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.

I used to read ‘be thankful’ as a polite sign-off, tacked on at the end without much thought. Then I read the whole letter in one sitting and noticed how often Paul comes back to it. He opens by saying he gives thanks for them whenever he prays (Colossians 1:3). He wants them overflowing with gratitude (Colossians 2:7). A few lines past our verse he tells them to sing with thankful hearts (Colossians 3:16), and to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus with thanks (Colossians 3:17). Near the close he asks them to stay watchful in prayer, with thanksgiving (Colossians 4:2).

So ‘be thankful’ in 3:15 is not a throwaway tag. It is one beat in a rhythm Paul keeps striking, the quiet undertone beneath everything else he asks of them. Peace and gratitude are not two separate chores. They hold each other up.

Most of what I have written here has been about peace settling a quarrel. There is a quieter way it works too, more to do with fear than anger. When a decision sits in front of me, a hard conversation I am dreading, a change I cannot see the end of, two voices want to make the call. One is fear, doing its sums in the dark, totting up everything that could go wrong. The other is the settled peace Paul describes, which is not the same as feeling sure I have got the answer right.

Letting peace rule, on those days, means asking a different question. Not which option removes the risk, because none of them does, but which way I can walk and still keep this peace rather than trade it away. I have made decisions out of fear and lived inside the cramped shape they left me in. The few times I have let peace cast the deciding vote, even while my stomach argued the other way, I have rarely been sorry. That is the umpire doing the thing Paul says it is there for.

It is worth remembering what Paul had been pushing against here. Some teachers at Colossae were pressing the church to measure itself by a thicket of regulations: what to eat, which days to keep, what not to handle or taste or touch (Colossians 2:16, 2:21). It looked devout. Paul’s verdict was that for all its severity it had no real power over a restless heart (Colossians 2:23). Set beside that, 3:15 offers something quite different. The thing meant to govern a believer is not a list of prohibitions policed from outside, but a peace settled within, the gift of the Christ those rules could never reach. An anxious religion of measuring up is answered by an umpire who has long since announced the result.

I have heard this verse used as a full stop when someone was still mid-sentence. A church meeting gets heated, somebody raises a real grievance about money spent without a vote, and the chair reaches for Colossians 3:15 like a gavel: let’s just let peace rule here, shall we. What that move actually does is hand the umpire’s whistle to whoever most wants the discomfort to end, which is rarely the person who was wronged. Paul never says peace means the complaint has to go quiet. He wrote this straight after telling the same church to forgive whatever complaint they have against one another (Colossians 3:13), and forgiveness assumes the complaint got heard first, weighed, named out loud. Skip that and 3:15 stops being an umpire and becomes a gag.

I have done the same thing to myself, quietly. I have called it peace when what I actually had was an apology I owed and had decided not to make. Telling myself God’s peace was ruling in my heart was a much easier sentence than picking up the phone. That is the misreading I watch for hardest now. Not the one someone else commits against me. The one I commit against myself.

If I were teaching this, I would not start at verse 15. Paul has just told the Colossians to put on a whole set of qualities the way you put on clothes (Colossians 3:12), and then, above all these, to walk in love, which he calls the bond of perfection (Colossians 3:14). I have heard that bond preached as the sash holding the outfit together, and I like the picture, though I would not claim Paul meant the clothing image to stretch that far. Only after all of it does the umpire walk onto the field. Peace in verse 15 is not one more garment. It is what governs people already dressed the way verses 12 to 14 describe, and it is hard to claim its verdict while still in yesterday’s clothes.

So a talk out of this passage has its spine ready-made: character put on, forgiveness practised, love binding the lot together, peace as the standing verdict, then Sunday’s singing and Monday’s job under the same name (3:16 to 17). Miss the early steps and 3:15 is a slogan with nothing underneath it.

This is a strong verse to open a members’ meeting you already know will be difficult, read before the disagreement starts rather than produced once it has, so the room hears whose peace is meant to govern the debate before anyone has staked a position. It fits a membership welcome too, since “one body” is precisely what is happening in the room.

