The Path to Peace

What if peace isn’t something you find—but something you’re given?

In this message, we explore why so many of us feel anxious, overwhelmed, and pulled in different directions—and how Jesus offers something deeper than just temporary relief. Not the absence of problems, but a kind of peace that puts us back together.

If you’ve been carrying stress, worry, or that constant mental noise you can’t seem to turn off, this talk will help you discover how to stop carrying it alone—and experience the peace only Jesus can give.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, and welcome to the brand new Burnett Church Podcast. My name is Tim, and I'm your host and the pastor of Burnett Church. Today's podcast uh is the audio from part one of our series called Reactions Speak Louder, in which we start to unpack how our reactions affect the world around us and also say something about our relationship to ourselves and to Jesus as well. Hope you enjoy the episode. How'd y'all sleep last night? Anybody struggling with their sleep? Anybody? Yeah, I'm not the only one. Praise the Lord. I had a whole bunch of anxiety about nothing last night, uh, and it kept me up. And when that happens in my life, this particular phenomenon happens. Do any of you ever get um earworms in the middle of the night? I know that sounds gross, doesn't it? Yeah. Um let me explain what I mean. I don't mean literally a worm, but like a song that's stuck in your head that you just can't get out. And it's a song that you liked five hours ago, but it's a song that you absolutely hate when it invades your sleep. This happened to anybody. I discovered a new song this week. Uh, those of you who are um more my age or up, you might know uh the band, The Pretenders. Does anybody remember The Pretenders? Yeah, okay. Uh they have a song called Don't Get Me Wrong. Um and uh and I I had not heard this song before this week, and I stumbled across a YouTube video, and then I listened to it too much, and it got stuck in my ear. And so in the middle of my anxiety last night, uh I was um I was not at rest because uh the pretenders were running through my head uninvited, taking up all my sleeping space. But I'm aware that that's not the worst thing to have happen to steal your sleep, right? Because some of you who didn't sleep well might have had something much more serious going on. You know, that's kind of one of those like, ugh, super annoying, but it's probably gonna go away, you know. Lord, please, tonight, right? I'm probably not gonna have the same earworm twice in a row. Uh some of you are gonna have the same thing on your mind tonight that you had on your mind last night, and the night after, and the night after, and the night after. For some of us, it's a financial matter that just isn't getting solved. Or a relationship that needs mending. And sometimes it's just this low-grade anxiety that we can't shake. It's like we're we're living, uh I was talking to um my, I won't throw anybody under the bus, one of my children's principals this week, and we were discussing how uh they're living their life in their yellow zone and jumping into their red zone really, really fast all the time. I wonder if you can identify with that, even in your adult life, living in this constant sense of worry and low-grade anxiety that you can't shake. The truth is we've all been there at some point or another. It's not uncommon. There's nothing wrong with us when we experience that. But I think because it's so common, many times, oftentimes, we feel like living without peace is just life. That's how life is. We began this series with with a question, kind of a fill-in-the-blank question. What our world needs now is, and you can't say love, sweet love. That's not the answer in this particular case. Okay? I know that's in one really profound way, yes, Luke, love is always the answer to the problems that we have. But in this particular case, it's it's framed as a question. If you were to answer that question, what does the world need now? And and if I say we're in a series and you're like, what's that? Because you're you you know, this is your first time or what have you, it just means that we're doing a collection of mornings and talks on the similar uh you know uh topic. Okay? Um and in this particular case, we're asking ourselves, really, what does living and following Jesus look like in the real world? And we're inspired to kind of look at this list of things that Paul, one of the New Testament writers, in fact, the guy who wrote the majority of the second half of your Bible, uh, says, the fruit of the Spirit is, and he has a list. And what he means by that is the things that can grow up out of our life as a natural result of following Jesus. What is the outcome of following Jesus? What is the outcome of a pursuit of a trust-filled relationship with God? The fruit of the Spirit is love. That's the first thing that Paul says, and so, yes, Luke, in some sense, you know, what the world needs now is love. Because everything else that we talk about, you know, last week we talked about joy, and this week we're gonna talk about peace, and there are a number of other things that go along with that as well, really are just the explanation of what love looks like according to God, fleshed out in the real world, right? Everything that comes after love in the list, if you want to look it up, it's it's uh in the book of, or the letter of Galatians, chapter 5, verse 22. