It is easy to find peace in peaceful times. When our environment has order in it, it naturally produces peace in us. It is great when that happens. (kind of) Jordan Petersen says that order is "when we set out to do something, we do it, and the result is what we expected" That makes a lot of sense. Order=Peace. The challenge comes when we try to maintain peace when our culture is chaotic. In our post-Christian culture the world is increasingly chaotic.
So, how did we get here? What I think happens is throughout peaceful/orderly times we get lazy and look to the environment/society to sustain order and peace. The problem is that we begin to think peace comes from the culture, and we put our faith and trust in the culture. It is a mistake to put faith in a human culture. Even a good one. But even worse than that is expecting to continually receive peace from a society without putting anything into it. that is very foolish. It would be like planting a field the 1st year and not planting it ever again and expecting to reap a continual harvest. When we stop sowing seed, and stop pulling weeds it is not going to end well. The culture soon becomes more weeds than crops. There are no Christian freebies handed out by society today. And even though this change did not happen overnight, every person comes to a point of realization where it hits them that they can't go with the flow of society any longer. It can be a rude awakening!
We have been riding on an innertube in the lazy river of what was a Christian culture. Everything was flowing just fine, but over time it slowed down and eventually started flowing backwards.
Physically speaking over the last couple of years I have been intentional about staying in shape and looking for ways to make sure I am capable if strength, endurance, and survival skills are required. The thing is, none of these things are required right now, so it seems like a waste of time to many people because our technology world takes care of everything for us. We are terribly dependent on technology. We are slave to it if we don't have an option to survive without it. But.. that may be a blog for another day. However, this physical example parallels exactly what we should have been doing spiritually/morally/ethically within our society instead of just floating along. The society we were dependent on has turned on us and does not serve Christians well any longer.
So, now we are floating in the lazy river that is now flowing the wrong way, So, what do we do when we can't ride the innertube around the lazy river of a Christian culture? We need to ditch the innertube and start swimming against the flow of the culture. Sadly, many won't commit to that. It is to hard and they are not conditioned to do that kind of work. Many were born in the lazy river and have no idea what it means or how to even start to swim upstream.
Spiritually speaking, it is chaos right now in the culture. Things are not happening as we would expect them to. When we are in chaos we go into a survival mode. survival mode is a struggle to establish some basic level of personal order. in a physical scenario, you need food, water, shelter, and an area that is protected. While it is tempting to just go off grid and go live in the woods or the mountains somewhere, that isn't our calling. So, what does it look like to meet those survival needs spiritually establish order/peace without dis-engaging entirely from the culture?
We have to establish ourselves on something secure and stable. Something orderly. For Christians that is the word of God. The culture used to be aligned with the word of God, so we jumped in the lazy river and the culture became our source and our comfort and what we were guided by. Again, we should not have made that mistake, but we did. Now, we now need to independently establish/reestablish that foundation in God's word. That, with a vibrant relationship with the living God, provides firm footing for us even when the waters are rushing against us. What does that look like? It looks like Steven in the book of Acts before he is murdered for opposing the culture. He finds bliss in a vision of Jesus sitting at the right hand of the father. The fear, the intimidation, the pressure to back down had no effect. There was something greater than any threat this world could dish out to him. It also looks like Paul and Silas in prison singing joyful songs and worshiping God in the most miserable of circumstances. Both of these examples were NOT going with the flow of the culture. They found peace outside of the culture and in the hope provided by Jesus Christ. (where our peace should have been the whole time)
In all things the culture throws at us, we must view them through the lens of the Bible. Does it flow against the word of God? We must look past the surface of what is presented and have discernment to see what is happening underneath, to be able to judge what is truly happening. Not everything that happens is evil, but sadly we can no longer can we trust institutions are just going to do what is right.
So, maintaining personal peace and order in our lives through the truth of the living word of God is right where we need to be. It pulls us out of the matrix that our culture has had us in. Yes, we need to swim upstream, we need to reverse the flow, but we will not be able to do this without maintaining our foundation, and our personal peace found only in Jesus. It will take a supernatural peace that passes all understanding for us to endure this fight against the evil one. We will be victorious!
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