Peace: Rest for the Soul

The last several days I have been hit in the face with peace.  From Sunday's sermon to my own devotions to God to conversations with people around me, I have been hounded by God about peace.  It started with a letter I wrote to God in which I found that one of my greatest desires is for God's peace in my life.  Today friend challenged me in her blog with the question, "What will you do?"

My experience in the last several days has been more a matter of asking, "What will you not do?"  I have numerous "peace-stealers" in my life.  As I walk through my day, I find that I am given to follow all sorts of rabbit-trails away from God's peace.  A couple of examples - as I came to my front door after work and my family was away at an Irish Dance practice for the kids, I felt a burden come on me.  I was weighed down by all the things I needed to get done and a frantic to-do list was already building in my mind.  Another situation surprised me.  A complement from a friend unsettled me.  I found my mind whirling and planning for how I could continue to impress this friend further to get more complements.

I have already tried to live in peace that was not not from God.  The peace of indifference is tempting at times, but certainly has no relationship with the peace of God which is coupled with love and joy.  The peace of ease is more tempting still, except that it makes me irritated with people (not loving at all) when they wreck my plans for ease and quiet.  I realize that one of the big problems with seeking God's peace is that I confuse it with other forms of "peace" that get thrown around.

Perhaps one of the the best description of God's peace is given by Jesus (surprise!) when he tells all those who are weary and burdened to take on his yoke.  Straining against a yoke like a cow or an ox was not the first idea I had about seeking peace.  Some sort of spiritual calm or release from troubles in my life seem to make more sense.  Instead Jesus says, "Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls."  (Matthew 11:29)  Jesus touches on where I really need rest: my soul.

The "yoke" of a Jewish rabbi in Jesus' time was his specific teaching.  The teaching of such rabbis (Jesus included) was not primarily book-learning, but life-learning.  We might do better to be apprentices rather than students of Jesus because of the typical idea of learning in our day.  A disciple of a rabbi was learning to become like the rabbi.  They were not trying merely to understand what the rabbi said, they were trying to do what the rabbi did.  So Peter got out of the boat to walk on the water as any disciple should who followed their rabbi.  Rabbi Jesus, in picking his disciples, was saying in essence, "I believe you can be like me!"

So I find two things at work.  First, I need to lay down my burdens.  I would call them burdens and not my work or my calling.  Burdens are the many things I take on myself.  God does not put them on me.  I gather them like a dust mop gathers dust.  And they stick.  When I am overwhelmed, I have been practicing reminding myself that God has given me enough time to do what he wants me to do.  Usually that means I do not have to hurry if I am trying to walk with him in my life rather than trying to please everybody else and myself.  God is not the author of hurry and worry.

Laying down burdens is really hard work!  However, Jesus' promise is that as hard as it is, it is much easier than trying to keep living with the burdens I gather for myself.  In order to take hold of Jesus' yoke I have to let go of the one I keep trying to pull myself.  In daily terms, this means that I have to learn how to say "No" and practice the first part of the Serenity prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."  As thoughts come that worry or hurry me, I am learning how to let them go and focus on what is at hand and what God would have of me.

At the heart of this is self-denial, or taking up my cross.  I need to learn not to harbor and to continually focus on my own desires.  I do not have to try to get rid of them entirely.  That is not possible or beneficial.  Rather, by putting them aside, I begin to learn which one are burdens and which ones are delights.  I learn how God can satisfy all my desires so that I do not have to worry about them.  I learn that the pride of uncontrolled desire is what makes my life miserable and ugly, while self-denial creates room for humility.  If I am not spending all my time worrying about how to get what I want, I might stand a chance at doing what God wants (his will).  I can thoroughly trust him to look out for my interests and meet my desires.

After laying some burdens down I am ready to take up the "easy yoke."  Why easy?  Well, I think it's at least easier than what I try to do on my own.  The Bible calls "doing on my own" living "in the flesh."  Instead God has provided grace which is his strength available to do what I cannot do on my own or in my flesh.  If I live by grace, I live by the loving strength that God provides for people who do his will, what he wants.  In terms of the yoke, I have the lift it up and put it on, but Jesus himself is my yoke-fellow.  So who is really doing the work?  Certainly not me.  But I do need to submit to the yoke and go where he goes.

When self-denial does its work by God's grace in my life, I find there is space for humility.  The rest that Jesus offers is not a vacation nor is it anesthesia.  The rest comes from humility.  Peace comes from humility among other things.  Humility is not merely realizing how wrong I am, but more realizing how right and good God is.  Humility lives where I am nothing and God is everything.  Not to say I am worthless, but that my worth is found in how I relate with God, live with God, and serve my God.  Humility is so much more than being "sorry."  It is knowing my proper place in God's great universe.