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. I think I got them all. Okay? And today, like I said, we're gonna we're gonna look at peace. But all of those are just a reflection of what love should look like in the world. And what I want to look at today is a very practical exploration of how you can find peace. If that low-grade anxiety thing is your norm, I want you to know I think that God has something else for you. Something else for all of us. And and the thing that I want us to focus on this morning is this peace, it isn't something you find, it's something you're given. Because when we think about peace, we're often looking for peace. And what we think of is the absence of conflict. Right? Like if we say, hey, wouldn't it be really great if we had peace in the Middle East, as an example? What we really mean is, wouldn't it be nice if we could remove war from the experience of that part of the world, right? And that's not the only part of the world that it needs to remove, but it is kind of a hotbed of, you know, today's society. It's on our minds again, you know. If we could have peace, and what we really mean is that we remove war from that part of the world. But sometimes it's way more basic than that. Sometimes we just want a little peace and quiet at home. And so we go to the bathroom with our telephone. And we sit. Not doing much of anything at all, actually. But just because it's quiet. I won't ask anybody to put up their hand for somebody who's done that before, but I can tell by your response, I'm not the only one who has decided I just need a moment or 30 on my own. You know, we go to the bathroom, why? Because nobody's gonna follow us in there, right? It's quiet. You're alone. You have removed from your life all of the other people, which oftentimes is the source of your lack of peace, right? So we're trying to give ourselves some peace again by removing something from our life. That is the common perception, I think, when it comes to finding peace. But when the Bible talks about peace, it doesn't talk about just the absence of something. When God speaks to us about peace, when we start to explore what his peace looks like, he speaks of replacing the conflict with something more enduring. The Hebrew word for peace, you may know this if you've been at church for a while, and if you haven't, this might be the first time, or you may have heard this word in a totally different context, the word shalom. Right? This is what the ancient Hebrew people used as a word for peace. Now, if you had somebody offer you shalom today, okay, somebody who's who's Jewish might greet you or say farewell to you, actually, uh, with that word. But it would be very similar to somebody uh in Hawaii saying aloha to you. Or somebody saying namaste. You know, these are all words that we kind of use as these generic cultural greetings. So when we say shalom, it translates directly into peace, but but it's it's it's not how we use it. It has a much broader meaning than that. And maybe the best place to kind of get our heads around that is there's a story of the people of God, the people of Israel, um, just after they're freed from slavery in Egypt. And God says, you need to build an altar, right, to celebrate this moment. But but Moses has given some very specific instructions about the kinds of stones that can be used to build the altar. They were to find stones that didn't have any voids or cracks in them. And those stones and the altar that was built that was that was free of because all the stones were free of voids, you know, that the whole altar was an altar of shalom. And what that what that meant and what it continues to mean in Scripture is this idea of it has a quality of wholeness and completeness. So God doesn't want to just, when he gives you peace or when he calls you to find peace, he just doesn't want to take the things that can rob your peace from your life. I have some bad news. If that's peace, none of us are gonna find it. Because the world will always have conflict, right? Until Jesus comes back and reigns as king in the future, someday, whenever that is, right, the world will have conflict. And your life will have some measure of conflict. So if the removal of conflict is the only way to have peace, I would be very skeptical about anybody finding peace. But that's not how God conceives of it. What God wants to do is give you a sense of wholeness that sustains you in the midst of the conflicts that you will experience. Because while things around you might be fractured, by the power of God it is possible for us to remain whole while other things are fractured. It's what having a relationship with Jesus is supposed to grow in us, this enduring sense, much like we talked about joy last week, not just momentary happiness that comes because I gave myself a new dopamine hit, but even when conflict comes, we are not stressed, broken, and fractured. Right? When the Old Testament looked forward to a day of peace, it looked forward to Jesus, who is called the Prince of Peace. And while many people find the motivations for things like world peace in the teachings of Jesus, right? Even Christians look at Jesus and go, wow, there's some philosophy, or sorry, even non-Christians, people who don't follow Jesus, often look at the teachings of Jesus and find motivations. You know, Muhammad Gandhi was very influenced by the teaching of Jesus as he pursued peace for India. He wasn't a follower of Jesus. Many people find motivation for world peace in Jesus' teachings. But I would submit to you that Jesus was not unconcerned about world peace, obviously, but just as concerned with the peace in your heart as with the peace out there. Right? Just as much as Jesus came to give any sense of peace out there, he came to give a sense of peace in here. And I think that we have a problem with that in our day and age. In fact, statistically, there's lots of evidence that that's true. Lack of inner peace, that might be today's biggest