"PEACE-ing Together a Decision? Colossians 3:15--Twisters Series

Introduction

            I imagine we’ve all done some pretty silly things in our lives as we’ve sought guidance from God about our decisions. I can remember using some rather silly ways to ask God whether I should ask out girls when I was in 5^th grade (which is WAY too young, as I see it now!). When I was thinking about asking a girl to be my girlfriend, I wanted to get some guidance from God—because that’s a huge decision in 5^th grade! You might spend the next two weeks of your life dating this girl, so you don’t want to mess up that decision!

            Normally, as I would prepare to call the girl, I would say something to myself like, “Okay, if someone answers the phone after the 3^rd ring, I’ll take that as a sign that I’m supposed to ask her out. If the phone keeps ringing for a 4^th ring, I’ll just hang up, because that’s my sign that I’m not supposed to ask her out.”

            Now don’t laugh too hard at me—you know you’ve done things like that, too! We all want guidance from the Lord about our decisions. But one thing’s for certain—we better be careful in how we go about it. We don’t want to seek guidance from God through some method that He never intended to use for that purpose. Otherwise, we may end up making a poor decision, yet all the while we’ll be thinking that God told us to do it!

            Today, we’re going to take a look at a statement from Scripture that often comes up in the context of decision making. It comes from Colossians 3:15, and it says, “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”

A Common Interpretation

            A fairly common interpretation of this verse relates it to the process of decision making, and it argues that a sense of inner peace is the defining influence that God uses to lead us in making decisions. The idea is that as you consider your options, God will give you a remarkable sense of peace about the option that He wants you choose. That feeling of peace is thus seen as His “seal of approval” on the choice that He wants you to make.

            This interpretation puts a lot of weight on the word picture that is painted by the verb “rule.” In the original Greek wording behind this translation, the verb used is the word for serving as a judge or an umpire at a sporting event. If we could paraphrase this statement then, we might say, “let the peace of Christ be the umpire (or referee) in your hearts.”

            Now, the referee in a sporting event is, of course, the one who determines if a player commits a foul or if he’s stepped out of bounds or broken a rule. In a sport like figure skating, the judges are the ones who determine who wins. They look over all the details of each performance, and then they decide who gets the gold.

            When this metaphor is applied to decision making, the “peace of Christ”—or a sense of inner peace—is said to act in this role of a judge. As you consider all the details of each option, it is said that you should choose the option about which you feel the greatest peace, because that feeling is said to be God’s way of showing you which choice to make.

But is this phrase “the peace of Christ” talking about a remarkable sense of inner peace? Is this whole phrase even talking about making decisions concerning things like a job offer or a move to a new town? Let’s take a closer look at the context to see what this statement means.

The Correct Interpretation

            In Colossians 2, we discover that this congregation was apparently divided over questions of Christian practice. Was it okay to eat certain foods or drink certain drinks, or should they avoid them? Were they required to worship on a certain day, or was there more freedom in this matter?

            These questions were very common in the early church, because the Holy Spirit was merging together two very different groups of people—Jews and non-Jews, or Gentiles. The Jewish people had very distinct lifestyle traditions based on the Law of Moses that dated back over 1,000 years. The various non-Jewish people in all of these cities also had their own traditions, so as you can imagine, as these people started to join together through their shared faith in Jesus, there was bound to be a clash of cultures—and we read about that quite often in the New Testament.

            Now again, in Colossians 2, we read that some people in the church were looking down on others who didn’t hold the same opinions as they did about some of these lifestyle questions. So Paul tells them, in a very godly, mature sort of way, to knock it off! He reminds them that their union with Christ by faith is far more important than regulations about things like food and drink that perish as they are used (to use Paul’s language from 2:20-22).

            He then encourages them instead to focus on the attitudes and actions that will foster unity among them. Let’s read a bit of this, starting at 3:12 [READ 3:12-17].

