Peace and contentment are not natural. Some people seem unflappable, they just don’t worry about things. Is that an honorable peace? Cows are unflappable, but they are still headed to the slaughterhouse. Would you trade positions with them?

Peace and contentment are also not magic. They don’t just descend upon you the moment you become a Christian, and you never struggle again. Oftentimes I will speak to a Christian struggling with anxiety, and they want to hear nothing about the gospel. I’m already a Christian, and yet I have no peace they protest.

Paul said it was something he had learned, and it comes only through prayer. Your fairy godmother isn’t going to tap you with the wand. God will still your busy soul, but you will have to work with him and learn the habits and lessons of peace.

4:8 think about these things. 9 What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

A. Practice of Prayer

Actually pray, don’t just worry. Continually reminding yourself of everything that has gone wrong and could go wrong, that is not prayer. Talking to God briefly is not prayer.

Sit down, tell him how you feel, call out to him with your frustrations. When your mind wanders, talk to God about what is wanders toward. Talk to him about your busy day, your wayward children etc. Those are the things your heart wants to talk about.

Pray messy, yell and get loud if you need to. Be honest with God, and he will begin to send his Spirit. Then you will see his heart. Let worry bless your prayer life. Worry keeps prayer from being fake.

When we pray we see God – Magician’s Nephew. Diggory could not care about the events in Narnia because he was so concerned about his mother. Finally, he stood face to face with the Lion, Aslan was talking to him, but Diggory just kept thinking about his sick mother back home. Finally, he blurted out, is there not anything you can do about mother? Then he looked up, and what he saw surprised him completely, he saw tears so big and so clear that he knew Aslan felt worse about his mother than he did.

God cares about the things you care about. Diggory would never have known that if he had not asked. You will continue to die of anxiety as long as you believe you are the only one who feels the way you do. Look into the eyes of God. Pray.

As we pray, he guards us with his peace. This is not the peace of getting whatever we want. The peace of prayer is the peace that comes from trusting God. We may be facing a situation where what God needs to do seems obvious.

But if I could take you back about 2000 years, I would show you a young woman having her life ruined by a pregnancy she did not ask for. I would then jump ahead 33 years and show you an unjust crucifixion. You would say that God clearly did not know what he was doing, and I would remind you that he was saving the world by those mysterious and seemingly unjust things.

As we see God we receive peace – God gives you what you would have asked for if you knew what he knew

When I was a Sophomore in college I fell in love. I wanted to do this relationship right so I prayed and prayed for this girl. I had a prayer partner, and I had him pray for us for weeks and weeks. Then time came for her sorority fall party, and she asked my prayer partner to go with her. The first day of class second semester I met Bianca.

God gave me what I needed, not what I had asked for.

Peace does not come from “not thinking about it.” Peace comes from the deep conviction that God knows you and cares passionately about you. You can trust him.