From the time we were born, immediately, we literally cried for peace. 

We were crying for everything to meet our craving, all of our desires because we believed that would bring peace and therefore satisfaction. 

As soon as we could speak, we had a favorite word…”mine!” We threw tantrums, verbally and physically. 

It never changes about us. We just do it differently as we get older. 

Crime and human disorder is about looking for personal peace, as wrong as that is. 

Immorality is about seeking personal peace. If it feels good it must be peace. So, when one thing doesn’t quite fit one’s peace (craving), they move on to something else. Sex, drugs, alcohol violence, it is all about wanting peace. 

Violence is a release valve kind of thing for someone who has run out of avenues to attain peace for themselves. Now they are more than angry. They are outraged that life and all in life has failed them in the “peace” department, so they try to destroy what has failed them. 

So it has been and always will be all about personal peace…me, me, me peace.

So, it is well established that there is nothing nor no one on earth that brings that ultimate peace the world is longing for and seeking to attain. 

The world keeps changing every day, never providing a lasting peace, so we search and try other things, which gets every one of us in trouble.  The world keeps failing or leaving us behind in the “peace” department.

Is there an answer? Let me say that what they are after in the “peace” department, unbeknown to them, is an inner peace that solves it all.  It is leaving the world behind as a source of peace and joy (contentment) and looking inward…into our “soul” need.  

What most of the world doesn’t understand is that it is trying to fill an internal void…a void made when a man in the Garden of Eden sinned against God and God put him out of that garden and separated Himself from man, leaving that void of His presence. God in the flesh, Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace, that “void” filler. He left man to himself and now a fallen world with not one capability to provide lasting peace, especially the peace that passes all human understanding…a peace that no longer looks to the world and people and human experience to bring a lasting peace that enables them to sleep and live with contentment under any circumstance. 

You see, the discontentment problem of one’s heart and life is that they lack the eternal peace of God and only have the temporary moments of peace the world gives. 

Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:” 

When Jesus Christ the Lord is received into one’s heart and life, receiving the redemption from sin, and becomes the central focus of living, then you will have the only peace that brings true sanity and contentment. 

(Phil. 4:7 “And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”).

 

Charles Empey is the Interim Pastor of Cove Baptist Church, Orange, Texas