Soldier of Peace

Guarding Our Hearts against Worry—Part Two

Philippians 4:4-9

Watch this short video from the Desiring God Pastor’s Conference that I attended last month. His example of the silly worship song reminds me of the federal government. Washington is currently singing the tune, “If you have four trillion dollars and you spend seven, that’s dumb.” My heart screams in agreement with this pastor. There is so much that is silly and irreverent in our churches and far too little training in Godliness. And when you have a topic like peace and anxiety, it would be easy to teach it in a silly and irreverent manner. There are books and seminars that dispense peace like candy. There is no shortage of shortcuts to peace. That is one reason why I included depression in with peace. You might be able to give quick and easy answers to someone who needs a little more peace in their lives, but there are no quick and easy answers for depression. As we said last week, the pathway to peace is not a quick fix but rather something that must be trained into us.

I introduced the big picture last week. According to this passage, there are three parts to the pathway to peace: correct praying, correct thinking and correct doing. Before we get to the first step, let me ask what you notice first about this passage.

                     Rejoice in the Lord always.       I will say it again: Rejoice!

Let your gentleness be evident to  all.            The Lord is near.

Do not be anxious about           anything.

                                      but in  everything,     by prayer and petition,

                                                                        with thanksgiving,     

present your requests to God.

The way I arranged the text, the answer is obvious. Paul has what we could call an absolutist view on these subjects. Rejoice in the Lord always. Let your gentleness be evident to all. Do not be anxious about anything… I said last week, it would be cruel to approach a severely depressed or anxious person and yell, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Come on, what’s the matter with you!?” It would be cruel to apply this passage in such a manner, but that does mean it is not true. The expectation is that we can and should rejoice always, but as we know, this is not a general state of happiness. The key to the phrase, and to this whole passage, is that we rejoice in the Lord.

I received an email link this week to a video about Nick Vujicic. Nick is twenty five years old and he has a vibrant speaking ministry. He travels all around the world speaking to teenagers, business people, people living in their-world poverty and the disabled. Each of them is looking for peace in all the wrong places—boyfriends and girlfriends, money and success—and many of them have little to no hope of peace in this life. Nick has a unique and powerful ministry because was born without any arms or legs. Growing up he went through some extremely difficult times of being teased by others, very low self-esteem and even desires of suicide. But then Nick met the Lord Jesus Christ and now he speaks of joy in Christ wherever he goes. He has the tragic disability, yet everyone he meets knows that he is rejoicing in the Lord. Such rejoicing and contentment makes no sense apart from the Lord.

But as I thought more about Nick, I wondered if Nick would be rejoicing if he had been born in India or China. Nick has an active ministry and certainly that in itself brings meaning and purpose to his life. I doubt he is a rich man, but he has all of his needs taken care of. Someone is always watching out for him. Though he doesn’t have arms and legs, he does have food, clothing, friends, family and a vibrant ministry. But would he have those things if he had been born in a third world country? Chances are he would not have lived beyond the first twenty four hours because he probably would have been left to die. But if he had compassionate parents who allowed him to live, what kind of a life would he have in the scorching desert of India or the rural, snow-capped mountains of China?

Obviously I am not wishing more pain on his already challenging life, but we can begin to see that true rejoicing is best seen when life’s gifts are stripped away. Ultimately we don’t rejoice in our job, our things, our health, our family, our church or even our ministry. We can receive a transferred joy from each of these things, but they cannot be the source of joy. We can receive joy from these things in the same way that we receive light from the moon—it is reflected from the sun. All of our joy, then, must be seen as reflected joy from the true Son—the Son of God. Can you see the difference? If I receive this kind of reflected joy from my job and then my job is taken away, do I still have joy? The true source of joy is still shining into my life even though I no longer have my job. What if the bank forecloses on my house? What if I acquire a chronic or terminal illness? What if I lose a family member? What if the bank forecloses on our church? If your joy comes from these things, then your joy is stripped away along with them. If you rejoice in any of these things, you are an idolater. You are worshipping the created things instead of the Creator. But if your joy was merely a reflected joy, then the source of all joy is still pouring into your life. What things are missing from Nick’s list? His arms and legs have been stripped from him but his joy remains.

