How to Gain Peace

Failing the Third Grade

Yes, I am still a horrible speller to this day, but what this led to was me being held back in the 3rd grade. At the moment I didn’t really consider what that meant. I was just kind of excited because my best friend was one grade below me. So all little 3rd grade Micah thought about was that I get to spend all of this time with one of my best friends.

That summer wasn’t horrible, but the next school year is when I realized how much failing a grade would affect me. You see, it wasn’t a normal school year. We didn’t have enough teachers and what they ended up doing was merging the 3rd and the 4th grade classrooms. At the beginning I thought that was awesome. I was so happy that I was able to spend time with my friends. My old ones from the now 4th grade and my new ones in the third grade.

Losing my Friends

Well, I remember those first couple weeks and it didn’t go as planned. I tried talking to a lot of my old friends in the 4th grade and at first they would talk to me and chat a little bit, But they ended up pushing me to the side to spend time with people in their own class.

I don’t fault them for this, if I was in their shoes I would have probably done the same thing. So I decided to spend time with the 3rd grade class. The problem was I was still a grade ahead of them in their heads. I was in the 3rd grade with them, but I was older, I had different experiences, I didn’t grow up with them. I was an outsider.

Only my best friend would really hang out and spend time with me. And even then, he wasn’t always there because he had friends of his own in that group that didn’t really accept me. So there I was. Alone.

Alone in a Room Filled with People

We shared a classroom together. There was a small divide in the middle of the hallway between the 3rd and the 4th grades. That’s it. I looked over every single day. I could see all my old friends, And yet we couldn’t spend any time together.

That kind of just compounded on something else that happened earlier in my life. My father left when I was four years old, and now all of my friends were leaving, what, four years later? This floated in my head and I lacked peace in a specific area of my life, which was the idea that people wanted to be around me.

Actually this has grown with me my entire life to where up until about 2020. I thought that up until then that none of my friends really wanted me around. And that I was just there. Needless to say, I did not have peace at all in that area of my life.

Jesus Came To Give us Peace

And I grew up in the church. I was raised to believe that Jesus came to bring us peace. In John 14:27 Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

In John 16:33, Jesus also says, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” And not only the words of Jesus, but in Christianity as a whole I keep hearing this idea as I grow up that if you don’t have peace that something is wrong with you.

You need to connect to God more, you need to pray more, you need to read your Bible more. If there’s this area in your life where you don’t have peace, just pray about it. And then when your prayers don’t get answered, what do they say?

Wait on The Lord

Oh, wait on the Lord ’cause He will do it in His time. Wait on God. Just sit there and wait. Keep praying. Wait. Read your Bible. Eventually you will have peace. I’ve heard that so many times in my life.

Wait, on the Lord. I hate the phrase. And it’s a biblical phrase, don’t get me wrong. A lot of people seem to think what we’re supposed to do as Christians is just wait. You see, there is a Psalm, Psalm 46, and I think most Christians have heard this if you have been in church for more than a year.

It’s Psalm 46 verse 10 and it says, “Be still, and know that I am God”. That word “be still” refers to this idea of sinking or relaxing and not having to worry. This whole Psalm is about trusting God, but something I notice is that it doesn’t say wait on the Lord. It says be still and know that God is there in the midst of your chaos, in the midst of your pain. Be calm, relax, know that God is with you.

What Does “Be Still” Really Mean

Now how is that different from being still? Because this is very important. When it comes to being still or waiting on the Lord, we have this almost idea that if we do something, God’s not going to keep up but newsflash, we’re not faster than God. We’re much, much slower.

We’re not waiting on God to catch up, God’s waiting on us to take action. So in these moments where there’s chaos, it says be still; not that we need to be still all the time. There’s this story in the bible, the exodus from Egypt when the Israelites, a group of slaves, are heading out of Egypt.

There’s a sea in front of them and the Egyptian army behind them, and they have nowhere to go. So what are they going to do? Well, what they start doing is they start complaining. They start saying Moses, the guy who is leading them out, weren’t there enough graves in Egypt that we could have just died there?

