Peace Comes From God.

Philippians 4:4-9
4 Always be full of joy in the Lord. I say it again—rejoice! 5 Let everyone see that you are considerate in all you do. Remember, the Lord is coming soon.
6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.
8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. 9 Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.

I must start by saying this post had to of been the "meant to be" type. Why you ask? Well, I had this Bible verse planned as a part of my peace discussions that have been going on in the last few posts. When I finally got around to thinking what I was going to write in the devotion part of it, I went on biblegateway.com (which is where I always get my scriptures from using the new living translation on the site followed by the convenient copy and paste method to provide the verses to you in this manner) and I saw something that caught my eye. I always take a glance at the verse of the day on the site and this time it had a different impact on me than any other day's verse. The verse of the day was one of the verses that are above! Specifically, verse 8. I'm sorry to break it to you, but my friend, I don't think this happened by chance. Not to sound selfish or anything, but I think God is trying to tell me something...that I'm doing the right thing. This type of thing has happened before, when somewhere, somehow I see the same verse throughout the day (every case has a different significance). However, this has never happened in relation to this project. Maybe he wants you to read that verse again too. Keep it in mind throughout the day ;)

Now to what I intended to talk about...

This scripture is largely about prayer, which if all goes well, I hope to do a series on in the next couple months. The whole thing about receiving peace from God is to pray to him constantly, but also praise him at the same time. There has to be something good that God has done to you recently.

After you pray and start thanking God from the bottom of your heart you'll notice this feeling...a feeling of goodness. Let's think for a minute, what type mindset do you enter when you start praising God? I don't know about you, but I'm usually very reflective and my mind is going all over the place. It's almost as if I don't know what to thank him for. This is what God wants. He wants you to reason with yourself, he wants you to discover your true identity, and he wants you to be greatly appreciative, but there is one catch. He wants you to be completely and utterly honest...100 percent!

"Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism." ~Dorothy Thompson