“Christian Resolutions_2020, Part 22” by Romans
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We are continuing in our examination of, what I have come to call, “Christian Resolutions,” and both their Foundation and manifestation, the Fruit of the Spirit. We have thus far covered Love and Joy, and we will continue tonight to review the third named Fruit of the Spirit: Peace.
In his Daily Calendar Devotional, “God's Way ~ Day by Day,” Charles Stanley wrote this for his entry on May 24th: Since it applied to our current Study, I decided to include it. It reads: “'Don't worry. Pray!' Paul says. And notice the immediate result – peace! Even before our prayers are answered, there is peace. Before we have any idea how things will work out, there is peace. Why? Because by crying out to God and unloading our cares and burdens on Him, He is assured of {and we are reminded of} our dependence on Him. And that is what pleases Him.”
Let's read that anchor verse, again, and see the way to peace that God provides us in Philippians 4:6-7: “Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”
Of this, Alexander MacClaren writes, “Philippians 4:6 How To Obey An Impossible Injunction: It is easy for prosperous people, who have nothing to trouble them, to give good advices to suffering hearts; and these are generally as futile as they are easy. But who was he who here said to the Church at Philippi, ‘Be careful for nothing?’ A prisoner in a Roman prison; and when Rome fixed its claws it did not usually let go without drawing blood. He was expecting his trial, which might, so far as he knew, very probably end in death.
Everything in the future was entirely dark and uncertain. It was this man, with all the pressure of personal sorrows weighing upon him, who, in the very crisis of his life, turned to his brethren in Philippi, who had far fewer causes of anxiety than he had, and cheerfully bade them ‘be careful for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, make their requests known unto God.’
Now, here are two things. There is an apparently perfectly impossible advice, and there is the only course that will make it possible. I. An apparently impossible advice. ‘Be careful for nothing.’ I do not need to remind you—for I suppose that we all know it—that that word ‘careful,’ in a great many places in the New Testament, does not mean what, by the slow progress of change in the significance of words, it has come to mean to-day; but it means what it should still mean, ‘full of care,’ {and/or worry}.
but it meant the thing which of all others unfits a man most for such prudent provision, and that is, the nervous irritation of a gnawing anxiety which, as the word in the original means, tears the heart apart and makes a man quite incapable of doing the wise thing, or seeing the wise thing to do, in the circumstances. We all know that; so that I do not need to dwell upon it. ‘Careful’ here means neither more nor less than ‘anxious.’
But I may just remind you how harm has been done, and good has been lost and missed, by people reading that modern meaning into the word. It is the same word which Christ employed in the exhortation ‘Take no thought for to-morrow.’ It is a great pity that Christian people sometimes get it into their heads that Christ prohibited what common-sense demands, and what everybody practices.
‘Taking thought for the morrow’ is not only our duty, but it is one of the distinctions which make us ‘much better than’ the fowls of the air, that have no barns in which to store against a day of need. But when our Lord said, ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ he did not mean ‘Do not lay yourselves out to provide for common necessities and duties,’ but ‘Do not fling yourselves into a fever of anxiety, nor be too anxious to anticipate the "fashion of uncertain evils."‘
But even with that explanation, is it not like an unreachable ideal that Paul puts forward here? ‘Be anxious about nothing’—how can a man who has to face the possibilities that we all have to face, and who knows himself to be as weak to deal with them as we all are: how can he help being anxious? There is no more complete waste of breath than those sage and reverend advices which people give us, not to do the things, nor to feel the emotions, which our position make absolutely inevitable and almost involuntary.
Here, for instance, is a man surrounded by all manner of calamity and misfortune; and some well-meaning but foolish friend comes to him, and, without giving him a single reason for the advice, says, ‘Cheer up! my friend.’ Why should he cheer up? What is there in his circumstances to induce him to fall into any other mood? Or some unquestionable peril is staring him full in the face, coming nearer and nearer to him, and some well-meaning, loose-tongued friend, says to him, ‘Do not be afraid!’—but he ought to be afraid.
