Deep Peace

Finding Calm in a World of Conflict and Anxiety

Todd D. Hunter

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310120445
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Experience deep wholeness in your life that springs forth from the peace of God.

We live in a fearful, anxiety-driven age where the problems and challenges of the world assault us from every direction and every media source, and they far exceed our abilities to respond to them. The sense of desperation that often comes of this leads to discord and violence: from bitter, cutting remarks to the atrocities of war; from pervasive racism to knee-jerk micro-aggressions. It contributes to our current, peace-bankrupt social discourse, leading to patterns of dismissing, dividing from, condemning, or hating people.

But what if the root of these problems is not found out there, in the situations, the information or misinformation of what's happening in the world? What if they come from here: in our minds, hearts, thought-life, and emotions?

In Deep Peace, Todd Hunter, founding pastor of Holy Trinity Anglican Church, analyzes the anxiety and desperation of our current moment and brings it before a biblical framework of profound peace. This book provides practices to help Christians value and actively seek peace, becoming people of reconciliation in ordinary life. Deep Peace:

• Uncovers the ten things that are most harmful to peace in a person's life.
• Unpacks the "Trinity of Peace" found in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and how we can find rest in each person of the Trinity.
• Reveals spiritual practices that will teach you how to pursue an inner calm and become the kind of person that meets conflict with love and renounces fear.

Deep Peace is a timely benediction that offers a practical and spiritual guide to recenter believers in the peace of Christ.

A TRINITY OF PEACE

CHAPTER 4

THE GOD OF PEACE

Absolute and eternal, God is whole and undisturbed within himself. Creation at first reflected that wholeness, that well-being. Everything was good in and of itself. The natural world was at rest. Humanity was at rest. Adam and Eve were at rest within themselves, with each other, and with God.

CLAUDE RICHARD ALEXANDER JR., “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS”

God is not nervously pacing the golden streets of heaven, his head held in his hands, muttering, “Oh my Self! What am I going to do? I didn’t anticipate that people would be debating human sexuality and gender! Quick, Peter, find my book on human ontology! I didn’t foresee pandemics. And how was I supposed to know that partisan politics would be driven by brutal social discourse? No one up here could have predicted the rapid rise and ever-present nature of technology. Paul, see if you can set up a Zoom meeting with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. I want to know what the H-E-double hockey sticks is going on down there!”

God sees the whole of human life. He knows a thing or two about health care, marriage, immigration, race relations, education, creation care, fair elections, and just governance. He gets it. He is at peace. He is the God of peace. Peace is a core descriptor of God. Our peace has only one source—namely, God’s peace. His kind of peace allows us to participate in all human drama as peaceful agents of healing and justice. The God of peace is at work in the world. He will work in you if you would like him to, if you won’t be troubled by the change his peace will bring. To receive God’s peace requires that we open ourselves to God’s renovation of our whole heart, mind, soul, emotions, will, and spirit. His peace operates in us by the Holy Spirit and becomes part of our character, equipping us to take our place in our various areas of human endeavor.

Reaching for God

The Bible proclaims that God “is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’ ” (Acts 17:27–28). Why then is life in God and its corresponding peace so keenly desired but so frustratingly elusive? Are there practices for receiving the God of peace and the peace of God? Yes, let’s think a bit about God and us—and how we relate to God.

God is wholly other. He is holy. We know that our sins make us unholy. Our sin cannot abide in his presence. That much most of us know. But too often such knowledge puts us on an treadmill of anxiety as we strive to be good enough so God will want to be near us, consider our thoughts, and hear our prayers. How would your imagination for your relationship with the God of peace change if you were to consider this:

“You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit . . .

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.”

JOHN 15:3–5, 9–10

This passage deserves a book of its own. Union with Jesus—like a branch in a vine—is core to Christian spirituality. It is essential to having peace and being a person of peace. Let’s observe a few of Jesus’ thoughts.

1. You are already clean. This saying does not imply that we are perfect or that there will never be other seasons of pruning or spiritual washings. But for our purposes here—for finding and living in peace—it means this: there is nothing more you need to do to clean yourself up in order to make God like you or want to be with you. All the cleansing we need was accomplished in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. But we put our judgments of ourselves onto God. We don’t like ourselves. A lot of other people don’t like us. We assume God, especially a holy God, must not want much to do with us either.

We cannot grow in peace if this pattern of thought dominates our relationship with God. Through the words “you are clean,” Jesus meant to assure his first followers that their discipleship to him, their hearing and obeying his teachings, meant they were already pruned of wrong ideas about God and his purposes in humanity, in Israel, in the church. What they heard Jesus teach, what they observed in his redemptive deeds of power, what they experienced in his manner of being—even through an arrest, unfair trials, and a brutal, bloody death on a cross awaited Jesus—had brought them into alignment with the purposes of God. Being students of Jesus in kingdom living purified their hearts when it came to love and service to others. The desire and the ability to love God, neighbor, and enemy and to bear the fruit of healing and justice were theirs through abiding in Jesus. Abiding in what God has done, not striving to get him to like us, yields the posture and practice of peace.

