"I NEED A LITTLE PEACE AND QUIET!!!" I would imagine that, at some point in our lives, we all have felt like we needed to shout something like that out loud. Maybe life was a little too hectic. Maybe a lot of was going on. Maybe we found ourselves in a situation that we hadn't planned for our counted on, and we needed some way to escape from it.
Peace and quiet. It sounds so nice, doesn't it? This is especially true when we live in a world of demands on our time, and where we tend to be surrounded by noise and sound almost constantly. Take a moment to think about it. When is the last time you were able to take 10 minutes, where no one was making a demand of your time, and where you could actually sit there without any kind of noise or sound? For many, doing something like that is unnerving because we've become so accustomed to dealing with noise and demands constantly.
For a moment, allow your mind to think about this question. Where does peace come from? Does peace come merely from the absence of things like sounds and demands? Is that true peace? Or is it something more along the lines of merely escaping "real life" for a little while? In a way, we could make the case that something that is only temporary isn't really true peace.
So where does peace come from? Well, you may remember yesterday that I defined peace as being in line with God's will and design for life. If that's the case, then you may not be surprised that peace itself is a gift that comes to us from God. If peace is being in line with how God created us to live, then being restored to that is the work of God, a work that begins in us when God extends His promise of renewal to us through the waters of our baptism.
In other words, true peace comes from God. Sure, we may try to search in ourselves for "inner peace" (and I'll talk about that a little more at some point), or we may try to escape from the demands of daily life to find peace, but those are fleeting. True peace comes from God. True peace has a high cost, which came at the cost of Jesus' life on the cross. True peace is a gift. It's not something we can find, or give ourselves. It has to come from the one who is the author of peace, the very Prince of Peace Himself.
Peace and quiet. It sounds so nice, doesn't it? This is especially true when we live in a world of demands on our time, and where we tend to be surrounded by noise and sound almost constantly. Take a moment to think about it. When is the last time you were able to take 10 minutes, where no one was making a demand of your time, and where you could actually sit there without any kind of noise or sound? For many, doing something like that is unnerving because we've become so accustomed to dealing with noise and demands constantly.
For a moment, allow your mind to think about this question. Where does peace come from? Does peace come merely from the absence of things like sounds and demands? Is that true peace? Or is it something more along the lines of merely escaping "real life" for a little while? In a way, we could make the case that something that is only temporary isn't really true peace.
So where does peace come from? Well, you may remember yesterday that I defined peace as being in line with God's will and design for life. If that's the case, then you may not be surprised that peace itself is a gift that comes to us from God. If peace is being in line with how God created us to live, then being restored to that is the work of God, a work that begins in us when God extends His promise of renewal to us through the waters of our baptism.
In other words, true peace comes from God. Sure, we may try to search in ourselves for "inner peace" (and I'll talk about that a little more at some point), or we may try to escape from the demands of daily life to find peace, but those are fleeting. True peace comes from God. True peace has a high cost, which came at the cost of Jesus' life on the cross. True peace is a gift. It's not something we can find, or give ourselves. It has to come from the one who is the author of peace, the very Prince of Peace Himself.
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