Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I encourage you to live as people worthy of the call you received from God. Conduct yourselves with all humility, gentleness, and patience. Accept each other with love, and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together. You are one body and one spirit, just as God also called you in one hope. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all. – Ephesians 4:1-6
Yesterday evening, after my Discipleship Task Force gathering, I waited in the church lobby while Rebekah’s ministry team finished up their work. There, over the “visitor information booth,” I noticed the banner pictured above, proclaiming one simple but beautiful thought: “PEACE.”
If we could guarantee one immediate and consistent response to walking through the front doors of a church, then I think “Peace” may well be my first choice. That, no matter what is going on in someone’s life, believer or otherwise, the peace that passes human understanding, a visceral response to the presence of God, would arrest them on the spot.
THIN PLACE: What I noticed Monday evening, simply sitting in the lobby and looking at the banner on the wall, was that Wake Forest Presbyterian Church has become a “Thin Place” for me, one of those locations where the interface between the spiritual and the physical is wafer-thin; where time and eternity overlap; where – as one of my favorite hymns from my growing-up years states so well – “heaven [comes] down, and glory fills my soul.”
In the days of temple worship, people believed God literally resided in the “Holy of Holies.” Today, as the Spirit lives in us and Jesus walks beside us, the physical space where so many believers meet for worship, study, and prayer – where we are engaged in ministry and where we “do life” together – really does become saturated with the presence of God. In a sense, then, God does live there; and I can still feel the residual fact of God even when nobody else is actually in the building.
PEACE, as I wrote extensively in my Advent book, “In My Heart I Carry A Star”, is seldom a passive concept. Peace is typically something we can do; it’s purposeful, proactive, and deliberate. Then the RESULT of our peaceable actions, prayers, intentions, relationships etc. is manifest as this calming, reassuring, encouraging, healing balm.
Monday evening, there in the lobby of our church, God’s presence was my peace. “Accept each other with love,” the Apostle writes, “and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together. You are one body and one spirit, just as God also called you in one hope.”
In love, and because of love – DEREK