Next, Paul said that we are to let our gentleness be evident to all. Gentleness is what your life looks like when peace and joy are applied on a daily basis. Think of the most angry person that you know? Picture them in the middle of one of their rages of anger. Do they have peace? Just as anger is the fruit of worry and anxiety, so gentleness is the fruit of peace and joy. This kind of gentleness is to be evident to all. For me, this is probably the most convicting verse in this passage. I am thankful that I have grown in this area, but I have such a long way to go. Friday morning I was making breakfast, and as usual, I was trying to do too many things at once. Ladies, you are superior at multi-tasking, but we guys are not so good. Anyway, while I was doing one thing, I burned the bagels in the toaster oven. I didn’t flip into a rage, but neither would you call my reaction gentle. The verse for my morning was, “Let your impatience be evident to all, especially to your children.”

But our gentleness is to be evident to all. You see, our rejoicing in the Lord is not meant to end with us. We are not to be collectors of joy but rather conduits of joy. The peace and joy of the Lord is to be evident to all—to the rest of the world. But what does this look like?

Last week David Wilkerson posted a prophecy on his blog.

AN EARTH-SHATTERING CALAMITY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN. IT IS GOING TO BE SO FRIGHTENING, WE ARE ALL GOING TO TREMBLE - EVEN THE GODLIEST AMONG US.

For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. Major cities all across America will experience riots and blazing fires—such as we saw in Watts, Los Angeles, years ago.

If possible lay in store a thirty-day supply of non-perishable food, toiletries and other essentials. In major cities, grocery stores are emptied in an hour at the sign of an impending disaster.

One of Wilkerson’s books was very instrumental in my conversion. I appreciate the man and his ministry, but I am not one to put much stock in such prophecies. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that he is right—that there is some impending doom awaiting us. With our economic collapse, such things seem more possible all of the time. What if we took Wilkerson’s advice as a church? What if we stocked a thirty day supply of food, water and basic medical supplies and we did it, not just for ourselves, but for others in the community. If things really got bad, I mean “end of the world” bad—famine, sword and plague—how long would our supplies last? As kindhearted and well-intentioned as we could possibly be, we would run out of food in a week, if it wasn’t stolen first. We could not possibly stockpile enough food and water to do much good to the community. I think the best way we could help our community is to stockpile peace and joy. We know we would run out of food and water, but we can never run out of peace and joy. A few weeks ago Chris made a comment to me about stockpiling. He said that hoarding is what you do when there aren’t enough goods, but stockpiling is what you do when there is plenty. Is there plenty of peace and joy? There is not only plenty, there is an infinite supply!

But one of our problems is that we treat peace like it is a commodity to be hoarded. We are very selfish about our peace. Let me explain what I mean. Last week I mentioned that there are two basic types of peace in the Bible—peace with God, which is our salvation and can never be changed, and the peace of God, which is the opposite of anxiety and can change all of the time. There is actually a third Biblical category I did not mention—peace with others. The foundation for having peace with others is having peace with God. When we had lunch with Lincoln Brunner when he was here two weeks ago, he told the story about these two South American gangbangers who each had a blood oath to kill the other man. If ever they saw one another, they swore to kill him. One day they saw each other in the airport and since one man had received Christ and found peace with God, he decided to approach the other man. Maybe he figured he would not try to kill him in a busy airport. Not only did he not try to stick a knife in his belly, the other man embraced him with a smile, for he too had found peace with God through Christ. Peace between these two men would have been absolutely impossible if they had not both found peace with God.

