The Path of Peace

That is the lesson we should learn—the duty of peace and the secret of peace. It is the duty of every Christian to have peace. Not to have it is to reject the Master’s bequest—“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.”* (John 14:27) It is to refuse His gracious gift—a gift He died to have to give unto us. Not to have peace is to fail to have the fruit of the Spirit in our lives, for part of this fruit is peace. Every one of us should have peace. If we have it not we are living below our privileges; we are missing one of the great blessings of salvation.

That is one part of our lesson. The other is that we can get this peace by having our minds stayed on God, that God may keep us in peace. For even He cannot keep us unless we put ourselves into His hands and leave ourselves there. The staying upon God is our part in securing the blessing that is promised. It must be a voluntary reposing. It must be an unbroken confiding. To trust and sing today, and then to fear and doubt tomorrow, is not the way to find perfect peace. “Trust ye in the Lord for ever,”* (Isaiah 26:4) is the lesson that is set for us to obtain the peace that shall never be broken.

If our peace is disturbed by some sudden trial or sorrow, or by overwhelming trouble, God very gently helps back into the nest those who have been thrown out of it by any such experience. One day President Lincoln was walking together beside a hedgerow, and came upon a young bird fluttering in the grass. It had fallen out of its nest in the bushes and could not get back again. The great, gentle-hearted man stopped in his walk, picked up the little thing, sought along the hedge until he found the nest, and put the bird back again into its place. That is what Christ is seeking to do every day with lives that have been jostled out of the nest of peace. With hand infinitely gentle He would ever help us back to the peace we have lost awhile.

The staying of the mind upon God suggests repose. We are to let ourselves down upon His strength, into the arms of His love, and to rest there, without fear, without perturbation, without question. But this does not mean that we shall drop our tasks and duties out of our hands. Always, in every exhortation to trust God, obedience is implied and presupposed. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness,”* (Matthew 6:33) said the Master. When we do this, He continued, we need never be anxious, for then all our needs shall be supplied. It is only in the faithful doing of God’s will that true peace ever can be found. We cannot commit either ourselves or our affairs to God unless we have done or are ready to do our own part faithfully.

Far more really than we think is work a helper of peace. The will of God is to be done, not only suffered, as some people seem to think, but done in unbroken obedience and service. Work is a law of life, and no life can be truly healthy which is not active. Work thus becomes a means of grace. We grow under burdens. Exercise develops the faculties. There is a satisfaction also in the consciousness of having faithfully done one’s duty and performed one’s part in the world, which is an essential element of peace. Love is the law of spiritual life. We do not begin to live in any worthy sense until we have learned to love and to serve others. Selfishness is always a hinderer of peace. Peace is the music which the life makes when it is in perfect tune, and this can be only when all its chords are attuned to the keynote of love.

We can stay our minds upon God only when the will of God has been done by us, or endured patiently and cheerfully. The bosom of God is a holy place, and nothing unholy ever can nestle there. No disturbed conscience can find quiet there. There must be peace in the heart, first, or even leaning on Christ’s breast will not impart peace. The poet tells of a heavenly music that he heard everywhere—

“Let me go where’er I will
I hear a sky-born music still:
It sounds from all things old,
It sounds from all things young;
From all that’s fair, from all that’s foul,
Peals out a cheerful song.

“It is not only in the rose,
It is not only in the bird,
Not only where the rainbow glows,
Nor in the song of women heard,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There alway, alway something sings.”1

But the source of this music was in the poet’s own heart. He heard it wherever he went, because his life was in tune with the will of God. Only thus can anyone find perfect peace. Even God cannot give it to one whose heart is filled with strifes, or with fears, or with reprovings of conscience. God can only keep in peace the soul that has made peace with God.

Peace gives such blessedness to the heart, and is such an adornment to the life, that no one ever should be willing to miss it. Whatever other graces God has bestowed upon us, we should not be content without this, the most beautiful of them all. However beautiful a character may be, if it has not peace it lacks the highest charm of spiritual adornment. And the Master is willing to bestow upon the lowliest of us the divinest of all graces—peace, His own blessed peace.