You Can't Have Peace Without Love

Sometimes, a run is exactly what you need to clear your head and get some peace.

Mind you, I'm not a major fan of running, so it usually causes some form of conflict on the inside as I try to power through. However, a recent run gave me the perfect opportunity to reflect on conflict in general.

And what the Lord told me in response may have changed my life.

Peace Amidst the Conflict?

As I settled into a rhythmic shuffle disguised as a jog, my thoughts slipped into questions about conflict. This happened because I typically want to solve problems or pray about issues in my life, and the run seemed as good a time as any to do such deep mental work.

But this time was a little different.

I recognized a small issue: I often pray about my issues to the Lord. Not that this is a horrible approach, but at some point: shouldn't I be praying about other things?

So as I tromped down the street, I asked the Lord a simple question, "How do I get peace inside?"

After all, aren't most of us chasing after peace? It seems that everyone I come across is pining away for inner peace. Some try to get it through religion, others through hedonism and pleasure, while others yet have given up on ever attaining peace and have tried to find peace in their own conflict.

It's a lifelong journey that so few seem to truly attain. However, we create a lifelong journey out of trying to find that perfect piece of the puzzle that might solve our peace issue.

But the Lord's response was truly mesmerizing. It blew me away with its succinct connection.

Peace in an Unlikely Place

He asked me, "What are the two greatest commandments?"

In Matthew, Christ is being questioned by the Pharisees and an expert in the law "tested" Him with a question, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?" Christ replied, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

That's when it hit me. Love equals peace.

Now, before you start listening to Janis Joplin and moving to San Francisco...let me explain. We're not talking about the concepts of love and peace that the world tries to use. Those are shallow, emotional, and worthless explanations for what the words represent spiritually.

What Love is, and Isn't

The love we're discussing has nothing to do with pure emotion. It does not flit to and fro like a love-drunk teenage boy who has confused one head with another. It's not a love-sick couple after 2 weeks. Love can certainly hold plenty of emotions in it, but let me ask this:

How much of a butterfly feeling do you get when God tells you to love your enemies? Yeah...those butterflies in your stomach get left behind in a pile in the ditch.

The love leading to peace that I'm talking about is a love that transcends emotion and lands in the realm of commitment.

When we commit to living a life of love for God and our neighbors (as ourselves), the things that chase away peace are allowed no space. After all, what room is there for unforgiveness, bitterness, and resentment in love?

Quite the opposite. You see, resentment, unforgiveness, and bitterness are the causes of and results of conflict. They stir up defensiveness, anger, passion, frustration, wrath, and guilt. They tear at our emotional states and decimate our identities. We live lives of resentment and bitterness, warping the air around us into a festering stench of decay and death.

But when we refuse to entertain unforgiveness, bitterness, and resentment, we summarily reject conflict in our hearts. We build a wall of peace in our hearts, protecting us from the fiery attacks of the enemy.

Love is the ultimate defender. Remember, perfect love casts out all fear. And what is fear if not a worry or anxiety about some form of conflict? That conflict could be spiritual, physical, emotional, relational, or symbolic. The tension within us is conflict. The hostile atmosphere in our environment results from conflict.

But perfect love casts out fear because perfect love is truly peaceful.

Christ lived with an inner peace we might struggle to even imagine. Because He embodied love for the Father and love for His neighbor in perfection, He walked this earth in complete peace. There was no unforgiveness, resentment, bitterness, or sin found in Him. There may have been righteous anger at times, but even then He did it with inner peace.

So what do we take away from this?

The Greatest Commandments Equal Peace

As I slapped worn-out rubber soles against the pavement on my arduous and death-defying 2-mile run, the Lord and I discussed how the two greatest commandments were the gateway to true peace.

I caught the revelation that loving God embraced peace with God. Loving my neighbor built peace between family, friends, and me. Loving myself helped fashion inner peace. And loving my enemy was the best option to build peace in the worldly battle...at least internally.

That type of love, which deals with those four realms, is a stout character. It clearly holds an inner strength that few of us give it credit for.

If we look to 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, we find a description of righteous love that leaves us all feeling a little convicted.

It states, "Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

How many of those can you reliably say define how you interact with the rest of the world (or even yourself)?

Do You Want Inner Peace

Do you want inner peace?

Take 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and apply it to your relationships with God and those around you. Let go of the unforgiveness, bitterness, and resentment that turn you against God and man. Take on the commandment (which cares not about your feelings) and commit to living out righteous love.

Love with patience

Love without jealousy

Love by covering over a multitude of wrongs

Love by bearing all things

Love by believing all things

Love by hoping all things

Love by enduring all things.

When you do, you'll find that the sacrificial love of Christ is all the more other-worldly. He voluntarily became the least of men, lived a life of receiving scorn and ridicule, put up with temptations of every kind, and went through a spiritually and physically torturous death...all in the name of sacrificial love. He considered Himself not His own, but God's and ours.

Even on the cross, He asked forgiveness for those who put Him there, passed His mother to John to ensure care, and even when He cried to the Father about being forsaken, He called out in humility.

He died always retaining perfect love.

Peace and Love...Dude.

The question for us is: do we attempt to get peace by leaning into the conflicts inside and outside? Do we determine that a little more concentrated unforgiveness will punish the other person thoroughly enough to grant us peace? Do we decide that resentment and bitterness are the best we can expect?

It's the two greatest commandments that lead us to peace. Because when we live in perfect love, we fulfill the law and the Prophets. That position is reserved for those dead in Christ and born again through Him. When we accept Christ, we take on His righteousness, which leads us to grow each day in knowing how to love as He does.

And when we truly love like He does, we'll know what it's like to have peace with God, peace with our neighbors, peace with our enemies, and even peace with ourselves.

Without love, there is no peace.