2. You are already loved. Can this be right—we are loved by Jesus the way his Father loved him? The Father loved Jesus with a love that was deep, meaning it went beyond the mere surface issues of life, extending to realities that cannot be contained in space and time. It was pure in that it was not contaminated by the human tensions that make untainted love difficult for us. It was eternal, which means it existed before Jesus came to this earth as an infant, and thus was not based on performance, on “what Jesus was doing for God.” Finally, God’s love for Jesus was perfect, in that it included all the elements—the various qualities and necessary characteristics for one to feel fully embraced and cared for and valued.

Jesus loves us with that kind of love. The invitation here is to make Jesus’ love for you the atmosphere and overall context of your life, not the things of earth. As a branch, you find your true home in the Vine. There is no other source for human meaning and fulfillment. Your home is not found in the things of earth. Thus, the vision for life that comes from being loved by Jesus means that his love for us is what we are most conscious of.

We don’t deny daily reality; we inhabit it. But we do so apart from any quest to find love and acceptance—which is maybe the biggest peace stealer of all. Before we enter any moment of life, the love and acceptance of Jesus are already the place where we dwell. Jesus’ love is meant to be the place where our hearts and souls are most at rest. It is where we are comfortable enough to get a cold drink from the fridge or prepare a hot cup of tea and put our feet up.

We are most at home when wrapped in love. We are most anxious, even abandoned, when feeling unloved. Most of us routinely go in cycles from being “settled in love” to searching restlessly for something more or better, something that can define us. The story that defines you is one of already being loved.

Trinitarian love is more core to your DNA than skin pigment, eye color, IQ, or size. The quality of your being is not defined by the strength, health, or stature of your body. You don’t bring the love of God into those things as if they are determinative; you bring them into the reality of God’s love and make meaning of them in that way. You are defined by the quality of love you have from Jesus. The fact that we are loved with the same kind of love the Father has for the Son is stunning in the extreme and thus challenging to grasp. We all should spend the rest of our lives coming to experientially know such love. In that love, we will find peace with God, peace within, and peace with others.

3. Remain in Jesus’ love. Having told us that we are loved, Jesus invites us to remain in that love. This is an invitation to a life in which we stay put; we don’t roam the earth looking for some thing or some person to make us feel accepted or loved. We simply abide; we continue in the place of being loved by God. Thus, love is what gives our life a sense of permanency, a settled state of being. I am loved; therefore I am. I am chosen; therefore I am. I am yoked with Jesus; therefore I am. I am an always existing being with a never-dying future in the new heaven and the new earth; therefore I am!

The classic way to remain in God’s love is through the exercise of spiritual practices. These practices don’t earn anything—how could they? We are already clean and already loved! Spiritual practices, such as prayer, study, fasting, silence, solitude, and service to others, are simply the things we do to notice and receive that which is already real and in place, already accomplished for us.¹ But what God has done does not set us aside or render us unresponsive. Engaging in spiritual practices enables an experience of what God has already done and is already doing. When we use spiritual disciplines, we are not creating something new that is outside the love of God in Christ. As branches, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are simply perceiving and experiencing the life of the Vine, a life made distinct by Trinitarian love.

Paul knew how crucial the experience of the love of God is to Christian spirituality. It is certainly the only basis for a peace-filled, peace-multiplying life:

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

EPHESIANS 3:17–19

Peace is established and grows from the roots of love. Grasping the truth that we are loved as the Father loved the Son is our path to peace. Being filled to the measure of all the fullness of God guarantees that peace will well up in us and overflow to the people and events in our lives.

Union with God

Peace is found through union with the God of peace. Such union is described in the phrases “in Christ” or “Christ in you.” Those phrases are used many times in the New Testament. Union with Christ is clearly a core dimension of Christian life.

This union is far more defining than any personality or behavior indicator—the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the DiSC profile, the CliftonStrengths assessment tool, or the Enneagram. To be in Christ points to the same reality we referred to earlier when we spoke of remaining in Jesus’ love. In Christ describes a stable state of being, one that is not determined by circumstances. We are in Christ, no matter our particular life context. This union means the peace Jesus experienced in his life is available to us.

Though we continue to commit sins, sin is not where we live. Though we are on earth, we are not in the world in the sense of being indifferent to or in rebellion against God. We are not in the past, with its mistakes, regrets, or even exploits. We are not in the future, with its fears or hoped-for successes. None of those things define us. If we try to let them define us, we invite anxiety and conflict. If we seek to discover our union with God, little by little we will receive peace and take on the characteristics of a person of peace.

How did the phrase “true identity” come about? You can now find consultants, coaches, psychologists, and personality tests all aimed at helping you discover your “true self.” Those resources came into being because there’s a large market for them. Apparently, a lot of us don’t understand ourselves or don’t know who we really are. As a result, a large number of people are needing to invent a self, create an identity. and then try to live consistently with what they create. This work is exhausting. And it creates anxiety.

It is something entirely different to discover and cultivate an identity in Christ. Focusing on that identity relaxes rather than exhausts. Identity in Christ is peaceful, nonanxious. It frees us from using people for their approval.

I know some may protest at this point, “But such a union and the peace one would expect to flow from it—that’s not my experience!” Yes, I get it. Replacing anxiety with peace has been a lifelong battle for me too. But what will y...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Ten Peace Killers
• A Trinity of Peace
• Peace Within
• Peace With Others
• Practicing Peace
• Conclusion
• Dear Reader
• Grateful Acknowledgments
• Notes