Why did we have to be brought out here to die? There’s nowhere to go. We can’t go forward because there’s a sea. We can’t go backwards there’s an army. And now we’re going to die thanks to you. Here’s that phrase. “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” 

Be still. Don’t worry about it, be still. The Lord will fight for you. The Lord will handle it. But when you actually start Looking into the Hebrew on that word “Be still” it doesn’t mean be still. I don’t know where that word comes from. What it actually means is to be silent or to shut up.

Trust in God and Shut Up

So when I first read that, I thought it was hilarious. I texted my wife right away because Moses is so savage here, they’re complaining they’re about to die. There’s an army on one side, a sea on the other, and Moses is like. Trust in God and shut up. Stop complaining. Moses then turns and prays to God.

He says, God, what do you want us to do? We’re here. We don’t know what to do. What do you want? And God says, I told you what to do. Go. Don’t wait. Stop sitting still. Move forward. What I’m seeing here and every passage that relates to this that I’ve ever studied is that when we try to be still, too calm, or wait on the Lord.

That God’s waiting on us to move. The moments where we are supposed to be still and wait are the moments where we’re ready to go back into slavery. The moments where we’re ready to go back because the journey ahead is too great.

At that moment, we don’t need to keep moving forward. The Bible says calm down, wait, be still, don’t make a rash decision and go back to where you were because there’s something greater waiting ahead of you.

Jesus Didn’t Come to Bring Us Peace

This idea of peace, God’s peace is something that he’s trying to give us. But is that even true? Because as I study the scriptures, there’s two separate scriptures that make it very clear where Jesus flat out says, I did not come to bring you peace. It’s both in Matthew and in the book of the Book of Luke.

In Matthew it says “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” In Luke it says, “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division.” I checked all those words and they are exactly what the Greek says.

There’s no miscommunication there, but we’ve already read scriptures that say, I came to bring you peace, from Jesus. So what is the difference? I had been struggling with this all week long. The idea of what is peace or why God wants to bring us peace, but also that he didn’t come to bring peace.

That doesn’t make sense. That’s a direct contradiction. You see, I checked all these Greek words for peace and they’re all the same. It’s not like it was two different ideas, like how there are several different words for love. This is all the same word for peace.

But what if God in these moments wants to give us peace, not as the world gives, but his own peace. That could be different. How would we draw the line between the two, though? 

The Storm

How do we figure out what God’s peace is and the peace that He’s trying to give us and the peace that the world so often wants? I see it so clearly in this passage. the disciples, they’re sailing. Now mind you, if you don’t know, the disciples were basically the best friends of Jesus and they helped him during his ministry, and almost half of the 12 were fishermen.

So they know how to sail a boat, but one day, while they’re sailing across the Sea of Galilee, a storm brews. A storm forms and starts rocking the boat. Jesus had a long day, reaching out to people, healing them, preaching to them, and he was asleep in the lower section of the boat. And the disciples, they have been through plenty of storms in their lives.

They’re holding the boat together no problem, but the storm gets worse and worse and worse. Water is pouring into the boat. They don’t know what to do. They know at this point if something doesn’t change, they are going to drown. They’re going to die.

Where is Your Faith

Then one of them realizes that Jesus is sleeping in the boat. Maybe he can help us bail out some water. Maybe with his help we’ll be able to do enough to make sure we don’t sink. So they reach out to Jesus, like Jesus, wake up, we need your help. We’re going to drown. Jesus help us.

Jesus got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. And the wind dies down, and the waves calm. And right after that Jesus says to his friends, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”. That has bothered me for a long time.

Because I don’t have that kind of faith. Not when the winds and the waves are raging, where I feel like my life is going to end. Where I don’t feel like I can make it another day. I call out to Jesus. Help me, I don’t know what to do. And then he would just look at me and say, where is your faith? That’s what the church has been saying to me, and it just doesn’t make sense, Or does it?

The Storm Within Us

Because what happened in this story? It was easier for Jesus to calm the wind and the waves than to calm the hearts of his friends? You see, that’s a problem. We want Jesus to calm our situation, to calm the storms in our lives, to bring peace by changing the situation.

But that’s not the kind of peace that Jesus wants to give. Jesus doesn’t want to change the situation in your life. Jesus wants to change you, and me. Not completely. He doesn’t want to make us separate from who we were initially. But instead, when the winds and waves are raging in our lives.

