Perfect peace

Stuff breaks. People cut you off in traffic. Fingers get smashed with hammers. Children disobey and disrespect. When any of these situations arise, do you respond by losing your cool and flipping out, or are you able to control yourself and remain calm during a trying situation? For us men of God, remaining calm as a way of life is a must. We are far too quick to allow ourselves the temporary satisfaction of letting loose and losing control. Your wife and kids will thank you for finishing this chapter.

I want to anchor this chapter in a verse that has been particularly helpful for me, and many others, in this pursuit of becoming a calm man. In fact, this is one of my father-in-the-faith’s favorite verses in all of Scripture. “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (Isaiah 26:3). We are going to slice this into a couple different pieces to better absorb the verse and, hopefully, implement it in our daily lives.

It begins with a promise: You keep him in perfect peace. This is the desire of our very souls, is it not? To have and maintain the peace of God in our hearts, leading us to respond in any and every situation with calm assurance and wisdom? I know that is something I pray for regularly. And this verse says the God will keep us in not just peace, but perfect peace. What, you might ask, is the condition for having this perfect peace?

That is answered in the second part of the verse: Whose mind is stayed on you. The man, or woman, who desires to have the perfect peace of God, must be a person whose mind is stayed, or fixed, on God. Not a mind that is obsessed with the shiny objects of this temporary world, or distracted by the endless onslaught of information, or perpetually distraught about the problems of the world. To fix the mind on God is to consciously and habitually direct the thought life back to the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, in as many moments in our day as we can. But how do we practically do this?

The final piece: Because he trusts in you. To keep the mind fixed on God is to actively trust in him and not what can be seen or perceived with the senses. We must learn how to cast our cares upon him, directing the mind and heart to the Father in complete trust. When we learn how to do that, we will begin to receive the perfect peace of God in every situation. But how does that help with being calm? That’s the point of the whole chapter, right?

When we can learn to trust our heavenly Father in every way, regardless of circumstance, then we will receive the perfect peace of God, the thing that we desperately need if we are to remain calm in the trying moments of life. When the kid talks back, the call drops after being on hold for an hour, or the in-laws get a little too controlling, the only way for a man to keep his cool and respond in a biblically masculine manner is to look to his Father in heaven for peace, trusting in his provision and aid to be able to handle the situation as Christ would. There is no hiding from nerve-grating and patience-testing moments, but there is a way to learn how to remain level-headed, and its by having the mind of Christ, which is yours if you are in Christ. With this mind, you can look to the Father in humble reliance for peace and grace.