Hey, parents, as you probably know, if you've lived on Earth
for more than about 10 seconds, there's a lot going on that
can rob your peace when you're watching the news,
when you're looking at the stuff that your kids are dealing with
and just life stresses and struggles and anxieties and pressures.
It's like peace can just go out the window sometimes.
And then we look at the Bible and Jesus, our Prince of Peace, is calling us to live
with peace.
And we're thinking, how is that even possible?
I don't know how to get there. How to keep it.
And so we want to talk to you
just a few minutes about what peace looks like, how to keep it
and how to protect yourselves from those things that rob it.
Because a few years ago, Ashley wrote an amazing book called Peace Pirates.
I highly recommend it.
But when she was doing the research for this book,
what she discovered about biblical peace, it completely blew my mind
because I used to think
of peace is just the absence of something, just the absence of chaos.
But what she discovered in Scripture was peace was really so much more than that.
It is you know, you may have heard the Hebrew word shalom.
You know, even today in Israel, when you go there,
if you say hello to someone, they're going to say hi.
But then they're also going to say shalom, which I think is awesome.
And they're essentially saying have God's peace.
But I wanted to take my research a step further.
So when I looked at the word shalom
and compared it to kind of the English translations,
a greater meaning than peace in English would actually be the word wholeness,
because when we have God's peace, we feel whole.
Another definition was lacking nothing.
But I wanted to go even further and see, well, what is the earliest way
that the Hebrews wrote this word?
Shalom, God's peace to each other.
And what I found just blew my mind, because there's four symbols
that write out the word shalom.
And these four symbols together stand for this.
They stand for breaking the authority established by chaos.
So essentially, God's peace,
shalom is God breaking the authority established by chaos in our life.
So in essence,
it really has nothing to do with whatever chaotic circumstances
are going on in our life.
But it has everything to do with the power and the authority
we give those circumstances.
So it could be
if we have a wayward child as parents, that can just make our heart sink,
of course. And our mind is going to be focused
on getting that child back on the right track.
But that doesn't have to be our authority.
That means we surrender that situation to God and say, God,
you see the greater picture.
You love this kid even more than I do.
And I know that you are with him.
You are with her, and you're going to bring him or her back home.
And we trust that he is going to do that
and he's going to teach us all something along the path.
You know, maybe we're having stress in our marriage.
We need to make sure every day we surrender our marriage to God
and say, God, please help me to be the best wife I can be.
Help my husband to be the best husband he can be.
Help us to be aware of any blind spots and where we trust that you are working
in this situation.
Help us have peace in the midst of this.
And what you'll find is,
the more we surrender and trust the Lord, the more we truly experience his peace.
Because the truth of the matter is, peace doesn't just magically appear to us.
We have to pursue it. We have to promote it.
And we have to protect it.
How do we do that?
By staying tuned into the word.
We need to fill our mind with God's truth.
By also connecting with other believers, other peacemakers, people who can
who can talk about God's peace
in their own lives and encourage us to have more of His peace in ours.
And also also realize that boundaries are very important, too.
We are called to be peacemakers, but not necessarily to the point where
where we're being beat up, so to speak, and someone is mistreating us.
Sometimes the most peaceful thing we can do is establish healthy boundaries
with someone who's trying to have authority in our life
when they're not supposed to. It's so good.
I love that
Ashley took those symbols, those Hebrew symbols for the word shalom
and put them on this little bracelet that she wears everyday. Yes. I
carry them with me.
And and so every time I look at this, every time I'm holding their hand,
I look down and I see that it's a reminder to me
that God has the power to break the authority established by chaos
and that we're putting ourselves under His authority.
Jesus is our Good Shepherd.
He's our Prince of Peace and they have different meanings?
They do.
Yeah.
Breaking the authority established by chaos.
He's bigger than anything we're facing.
He's bigger than the chaos. He's bigger than the stress.
And so even in the midst of that storm, our savior is there with us in it.
And he wants to give us peace.
Our Savior
who took a nap in the middle of a storm because he's like, you know what?
Don't even worry about this.
He wants us to have that kind of peace in our lives.
So, guys,
you can have it and you don't have to wait for your circumstances to change
to have it. Start inviting that peace that comes from Christ
to rule in your hearts,
as it says in Colossians 3:15, and that peace
is going to take root in your life and in your home.
And little by little,
that anxiety that that fear, that stress that all of us feel
sometimes is going to start to lose its grip
and it's going to be replaced by the peace that only Christ can
bring.