            From this context, we can see that when Paul talks about peace in v. 15, he’s not talking about a sense of inner peace in your heart—he’s talking about the peace that they should have in their relationships with each other. When he says, “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” I believe he’s saying that they should prioritize peace with each other over their personal opinions on lifestyle questions. Rather than berate others who thought differently about matters of food and drink and when to worship, they were to befriend them as fellow Christians.

            So rather than saying that we should allow inner peace to guide the way when we’re trying to decide who to date, Paul is saying that our unity in Christ should lead us to live at peace with other Christians.

What’s the Danger?

            So what’s the danger of embracing the misinterpretation of this verse? To put it simply, we could end up using a poor or even unbiblical process of decision making, and yet think we are actually following God’s will! That misunderstanding could lead to tragic decisions.

            Perhaps you’ve known a Christian young person in your life who has chosen to marry an unbeliever, and their rationale was, “Why would God give me such a peace about this if its wrong?” Or maybe you’ve known someone who has walked away from their marriage during a difficult time, and in explaining their actions, they simply said, “Doesn’t God want us to be happy? This marriage simply doesn’t make me happy anymore.”

            But I imagine the more likely danger for most of us is failing to obey a biblical command because it requires something unpleasant, and we feel unsettled because of that unpleasantness. So instead of obeying the command, we fall back on whatever makes us feel more at ease. We can find ourselves in that situation quite often—when we need to ask someone to forgive us for a sin, when we need to have a difficult conversation with someone whose sin is hurting themselves and others, when we are called to show kindness to someone who is not kind to us, when we consider an extraordinary act of generosity that will require us to make a personal sacrifice.

            In all of those situations, we’re likely to feel very unsettled about the task at hand. I don’t know anyone who feels totally at peace when they have to ask someone to forgive them! And yet, in those situations, we have to push through our feelings in order to do what’s right.

            Now, when we’re faced with a decision, should we recklessly go forward with a certain course of action even if we aren’t at peace about it? No—of course not! We should certainly ask ourselves why we feel uneasy about a certain choice or a certain opportunity. There is some truth to what we call a “hunch” or a “gut feeling.” Life experience can teach us that certain choices probably aren’t going to work out well, even if we can’t explain specifically why we feel that way.

            The warning that I’m trying to give you today is to avoid elevating a feeling of peace from simply being a factor in your decision to being the factor in your decision—the factor that trumps all others. When you’re faced with a decision, you should consider your feelings about it along with any Scriptural commands on the issue, and advice that you should solicit from mature believers. We just simply want to avoid letting our feelings override the wise council of God and others.

Interpretive Error

            So where did we go wrong to arrive at the wrong interpretation of this verse? Essentially, by taking this statement out of context. We’ve seen this error before in this series, haven’t we? And we’ll see it again, because this error is the cardinal sin of Bible study. It is the Bible study equivalent of leaving your starting pitcher in the game to face the Royals in the 9^th inning! It will come back to haunt you every time!

            When you take a biblical statement out of its context, you lose the resources of the context to help you answer the questions you have about the statement. When that happens, you’re most likely then going to supply answers for your questions from some other context—maybe your own personal opinions, maybe the popular thinking of your culture. It could come from anywhere, because you’ve lost the controlling influence of the original context.

            Context is to a statement what rails are to a train. It is not at all likely that a train will veer off toward the right if the rails are veering off toward the left. The rails guide the train and keeping it pointed in the right direction.

            Likewise, it is much less likely that you’ll misinterpret a verse if you read it in its context. The context will keep you pointed in the right direction, so as long as there isn’t some other interpretive malfunction along the way.

            Last week, we received an e-mail update from Brad and Maddie Fox, our missionaries in Alaska. An 11-year-old girl that they’ve been ministering to has recently committed to read through the Bible. Her name is Elizabeth, and her comment about her decision was this: “Is there a better way to understand the Bible than to read it all?” She’s on to something, isn’t she? There is no better way to understand the Bible than to just keep reading more of it, and more of it, and more of it! Don’t just pick out small phrases here and there—read it in large servings, saturate your mind with it. As you fill your mind with the Word of God, your understanding of it will grow accordingly.