I Called It Peace

He goes out on the step at the end of the day. He has done it for about twenty years and he does not make anything of it.

It is not a discipline. He did not read about it. He goes out because the house is behind him and the light is going and there is a stretch of about fifteen minutes out there that has a quality the rest of the day does not.

And if you asked him what it is, he would say: it is peaceful out there.

He has been saying that for twenty years. To his wife. To his brother. Once, at a funeral, to a man he barely knew who asked him how he was coping, and the man nodded and said he should try to get more of it.

Peaceful. A quality of an evening. Like it being mild, or the tide being out.

And last week, sitting there with his shoes off, he had a thought arrive that has not left him alone since.

He thought: peace is not a thing that happens outdoors.

He does not know where it came from. He was not reading anything and nobody had said anything to him. He was just sitting there the way he sits there, and the sentence came, and behind it came another one, which was: I have been describing a Person as though it were weather.

Now understand him. He is not a man who over-thinks. He would tell you he has never had a mystical thought in his life and he would mean it as a compliment to himself.

But he has sat on that step through a bad year and two funerals and the stretch in 2019 when nothing at all was working, and the fifteen minutes was there in all of it, and it did not go away when things went wrong. Weather goes away when things go wrong. Weather does not sit with you through a February.

He has been on that step with Somebody for twenty years and has been calling it the evening.

And that is you on your own step, or you would have stopped reading by now.

Peace is not a condition, it is a description of Somebody

Here is the sentence I want to put in your hand, and it is one you have heard a hundred times without hearing this part of it.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.Galatians 5:22-23

Everybody reads that as a list of things a Christian is supposed to become, and it is that, and I am not going to take it off you.

But look at whose fruit it is.

Fruit tells you what the tree is. That is the whole point of the word. You do not have to argue about what kind of tree it is if you have the fruit in your hand, and Paul is not describing a set of virtues floating loose in the world. He is describing what comes off a particular Person when He is near.

Peace is not primarily a state. It is what the Holy Spirit is like to be around.

You have not been sitting in a mild evening for twenty years. You have been sitting near Somebody, and that is what He is like. It is written that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace (Galatians 5:22), and fruit is a word that tells you what the tree is. The Holy Spirit is the tree in that sentence, and He has been on that step through every one of those Februaries.

Now the thing that should settle it for you, because you are a practical man and you will want the evidence rather than the poetry.

You already noticed it yourself. You said it in your own head last week.

Weather goes away when things go wrong. The fifteen minutes did not.

You have been kept company through a bad year, two funerals and a stretch when nothing worked, and none of that was a mood that happened to hold. It is written that He will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never is a word about a Person keeping a promise rather than a run of good evenings. The Holy Spirit is how that promise is kept, and He kept it through 2019 on that step.

And let me say the thing that I think you half expect and that is not going to happen.

Nobody here is telling you that you have been shallow, or that twenty years of saying peaceful was a failure. It was not. It was accurate. It was simply the smaller half of a true sentence, and you were never given the other half.

You are not being corrected on that step tonight. It is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and a man who names a Person by their effect has not sinned, he has just not been introduced. The Holy Spirit has not spent twenty years waiting to be called something better.