So we have three categories: peace with God, peace with others and the peace of God. But here’s the thing. Almost every time the word peace is used in the New Testament, it is referring to the first two types of peace. In fact, this verse is the only time the phrase the “peace of God” is found in all of Scripture. But we tend to think that the peace of God is the most important thing. Most of us want more peace in our lives and less anxiety and worry. There is nothing wrong with this desire. But ask yourself this question: why do you want more peace? You might be thinking this question is a winner in the dumbest question of the year award. It is kind of like asking the question, “Why do you prefer not to have a knife sticking out of your back.” Isn’t it obvious? We want more peace because peace is far better than worry or anxiety. Again, true enough, but why do you want more peace? What I am driving at is for you to understand the motive behind wanting more peace. If we are honest, I think we want more peace so we can spend it selfishly. Do you see what I mean? We would like to have more peace so that our lives will be better. We want more peace so that we will feel calmer and less anxious; so that we will be happier and less stressed out. We want peace so that we can “spend the peace” on ourselves. When we ask for more peace, we are primarily thinking about ourselves.

It is like what James said. “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:3). Normally we think of this verse in context of material goods. Maybe our budget is really tight so we humbly ask God for more money. But even if such a prayer seems genuine to us, God knows our hearts. He knows that we prayed for more money, not just because the budget is tight, but so that we can have a little more spending money and buy a little more stuff that we want. We prayed with wrong motives because we planned to spend it on our selfish pleasures. This makes perfect sense in the material realm, but we fail to see our selfish motives in the spiritual realm. We may be asking for more peace so that we can spend what we get on our own pleasures.

What do you call someone who prays for more money so that they can spend it on themselves? You might call them a materialist or a proponent of the prosperity gospel. The charismatic prosperity preachers who run up and down the aisles yelling, “God wants you to be rich” are all preaching a false gospel. I hope that you know this is true. But if I stand up here and tell you that God wants you to have peace, but I know that you are going to spend that peace on yourself, that I am guilty of preaching a prosperity gospel. The only difference is that the commodity I am pushing is peace instead of dollar bills. I don’t know if God wants you to have more money, but I do that God wants you to have more peace—as long as you don’t plan to hoard it for yourself but spend it on others.

This is why the order of verses three and four is vital. Rejoice in the Lord always. Let your gentleness be evident to all. Our joy, in the Lord, is the very thing which is supposed to transform us and spill over into the lives of others. For two weeks I have been telling you that the pathway to peace comes in three parts: correct praying, correct thinking and correct doing. We won’t actually get to these three parts until next week because before we pray for peace we have to examine our motives. Peace is not meant to be hoarded. Peace is meant to be evident to all. It is supposed to be beaming in our lives so that everyone can see it and experience it.

Here is where we can see the intersection of the three types of peace. We have been given peace with God and he wants to give us the peace of God so that we can help others find peace with God and so we can be at peace with others.  Peace from God helps others to have peace with God and helps us have peace with others. If you plan on spending the peace of God on yourself, don’t even bother asking for it. But if you plan to spend it on others, if you want your gentleness to be evident to all, then ask away. So then, this instructs about how to pray for peace. Understood correctly, we can pray like this. Lord, give me more peace so I can be a better parent.  Lord, give me more peace so I can be a better witness for you. Lord, give me more peace so I will be a better employee, a better neighbor, a better husband, a better wife. Lord, let my gentleness be evident to all.

One final comment on the three word phrase in verse five: The Lord is near. This is a word of encouragement with a double meaning. The Lord is near in the sense that he is near at hand and with us at all times, and he is near, meaning his return is near. The interesting thing about this phrase is that grammatically, it is not connected to what precedes it or what follows it. In other words, it does NOT mean,

Let your gentleness be evident to all because the Lord is near,

nor does it mean

The Lord is near, therefore, do not be anxious about anything.

The phrase just kind of hangs there without a qualifier or a context. I can’t know this for certain, but to me, it seems as if Paul had an experience of the nearness of the Lord while he was writing this letter from prison. The Lord is near. It is encouragement and it is warning. We should rejoice and we should take heed.

Rich Maurer

March 15, 2008