Dear Elim Grace,
We will always be busy and we will always face troubles in this life.
But, if we’re not careful, we can get busy and we can create trouble due to lack of growth in wisdom and character on our part. When this happens there’s no lasting peace in our heart or in our home or in our workplace.
For the disciple of Jesus, peace is an embrace but also an exchange. It is not merely the absence of what troubles or worries or pains you. It is the embrace of the Prince of Peace in the middle or in the face of what troubles or worries or pains you.
But it is in that embrace also an exchange. Your heart is disentangled from earthly things and pursuits and in turn is entwined, united, made one with Jesus. The things of His heart spill over into yours and fill you. Little by little you put (He takes) your whole heart into Him and not into the things of this world.
Yet this “exchange” is more than a simple give and take. Jesus is interested in more than answering your prayer when you are in trouble or facing difficulty. He’s interested in walking with you and you walking with Him. He’s interested in a life devoted to Him, taking on the shape of Him in wisdom and character. In other words, a total transformation of your heart and complete reorientation of your life.
The areas of our life we save for ourselves and won’t surrender become “the fields and the trees” that seasonally give us trouble. They produce again and again unhealthy fruit, so that 5, 10, 20 years down the road we are still dealing with the same problems, having the same conversations, and fighting over the same issues. Even if there is only one area of our life in which we refuse to walk in obedience, that area is still (inter)connected to every other area of our life.
Not until we lose ourselves to Christ, not until we surrender every area of our lives and submit to His Lordship, do we, can we, will we know His abundant life. Peace is wholeness. Fulness. Harmony. It’s every area and part of my life working together as it should under the leadership of Jesus and, therefore, by the power of His Spirit.
You are powerless in yourself to change the deepest seated desires and actions of your heart. To close the widest fissures stretching across your heart. But you are not powerless in the Spirit.
If the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead now lives in you, you have the power to say “No” to sin and “Yes” to God. You have the power to say “No” to the desires of the flesh and “Yes” to the fruit of the Spirit. There is a peace that comes only in surrender to the work of Jesus in every area of your life. That comes only in the freedom of the Spirit to live as a new creation in every area of your life.
If you want this kind of peace and this kind of power, there’s only one way — the Way, the Truth and the Life.