Philippians 4:6-7 promises supernatural, soul-preserving peace to believers in Jesus Christ who will … pray.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And … peace.
Have you found prayer as effective as Paul promised? Can you count on prayer to quench the mind-warping pressures of modern life? Have you found it a bulwark capable of protecting your emotion stability? Maybe you’ve never thought of the question because that wasn’t the goal of your praying. Your goal in prayer was to petition or request something from God. Your expectation is that God, being both powerful and loving, is capable of answering your prayer.
God is powerful and loving. He is capable of answering our prayers, but that is not the promise of these verses. The promise is that if we take our petitions and requests to our Heavenly Father, he will give us his peace; Marvelous peace, divine peace, beyond comprehension and capable of protecting our psyche (heart and mind). The verses make no promise that everything we ask for will be granted. They do unreservedly promise that we can exchange our anxiousness in any situation for God’s peace.
I have lived through some soul-crushing experiences in life. Some I have fought through in my own strength, experiencing levels of anxiety that probed the limits of my mental fortitude and wreaked havoc on my nervous system. Others I faced with prayer, confident of my Father’s sovereign love and care. The divide between brooding anxiety and supernatural peace has been a sliding scale. It has depended on how quickly I got in my “right mind” and remembered God’s promise of “peace that passes understanding.” Even as I write, I know that the struggle between self-sufficiency and God-dependence will be ongoing.
In my next post on August 13 I’ll share the most recent (and perhaps most important) way these verses have challenged my prayer life.