That is about all that worldly wisdom and morality have to say to us, when we are in trouble and anxiety. ‘Shut your eyes very hard, and make believe very much, and you will not fear.’ An impossible exhortation! Unless you have a great deal more than that to say, I must be, and I ought to be, anxious, about a great many things. Instead of anxiety being folly, it will be wisdom; and the folly will consist in not opening our eyes to facts, and in not feeling emotions that are appropriate to the facts which force themselves against our eyeballs.
Threadbare maxims, stale, musty old commonplaces of unavailing consolation and impotent encouragement say to us, ‘Do not be anxious.’ We try to stiffen our nerves and muscles in order to bear the blow; or some of us, more basely still, get into a habit of feather-headed levity, making no forecasts, nor seeing even what is plainest before our eyes. But all that is of no use when once the hot pincers of real trouble, impending or arrived, lay hold of our hearts. Then of all idle expenditures of breath in the world there is none to the wrung heart more idle and more painful than the one that says, Be anxious about nothing.
II. So we turn to the only course that makes the apparent impossibility possible. Paul goes on to direct to the mode of feeling and action which will give exemption from the else inevitable gnawing of anxious forethought. He introduces his positive counsel with an eloquent ‘But,’ which implies that what follows is the sure preservative against the temper which he deprecates; ‘But in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.’
There are, then, these alternatives. If you do not like to take the one, you are sure to have to take the other. There is only one way out of the wood, and it is this which Paul expands in these last words of my text. If a man does not pray about everything, he will be worried about most things. If he does pray about everything, he will not be troubled beyond what is good for him, about anything. So there are these alternatives; and we have to make up our minds which of the two we are going to take.
The heart is never empty. If not full of God, it will be full of the world, and of worldly care. Luther says somewhere that a man’s heart is like a couple of millstones; if you don’t put something between them to grind, they will grind each other. It is because God is not in our hearts that the two stones rub the surface off one another. So the victorious antagonist of anxiety is trust, and the only way to turn gnawing care out of my heart and life is to usher God into it, and to keep him resolutely in it.
‘In everything.’ If a thing is great enough to threaten to make me anxious, it is great enough for me to talk to God about. If He and I are on a friendly footing, the instinct of friendship will make me speak. If so, how irrelevant and superficial seem to be discussions whether we ought to pray about worldly things, or confine our prayers entirely to spiritual and religious matters. Why! if God and I are on terms of friendship and intimacy of communication, there will be no question as to what I am to talk about to Him;
I shall not be able to keep silent as to anything that interests me. And we are not right with God unless we have come to the point that entire openness of speech marks our communications with Him, and that, as naturally as men, when they come home from business, like to tell their wives and children what has happened to them since they left home in the morning, so naturally we talk to our Friend about everything that concerns us. ‘In everything let your requests be made known unto God.’
‘By prayer’—that does not mean, as a superficial experience of religion is apt to suppose it to mean, an actual petition that follows. For a great many of us, the only notion that we have of prayer is asking God to give us something that we want. But there is a far higher region of communion than that, in which the soul seeks and finds, and sits and gazes, and aspiring possesses, and possessing aspires. Where there is no spoken petition for anything affecting outward life, there may be the prayer of contemplation such as the burning seraphs before the Throne do ever glow with.
The prayer of silent submission, in which the will bows itself before God; the prayer of quiet trust, in which we do not so much seek as cleave; the prayer of still fruition—these, in Paul’s conception of the true order, precede ‘supplication.’ And if we have such union with God, by realising His presence, by aspiration after Himself, by trusting Him and submission to Him, then we have the victorious antagonist of all our anxieties, and the ‘cares that infest the day shall fold their tents’ and ‘silently steal away.’ Brethren! prayer in the highest sense, by which I mean the exercise of aspiration, trust, submission—prayer will fight against and overcome all anxieties.
‘By prayer and supplication.’ An actual petition for the supply of present wants is meant by ‘supplication.’ To ask for that supply will very often be to get it. To tell God what I think I need goes a long way always to bringing me the gift that I do need. If I have an anxiety which I am ashamed to speak to Him, that silence is a sign that I ought not to have it; and if I have a desire that I do not feel I can put into a prayer, that feeling is a warning to me not to cherish such a desire.
