Expecting Peace When There is No Peace

When you come to expect emotional peace from God as a sign of his love and approval

Photo by Hermann Wittekopf - kmkb on Unsplash

I’ve said this before on Twitter (I’d link to it but “X”s search function is broken) and I discuss it in On Getting Out of Bed, but I continue to be concerned about the evangelical teaching that to be right before God one needs to feel a sense of peace. And that if one doesn’t feel at peace it is more than likely a sign of sin or the Holy Spirit otherwise convicting you. This was especially true when making a decision or taking an action. When you ask someone out and you don’t feel a peace about it, that must be God telling you “No.” If you were reading a novel and you didn’t feel peace about it, that must be God telling you, “This is immoral.” And so on.

Growing up in more charismatic churches, this was widely taught to me by pastors and spiritual elders. If I felt bad, that meant the Holy Spirit was communicating something to me about my state before God. And I had to listen to that voice. And of course, there is something true about this. We do have a conscience and the indwelling Spirit and he can convict us and guide us, particularly when we are in sin. It’s also possible to “hear” the Holy Spirit” when it’s actually just cultural Christian norms guilting you into falling into line. I distinctly remember breaking certain secular CDs out of terror that they were demonic. I should have broken them cause they were in bad taste, but in my mind this was a profound spiritual battle of good and evil, and by purchasing the CDs I had invited Satan into my home. I promise you, the guit, dread, and anxiety I felt at that moment seemed like the Holy Spirit convicting me that I had to destroy those CDs to free myself of a demonic influence. And these “false positives” have followed me throughout my life. I have felt no-peace about all kinds of things, terrified that I had crossed some amorphous line and damned myself. Now, as I’ve grown older and come to understand myself better, I’ve learned that I suffer from moral and religious scrupulosity, a form of OCD. And I’ve realized some of the reasons why I often don’t feel at peace with God when I should. But I’ve also come to realize that many people don’t feel a sense of peace when making a decision or taking an action. Sometimes we feel bad when we shouldn’t, and sometimes we feel good when we should feel bad. Our conscience can be overly sensitive or seared. The response, which I argue for in On Getting Out of Bed, is to practice knowing-with others in community and having your conscience formed by the Word, prayer, and the gospel.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times in my life I have gone astray by listening to my feelings of anxiety and distress and assuming that they were signs from God that I was not at peace with God. It’s taken me many years to begin to internalize the reality that I am always already at peace with God, because he has made peace with me when his Son died on the cross for my sins. Yes, there are daily opportunities for repentance, but I remain justified, redeemed, and loved even in my sin. “But,” my mind will reply, “What if this feeling means that we’re outside the will of God!” And of course, sometimes we are outside his will for us. For example, whenever we sin. But in those moments there is a clear action to take: prayer for clarity and insight, repent, and rejoice that you are forgiven. The kind of anxiety and dread I’m referring to doesn’t go away so easily, however. It hangs on you and weighs on you. It condemns you. Sometimes I believe it comes from the Accuser, telling us to despair of our salvation. Sometimes it comes from past trauma. Sometimes from mental conditions or suffering or I don’t know what. Our minds are infinitely complex. I’m not convinced we can explain why we always feel so anxious and ill-at-ease. Of course in these moments, we are to cast our anxieties on God because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). But that experience of casting doesn’t always mean that the clouds are lifted immediately.

What adds to this anxiety is the pressure to feel peace. When you are told by spiritual leaders that the normal and proper state of the Christian life is a feeling of peace with God, it’s easy to begin to feel broken. You start to feel out of place, a failure, hopelessly condemned. And what’s frustrating is that often you won’t know the source of your dis-ease, so you feel spiritual shame for not feeling peace and spiritual dread for not knowing why you feel bad.

The proper state of the Christian life is to be in peace with God, but that peace is a state, an ontological and existential state, not primarily an emotional state. Sometimes you feel it. It’s nice if you feel it. But it’s not guaranteed. And if you don’t feel an emotional sense of peace, that isn’t necessarily a sign that you’re in sin or out of God’s will or that something is wrong. Sometimes you just feel bad and that’s it. That’s it. You just feel really bad. And when that happens your job is just to keep walking forward and doing the next thing. Eventually, in time, usually your behavior will correct your emotions. But even if it doesn’t, at least you will have done what you are responsible for doing.

What else can we do when we don’t feel the peace we are told to we ought to feel? As I argue in On Getting Out of Bed, it’s important to know-with other people when our conscience is in question. When we struggling to know whether we are in God’s will or acting rightly, it’s good to rely on wise counsel to help us see rightly. Sometimes we need to be reminded that our conscience is overly sensitive, that we are feeling false guilt and that there is no sin in a particular area of our lives. Other times we need wise counselors to remind us that we have neglected God’s good law and let our conscience grow weak.

In addition, each of us has the personal obligation to develop a wise, godly conscience by reading the Word, praying, and allowing the gospel to dwell in us deeply. It is that last part that I think is most important. If we fail to understand the gospel of grace, we will struggle to accept that we are known and loved even while we feel bad. Most decisions in this life we will have to make on our own, without running to friends for counsel. Which means it’s important to develop godly wisdom so that we can make good decisions and then trust in the Lord to provide wisdom (as he promises!) in any particular circumstance.

Taking these steps can help us move forward, while sometimes feeling anxious, without falling into the trap of a seared conscience or an overly sensitive conscience. But what I hope to see is the church move away from insisting that a healthy life with Christ is one always and necessarily marked with an emotional state of peace with God. This is not accurate for most people, and for some people it can be harmful. I know for myself, if I listened to every guilty urging toward peace that came into my head, I would live a life of compulsions and would hurt a lot of people. I’ve had to learn that the peace of Christ transcends my emotional state. It’s an objective fact about the nature of reality. And that’s wonderful, because my emotions often are rotten. But his love for me is eternal.