Peace in Church and Heart

Overview

If you have to study history in any way, one of the things that hits you right away about the difference between modern life and other times and places is how unstable everything is. Stability is very hard to find in our lives today. One of the few things you can be sure of is there are few things you can be sure of.

There are a lot of technological and sociological reasons for it, which we won’t go into now, but the fact is most people, in most times, and even today in most places in the world could count on living in roughly the same place through most of their lives, knowing roughly the same people through most of their lives, certainly working in roughly the same job or field most of their lives, or believing most of the same things for most of their lives.

Today, of course, we cannot count on any of those things. There are lots of discussions about them. You’ll read articles saying just in the last 10 years companies are not loyal to their employees. By and large, employees are not loyal to their companies. You see this sort of thing. There are so many dimensions to it. Lack of stability.

A physical fact: When you get into a highly unstable environment, if a vessel wants to navigate a highly unstable environment, it has to have strong stabilizers within. Airplanes and ships have stabilizers to counteract the turbulence that comes in the air or the water. The more the turbulence, the more important are those stabilizers. In airplanes the back fins are mainly their stabilizers. Evidently, the vertical fin is what keeps you from bobbing around right to left, but in particular the horizontal rear fin is what keeps you from bobbing up and down.

The more turbulence in the external environment, the stronger, more effective, the internal stabilizers in the vessel have to be. That would mean then there has never been a place, never been a time, more than modern Western secular societies the individual will need more deep, strong, effective internal stabilizers. Most people, most places, most times did not have to face what we face because there were all sorts of external props that kept down the external turbulence.

Most people lived in traditional societies where there was a lot of stasis. You didn’t have to think that much for yourself about the big questions, because you didn’t have to. They were told to you. You didn’t have to have all kinds of tremendous internal disciplines of thought and spirit in order to be a person of great peace and stability, but today you do, because you and I, facing this world, have to have far more incredibly effective internal stabilizers than our ancestors had to.

Paul tells us about that in this passage. He also had a pretty unstable life, tremendous turbulence in his life. At the time in which he is writing, he’s in jail with a death sentence over him. He has experienced all sorts of things going across his bow, all kinds of turbulence, but he’s a rock. How did it happen?

A lot of people in Manhattan know Manhattan is very much a kind of paint mixer, spiritually speaking. Have you ever seen in the hardware stores when they put two kinds of paint together into one can and they stick it in the mixer? The mixer shakes it up. That’s really what it’s like to live in Manhattan spiritually, incredible turbulence. People are constantly saying to me, “I have to get out,” because almost anywhere in this country outside of Manhattan there’s more stasis, and yet things that start in Manhattan usually show up in rest of our society about 20 years later.

It’s coming to get you. You might want to leave, and you might ask yourself, “Maybe my problem is a lack of internal stabilizers. Maybe my problem is not Manhattan. Maybe my problem is not the circumstances. Maybe the problem is I’m an airplane without any rear fins. I don’t have any stabilizers.”

Paul had them. In verse 1, he says, “Therefore, my brothers, you whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, that is how you should stand firm in the Lord …” When he says be “firm,” that’s a word that is usually translated stand fast. It means, “I’m showing you how to be a rock.” It’s a historical fact that Paul was a rock.

On Sundays when Kathy and I were in school up in the North Shore of Boston, a long, long time ago, after church we used to buy sandwiches. We’d go to the coast of somewhere along the North Shore of Boston, and we’d watch the waves hit the rocks. On a day like this with Hurricane Felix out there stirring things up, I imagine it would be amazing. Very often you’d see these rocks, and the waves would come after these rocks. Sometimes you would say, “No way did it survive that one.” Sometimes they’d disappear under the waves. The waves would recede. There they were.

Paul was like that. Wave after wave after wave, turbulence, turbulence … He was a rock. He stood firm. He never wavered. Why? He tells you here, “This is how you can stand firm.” He tells you. If you look at the passage, you’ll see, first of all, he lays down a basic principle for stability, and then he lays down a threefold method for applying that principle. I’d like to look at both the principle and the threefold method. I want you to think about this, because many of you live in New York. Most of you live in Manhattan. As a result, you’re in a paint mixer. Where are you going to get the stabilizers? Let’s look at what Paul says.