challenge. In Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, he talks about the growing sense of anxiety we are experiencing generation over generation. So cases of anxiety are up across our society, and it's getting worse with every generation. Right now, it's up 52% for Gen Xers like me, 103% in millennials, 139% in Gen Z. Nearly a third of our society are experiencing anxiety and depressive disorders. The answer to how we might find inner peace seems really important, doesn't it? And incidentally, I think that God's plan for peace in the world starts with peace in our hearts. God's plan seems to primarily be if I can heal the human soul, I can heal the world. The first century followers of Jesus were given very specific instructions when it comes to leading them on a journey towards inner peace. And by the way, I'm not using that in sort of a new age sort of way. I'm just identifying that there's a peace that can reside and live inside of us that God wants to give you. Okay? Here's what it says in the letter to the Philippians. Much of the New Testament is written as uh as letters from one person to another or a group of people. And so Paul, who I've already referenced once, he wrote a letter to people living in Galatia. We call that that letter or that book Galatians. Um he also wrote a letter to a group of people living in Philippi, and that's called the book of Philippians. So if you have a Bible, you can open it to the book of Philippians. We're gonna spend some time there. If you have it on your phone, that's fine. And if you don't, we put it on the screen. In Philippians chapter 4, Paul says this wild thing. Do not be anxious about anything. And many of us close the book. Because that's not possible, Paul. I don't know what fairy tale world you live in, but that's not possible, is it? Well, again, I don't like trying to make the Bible overly complicated, but the Bible is kind of a complicated book, written in a number of different languages by dozens of different people, and so digging past what sometimes you read in one line is very, very, very important. Okay, in this particular case, the word that Paul uses for anxiety is really interesting because although shalom is a Hebrew word, and the word that Paul writes here is in Greek, the two words are almost anthetical to one another. The word that Paul uses, if shalom is this idea of completeness, no cracks, wholeness, okay? The word that Paul is using for anxiety is basically don't allow yourself to be pulled apart. Don't allow yourself to be fractured. Don't allow yourself to be divided in your inner being. That part of you is calm and rested in who He is? What part of you is running a constant end list of worst-case scenarios in your mind? What Paul is saying by saying, don't be anxious, is he's saying don't let anything pull apart the wholeness God is giving you. Let God be the center. Let him inform your sense of wholeness. Don't try to piece it all together on your own, because that only ends up in a life that's fractured. Everything that you need, Paul is saying, is right here. Right? Which is why it's really, really, really important, if you are following Jesus, to ensure that he has the right place in your life of allegiance. So many people want to add Jesus on to a life that they've already created for themselves. And I think that that's part of our problem. I think that's part of the reason why people can believe in Jesus but still feel very fractured. Because in fact, they've dove in with the world on some other agenda that isn't Jesus' agenda. And if you haven't noticed, we live in a world that is trying to polarize everyone and everything. One of my favorite pastors talks about the difficulty of fighting for an intelligent middle in our world. That everybody wants to be on this side or that side, and nobody wants to kind of actually try to hold on to some centrist point of view. We are being pulled apart on purpose by different forces in our world. Lest I get overly political, I'm going to move on. I think, though, what we should know is that following Jesus is supposed to fix that problem for you. He grows to be our singular allegiance. And then nobody can pull you apart. So hear this again. Do not be anxious about anything. But instead, in every situation, through prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, Paul's got all these conditions on it, like just, it's not easy, but here's how you do it. In every situation, with prayer and petition, and a heart full of gratitude, give it to God. Present the things that want to pull you apart to Him. If something is pulling your heart, your mind, your marriage, your family, or your life apart, whatever is robbing you of the shalom that God wants to give you, take it to the Prince of Peace. It doesn't mean that you give up caring, it doesn't mean that you can give up working, but it does mean that you hand it over and you entrust it to someone who cares about it and who cares about you even more than you can imagine. And not only do they care, but they have the ability to do something about it. Right? So you might come to somebody, a small child, who cares about you. And cares about the fact that they want to, you know, imagine it's one of your children. And you're trying to move. And they care about the situation. They care about how the house looks, they care about how fast we get there, they care about what's for dinner, they care. They care about a lot of things that are going on in your life. But you have to move the couch. You don't ask the kid who cares to help you move the couch why they're incapable of moving the couch. They're too small. They can't do that, right? So you have to make sure that when you actually ask somebody, like sometimes I think what