There are many vague and oppressive anxieties that come and cast a shadow over our hearts, that if we could once define, and put into plain words, we should find that we vaguely fancied them a great deal larger than they were, and that the shadow they flung was immensely longer than the thing that flung it. Put your anxieties into definite speech. It will reduce their proportions to your own apprehension very often. Speaking them, even to a man who may be able to do little to help, eases them wonderfully. Put them into definite speech to God; and there are very few of them that will survive.
‘By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving.’ That thanksgiving is always in place. If one only considers what he has from God, and realises that whatever he has he has received from the hands of divine love, thanksgiving is appropriate in any circumstances. Do you remember when Paul was in gaol at the very city to which this letter went, with his back bloody with the rod, and his feet fast in the stocks, how then he and Silas ‘prayed and sang praises to God.’
Therefore the obedient earthquake came and set them loose. Perhaps it was some reminiscence of that night which moved him to say to the Church that knew the story—of which perhaps the gaoler was still a member—’By prayer and supplication with thanksgiving make your requests known unto God.’
One aching nerve can monopolize our attention and make us unconscious of the health of all the rest of the body. So, a single sorrow or loss obscures many mercies. We are like men who live in a narrow alley in some city, with great buildings on either side, towering high above their heads, and only a strip of sky visible. If we see up in that strip a cloud, we complain and behave as if the whole heavens, right away round the three hundred and sixty degrees of the horizon, were black with tempest.
But we see only a little strip, and there is a great deal of blue in the sky; however, there may be
a cloud in the patch that we see above our heads, from the alley where we live. Everything, rightly understood, that God sends to men is a cause of thanksgiving; therefore, ‘in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.’
‘Casting all your anxieties upon him,’ says Peter, ‘for He’—not is anxious ; that dark cloud does not rise much above the earth—but, ‘He careth for you.’ And that loving guardianship and tender care is the one shield, armed with which we can smile at the poisoned darts of anxiety which would else fester in our hearts and, perhaps, kill. ‘Be careful for nothing’—an impossibility unless ‘in everything’ we make ‘our requests known unto God.’”
Philippians 4:7 THE WARRIOR PEACE: The great Mosque of Constantinople was once a Christian church, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom. Over its western portal may still be read, graven on a brazen plate, the words, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’ For four hundred years noisy crowds have fought, and sorrowed, and fretted, beneath the dim inscription in an unknown tongue; and no eye has looked at it, nor any heart responded.
It is but too sad a symbol of the reception which Christ’s offers meet amongst men, and —blessed be His name!—its prominence there, though unread and unbelieved, is a symbol of the patient forbearance with which rejected blessings are once and again pressed upon us, and He stretches out His hand though no man regards, and calls though none do hear. My text is Christ’s offer of peace. The world offers excitement, Christ promises repose.
I. Mark, then, first, this peace of God. What is it? What are its elements? Whence does it come? It is of God, as being its Source, or Origin, or Author, or Giver, but it belongs to Him in a yet deeper sense, for Himself is Peace. And in some humble but yet real fashion our restless and anxious hearts may partake in the divine tranquillity, and with a calm repose, kindred with that rest from which it is derived, may enter into His rest.
If that be too high a flight, at all events the peace that may be ours was Christ’s, in the perfect and unbroken tranquillity of His perfect Manhood. What, then, are its elements? The peace of God must, first of all, be peace with God. Conscious friendship with Him is indispensable to all true tranquillity. Where that is absent there may be the ignoring of the disturbed relationship; but there will be no peace of heart. The indispensable requisite is ‘a conscience like a sea at rest.’ Unless we have made sure work of our relationship with God, and know that He and we are friends, there is no real repose possible for us.
Again, the peace of God is peace within ourselves. The unrest of human life comes largely from our being torn asunder by contending impulses. Conscience pulls this way, passion that. Desire says, ‘Do this’; reason, judgment, prudence say, ‘It is at your peril if you do!’ One desire fights against another, and so the man is rent asunder. There must be the harmonising of all the Being if there is to be real rest of spirit. No longer must it be like the chaos ere the creative word was spoken, where, in gloom, contending elements strove.
Again, men have not peace, because in most of them everything is topmost that ought to be undermost, and everything undermost that ought to be uppermost. ‘Beggars are on horseback’ (and we know where they ride), ‘and princes walking.’ The more regal part of the man’s nature is suppressed, and trodden under foot; and the servile parts, which ought to be under firm restraint, and guided by a wise hand, are too often supreme, and wild work comes of that.
