ONE
The Peace Promise
Jesus promised us life’s greatest reward: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you” (John 14:27). But there is a catch. “I do not give to you as the world gives.” A friend once said to me, “That’s exactly the part that troubles me!” In this book, you will see how radically true that is. It takes courage to receive the peace of the Lord because his ways are not our ways. Only by personal experience will you discover that his ways are also better than our ways.
Jesus encouraged us further by saying, “Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27). Sigh. If only it were that easy.
Consider for a moment what is troubling you. Why does it bother you? Perhaps you feel stuck and unsure what to do. Or you did what you had to do and now you are playing the waiting game; the outcome you want has not happened. Until then, you are not at peace. The finances, the job, the marriage, the children, the divorce, the estranged relationship with your sibling or parent—one of these is stealing your peace.
To reap the peace of Christ, you must face the thief itself: anxiety. Anxiety is an inescapable dilemma that seems unresolvable, not only for you but for all human beings. It is a classic rock and a hard place that leaves you feeling damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Let’s look at a peace-robbing situation involving a troubled marriage, in which the ideas of leaving and not leaving both led to a loving wife’s deep anxiety.
A reader of one of my previous books,The Non-Judgmental Christian, wrote to say she was struggling with how to respond to her husband’s infidelity. She wanted to be loving and nonjudgmental, yet every time she forgave him, he would return to and even increase his hurtful ways. She wrote:
Be it a curse or a blessing, I have a very forgiving heart, and each time I discovered porn sites or communication with someone on a dating site, we would go through the same process: anger that I had been “spying” on him, confession (admittance) of only what I had discovered, declaration that he loved me and didn’t want to hurt me, and a promise to never do it again. At first it happened once every six months, then every three months, until he was going out to local bars and not coming home twice a week.
This wife’s unhappy situation illustrates a different dilemma that blocks our path to peace: that of the hammer and the doormat. If she stands up for what she believes, she comes across as if she is wielding a hammer, pressuring her husband to change his ways. If she pushes hard enough, he might change—or he mi
