Peace Is Not
an Accident

Devotional

Peace Is Practiced

Read the passage again and notice that almost every sentence in it is a command.

Stand firm. Be of the same mind. Help these women. Rejoice. Let your gentleness be evident. Don’t be anxious. Present your requests. Think about such things. Put it into practice. Paul gives us nine imperatives in nine verses, which tells us something important about the peace he’s describing.

That’s really good news for anyone who has watched calmer people and assumed they were simply built differently. Paul doesn’t describe peace as something that settles on the fortunate. He describes a set of practices, and practices are available to anybody willing to do them.

Notice as well how the passage is ordered, because the sequence isn’t random. It opens with a relational conflict between two women, moves to joy and gentleness, then to anxiety and prayer, and finally to the mind and to practice. Paul goes from the outside in and then from the inside out.

That order says something we tend to resist. You can’t have peace of mind while carrying unresolved conflict, and that’s why Euodia and Syntyche come first. The most spiritual thing some of us could do this week isn’t a longer quiet time but a difficult phone call.

Then look at how the passage bookends itself with peace. Verse 7 gives us the peace of God guarding us, and verse 9 gives us the God of peace being with us. Paul starts with the gift and ends with the Giver, which is the direction the whole letter has been moving all along.

So take one honest inventory before the weekend. Is there a relationship you need to repair, an anxiety you’ve never actually prayed, or an input you need to replace?

Pick one. Peace isn’t an accident, and none of those three fix themselves. Notice as well that all three are things you can begin today. That’s why Paul wrote them as commands rather than as observations.