What can we do to experience God’s peace?
Here’s your spoonful of courage.
Here’s three practical suggestions:
In the last video, we discussed three ways to experience the peace of God: we pray, we get our perspective focused, and we put into practice what we know to do. you may need to check out the video in the link provided.
So let’s dive into it. If you’re like me, I struggle with prayer. Here’s something which really has been helpful for me. I pray the scriptures, specifically the Psalms. I take a psalm and read the verse and pray what comes to mind. What’s striking about this method is that I realized that the writers were facing some of the same problems that I typically face. Praying the Psalms also helps me with distractions.
Sometimes I don’t know what to pray and if I encounter those verses it’s confusing and I move on and skip it. This always stirs up creativity. Sometimes a verse will help me see a problem in a new way, something I had never thought of before. That’s one way to pray.
Once again as we pray, the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will fill us and God’s words bring peace.
Here’s the second practical way we can experience peace: meditation.
We replace negative thoughts with those mentioned in Philippians 4:8. Have you ever prayed and given an issue over to God and then boom, five minutes later that problem is boomering back into your consciousness and you’re robbed of peace again? So have I.
we have to replace one thought, the one weighing us down, with one of God’s good promises. That’s where meditation comes in.
Meditation involves filling the mind, not emptying it as other world views suggest. Let’s meditate on one of God’s promises to get peace. Isaiah 26:3 “And you will keep him in perfect peace those whose mind is stayed on you”. This promise really fits in well with Philippians. “Finally brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is good repute, if there’s any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things”.
We’re encouraged to meditate, that’s the mind stayed on God. So to meditate, take a verse, pick it apart, just meditate.
What does that mean, the mind stayed? Well in surgery, we use stay sutures. Stay sutures fixate tissues together. With stay sutures, structures don’t move. We should stay our thinking. This is a conditional promise. We can’t be doing mental flip-flops, bouncing back-and-forth.
So the second part about it is our part. Now let’s look at the first part of the verse. That’s God’s part; “You will keep him or her in perfect peace”.
What does it mean that God will keep you in perfect peace? The God of the universe is describing in Colossions the one who is above all things and in whom all things hold together. You think God has the ability to keep you? Now that’s a promise to meditate on.
“And we are kept in perfect peace”. Well, what does that mean to be perfect? Do you see that what we’re doing here, we’re meditating, we’re ruminating on those things that are true, honorable, right, and excellent. And as we begin to focus on these things, guess what, those problems weighing us down just fade away because they’ve been replaced; because we are staying our mind on the God of peace.
