The Reassuring, Transformative Peace of Jesus
Jesus knew we would face tough times in life. In those times, He promises us His peace. What does this peace look like? How does it change us? And how do we get it?
When life goes off course and our plans are upended by disease, war, fractured relationships, job loss, or cutting disappointment, anxiety, fear, and pain can paralyze us in debilitating ways. In these moments, we want to know that things will be okay. The night Jesus was going to be arrested, He understood that life was about to go wildly off course for His followers. They were expecting triumphant victory over an oppressive empire. They were about to encounter what would seem like deep failure and complete defeat. Jesus, knowing what lay ahead, gave them a promise:
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.1
What is this peace? How does it transform us? And how do we get it?
Jesus’s Peace Reassures us about God’s Character, Authority, and Love
Jesus’s peace is the reassurance that even when we face life’s trials, three things are always true:
God is still good
God is still in control
God still loves us and is with us
God is still good
When disease, broken relationships, or tragedy strike, we wonder if God is good. We ask why. Why us? Why this tragedy? When we do not get the answer (and we rarely do), we are tempted to sit upon judgement on God. We think, “if God allowed this bad thing to happen, He is must not be good.”
But God is always good. We know this because we know Jesus. He radiated God’s goodness in everything He did – from protecting the weak and vulnerable, to healing the sick, to standing up against injustice and greed. Jesus’s peace reaffirms God’s good character in the face of a hard and cruel world.
God is in control
Sometimes we know God is good but we don’t think He is in control. The thinking goes like this: “Well, if God is supposedly all-powerful, why would He let this bad thing happen? He must not be as powerful because He did not stop this bad thing.” This thinking is amplified further when bad things happen to people we do not feel deserve it, such as our loved ones or people we think of as innocent, like children.
One of the hardest tensions to reconcile as a follower of Jesus is why a powerful God lets these bad things happen. Although we may not know why, we know for sure that no matter what happens, God remains in full control of the world and everything that happens in it.
Again, we know this from the life of Jesus. God sent Jesus to live a perfect life on earth, which He did. Yet, the religious leaders of His day were overcome with jealousy and fear leading them to unjustly arrest and orchestrate Jesus’s death. But God raised Jesus from the dead signaling that no matter what happens in life, He has ultimate authority – even over death. This means that even when the worst happens in life and people we love die, death is not the end of the story. We do not know why God lets certain things happen, but we know that in the end, there is always a purpose we might not see. God is always in control.
God still loves us and is always with us
Maybe the most reassuring thing about Jesus’s peace is the comfort that Jesus still loves us and is always right there with us no matter what is happening. In our darkest moments, this truth gives us the greatest comfort.
We know God cares because we know Jesus cared deeply about the people around Him. He cared a lot about children. He cared about the poor and the rich. He cared about the weak and the powerful. He cared about all His followers. He cared about the in group and He cared about the outcasts. He cared about the very people who were putting Him to death. Jesus’s life is marked by a wellspring of love towards humanity that never runs dry.
When we understand that Jesus’s peace reassures us about God’s goodness, His control over the world we live in, and His unyielding love for us, our lives are completely transformed. How?
Jesus’s Peace Transforms our Approach to Life
The best way to understand how Jesus’s peace transforms our life is to look at how it transformed the lives of His earliest followers. Jesus hinged His entire life legacy on the inner circle of followers He had been training for three years. They were not sophisticated scholars or theologians. They were simple, ordinary men, mostly fishermen and tradesmen. These were the people Jesus trusted to be world changers. How were they supposed to do this in the face of the uncertainty and hard times they would encounter?
When Jesus promised to give the disciples peace, He promised to send them a Helper, the Holy Spirit, who would guide them in this mission. This same Holy Spirit authors the peace Jesus gives to us. Just as it transformed these early followers of Jesus, the Holy Spirit transforms us today. When we have the peace of Jesus, our lives are transformed in at least three fundamental ways:
We are inoculated against bitterness
We are given a more mature perspective
We are empowered to persevere
Jesus’s peace inoculates us against bitterness
Jesus’s peace protects us from bitterness. We may still wonder why God is allowing something to happen. But instead of judging God as either uncaring or incompetent, we have the confidence that God still cares about us. This knowledge prevents bitterness from building up like spiritual plaque within us destroying our faith and sapping our vitality. When we know that God cares about us, we can take comfort in the words of Paul. As a follower of Jesus, He was deeply familiar with suffering. Yet, he still wrote these encouraging words:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.2
We may not understand the suffering in the moment, but we can still trust God knowing that He will find a way to use our suffering for good.
