Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:06] Welcome back to a brand new week of the weekday podcast. We're grateful you're here. If you're new to these, we spend three to five minutes every single weekday to offer a little bit of encouragement if you've been around a while, man. Thanks for spreading the word and inviting more people to swing by. Weekdaypodcast.com well, I don't know if you've noticed it, but it seems like Peace is a product. Now, there's a candle at Target, and I'm not making it up. The label just says serenity. That's it. $24. Smells kind of like a eucalyptus tree that took a bath. And then there's a meditation app. It's designed to help you be calm and present and it sends you push notifications like, hey, you haven't been present today. And now I'm anxious about not being calm enough. Now, none of those things are bad. Candles are great. But if we're honest, what most of us call peace is actually just a pause, a little break from the noise before the noise comes back. So. So I want to take you into a room where there was no candle. There was no app, There was just fear. And it was a room with the doors locked. It's Sunday night, the very first Easter. A group of men are crammed into a room in Jerusalem, hiding every footstep outside. Sounds like soldiers to them. Three days earlier, these guys said, jesus will die with you. And then they ran. Here's how John tells us what happened Next. In John 20, it says, so when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were for fear of the the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst. And he said to them, peace be with you.
[00:01:39] I love this. Jesus doesn't knock. He doesn't stand outside saying, whenever you guys are ready, he walks into the locked room and the first words to that room full of people who abandoned him aren't, so where was everybody? Instead of search words are, peace be with you.
[00:01:59] Peace is not the absence of trouble. There's a preacher from the 1800s named Alexander McLaren, and Pastor Chuck points to him in the book When Peace Leads. The idea is simple. Peace isn't the absence of trouble. It's the presence of God. I think most of us have it backwards. We're waiting for the trouble to leave so that we can finally feel peaceful when the kids are older, when the bills are paid, when the results come back, when work calms down. But Jesus walks into a room where nothing's changed. The doors are still locked. The danger is still outside. The guilt is still sitting right there in a Brings peace. Anyway, that's not a mood. That's a person showing up. And the reason why this matters today is that Chuck points out in his book that chronic stress doesn't make us feel bad. It actually reshapes the part of our brain that makes decisions. Living without peace changes how we think, how we parent, how we lead, and how we love. So peace is not a spa day for the soul. It's foundational. And here's the good news. You don't have to fix the room before Jesus comes in. You don't have to have your fear sorted out or your heart all tidied up first. The first step is to maybe take 60 seconds, something quiet if you can find it, and just say, jesus. I'm not waiting until I've got this figured out. Be here, right here in the middle of it. That's not a technique, it's an invitation. Would you invite Jesus into your day?
[00:03:27] Peace isn't the absence of trouble. It is the presence of God. And tomorrow. Here's the thing. Most of us don't hide behind a literal deadbolt. Ours looks more comfortable. Some of them even feel like peace. But tomorrow, I want to help you find yours. And you might be surprised what it is.
[00:03:43] Have a great day.