we're doing is we we're trusting our ability to explain what's stressing us out to another person who doesn't have the ability to fix it. And wondering why just the release valve of expressing our anxiety to somebody else didn't fix our anxiety. Well, that person doesn't have any ability most of the time to fix your anxiety, unless, of course, they're the cause of your anxiety, in which case maybe that's not a bad idea. Jesus would want you to pray about that conversation before you go and talk to the person who's giving you anxiety, right? The point is you have to ask somebody. Who can do something about it? Paul continues. The peace of God, which transcends your understanding, if this doesn't make sense, it's okay. Paul understands. This is spiritual stuff, and it doesn't always immediately make sense to us. But if we will give what concerns us to God, the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. I saw this in action. A little more than a month ago, I think. Didn't look up the date. But I was at a funeral, and in fact, several of you in this room were at that same funeral. Funeral for Nancy Salmon, who is a dear saint who attended our church for years. And I loved talking to Nancy because regardless of what was going on in her life, she would come through the front door and I would say, Hey Nancy, how are you doing? She would say, I am too blessed to be stressed. Even when her health was waning, things were not going her way. This is friends, that's Nancy every week, all the time, this is what she said, right? And this was the story that was told at her funeral. You know what was remarkable about Nancy's funeral? The lack of tears in general. Because I've been to some funerals where people are absolutely hopeless. This is the end of it all. And they are in deep, deep mourning, as they should be. There were tears at Nancy's funeral, don't get me wrong. People cared that she wasn't with them anymore. But on the scope of comparison, what it seemed to me was happening was a bunch of people who were celebrating a life well-lived, a life of wholeness and completeness, because she knew where her peace came from. I wonder how many of us. It doesn't make sense. You know, like even my native language is sarcasm, okay? And people laugh because they know it's true. It's funny because it's true. Even those of us who are trying so desperately to live their lives for Jesus don't always find the level of peace that Nancy found. Because you know what's crazy? Like, I have an aversion because I'm sarcastic. I have an aversion to people saying things like, I'm too blessed to be stressed. That is usually an inner roll of the eyeballs for me, every time. And maybe I did that once or twice when I first met Nancy. But I stopped doing that because I realized it was actually true. It was actually true. She had found peace that transcended my understanding. So if you want to find peace, we're asking the question how? All of that to say, the first step is you've got to ask somebody for help that can actually make a difference. The second step, and this might be harder, you actually have to take them up on the offer that they make you. When they say, I'm going to trade you what you've got for what I've got, you've got to make the trade. Right? And this is what Paul says the trade looks like. Friends, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things. No one can completely reject or stop worrying about things in their life. Right? You don't just develop a habit overnight. You oftentimes have to take a habit and replace it with something else, right? You have to trade what you're currently dwelling on for something better and more beneficial. It's a fight that we have to engage in, right? Because bad news, because of our survival instincts, we are all predisposed psychologically to pay attention to bad news so that we can avoid the effects of bad news. This is why big news loves bad news, right? Bad news sells, travels quickly, gets people to come back to find out what's going on with the bad news, and ends up following us everywhere we go, right? And if we're honest and self-aware, most of the time we like it. Right? How do I know that? Because you wake up in the morning and grab your phone and go on social media to find out what's going on with the bad news that you were reading about yesterday. And then you get in your car and you turn on a podcast that can articulate more things that are the bad news. And then you go hang out with your friends, and all you talk about is the bad news that's going on in the world. I have been stuck, I am often stuck in that pattern. And those who control your algorithm, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist here for, this is what the algorithm is built on. You realize the algorithm on your social media does not care if you are engaging with something negatively or positively. That's why you keep scrolling past things that enrage you, and you wonder who would ever click on that. And then you find yourself clicking on it and commenting on it. And then your feed gets full of more stuff that you're supposed to click on, right? Like, guys, we have to be aware of how much bad news we're actually ingesting. And what Paul is saying is like, stop it. Stop it. If you need to, throw your phone in the lake. Come on, stop, stop feeding yourself a constant stream of bad news and replace it with anything that's excellent and praiseworthy. Focus on that because it is possible for things to get better. It is possible for the world to progress. That's also set out fairly scientifically for us. Here's another book you might want to go look at. It's called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. What he was trying to do was help us to