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    The Peace Promise: Trusting God to Solve the Unsolvable
    The Peace Promise: Trusting God to Solve the Unsolvable
    The Peace Promise: Trusting God to Solve the Unsolvable
    Ebook127 pages3 hours

    The Peace Promise: Trusting God to Solve the Unsolvable

    By John Kuypers

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    About this ebook

    How much time do we spend scrutinizing others, judging them, finding fault with them, being disappointed in how they've treated us? How much unhappiness could be avoided if we had a different way of dealing with the anxiety, stress, and broken relationships in our lives?

    In this new book, author John Kuypers shows how Jesus' teaching in the gospel of Matthew can revolutionize our relationships and our approach to the issues that trouble us. If we stop and get rid of the log in our own eye first, we will reach a place of peace even before we know how to deal with the speck in our neighbor's eye. And in that place of peace, the Holy Spirit can reveal what needs to be done to resolve things.

    Whether you're a spouse, a parent, a teacher, an employee, or an employer, this is a practical, real-world teaching anyone can apply in any situation. Experience for yourself the wonderful peace of seeing clearly and its transforming effect on your relationships.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateFeb 5, 2018
    ISBN9781635820294
    The Peace Promise: Trusting God to Solve the Unsolvable

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    • 5/5
      Peace is the longing of every heart whether they know it or not. This has great insights about how to find peace.

    Book preview

    The Peace Promise - John Kuypers

    NOTES

    PART ONE

    Admit You Lack Peace

    ONE

    The Peace Promise

    Jesus promised us life’s greatest reward: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you (John 14:27). But there is a catch. I do not give to you as the world gives. A friend once said to me, That’s exactly the part that troubles me! In this book, you will see how radically true that is. It takes courage to receive the peace of the Lord because his ways are not our ways. Only by personal experience will you discover that his ways are also better than our ways.

    Jesus encouraged us further by saying, Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid (John 14:27). Sigh. If only it were that easy.

    Consider for a moment what is troubling you. Why does it bother you? Perhaps you feel stuck and unsure what to do. Or you did what you had to do and now you are playing the waiting game; the outcome you want has not happened. Until then, you are not at peace. The finances, the job, the marriage, the children, the divorce, the estranged relationship with your sibling or parent—one of these is stealing your peace.

    To reap the peace of Christ, you must face the thief itself: anxiety. Anxiety is an inescapable dilemma that seems unresolvable, not only for you but for all human beings. It is a classic rock and a hard place that leaves you feeling damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

    Let’s look at a peace-robbing situation involving a troubled marriage, in which the ideas of leaving and not leaving both led to a loving wife’s deep anxiety.

    A reader of one of my previous books, The Non-Judgmental Christian, wrote to say she was struggling with how to respond to her husband’s infidelity. She wanted to be loving and nonjudgmental, yet every time she forgave him, he would return to and even increase his hurtful ways. She wrote:

    Be it a curse or a blessing, I have a very forgiving heart, and each time I discovered porn sites or communication with someone on a dating site, we would go through the same process: anger that I had been spying on him, confession (admittance) of only what I had discovered, declaration that he loved me and didn’t want to hurt me, and a promise to never do it again. At first it happened once every six months, then every three months, until he was going out to local bars and not coming home twice a week.

    This wife’s unhappy situation illustrates a different dilemma that blocks our path to peace: that of the hammer and the doormat. If she stands up for what she believes, she comes across as if she is wielding a hammer, pressuring her husband to change his ways. If she pushes hard enough, he might change—or he might walk out of their marriage. Yet if she doesn’t stand up to his wandering ways, she becomes a doormat, putting up with behavior that is unacceptable to her. Each time she forgave her husband, he acted even more disrespectfully toward her and toward his commitment to her. Indeed, her approach only led him to increase the very behavior she did not want. She ended her letter by asking me:

    How can I stay in this marriage and stay nonjudgmental when clearly he continues to make bad decisions that are playing with fire and hurting me so much? I am still crazy in love with this man and he is pretty much a perfect husband with the exception of this deal-breaking behavior.

