Let The Peace Of Christ Rule In Your Hearts

One thing that surprises people about Colossians is that Paul, by his own account, had not met most of the people he was writing to. He speaks in the early chapters of those who had not seen his face. The church at Colossae, a town in what is now western Turkey, seems to have been planted by a man called Epaphras (Colossians 1:7), and Paul writes as a kind of distant elder brother, from what the letter itself describes as imprisonment (he asks them, in Colossians 4:18, to remember his bonds).

That matters for how I read 3:15. The man telling a church to let God’s peace rule is not writing from a comfortable study with everything going his way. He is a prisoner, writing to a young congregation he knows mostly by report, in a place unsettled by some strange teaching that he spends the first two chapters gently correcting. The peace he commends is one he appears to be living on himself. I trust instruction more readily from someone holding the same medicine they are handing me.

The reflection already points at the umpire image, and it is worth slowing down on, because it is not just a preacher’s flourish. The Greek verb Paul reaches for here, brabeuo, carries the sense of acting as umpire, the one who arbitrates and makes the call that ends a dispute. So when he says let God’s peace ‘rule’, the picture is of a verdict that settles things.

What I find easy to miss is where this umpire is posted. Not over the church meeting or the family budget but ‘in your hearts’. The contested ground is internal first. Before two people can be reconciled across a kitchen table, something has to be settled inside each of them. I have noticed that my outward rows are usually a leak from an inward one I lost earlier. Paul is appointing a referee for that hidden contest, the one between my resentment and my willingness to let a thing go, and telling me whose verdict gets to stand.

The line that keeps me honest is ‘to which also you were called in one body’. Paul will not let peace stay a private feeling. He ties it straight to the church, to people I did not choose and might not naturally warm to. The verse before it makes this concrete: in Colossians 3:13 he tells them to bear with one another and forgive any complaint, as the Lord forgave them. Peace here is not the absence of difficult people. It is what is meant to govern me while I am stuck in a room with them.

This runs back through Scripture. The peace Paul names elsewhere as guarding the heart (Philippians 4:7), the steadfast mind kept in peace that Isaiah speaks of (Isaiah 26:3), and the peace Jesus left with his friends (John 14:27) all settle in Christ, who dealt with the great enmity at the cross. A church learning to forgive small slights is just that same peace working its way down to the level of the tea rota.

I want to be honest about how this lands, because peace can sound like a soft word until you try to obey it. The hard part of 3:15 is the verb ‘let’. It reads more like permission than effort. I cannot manufacture this peace by clenching harder, or by rehearsing my grievance until I have proved I was right. I can only stop barring the door against it.

Where I feel that most is the morning after a disagreement with someone I love, when I wake with the argument already running and a small case for the prosecution assembling itself before I am even out of bed. Letting peace rule, on that Tuesday, means choosing not to relitigate, even though I have not yet won. And Paul’s last two words, ‘be thankful’, turn out to be the practical lever. Gratitude is hard to hold at the same time as a grudge. When I can name one true thing I am thankful for in the very person I am cross with, the resentment loosens its grip. Not always. But often enough that I keep coming back to it.

• Where is the umpire in my chest currently being overruled by something louder: anxiety, a need to be right, or an old hurt I keep feeding?
• Is there one person ‘in the body’ with whom this peace is meant to flow but currently does not, and what would the first small step towards it look like?
• What would change about today if I let God’s peace, rather than my worry, make the deciding call?
• Can I name one honest thing I am thankful for in the person, or the situation, that troubles me most right now?

If you want to keep going, you might read the rest of Paul’s letter in the book of Colossians, or look at how Scripture handles a heart that is loud over on our verses for how you feel page.