He doesn’t want to calm the storm, he wants to calm your heart. And this is the idea that I’ve been missing. This idea of situational peace Verses personal peace. As I read the scriptures, it seems to be so clear that Jesus doesn’t want to calm our situations. He wants to calm our hearts.

Because Christians, in particular, those of you who believe you are a child of God who serve Jesus. He doesn’t want to just separate us from those situations because we need to relate to those out there. We need to be able to go through the pain and still follow God.

We Should Have Peace

That’s one thing that a lot of non Christians told me when I was younger was that Christians just live in this little bubble of a world where everything is going to be okay and the moment things start going wrong we falter, we fail. We no longer believe. Because that peace is gone. That situational piece is gone and they’ve seen us lose our peace. 

We’re in the probably the least peaceful generation that has lived on this earth for, if not ever, for a very long time. And yet we have all this technology, we have all these resources, we have all of these blessings. And we’re still anxious. We’ve solved the problem of mass food. Where most people in America don’t have to starve and in fact I think it’s over 20% of Americans now obese.

We have too much food, we have electricity, we have lights at night, we have heat in the winter, we have air conditioning in the summer, we don’t have to suffer and yet we’re still anxious. We still don’t have situational peace.

Personal Peace Vs Situational Peace

But have you ever seen that person where there’s chaos all around them in their entire life, and yet they’re standing strong. You look at them and you’re like, if I went through that, that would crush me. And they’re just like, that’s just another Tuesday. How do we get there? How do we start? This difference between internal peace and situational peace. This peace that says I don’t care what the situation is. I’ve got this.

But why wouldn’t you want situational peace? Wouldn’t it be nice to just not have to worry at all in the first place? If you’re thinking that you might be right but here’s why I disagree. 90% of the time when there are problems in our lives they are caused by people. We would have to fix that before anything else.

The problem with that is, as a christian, we believe that God created us with free will, and the only way God can create situational peace in these situations is to take that free will away. I mean think about it, how many times have you caused problems for yourself or other people in your life. The only way is to take away our choice to make those decisions.

Situational Peace Creates Apathy and Stagnation

Let’s take this a step further. What if God did take away our free will to remove those situations in our lives. That might be nice, but as I think of it I can’t come to that conclusion. Because if I imagine a world with complete peace this is what I see. Apathy and stagnation.

You see there are two main drivers when it comes to human progress. Internal drive and external drive. In a world of perfect peace we would have to remove any form of external drive, because all external drive is formed without peace.

The best way I can see this is thinking back to England where hundreds and hundreds of years ago there was war and chaos. In response to these external drives we developed things like Castles, Moats, Iron, Bronze. All of these things that we take for granted today were driven by external drives.

Internal Drives Remove Peace

Well, at least we have our internal drives you might think, but that would have to go as well. When you have a drive to do something it is anything but peaceful. Most people know what it is like to try to go to bed but something is gnawing at them trying to get out that drive that says, “I cannot leave this unfinished.” or “I have to do this.”

These ideas drive us crazy and they also can create great things. People have been driven by this internal drive throughout history. From Leonardo Da Vinci to Henry Ford to Elon Musk. All of these men know what it is like to have this drive that would not let them stop and if we had perfect peace all of this would be taken away. So how do we find this internal peace if external peace is not the way to go?

Well, the best advice I can give is from the Apostle Paul. You see In Colossians 3:15 he wrote, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful”.

Control vs Letting Go

Paul is writing about internal piece here, and he says let that internal peace control your thinking. What in the world does that mean? I can’t even control my own thoughts half the time. How am I supposed to let this peace that Jesus has given me control my thinking?

Paul also says in another book that you must take every thought captive. I can’t do that either. How in the world do we do that? In fact, more often than not the lack of peace in my life comes from my mind that  runs and runs and runs and doesn’t stop. So how in the world do I let this peace control my mind?

The answer is rough. I’ve learned that for inner peace you have to do a couple things first. For those of you who have never been to a 12 step meeting or a ten step meeting, things like Alcoholics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous, in those meetings, at least when they were first created, they had this prayer that they would pray.

The Serenity Prayer, And it says this, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He(Jesus) did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next. Amen.”

