Peace. If someone were to come and ask you, “What is peace,” how would you answer them? Peace is one of those things that everyone wants, but no one has a real clear answer of what it is or how you can get it or how you can keep it. Mirriam Webster defines peace as “a state of tranquility or quiet… freedom from civil disturbance… a state of security or order within a community… freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions… harmony in personal relations” Someone else once said that “Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.”

Unfortunately, that’s not so far off. I would argue that peace is one of the most elusive qualities in the world today, no matter how you define the term. Politically, we see continual unrest in the Middle East; and gang riots in the streets of Brazil.

Relationally, we deal with all kinds of interpersonal conflicts. Whether it’s relationships with our children, our spouses, siblings, our co-workers, even others in the church, conflict is pretty much an inevitable part of human relationships.

But the problem runs deeper than that. The truth is very few people in this world are at peace with themselves. Most people carry a high degree of stress, of anxiety, of tension in their lives. And that stress and anxiety can take quite a toll: Stress is a factor in everything from headaches, to backaches, to stomach ulcers, to heart disease. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental disorder in the United States. According to the Surgeon General, 1 out of 6 American adults suffer from some degree of anxiety disorder over the course of a year.ⁱ

So where do we find this kind of peace? How do we find peace within? There are all kinds of methods and philosophies promising peace. I checked on Google and I found the answer. This is what one of the little links actually said:

Inner Peace: Looking for Inner Peace? Find exactly what you want today.
www.eBay.com

So if you hurry home and get your bid in, you too could have inner peace—today. Thank goodness for eBay!

If only it were so simple. If only you could go online and order peace. Sure, you can take a pill to alleviate the symptoms, but you can’t buy peace on eBay or anywhere else.

The Bible has quite a lot to say about the subject. What we find is that true peace is a gift from God. Isaiah 26:3 says this: “You, Lord, give true peace to those who depend on You because they trust You.” Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you” (John 14:27). Peace is listed as a fruit of the Spirit in Galatians. Jesus himself is called the Prince of Peace.

But if peace is a gift from God, why does it still seem so hard to find, even for Christians? I need to say up front that peace has nothing to do with problem-free living. If you have to wait until all your problems are solved to be at peace, you’re never going to be at peace. Throughout your life you’re going to have conflict and problems of some kind. But is it possible to have true peace even in the conflict?

Listen first to what Paul says here about our attitude:

“Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!”

We want to respond, “But Paul, you don’t understand my situation. There’s no way that I can rejoice with what is going on in my life right now.”

Rejoice in the Lord always…

As we study Paul’s words in Philippians, it’s important to understand something. When Paul wrote these words and gave these instructions, he was not lying back in a lounge chair on the beach at a five-star Mediterranean resort sipping a Margarita. “Don’t worry, be happy! Hakuna Matata!”

No, Paul was in a Roman prison. He’d been beaten. He was unable to visit his friends, prevented from ministering in the churches, facing the threat of his own execution, with a Roman guard standing over him 24/7. It was the kind of situation where you would expect a person to be in despair and to exhibit fear and dejection, not joy, not peace. This is the context from which Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always…”

I heard recently of a Chinese pastor who was given a 3-year sentence in prison for declaring his faith. While in prison, he began ministering to the other prisoners and more and more came to know the Lord. He had an opportunity for an early release, but he refused because he knew that his work in prison was not over yet. Rejoice…

At a missions conference last fall, I heard firsthand of how ten families in a city in Laos began to share their faith. They began to see many of their friends and neighbors come to faith in Christ and this house church started to grow.

You may not realize that the Laotian government is among the most oppressive toward Christians right now. The government rounded up these ten families, separated them, and shipped them off to distant villages so they couldn’t congregate together. What happened? Suddenly people were becoming Christians in those villages. So the government relocated these families back to the city so they couldn’t cause any more trouble in the villages. And the church in that Laotian city began to blossom. The churches in the villages they had come from continued to grow.ⁱⁱ This is happening today.

These believers are rejoicing in what God is doing even in the face of persecution.

And Paul, even in prison, continued to preach the gospel. It says in Philippians 1 that Paul was preaching the gospel to the whole Imperial guard from prison.

So Paul was not being a hypocrite here when he told them and us to rejoice. He knew what hard times were, and he knew that the right way to react to them was not with fear or anger or anxiety but with joy in the Lord and trust in God’s promises. With that joy and trust came a deep and abiding peace. So how do we get to that point where, like Paul, we can rejoice and be at peace regardless of circumstances?

Again, peace is a gift from God. We can’t earn it. And yet there are things we can do that either keep us from experiencing the peace of God or that allow us to experience the peace of God in a deeper way.

To more fully experience the peace of God, Paul gives us three tools, three keys that guide our praying, our thinking, and our living.

4:6-7 The first key Paul gives us has to do with our praying. This is what Paul says: “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil 4:6).

Paul doesn’t just say, “Don’t worry about anything” and stop there. Telling someone not to worry doesn’t really help anything. We need to know how. Paul gives some specific instructions to help us overcome worry. And it starts with prayer.

Sometimes we’re prone to come to God with the big stuff, but then say, “I want to handle the details.”

