He Is Faithful, and He Guards

She got something in March that she had never had before, and now she is frightened of it.

Peace. That is what it was. She could not tell you the mechanism, only that she came out of a very long season and something settled on her that she had genuinely never carried in forty-one years of life: a quietness in her chest, in the mornings especially, that did not depend on anything going right.

For about six weeks she was so glad she could have wept, and did, twice, in a car.

And then, some time in May, a new thing arrived, and it is the reason she is reading this.

She started guarding it.

She is careful now about who she talks to. She has stopped watching certain things. She has begun to notice, with a sort of low dread, when a day starts wrong, because she has a theory that the peace is a fragile object and a bad enough day could crack it, and if it cracks she does not know that she could go back to before.

She had nothing for forty-one years and coped. She has had this for five months and is terrified.

That is not ingratitude. That is what happens when a person is given the first thing they could not survive losing.

The verse has two halves and most of us only ever preach the first

But the Lord is faithful, who shall stablish you, and keep you from evil (2 Thessalonians 3:3).

The first half is the one everybody quotes. The Lord is faithful. True, and glorious, and by itself it can drift into a sentiment.

The second half is where a frightened woman lives. He shall stablish you, and keep you. Establish, which means set on a foundation and make firm, and keep, which is a guarding word: the same word family that describes a garrison round a city and a watch set at a gate.

So the promise is not only that God is good. It is that God has posted a guard around what He established.

You have a guard posted around a gift you have been trying to guard yourself. That is what the word says in the second half of the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written guarantee real in a chest that has been braced since May, because Scripture says He Himself is the seal on what belongs to God.

Who gave it to you, and can they lose it

Now let me ask you something plainly, in the way I would ask you if we were sitting down.

Where did the peace come from?

You cannot tell me. That is what you said. Something settled on you and you did not manufacture it and you could not reproduce it if your life depended on it.

Then hear yourself. A thing you did not produce is a thing you cannot lose by failing to produce it again. You are guarding something with hands that never made it, against a loss that would not be yours to cause, and the exhaustion in that is enormous and completely unnecessary.

You are not the manufacturer and you are not the security. The word says the peace of God passes all understanding and shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7), and look at the direction of that verb: the peace does the keeping. It is not the thing being kept. And it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the one who produces peace as fruit, which means it grows on a branch rather than sitting on a shelf.

Peace is not a vase

Here is the picture I want to take off you, because it is the wrong picture and it is running your May, your June and your July.

You are treating peace as a fragile object. A vase, high on a shelf, and every bad day is somebody walking past it too fast.

Scripture does not treat it that way once. It calls peace fruit, which grows. It calls it a garrison, which guards. It calls it a gift left with us by Jesus with the words: not as the world giveth, give I unto you (John 14:27). And the whole point of that comparison is that the world's peace is conditional and fragile and His is not.

You have been given something that guards rather than something that needs guarding. The written word puts peace in the role of the garrison, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that felt in a woman's morning, which is where she has been most afraid.

And I will be honest, because this site does not oversell. You will have bad days. Something will land in September and your chest will tighten and you will think it has gone. It has not gone; a covered sky is not the same as no sun, and a hard day is not a lost gift. What is guaranteed is not a calm year. It is the faithfulness of the one who established you, and He does not establish a thing and then leave it unattended.