When you put the captain and the officers, and everybody on board that knows anything about navigation, into irons, and fasten down the hatches on them, and let the crew and the cabin boys take the helm and direct the ship, it is not likely that the voyage will end anywhere but on the rocks. Multitudes are living lives of unrestfulness, simply because they have set the lowest parts of their nature upon the throne, and subordinated the highest to these.
Our unrest comes from yet another source. We have not peace, because we have not found and grasped the true objects for any of our faculties. God is the only possession that brings quiet. The heart hungers until it feeds upon Him. The mind is satisfied with no truth until behind truth it finds a Person who is true.
The will is enslaved and wretched until in God it recognizes legitimate and absolute authority, which it is blessing to obey. Love puts out its yearnings, like the filaments that gossamer spiders send out into the air, seeking in vain for something to fasten upon, until it touches God, and clings there. There is no rest for a man until he rests in God.
The reason why this world is so full of excitement is because it is so empty of peace, and the reason why it is so empty of peace is because it is so void of God. The peace of God brings peace with Him, and peace within. It unites our hearts to fear His name, and draws all the else turbulent and confusedly flowing impulses of the great deep of the spirit after itself, in a tidal wave, as the moon draws the waters of the gathered ocean. The peace of God is peace with Him, and peace within.
I need not, I suppose, do more than say one word about that descriptive clause in my text, It ‘passeth understanding.’ The understanding is not the faculty by which men lay hold of the peace of God any more than you can see a picture with your ears or hear music with your eyes... The peace of God transcends the understanding, as well as belongs to another order of things than that about which the understanding is concerned. You must experience it to know it; you must have it in order that you may feel its sweetness. It eludes the grasp of the wisest, though it yields itself to the patient and loving heart.
II. So notice, in the next place, what the peace of God does. It ‘shall keep your hearts and minds.’ The Apostle here blends together, in a very remarkable manner, the conceptions of peace and of war, for he employs a purely military word to express the office of this Divine peace. That word, ‘shall keep,’ is the same as is translated in another of his letters kept with a garrison —and, though, perhaps, it might be going too far to insist that the military idea is prominent in his mind, it will certainly not be unsafe to recognize its presence.
III. So, then, this Divine peace takes upon itself warlike functions, and garrisons the heart and mind. What does he mean by ‘the heart and mind’? Not, as the English reader might suppose, two different faculties, the emotional and the intellectual—which is what we usually roughly mean by our distinction between heart and mind—but, as is always the case in the Bible, the ‘heart’ means the whole inner man, whether considered as thinking, willing, purposing, or doing any other inward act;
and the word rendered ‘mind’ does not mean another part of human nature, but the whole products of the operations of the heart. The Revised Version renders it by ‘thoughts,’ and that is correct if it be given a wide enough application, so as to include emotions, affections, purposes, as well as ‘thoughts’ in the narrower sense. The whole inner man, in all the extent of its manifold operations, that indwelling peace of God will garrison and guard.
So note, however profound and real that Divine peace is, it is to be enjoyed in the midst of warfare. Quiet is not quiescence {inaction}. God’s peace is not torpor {listlessness}. The man that has it has still to wage continual conflict, and day by day to brace himself anew for the fight. The highest energy of action is the result of the deepest calm of heart; just as the motion of this solid, and, as we feel it to be, immovable world, is far more rapid through the abysses of space, and on its own axis, than any of the motions of the things on its surface.
So the quiet heart, ‘which moveth altogether if it move at all,’ rests whilst it moves, and moves the more swiftly because of its unbroken repose. That peace of God, which is peace militant, is unbroken amidst all conflicts. The wise old Greeks chose for the protectress of Athens the goddess of Wisdom, and whilst they consecrated to her the olive branch, which is the symbol of peace, they set her image on the Parthenon, helmed and spear-bearing, to defend the peace, which she brought to earth. So this heavenly Virgin, whom the Apostle personifies here, is the ‘winged sentry, all skilful in the wars,’ who enters into our hearts and fights for us to keep us in unbroken peace. And the peace of God keeps our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
What is the plain English of that metaphor? Just this, that a man who has that peace as his conscious possession is lifted above the temptations that otherwise would drag him away. The full cup, filled with precious wine, has no room in it for the poison that otherwise might be poured in. As Jesus Christ has taught us, there is such a thing as cleansing a heart in some measure, and yet because it is ‘empty,’ though it is ‘swept and garnished,’ the demons come back again. The best way to be made strong to resist temptation, is to be lifted above feeling it to be a temptation, by reason of the sweetness of the peace possessed.