realize that the world is not as bad as everybody wants you to believe it is. Here are some fun statistics for you. In the year 1800, 85% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. In 2022, that number was 8%. In a century, we have virtually eliminated extreme poverty from the planet. Now, is that what you're being told? Is that what you hear all the time? No. No, it isn't. In the early 1900s, approximately 325,000 people a year lost their lives to natural disasters. That number's down to 80,000. Two-thirds in a century. The world is verifiably safer, richer, and provides more opportunity than it ever has at any other time. And yet, we, even those of us who follow Jesus, often feel like the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Right? We are being conditioned to focus on the bad instead of celebrating what's good. And Paul said, you need to take your thoughts captive. Shift your thinking to those that are good, right, and true. And if you do that, Philippians 4.9 says, the peace of God will be with you. Science has proven it, you know. There are systems going on in your brain that are replacing your brain cells every day. And all those new brain cells can be moved in one direction or the other. If you take control of them, they can be moved to create positive neural pathways in your mind. It's almost like when Paul said in Romans chapter 12, verse 2 that we should not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. He had an insight into what would come thousands of years later. Literally, your mind is being renewed. And because it is, you can change the focus of your thoughts. You can take captive of it. You can replace your instinct to look for bad to an instinct to look for good. God is not being hyperbolic when he says it is possible for your anxiety to be replaced with shalom. Now, I want to recognize that through this talk, I have used language that can connotate serious mental health struggles. And I am not in any way trying to minimize that. If that's where you are, sometimes all of this work is a life's work. Sometimes it requires a lot of help. I think that we should look for that help. I don't think that we should be naive about simply saying, well, if I pray about it more or I read more scripture, God will heal all of my mental health challenges. That's not what I mean. But I mean that if we are not looking to him and his wisdom as a primary source of that, then we might very well be missing potentially the most important part. And I want you to know that I have been there, I have been in a place where my anxiety is getting the better of me. Where because of the anxiety that I was choosing to live with, because I wasn't asking God for the help that I needed, my blood pressure was wildly out of control, had spiked well over 200, my face was leaking blood at night. It was a really bad, bad place to be. Because I was trying to manage all of the stress and anxiety of my life on my own. And so I can tell you with assurance that that's a bad plan for your health. And that God has a better intention for you. But you have to take them up on the offer. It can't be just cerebral. There's work involved. And sometimes that work involves the work of going to the doctor and taking some medicine, but sometimes it's just trying to figure out a way to take captive of the things that have taken captive of your thought life. And that's what Jesus wanted to do in John chapter 14. He says, This I'm leaving you with a gift. Peace of mind and peace of heart. And the peace I give you, the world cannot give. What he was saying is, you can't get my well-being, you can't get my wholeness, you can't get my completeness from any other source but me. If you will entrust me, the Prince of Peace, with what's dividing you, fracturing you, and pulling you apart, and trade it for what's good, right, and true, I will give you my peace. That's what Paul said. The peace of God will rest on you. The exchange, the trade is whatever is pulling you apart for the shalom that Jesus wants to use to put us back together. What does the world need now? It needs us to pursue wholeness. Because God's plan for healing the world is to heal the human soul. A more peace-filled, Christ-like version of you and I. And as we close this morning, I just want to invite you to do something. I don't know what you came in here with today. I don't know what anxieties you brought with you. Could be your marriage or your kids, your health, your future, your finances. Many of us came in here trying to manage it on our own. And so I'm going to invite you to do something. I'm going to invite you to do something physical, something that might just start to reclaim some of those neural pathways. So if you if you wouldn't mind just closing your eyes. Putting yourself in a posture of prayer. And if there's something that as we've been talking this morning, you realize I need to give this to God. You just put out your hands in front of you, not asking you to put them way up in the air. Just kind of hold them out in front of you. And imagine that that thing that you've been carrying, that you want to trade, that you give to Jesus. And as I pray, I just allow Jesus to come and give us peace that passes understanding. Jesus, we long, long for the peace that you promise. We long for the courage to believe that you will give this to us if we enter into this relationship that you've invited us into. God, I pray for every person here who has been struggling to be whole, who's been pulled apart. God, help us to make wise choices about the things that we reinforce our minds with. Help us to take captive of our thoughts. Help us to betray all that bad news for the good news. We ask you for this in Jesus' name. Amen.