answer this question? What do you think you are now wearing, spiritually? It's a tricky question because there are three possible answers. It's not just a matter of the clean, white garment of the Spirit, or the dirty garment of the flesh. There's a third possibility.
First of all, can you honestly say, hand on heart, that you now have on the pure white garment, "unspotted from the world" of the elect of God? Remember it consists of things like holiness, kindness, humbleness, meekness, longsuffering, and above all, love. Maybe when you look at this list you feel you don't quite have that good a raiment—not quite your style! Yours is a bit ragged and muddy from your passage through life.
But now consider the other garment. It's not just a little bit muddy, is it? It's absolutely filthy! "Fornication, anger, wrath, malice, blaspheming, filthy communication, lying." Well... no, you surely don't have one like that on, do you? Surely none of us is wearing that!
But if you're not wearing the filthy one, and if you don't quite see yourself wearing the clean, white one; if you think of yourself as something in between—then what are you?
Naked is the answer!
The Laodiceans weren't wearing either the filthy garment or the white one. So they were naked. They weren't malicious or blasphemers, or liars. Oh, no. But neither were they humble, or merciful, or longsuffering (in a word, loving) towards one another. They were neither one thing or the other, and so they were naked.
They were in The Gap. They had moved away from the mind dominated by the flesh, but they hadn't moved all the way towards a mind dominated by the Spirit. If they made that move, they would have clean white garments, not the ugly red-blotched garments of sin. For "though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." Every time we seek and obtain forgiveness for our sins, every time we seek to walk in love, Christ whitens our garments for us. That doesn't happen in The Gap, where we have no clothes to be whitened.
Simply putting off the old, filthy garments is not enough. Once the negatives are ousted, there must be the positive action of putting on, or we will be left in The Gap. There are two things to be done: "resist the devil" and "draw near to God". These are not one and the same action, but two separate and complementary actions that will together lead us to and keep us in a state of peace. "To be spiritually minded is life and peace" wrote Paul (Rom.8:6).
When Paul wrote to the Corinthian believers about the haphazard way in which the gifts of the Spirit were being employed in their ecclesia, he chided them with the words: "For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace..." (1 Cor.14:33). The Greek word for confusion in that verse is akatastasia which conveys the idea of instability, the rocking back and forth of a boat on water. (AV margin also says tumult or unquietness). It also conveys what I mean by The Gap. The Gap is a mental state of confusion, instability, tumult. God is certainly not the author of The Gap; we are. He is the author of our peace, if we will allow Him to be.
When you're in the gap you're looking both ways at the same time, like the mythical Roman god Janus who is represented with two faces, one on the front of his head and one on the back. Our month of January is named after Janus, because he was thought to stand at the gate of the year looking into the past and into the future. But the believer stuck in The Gap could be depicted in the same way, confused between the mind of the flesh and the mind of the Spirit, trying to blend the two and not getting anywhere because the two just don't mix. He certainly doesn't have peace of mind.
James talks of this sort of person as "a double minded man" (though of course there are double minded women also!) James says that "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways." (Jas.1:8) All of them! Everything he does! That word unstable is the Greek akatastatos and it's a variant of the same word Paul used when he said that "God is not the author of confusion". A double minded man is unstable and confused about all he does because his mind is in conflict. He wants to go two different ways, live two different lives. He won't commit himself one way or the other, and so he has no peace of mind.
The only way for the double minded man or woman, stuck in The Gap, to find real peace is to bring an end to the inner confusion by fully committing to the way of the Spirit. Draw near to God. Especially turn to Him in praise for everything in your life, and look more closely into His Word for everything you need to help you.
"Teach me thy way, O Lord; I will walk in thy truth: unite my heart to fear thy name. I will praise thee, O Lord my God, with all my heart: and I will glorify thy name for evermore" (Psalm 86:11-12).
Those verses express the perfect frame of mind for anyone seeking real peace of mind. A united heart is what we need. Above all we need to be able to praise God with our whole heart. This is the way of peace. It is the way of praising God for everything in our lives, because it is all working together for good. "In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ concerning you" (1 Thess.5:18).
There's an apposite reference in the Old Testament. It concerns those men who pledged their allegiance to King David in Israel. David is a type of Christ, therefore we can view those who choose to follow him as typical of believers. In 1 Chronicles 12:33 we read the following amid the list of families who threw in their lot with David:
"Of Zebulun, such as went forth to battle, expert in war, with all instruments of war, fifty thousand, which could keep rank: they were not of double heart."
And just look in the AV margin against that phrase not of a double heart. It gives the literal Hebrew rendering as: "without a heart and a heart." Doesn't that express it perfectly! Those who followed David from Zebulun were not the sort to have two hearts, or to be in two minds about it. Their hearts were united to follow him in literal war, exactly as our hearts must be united to follow the Captain of our Salvation in spiritual war. Paradoxically, being an "expert in war, with all the instruments of war" will bring us the only real peace available. As the Psalmist expressed it, "Great peace have they who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble" (Psalm 119:165 NIV).
In the days soon to come when the Kingdom of God is established on this earth, Jerusalem will be the capital city. Isaiah spoke of those days saying, "For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream..." (Isaiah 66:12). It's a beautiful simile, isn't it? and one which is picked up in the final chapter of the Bible, where the Kingdom is described for the last time:
"And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb [in the new Jerusalem]. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (Rev.22:1,2).
This is a symbolic glimpse of a time of unparalleled peace on earth. Did you notice anything familiar about that picture of a tree by a river bearing bountiful fruit with healing leaves? It takes us back to Psalm 1 where the truly righteous man is pictured. He is the man who develops the fruit of the Spirit from the water of life which is in God's Word. He is "like a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season." (Psalm1.3). His leaf shall not wither. In fact, his leaves shall be for the healing of nations, because the righteous ones will teach the nations the Truth. Such people, who delight themselves in meditating upon God's Word, will be in the New Jerusalem, when "the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace" (Psalm 37:11).
But we don't have to wait until then to experience a good measure of inner peace for ourselves. Real inner peace is part of the fruit of the Spirit we are to develop now. Christ will be looking for it in you and me when He comes.
"We, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth right-eousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless" (2 Pet.3:13,14).
Above all, don't forget that real God-given peace (the only sort worth having) comes from being thankful for everything in your life in Christ. "And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful" (Col. 3:15).