Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 5: 1

 

Peace, we all want it; yet, it seems to work at being elusive. Peace is so hard to catch up to, it runs ahead a stays just one turn in the street and a couple of steps beyond reach all of the time. Despite the desires that most of us possess, a state of peacefulness is hard to settle into. Even the idea of resting peacefully can be disturbing and unsettling in itself. Turmoil and agitation are such a regular part of our world that they often define normalcy for us, and their absence is the thing that troubles the spirit and that incites the feet to run toward change. Yes, we are strange creatures, we humans; for, we claim to want to know peace and to have it settled deep in our beings; yet, we do almost anything to overturn its presence when it does happen to invade the place that we live.

 

Perhaps the issue is more with the place where we are looking for that peace and with the nature of the thing that we think that we desire. The peace that God wants to provide for us is different than that which we often say we want. Our first priority is for calm, quiet, and a form of settledness of the spirit that can accept life as it is with trust in God’s provision of an acceptable outcome. In itself, this is not a bad perspective, but it may not be the beginning place for the peace that God desires to see exist with us. The peace that God seeks to bring about in our lives starts at a higher place and has a purpose that transcends this world and our lives and that ventures forth into the eternal. The peace that comes through and by Christ comes about with no effort of ours and is a state of being that we either accept or fight against as it is conferred upon us by God.

 

All peace starts with Christ. There is no other way to commence understanding of it than by accepting Christ. He brings about healing and transformative change in our relationship with God, for Christ grants a new, redeemed relational status to each of us who surrender to Him. The war with God that exists from birth for each of us is settled by the blood of Christ’s cross, and we are established as residents in the Kingdom of God from that moment forward. This is not just a treaty status that can be easily revoked or modified; rather, it is a permanent recasting of the entire relationship with God that is formed out of faith in Christ and that is devised by God to grant us unending direct access to Him. This is the peace that all people actually need in order to know the sort of peace of the spirit that we think that we desire. The ability to live life with the certainty of our eternal status and with a state of being calm even in the great storms that come our way is the result of the peace that exists between ourselves and God, and Christ alone brings this peace into our souls.