Oh! if our hearts were filled, as they might be filled, with that divine repose, do you think that the vulgar, coarse-tasting baits which make our mouths water now would have any power over us? Will a man who bears in his hands jewels of priceless value, and knows them to be such, find much temptation when some imitation stone, made of coloured glass and a tinfoil backing, is presented to him? Will the world draw us away if we are rooted and grounded in the peace of God? The peace of God will keep our hearts and thoughts.
III. Now, lastly, notice how we get the peace of God. My text is an exuberant promise, but it is knit on to something before, by that ‘and’ at the beginning of the verse. It is a promise, as all God’s promises are, on conditions. And here are the conditions. ‘Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.’ That defines the conditions in part; and the last words of the text itself complete the definition. ‘In Christ Jesus’ describes, not so much where we are to be kept, as a condition under which we shall be kept. How, then, can I get this peace into my turbulent, changeful life?
I answer, first, trust is peace. It is always so; even when it is misplaced we are at rest. The condition of repose for the human heart is that we shall be ‘in Christ,’ who has said, ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation, but in Me ye shall have peace.’ And how may I be ‘in Him’? Simply by trusting myself to Him. That brings peace with God. The sinless Son of God has died on the Cross, a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, for yours and for mine. Let us trust to that, and we shall have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ.
And ‘in Him’ we have, by trust, inward peace, for He, through our faith, controls our whole natures, and Faith leads the lion in a silken leash, like Spenser’s Una. Trust in Christ brings peace amid outward sorrows and conflicts. When the pilot comes on board the captain does not leave the bridge, but stands by the pilot’s side. His responsibility is past, but his duties are not over.
And when Christ comes into my heart, my effort, my judgment, are not made unnecessary, or put on one side. Let Him take the command, and stand beside Him, and carry out His orders, and you will find rest to your souls.
Again, submission is peace. What makes our troubles is not outward circumstances, howsoever afflictive they may be, but the resistance of our spirits to the circumstances. And where a man’s will bends and says, ‘Not mine but Thine be done,’ there is calm. Submission is like the lotion that is applied to mosquito bites—it takes away the irritation, though the puncture be left.
Submission is peace, both as resignation and as obedience.
Communion is peace. You will get no quiet until you live with God. Until He is at your side you will always be moved. So, dear friend, fix this in your minds: a life without Christ is a life without peace. Without Him you may have excitement, pleasure, gratified passions, success, accomplished hopes, but peace never! You never have had it, have you? If you live without Him, you may forget that you have not Him, and you can plunge into the world, and so lose the consciousness of the aching void, but it is there all the same.
Bow your wills to Him in acceptance of His providence, and in obedience to His commands, and so, ‘your peace shall be as a river, and your righteousness as the waves of the sea.’ Then keep your hearts in union and communion with Him, and so His presence will keep you in perfect peace whilst conflicts last, and, with Him at your side, you will pass through the valley of the shadow of death undisturbed, and come to the true Salem, the city of peace, where they beat their swords into ploughshares, and learn and fear war no more.
You never will have peace until you go to Him. There is only one way to get it. The Christless heart is like the troubled sea that cannot rest. There is no peace for it. But in Him you can get it for the asking. ‘The chastisement of our peace was laid upon Him.’ For our sakes He died on the Cross, so making peace. Trust Him as your only hope, Saviour and friend, and the God of peace will ‘fill you with all joy and peace in believing.’
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Christian Resolutions_2020, Part 22.”
I am planning at least one more Installment in which to review and examine Peace, the third Fruit of the Spirit. God willing I will bring you that to you next week. I hope as many of you as are hearing my voice, or reading my words will join me for that.
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on June 3rd, 2020.
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