How often don’t I hear people saying, “I trust my instincts,” or “I trust my gut feel,” where they should actually be saying, “I trust my God.” I do realize that God does give us a feeling of peace when we trust Him for something, but the peace is not what we should be trusting. We should be trusting the God who gives the peace. Peace is such a precious commodity yet it is so overlooked and not given the status in our lives that it should have. How often can we claim to really have peace in our lives?
Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.”
Psalm 4:8, I will both lie down in peace, and sleep;
For You alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.
Psalm 119:165, Great peace have those who love Your law,
And nothing causes them to stumble.
Isaiah 26:3, You will keep him in perfect peace,
Whose mind is stayed on You,
Because he trusts in You.
These verses tell us that God brings peace to those who belong to Him. I have often prayed about decisions I had to make and that I wasn’t sure of, and God has led me with peace. One thing I do know is that if I have to make a decision and I have an uneasy feeling about it, I definitely must not do it. It took me a long time to realize that and as a result I have made some really foolish decisions in my life. Sometimes we pray about something and feel peace and go ahead and do it, and it doesn’t work out the way we envisioned it. Does that mean that we had a false sense of peace or that God changed His mind about it? I don’t think so because we aren’t always going to just have good times. Sometimes there is a lesson we have to learn when things don’t go exactly our way. Something I have learned is that when we trust God through trouble we grow in character and we get much closer to God than if we had just had it easy.
What I do know is that even in the worst of times, if we hold on to the promises and if we hold on to the love of God and if we never forget that Jesus died for us, we are going to have peace. Look what Acts 16:25-26 Paul and Silas did when they were in prison.
But at midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were loosed.
Even though they were in prison they were singing hymns. You don’t sing if you don’t have peace.
The kind of peace that they had is the kind of peace we should seek. The kind of peace that leaves you calm when everything is collapsing around you. When sickness threatens to claim a loved one’s life; when you are overwhelmed with debt; when relationships are torn apart; when crime is rampant; that’s when you have to look to Jesus and remember that He died for all these things. He has already taken all the pain that these things cause and the Holy Spirit came to comfort and guide us through all the trouble.
God is our source. Our source of sustenance, our source of comfort, our source of wisdom, our source of life and our source of peace. Nothing that can happen in this world is so bad that we cannot overcome it if we look to God as our source. The peace that He provides is all we need to be able to function. We have to trust Him at all times with everything we have and with everything we are because He loves us and He will never leave us or forsake us.
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