So, I am finding that peace comes from letting my desires go easily and quickly in favor of doing what God wants.  In that practice my whole life (my soul) begins to become more ordered by God's commands.  Each part of my life (mind, heart, body, social sphere) begins to work together with God as one whole life instead of as fighting factions, mind vs. body, etc.  Meaning and direction start to form in this ordered, integrated soul and make obedience to God possible.  That is where this peaceful "soul rest" comes out: obedience to Christ.  In God's kingdom, in that most intimate relationship with Christ, obedience is abundance.

All that to say I will seek peace by:

1. Seeking, studying, and asking for the peace that Christ had as he lived, loved, and served other people in his earthly ministry,
2. Learning to say "No" to my desires in everyday life and through deliberate practices by God's grace, 
3. Learning to say "Yes" to the commands of Christ my Teacher in everyday life and through deliberate practices by God's grace, and 
4. Anticipating and seeking a life where God is everything to me and where I rely on him to fulfill my needs and desires.

How would you find peace, rest for your soul?  How would you learn from Christ?

Spiritual Exercises as Part of Jesus' Yoke of Grace

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

In my last post, I wrote about the means that Jesus gives so that people might come to know God.  Certainly, these means provide for a great beginning to knowing God, but they are also the places where friendship with God can really take root.


Strangely, I hesitated to bring in prayer as one of those means.  One reason is that I do not consider myself a really great pray-er.  I do not find myself asking for a lot.  I kind of have to make myself ask.  I have been given much, but I think that more of that comes from an ingrained sense of self-sufficiency that makes the humility of asking foreign to me.  I am working on it.

Another reason for not involving prayer in the introduction to knowing God is that prayer is so easily misconstrued for other things.  Although scriptural meditation and contemplation have their places in the realm of prayer, prayer is most fundamentally asking.  Prayer without request is not Christian prayer.  Certainly asking can be simply directed toward the fulfillment of my desires, but it also encompasses interceding and confessing.  The point is that it is directed to God and not merely to a state of mind.  The many fashions and misunderstandings of prayer make it a minefield when seeking God at first.  Not everything "spiritual" is good.

Also, prayer is so common and subjective that it is difficult to hear God initially amid the many other inner voices and feelings.  My prayer needs a lot of help from the outside.  I need the Bible, the church, and the creation in order to find and hear God.  Without them, I would find prayer to be very confusing and disheartening.

That being said, without prayer, the Bible, the church, and the creation are extremely limited in their own ability to present the knowledge of God.  They may present many facts and even truth, but without prayer, they are a table set without a feast.  Jesus sets the table that I might be nourished and filled, yes.  Even more, though, he sets the table that I might be filled with the company of God himself.  Such a feast is designed to be shared, not merely hoarded or admired.

This sharing of the feast is what spiritual exercises are about.  They are the ways in which each person can partake of the means that Jesus has provided for our friendship with himself and the Father.  In essence each spiritual exercise is one of prayer and one of practice.

Spiritual exercises are all prayer in that they are yearning for God.  Without the yearning and asking for God and his good gifts, spiritual exercises are useless and possibly harmful.  Whatever is done is done for the sake of knowing God and Jesus, whom he sent.  This is the fundamental reason for Christian spiritual exercises.

The "classic" exercises of solitude, silence, fasting, study, worship, etc. are the tried and true methods with thousands of years of practice behind them.  They are the means for feasting with God.  Each can be used to serve other purposes which can widely be understood as looking good or feeling good.  These are covered in the Bible by Jesus when he says, "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness to be seen by men.  If you do you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."  (Matthew 6:1)  James covers the other aspect of incorrect motives by saying, "You do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."  (James 4:2-3)

This does not mean that spiritual exercises are all drudgery.  They are feasting with God and should be understood that way.  On the way, a person may find that they "look good" or "feel good," but these are not the primary motives.  When they take the place of seeking and knowing God and his goodness, then they become diversions and shows for other people.  Jesus' advice on prayer can be used with spiritual exercise in general: "Go into your room and close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen.  Then your Father, who sees what is unseen, will reward you."  and "Do not keep babbling on like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.  Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him."  Talking about spiritual exercises is dangerous if it does not lead to practicing them.  Doing spiritual exercises for the sake of reporting to them instead of seeking God is dangerous.  What is exciting is that God rewards those who seek him and he knows my needs deeply and intimately, so that I so not need to try to secure rewards and pleasures from other people or my own impulsive desires.