Go Until You Get a No

There’s this passage where Paul talks about whatsoever is noble, whatsoever is lovely, whatsoever is beautiful, whatsoever is of good report. Think about these things. And when you take that wrong, you can think, okay, it has to be good, it has to be lovely, it has to be beautiful and all this and all this, and it ends up turning your actions and your life into a tightrope.

When in reality Paul’s just saying. If you don’t know what to think about. Think about something that’s lovely, anything that’s lovely. I think about something that’s good, anything that’s good. Something of a good report. That’s a good thing to think about. That’s all that matters. Is it a good report? Yeah, well think about it.

We try to be so perfect in this world and we don’t need to be. And in fact, we are less of who we are meant to be when we stand still. Now I’m not saying don’t reach out to God with these things, but don’t wait on the Lord. Take action if it’s good. If it is good, run for it and listen to see if God says otherwise.

If God tells you to stop, then stop. That’s fine. Take a breather, reevaluate, but the simple phrase I use here is “go until you get a no”. That’s it. So step one here is simply let go of the things that you cannot control and take hold and run with the things you can. That is step one.

Controlling Your Emotions

Step two for gaining that inner peace is controlling my emotions rather than letting the world control it. Easier said than done, I get it. But if we learn how to control our own emotions then what other people say and do won’t bother us. With that, I’m not perfect by any means. That is a very difficult thing.

In fact, this very week I was watching something and it enraged me so much and the only thing that calmed me down was this idea that Jesus specifically told us that we must love our enemies. And he said that while he was a slave to the Roman Empire.

If you forgot that little fact, Jesus was born a slave and died a slave. All of Israel at the time of Jesus was a slave to the Roman Empire. They were able to live somewhat free lives. It was different from slavery that we had here in America, but they were still slaves. And he said to love your enemies as you love yourself.

That hurts. That’s difficult. I Struggle with this idea of controlling my own emotions and not letting other people control those emotions but that’s Step 2 here. Step 2 is so important because It kind of builds off of Step 1.

It’s Your Choice to Make

I can’t control what other people say, but I can control how it affects me, and you may have tried that before, but if you didn’t, do Part 1 and let go of the things you cannot control first you’re going to run out of energy by the time you need to control yourself.

Because you waste so much time trying to control things you can’t. Once you let those go, then and only then can you actually start controlling the things you can because you’ll burnout otherwise.

You see, no one can make you mad. Not a single person in this world can make you mad. They can only give you reason to be mad, they can give you a reason to be angry, they can give you a reason to be sad. But they don’t make you that way.

That’s your choice you get to make. It’s difficult. It’s painful. And it’s infuriating sometimes. Because sometimes I want to be mad. Sometimes I want to be sad. And it’s difficult to get there.

Peace in life’s Chaos

At the beginning of this I told you about the time I was in the 3rd grade twice. I lost a lot of my friends and that stuck with me for many many years, but that’s not the end of the story. I’m still not really close friends with anyone who was in that grade before. I see them still.

When we walk through the halls, we’ll say hi, we’ll wave. But then we go on about our day. That’s over and gone. Now I don’t question that my current friends want me in their lives because I can’t control that. What I can control is being there, what I can control is reaching out to them when things are going wrong.

What I can control is showing them love regardless of what happens to the friends I still have, and the friends I make to this day. So no, I never got those friends back, ever. And for many years I thought all my other friends would leave.

But now I have this inner peace, this peace that passes all understanding when it comes to one of the biggest pain points in my life. Where I control what I can, and I try not to let their absences or distance create any sort of emotion in me. Sometimes I fail, but I have a much better life than I used to.

Growing in Relationship With Jesus

And that’s what I want for all of you. That’s what God wants for you. You see, there’s a small mistake that some Christians make that they think Jesus is only here for saving our souls and bringing us to heaven. But that’s not the only reason he’s here.

The other reason He’s here is to bring heaven to earth. To heal us from our stuff now, it may not be the way we want. It may not be by removing the situational chaos. But rather by giving us inner peace. And you’ll discover this as you go along your journey, if you haven’t already.

There are many things that you think you want. Where Jesus says, no I have something better for you. If you’re willing to go through all of this pain, let go of the things you can’t control, control the things you can and control and not let others control your emotions. If you’re able to do that then you might just have peace.