Knowing and Doing the Will of God by Kim Reisman

Scripture Focus:

If you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him, because it isn’t looking for him and doesn’t recognize him. But you know him, because he lives with you now and later will be in you. No, I will not abandon you as orphans—I will come to you. Soon the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Since I live, you also will live… I am telling you these things now while I am still with you. But when the Father sends the Advocate as my representative—that is, the Holy Spirit—he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you. I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don’t be troubled or afraid.

John 14:15-19, 25-27 (NLT)

There is no ongoing peace apart from keeping our mind stayed on Jesus.

I’ve spent much of my adult life studying scripture, reading theology, writing sermons and books, preparing for worship, praying, seeking to lead others, caring for persons in need, and in the process receiving a lot of love and affirmation. Yet, there are times when I feel an absence of peace. A subtle franticness sets in, and I become uneasy, uncertain, unproductive. I lose my sense of centeredness and go into a “funk.” Sometimes this gloom and absence of peace is short-lived. Sometimes it’s for a day even a week.

The time is determined by how long it takes me to realize I’ve taken my eyes off Jesus. My mind isn’t stayed on Christ. When I discover what priority has replaced Christ as the priority in my life, then through prayer and commitment, I recover peace.

This is the first way to cultivate the certainty of God’s presence, and thus receive the by-product of peace – keeping our minds stayed on Jesus.

In his classic book Brother to a Dragonfly, Will D. Campbell tells the story of a woman who transparently kept her mind stayed on Jesus.

And about Mrs. Tilly a little Methodist woman from Atlanta, who never weighed more than a hundred pounds in her life, who looked about eight years younger than God, joined forces with a group of forty thousand women in the thirties and forties in what they called the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She was then active in advocating the desegregation of public schools and got a lot of obscene phone calls, calling her everything but the gentle woman she was. She had an engineer hook her telephone to a phonograph and when someone called her late at night the answer they heard was some deep-throated baritone singing The Lord’s Prayer. The calls soon stopped. [1]

What an imagination! But also, what confidence in the Lord! No wonder Mrs. Tilly knew peace. She kept her mind stayed on Jesus.

Then there’s a second realization. The Christian’s peace is the companion to knowing and doing God’s will. If we’ve been given marching orders in a particular area or relationship of our lives and have refused to follow, then we can’t know peace. If we pray, “Lord, what do you want me to do? Where do you want me to go? How do you want me to act?” and the Lord responds with direction that we consciously refuse to follow, we won’t know peace. Faithful obedience is the environment essential for the fruit of peace.

It sounds presumptuous, but we’ve got to give God “elbow room” in our lives. We have to make room and be willing to allow God to move in our lives as God pleases. However intimately we may know God, we never know God well enough to predict when and how God is going to act and what God is going to demand. Obedience must be our ready response.

I saw this stance of obedience and thus a peace that passes all understanding in the life of my family’s friends, Abel and Freida Hendricks. Abel was a Methodist preacher in South Africa. He fought the battle against apartheid and stood with the poor and oppressed at great cost. At one point, he had been imprisoned by the government for his courageous opposition to oppression. My father had a telephone conversation with him the day after his release. Though my father didn’t know until later, Abel was on the verge of nervous collapse; he had suffered so much physically and emotionally. He was very emotional as they talked on the phone, even crying at times. But his words were strong and confident: “We’re going to be all right. They can put us in prison; they can close our schools; they can continue to deny human rights and try to reduce us to animals. But they cannot take away our peace and joy in Christ.”

Where is the secret of Abel and Freida’s joy and peace? Keeping their minds stayed on Christ and knowing and doing the will of God.

As you pray and fast this week, reflect on these questions. Would those who know you say you are peace-filled? Are you resisting some call, failing to respond to what you know is God’s will? I will be praying for you! That you would claim the promise and live in the confidence that God will keep in perfect peace those who trust in him.

[1] Will D. Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly (New York: The Continium Publishers Corporation, 1995), p137.