So if I practice silence, it is with the hope and expectation that God will be with me.  If I study the Bible or creation, it is with the hope that I will hear God and know him more fully.  If I serve other people, it is with the goal of them seeing what I do and praising God for it.  The only thing that enables me to get through the "dry" times is the goal of seeking the best for God in each circumstance (that would be his "glory").  If I slip into seeking pleasure or others appreciation, then spiritual exercises quickly fade.

Most importantly, prayer depends on God.  The Holy Spirit is who enables all actions toward God.  The "burden" of seeking God and knowing him is too much for any person to carry on their own.  Asking God through prayer for his help makes the burden "easy and light" because he is at the other end doing most of the lifting.  My task is small in term of lifting the yoke, but necessary in term of shouldering the yoke and putting in my own effort.  The yoke of spiritual exercise is "easy and light" because it is performed in and through prayer, but spiritual exercises are a yoke because they take genuine effort.

This effort component to spiritual exercise is practice.  The most dangerous kinds of "spiritual exercises" are ones that remain mere topics of conversation or interest.  It is tempting to remain a spectator in the sport of spiritual exercises.  People can talk about them, study them, and even admire them, but without practice they will not really be spiritual exercises, but only spiritual wall hangings in a person's life.

It is necessary to talk about them and think through them, but only as a precursor to doing them.  The talk and thoughts of a person intending on making a trip around the world is different from a person who just talks about going around the world.  The first one plans while the second one merely wishes or pretends.  Intention takes the vision of spiritual exercise and turns it into action.

Another part of practice is starting small.  While inaction is on the major causes for failure in the practice of spiritual exercise, not far behind is the tendency to do something "big."  It is not enough to be still five minutes in a day, I must try to spend eight hours in silence.  It is not enough to study and memorize Psalm 23, I must outline the whole book of Psalms.  Usually, this tendency to do "great" things stems from more pride than devotion.  This is not to say that moving toward eight hours of silence is not good, but it takes practice to do this successfully and usually, starting with what a person can do rather than what they think they should do.

My own experience in memorizing scripture demonstrates this.  When I started my kids on the task of memorizing Bible passages, I did not start with Romans 8 or the Sermon on the Mount.  We started with Psalm 23.  Just like when I first started to memorize scripture recently, I found one of my main difficulties was knowing that I could and that the effort was good.  I had been not merely saved by grace, but paralyzed by it, thinking that all effort was seeking to earn God's favor.  This came from a misunderstanding about spiritual exercises being merely works of the flesh or natural human ability.  I found that what made them works of the flesh was not that they were work, but when they were merely of the flesh.  Depending solely on my own abilities and talents when performing such work meant that I was not doing them in prayer but by sheer "willpower" or pride nor was I practicing them as much as performing them.

I return to Jesus picture of the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light.  Strangely enough, the yoke of spiritual exercises is best taken up by those who are "weary and heavy laden," more than those who sense and trust their own power and ability to accomplish things.  To practice them, I must first come to rest and stop doing what I have been doing to better myself and run my life.  Jesus begs the weary to come to him and find rest.  Spiritual exercises are all about that rest.  The passive part of them is releasing the results to Jesus, who carries most of the burden.  Ironically the release takes real effort.  Who would have thought that letting go could be so hard?  Yet this is the rest that Jesus invites me into that involves a yoke and real effort.

Rest is trust.  Rest is humility.  Rest is effort in the right direction for the right things.  Fortunately, rest is possible because God is always at work.  The heart of rest is prayer for grace, asking God to do what I cannot do.  Such rest only comes through practice, since even grace freely given must be received.  In this way when Jesus calls me to rest, he calls me to pray to him and practice life with him under his yoke of grace.

Wow.  I never thought that the yoke Jesus was talking about was grace, but now I see it clearly.  It is the favor of God that I might work with Jesus, learning to be gentle and lowly of heart through practice.    Also, it is taking on his burdens and resting from my own.  Finally, it is continually relying on and asking for the favor of his strength to do what I cannot, bear the yoke.  And so grace is the easy yoke of Jesus: resting from my work, practicing his work, and praying for his continual lift in the process.

Lord, please let me take this yoke and leave my own behind.  Let me shoulder your grace, which is your rest, your work, and your salvation for my hungry soul.  When I say, "Give me your grace" or "Have mercy on me," help me to remember taking on this yoke that you offer to the weary and heavy-laden.  That is what I am, so this is what I so desperately need.  Amen.