The Recipe for Peace (2)
Colossians 3:12-14 God has chosen you and made you his holy people. He loves you. So your new life should be like this: Show mercy to others. Be kind, humble, gentle, and patient. Don’t be angry with each other, but forgive each other. If you feel someone has wronged you, forgive them. Forgive others because the Lord forgave you. Together with these things, the most important part of your new life is to love each other. Love is what holds everything together in perfect unity.
Here’s a blunt, inconvenient truth: your attitude towards the difficult people in your life can either maintain your sense of God’s peace or rob you of it. No, your peace isn’t contingent on their behaviour. Rather, it depends on how you choose to respond. Blunt yes, but absolutely true.
That may or may not be what you want to hear. It’s so easy to point the finger at those peace-robbers out there; those difficult people whose appalling behaviour (yet again!) has completely disrupted your sense of peace and wellbeing.
And sure, they should have behaved better. They shouldn’t have done what they did to rob you of your peace. But the deed is done. You can’t wind it back.
Yesterday, we saw the first part of God’s solution to all this. It harks back to what I spoke of just a minute ago: your attitude toward them (and mine too for that matter).
Colossians 3:12,13 God has chosen you and made you his holy people. He loves you. So your new life should be like this: Show mercy to others. Be kind, humble, gentle, and patient. Don’t be angry with each other, but forgive each other. If you feel someone has wronged you, forgive them. Forgive others because the Lord forgave you.
Instead of being offended, your attitude of mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, forgiveness, restores your peace.
But there’s something even more important, something that underpins all those things, something that makes them possible in the first place.
Colossians 3:14 Together with these things, the most important part of your new life is to love each other. Love is what holds everything together in perfect unity.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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