A Soul Filled with Peace and Rest

How would you like to be a person who has an unusually high level of personal peace?

What would it be like if your demeanor could be described as living in spiritual rest?

What if you could live with a settled conviction that all will be well even if your outside world seems to be spinning out of control?

Jesus promises we can have this to the full.

In his magisterial essay Pax Vobiscum, nineteenth-century writer Henry Drummond lays out Christ’s “recipe” for rest and personal peace. In Drummond’s mind, gaining peace is like baking a cake: there are certain ingredients that need to be mixed together and put through a certain process. When you do that, a “cake” (peace) results.

The first thing to understand if you want to gain rest is that “restlessness has a cause.” Makes sense, right? To have rest and peace, we must first remove restlessness. There’s a spiritual condition that results in restlessness, and a spiritual condition that results in peace. We’ll come back to this point but keep it in mind. We have to attack the cause of restlessness if we want to enjoy true and lasting rest.

The recipe for restfulness and personal peace begins with this: “Come to Me and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:29).

Rest is found in relationship. Think of it this way. Imagine being in the middle of a windstorm and hurricane. Furniture is flying all around you. Your house has just disappeared. You don’t know when the storm will end. But right next to you, holding your hand, is Jesus. You can see Him, hear Him, touch Him. How could you not have peace? His presence overcomes and overwhelms the earth’s seeming chaos. Because you’re experiencing this devastation and destruction with Him, you still have peace because He’s a more significant factor than the storm.

The second step in the recipe for achieving rest is understanding that it is acquired via a process. “Learn from Me and you will find rest for your souls.” We have to learn to spiritually rest. Peace won’t fall from the sky. It won’t “just happen.” We have to learn how to “cook” personal peace in our “spiritual oven.”

What does that learning involve? Jesus tells us the two key ingredients that produce peace are gentleness and humility. “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.” (Matthew 11:29)

Rest for our souls will be found in Christ’s gentleness and humility. Which means, as you learn to live with gentleness and humility, you gain rest.

Let’s go back to what we said earlier: restlessness has a cause. What is that cause? “Pride, selfishness, ambition. As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which…life has brought you?”

When our ambitions are frustrated; when our selfish hopes and wants are dashed; when we feel slighted—either attacked or ignored—we lose our peace. We feel the loss so sorely our souls scream out in pain. “Wounded vanity, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness—these are the old, vulgar, universal sources of man’s unrest.”

Responding harshly to others or ourselves instead of responding with gentleness makes bad things worse. Arrogant harshness pushes rest and peace away. Gentleness invites them back in the face of a full-frontal assault. Perhaps that’s why Ambrose calls gentleness one of the two “parents” of all virtue.

Gentleness and humility strike the cancers of restlessness at their very core, isolating them, and taking away any chance that unrest has a place to grow. “They cure unrest by making it impossible. These remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms; they strike at once at removing causes.”

Look at how practically, clearly, and simply the virtues of Jesus lead to rest and peace: “Be lowly. The man who has no opinion of himself at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him. Be meek. He who is without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him.”

If you must be recognized and praised, you will never have peace. “There are people who go about the world looking out for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every turn—especially the imaginary ones.”

To know true peace, you must value peace. I’m going to repeat that to emphasize it. To know true peace you must value peace. Too many of us don’t, or we don’t value peace enough. We want peace and success. We want peace and affluence. We want peace and acclaim. But those three things work against our peace if peace isn’t valued above them. Pursue peace and you might become wealthy and acclaimed; pursue wealth and acclamation and you destroy peace because you become vulnerable to the causes of unrest. You worry about whether you have enough wealth or whether you might lose it. You worry that someone else has more acclaim than you do, or that your acclaim is fading. If peace isn’t a primary value, you’ll never have it.

Here’s how backwards Jesus’ recipe for peace can sound if we don’t “unlearn” our former way of thought (that security is found in acclaim, affluence, and earthly standing): “The first effect of losing one’s fortune is humiliation; and the effect of humiliation is to make one humble; and the effect of being humble is to produce rest.”

If I ask you, do you want peace, your first thought will be, of course! If I tell you the path to peace is humiliation, you’re just as likely to say, “No thank you. I don’t want peace that much.” It is a lie to say we value peace if we don’t value what brings peace. It is a lie to say we want to be spiritually healthy if we strive after the very things that make us spiritually unhealthy.

Does anybody doubt that Jesus had peace? Of course not. But did Jesus have money? No. Did Jesus have many detractors? Yes. Did Jesus have people plotting to kill Him? Absolutely. Did Jesus have a close friend betray Him? Of course. Did Jesus’ disciples remain by His side during His most vicious trial? No.

Not even one.

Let’s see: No money. Lots of enemies. Fair weather friends. An unfair trial, torture, and a death sentence.

And yet, peace?

“Christ’s life outwardly was one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived. Tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over it all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm was always there.”

Peace is found in who you are, not in what you have. Peace is found in whose you are, in whose hand you are holding. Peace is found in what you value.

Would you have rest? Then first come to Jesus above everyone else. Make Him the center of your affections and thoughts.

Second, learn the process of rest—let go of pride, ambition, the lust for fame, financial gain. These actively and viciously work against your peace. You cannot have peace if you seek those three.

Third, pursue gentleness and humility. Stop asking the world to celebrate you. Focus instead on celebrating Christ. Recognize that every seemingly bad thing in your life can produce good spiritual fruit if that bad thing is viewed through the lens of humility.

Take these three short steps and this very moment you could be on the doorstep of rest! You are at the very portal of peace! You simply have to say and mean it, “I want peace more than I want acclaim. I want to be with Jesus more than I want anything or anyone else.” Then keep walking in that direction until you get further into that attitude and deeper into an unshakeable peace and spiritual rest.

“Rest lies not in emotions, nor in the absence of emotions…It is the mind at leisure from itself. It is the perfect poise of the soul; the absolute adjustment of the inward man to the stress of all outward things; the preparedness against every emergency; the stability of assured convictions; the eternal calm of an invulnerable faith; the repose of a heart set deep in God.” For more on how practicing the virtues of Christ will set you free and give you your life back, check out my newly revised book on practicing the virtues: The Glorious Pursuit: Becoming Who God Created Us to Be.