    The dilemma of the hammer and the doormat causes divorces, job terminations, and even wars. Each side wants the other to change. When one refuses, the other either enforces punitive consequences or sweeps the issue under the rug, hoping it goes away by itself. One approach invites immediate conflict, while the other gnaws unhappily at our insides, often for years.

    To cope with the angst, we put up thick walls to protect ourselves from criticism or indifference to our needs by those who matter to us. Walls are the reason we fall out of love. They suppress our true thoughts and emotions, eating away at us whether we realize it or not. This ticking time bomb shows up in ill health, cold relationships, and profound unhappiness.

    A year later, my reader friend wrote to say she had decided to leave her husband and was at peace with her decision. She had done her best, and that is the most any of us can do. The Bible supports her decision, giving adultery as the only justification for leaving a marriage.

    Her life unfolded as it does for many of us. If the people who drive us crazy won’t change, we move on. We leave the marriage, quit the job, kick out the adult child still living at home, or find a new best friend. We feel our only other choice is to be treated in ways we find intolerable and unacceptable.

    Jesus gave us a powerful escape from this soul-ripping dilemma. It is a path to the promise of his healing, nourishing peace on any given issue. He offered up a teaching about how we can actually cause a change in the person stealing our peace if we are first willing to change something in ourselves. I call it the Peace Promise:

    First take the plank out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5, NIV)

    I have been practicing the Peace Promise for more than twenty years. In plain English, this is what it actually means to take the plank from your eye in order to remove the speck from the eye of another:

    First get neutral about outcomes, and then you will see clearly what to do.

    The plank in our eye blinds us from seeing clearly how to make a right response about outcomes we want from others. As a result, we try and we fail. When we have failed for the umpteenth time, we become utterly convinced that there is no hope. Our spouse will never change. Our job will never get better. Our child will never get on track. Our family of origin will always get under our skin. The plank in our eye becomes petrified wood. We are dead certain that no one can change this person. To think otherwise frightens us. Could we have been wrong for so long?

    Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and you will. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against any one, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. (Mark 11:23–25)

    My experience is that you will receive what you ask in prayer if you are at peace that you may never receive it. Being at peace first removes your fears and doubts. Now you become capable of believing that you will receive it. Anxiety and doubt are the enemies of deep faith and trust.

    Furthermore, you need to forgive and seek forgiveness from those who most upset you—two actions our prideful ego loathes. When we do as Jesus taught, we become instantly neutral. The plank in our eye is gone. We see clearly what the Lord wants us to do. We are at peace if we do not get what we want and we can fully expect to receive it. Both of these opposing truths become valid for us. An unknown wise person wrote, The definition of a genius is someone who can hold two opposing thoughts at the same moment in time. Peace is a paradox.

    What would have happened if this wife had stopped trying so hard to save her marriage? What if she had focused instead on becoming neutral about whether her marriage held together or fell apart? What if in so doing, she trusted that God would lead her to wisely respond to her husband’s hurtful ways? She would have been a spiritual genius but only in weakness and surrender. For her to do this would have been a leap few of us can make quickly, yet all of us are capable of it.

    One reason getting neutral works is that we set others free to make their own choices. Rather than pressuring them to please us or causing them to react defensively against what we want them to do, our unbiased stance causes them to take ownership of their choices and the resulting risks and consequences. They see more clearly the right thing to do when they cannot blame us for their choices.

    Setting them free does not mean we offer no opinions! Instead, we couch our opinions with words that make it clear they are free to make their own choices. In so doing, we also set ourselves free to take whatever stand is right for us. This is what unnerves us—to think that we were free all along to respond differently and didn’t know it. We often feel trapped in dysfunctional relationships in which the only escape seems hurtful. In reality, the fear of hurting someone is often the biggest plank in our eye.

    One happy client showed me text messages he received from his wife, apologizing for her cranky attitude that morning. For him, this was a miracle he had wanted for years but had always failed to get. Once he started being calm, centered, and neutral in his response to her moods, she began to change of her own free will. Miracles happen if we are willing to do things Jesus’ way. To get them,

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