“God, you keep the world in its orbit and deal with any major, life-altering issues, but I can handle my day-to-day life just fine.” So we don’t bring many of our daily concerns to God in prayer. Or we don’t want to bother Almighty God with our trivial concerns.

But the Bible doesn’t set any conditions on when we should or shouldn’t pray. It says what? Don’t worry, but in… EVERYTHING let your requests be made known to God.

Friends, no concern is so small that God doesn’t care. No concern is so great that God cannot handle it.

As we approach God in prayer, we also learn here that we’re to pray with thanksgiving. When Jesus healed the ten lepers, only one came back to say thank you. It’s not so different today. We live in a culture of entitlement. People think they’re entitled to everything, and so it’s rare to see an attitude of gratitude.

Yet simply giving thanks is a remarkable weapon against anxiety and worry. Because as we give thanks, what are we doing? We’re remembering God’s goodness and faithfulness. We’re thanking God for what we do have. As we give thanks for God’s faithfulness in the past, we look at God’s track record and realize that God will continue to be faithful in the future. That gives us security. Giving thanks is good for us as we develop an attitude of gratitude.

The more we bring everything to God in prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, the more we can let go of our burdens and experience the peace that God gives. How does the old hymn go?

O, what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear; All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

Prayer is the first key we find to unlocking God’s peace within.

The next key is this: Along with right prayer, Philippians says a key to experiencing God’s peace is Right Thinking. Setting our minds in the right place. Looking at verse 8:

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

This is easier said than done. According to some research, the average person has more than two hundred negative thoughts a day—worries, jealousies, insecurities, doubts, anger, etc.ⁱⁱⁱ

I suppose it’s no surprise. When you pick up the newspaper in the morning and look at the front page, what do you see? Usually, you see all the things that are going wrong in the world. Turn on the news, and what do you find? Disasters, crime, scandals, war. Even in our everyday conversations, it’s much easier to complain and talk about the things that aren’t going well than it is to celebrate the things that are.

With our minds so bombarded with negative thoughts and events and conversations, no wonder we become anxious and stressed and worried.

The other day I literally went out to smell the roses in my backyard. But when I bent down close to the flower, do you know what I saw? Aphids. Little green buggers drinking the life out of my roses.

So I start looking for aphids, and I start thinking about how to best get rid of them. Should I go to Armstrong’s and get a jar of ladybugs to eat them the natural way, or should I pull out the weapons of mass destruction, the chemical weapons, and blast them with insecticide? I never ended up enjoying the roses, because I was on a bug hunt!

It’s amazing how the tiny negative things can dominate our thinking. Psychologists tell us that in relationships, each negative interaction carries the weight of five positive interactions. In other words, for every negative interaction you have with your spouse, it takes about five positive ones to balance it out, or the relationship becomes increasingly strained over time. How do we break the cycle of negativity? Romans 12 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” We’re not to think the way the world thinks any more.

So Paul advises us to fix our thoughts instead on things that are True: not dwelling on the gossip and deceit that are everywhere, but dwelling on the truth. Dwelling on Jesus and his words. He says to fix our thoughts on whatever is Honorable, Just, Pure, Commendable, Excellent, Worthy of Praise: Focus on the things that are worthy of honor, those things that motivate us. Look for the best in people and situations. Build up, rather than tear down.

Paul calls us to buck the trend here and adopt a new mindset as God’s new creations. As we learn to think rightly we move from worry to worship, from anxiety to awe, from perplexity to peace.

4:9 This brings us to the third key to peace that we find here in Philippians. Right Living. Praying and thinking can go so far until they translate into the way we live. “Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you” (Phil. 4:9).

It is as we begin to live rightly that we begin to experience the full depths of God’s peace.

If we’re living in sin and we know it, we shouldn’t expect to experience the peace that passes all understanding. We will continue to be troubled. If there’s an area of your life that you refuse to yield to Christ’s control, God still loves you, he still forgives you, but you won’t be able to experience the fullness of his peace.

We can’t fully know peace, until we give the Prince of Peace his rightful place at the center of our lives. That’s where it all begins.

When you make peace with God through Christ then you begin to experience the peace of God; and when the peace of God is in your life then you can begin to have a peace within you and a peace with other people that you never thought possible.

But peace with God is different than a truce. A truce is saying, “God, you stay on your side of the line and I'll stay on my side. God, you handle all the big problems of the world, I'll handle my life.”

That's no peace, folks. That's just a truce. Peace comes when you say, “Jesus Christ come into my life and give me Your peace. Lead me, guide me, help me to live the way You would and give me the power to do it.”

Maybe there’s an anxiety within you that you can’t seem to let go of. Maybe there’s someone in your life that you need to be reconciled with. Or maybe you’ve been declaring a truce with God, but now it’s time to make peace. In any case, the steps we find here are the same: To come to God in prayer; To cast your burdens and worries upon him; To invite the Prince of Peace to come into your life and guide your thinking and your living; To allow God to shower you with his grace and fill you with his peace.

May the peace of Christ be with you.

Amen.

ⁱ U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General—Executive Summary. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Mental Health Services, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, 1999.
ⁱⁱPlenary Speaker, Global Missions Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2005.

ⁱⁱⁱ Dr. Elinore Kinarthy in Homemade, Sept., 1988