Jesus’s peace matures our perspective
We tend to want to boil down complex concepts into simple cause and effect. We look for explanations that make sense. While this is not wrong, it can lead us into overly simple ways of thinking that might be incorrect. For example, we might think of peace as the absence of conflict and have a picture in our minds of total calm. However, peace often coexists with other complex emotions.
On the very night Jesus was telling His followers about the peace He would give them, He also prayed to God. Jesus was going through extreme levels of anxiety because He understood the imminent emotional and physical agony He was about to face. He knew He would die a gruesome death on the cross. Jesus acutely understood that God was good, in control, and loved Him. Yet Jesus still asked if there was another way. If He could avoid this agony. Despite all the peace Jesus had in willingly surrendering to God’s way, He grappled with the unavoidable pain and torment He would shortly endure.
Paul, the same follower who wrote that all things work for good, also experienced a “thorn in the flesh.”3 We do not know what this thorn was though some suspect an ongoing ailment. But we know that Paul, who also trusted in God’s goodness, His sovereignty, and had personally experienced the overwhelming love of Jesus, lived with a chronic condition that seemed to stay with him for life.
Instead of turning over every rock for an explanation of our suffering, or maligning God’s character or competency, or trying to come up with simple explanations to complex realities, Jesus’s peace matures our perspective. This perspective places trust in God and holds the peace we experience with the tension of unresolved difficulty, the lack of any good answers, and the complex emotions of the moment.
Jesus’s peace empowers us to persevere
When we have Jesus’s peace, we are empowered to persevere during the hard times. Jesus endured the cross with all its brutality and injustice. Because He knew God would triumph over death, He submitted Himself to the most humiliating and painful experience. Paul endured horrific suffering as well because He understood that his pain had an ultimate purpose.
After spending extensive time preparing the disciples for the hardship they would endure, Jesus gave them a promise about the future:
So also you have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.4
In part we endure through the hard times because we know there is a better day coming, when our joy will be full. We look forward to a time when the moments in which we were enmeshed in pain and grief give way to boundless joy. Holding on to this promise in the moment is incredibly difficult. But it is easier when we remember that God is still good, God is in control, and God still loves us.
So how do we get this marvelous peace of Jesus, which reassures us in tough times and completely transforms our approach to life?
Jesus’s Peace Stems from a Relationship with Jesus
To experience the peace of Jesus, we need to have a healthy relationship with Him. Cultivating a healthy relationship with Jesus requires three things of us:
Faith in the reality of Jesus
Surrendering our life to Jesus
Acting on the implications of these truths
Faith: Believing in the reality of Jesus
Among prominent historical figures, Jesus is unique for three important claims He made: 1) He said He was the Son of God - and that He was God; 2) He said that out of deep love for us, He came to save us from all the wrong things we have ever done; and 3) He said He came to offer eternal relationship with Him to anyone who believed in His claims. Understanding and accepting these claims may take some time. It is time well spent because our faith needs to be grounded in the reality of who Jesus said He was, what He came to do, and in the recognition of His love and power.
Surrender: Yielding our life to Jesus
Everyone has a specific philosophy or worldview around which they order their life. If, as followers of Jesus we believe that Jesus came to earth because He loves us and wants an eternal relationship with us, then we must be willing to live according to how He wants us to live, not according to how we want to live. That is hard because our own desires often pull us away from Jesus. Because Jesus understands more about the world and spiritual reality than we do, He shared with us how we should live. When we align our lives with these teachings, our relationship with Jesus grows. As our relationship with Jesus grows, our love for Him and for others naturally grows deeper, especially as He reshapes our desires.
Action: Nurturing relationship with Jesus
Like any relationship, being in relationship with Jesus means we must cultivate and tend to that relationship regularly. And because Jesus’s desire is that our relationship with Him would be the most important relationship we have, it means that if we want this relationship to thrive, we must tend to it daily. Jesus spent long stretches of time with God. He did this not out of obligation but desire. In the same way, as an outgrowth of our love, Jesus desires that we would spend time with Him regularly.
Healthy relationship with Jesus leads to us walking according to His ways. It also naturally leads to us experiencing the peace that Jesus offers which is the reassurance that God is always good, is always in control, and loves us deeply. As we experience more of this peace, our lives will be profoundly transformed, allowing us to cultivate the resilience we need in the face of life’s challenges. In this transformation, we become world changers who even in our toughest moments, point more people to the love of Jesus and radiate this love in the world around them.
John 14:26-27
Romans 8:28
2 Corinthians 12:7
John 16:22