Where I would not use it is in the hour after someone has told me what was done to them. A person still shaking from a betrayal, or a bereavement that has left them furious rather than settled, does not need me announcing the umpire’s verdict over them. That verdict is theirs to reach, in their own time, with their own forgiving to do first. Me saying the words on their behalf is not comfort. It is pressure dressed as scripture.

Near the end of the letter Paul sends greetings, and among the names is Onesimus, “the faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you”, sent to Colossae with Tychicus to tell the church how things stood with him (Colossians 4:9).

That name turns up again in the short letter Paul wrote to a man called Philemon at around the same time, about a slave parted from Philemon’s household, who found Paul, became a Christian, and was sent back holding a letter asking for him to be received no longer as a slave but as a beloved brother (Philemon 15 to 16). Paul never actually writes that he bolted, though the offer to repay anything owed (Philemon 18) has made most readers assume something of the sort. And most who read the two letters side by side think it is the same man. I cannot prove that, and neither can anyone else.

If it is right, though, then the letter carrying let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body, came up the last of the road to Colossae in the hands of an enslaved man walking back into the house he had fled, holding, in effect, his own case for reconciliation. One body was not a devotional phrase in that household. It was a test with a name, a face and a front door: would peace actually rule when Onesimus knocked.

I have not been able to read verse fifteen the same way since. One body slips very easily into meaning a general fondness for the people at church. It is much harder once you picture a master with his hand on the latch, about to open his own door to the man he used to own, and the whole household finding out in that single moment what kind of peace they actually had. And Paul does not order Philemon to obey. He asks. Which means the umpire had to make his call in somebody’s chest first, in private, before anyone in that hallway said a word.

There is an old hymn I keep coming back to on this verse: Peace, Perfect Peace, written in 1875 by Edward Henry Bickersteth, an English clergyman. Hymnals have long printed Isaiah 26:3 over it, the promise that God keeps in perfect peace the mind that stays on him. I would not claim Paul had Isaiah open in front of him in his cell, and I have no way of knowing. But it is the same promise, and Bickersteth heard it in the same key.

What I love is the shape of the thing. Every verse opens by naming a trouble and putting a question mark on it. In this dark world of sin. With loved ones far away. Our future all unknown. And every answer comes back in the very next line, before the trouble has shifted an inch.

That is the awkward, wonderful move Paul is asking for in 3:15. Not the removal of the dark world, or the absent loved one, or the unknown future. None of those gets answered on its own terms, in the hymn or in life. What changes is who is allowed to speak last.

One more thing, which took me embarrassingly long to see. It is a congregational hymn. A room full of people, a good number of them carrying at least one of those exact troubles that week, take turns letting the answer come out of their own mouths, whether they feel it that morning or not. Verse 15 asks me to let peace rule alone, in a kitchen, on a Tuesday, with nobody watching. A hymn like that is the same letting, rehearsed out loud together, so the Tuesday version has something to fall back on.

Elsewhere on this page I have written about the peace I refuse out of plain stubbornness, sitting up relitigating an argument I have not yet won. That is a failure of will, and on my better days I can do something about it. This is not that.

Some people reading this verse have been trying to let peace rule for years. Through an anxiety that has a diagnosis and a prescription. Through a grief with no bottom to it. Through a thing done to them long ago that does not lie down simply because a sermon told it to. And the peace has not come, not reliably, not on the nights that matter. If that is you, the last thing you need is me explaining the umpire metaphor more slowly.

So let me say what I think the verse does not do. It is not a technique, and there is no dose of letting go you have been failing to administer correctly. It also does not say when. Paul gives no timetable here at all, and I have watched people read that silence as a verdict on themselves, as though everyone else got the peace on schedule and they alone were the faulty unit. It just means he did not say.

What has actually helped, as far as I can see, is almost never a bigger effort at letting go. It is the clause we skim past: to which also you were called in one body. Someone else’s steadiness lent to you on a night when yours will not hold. A friend praying words you cannot get your mouth around. A church doing the being thankful on your behalf until you can manage your own again. I used to think that was the consolation prize, what you settle for once you have failed at the real, private, interior version. I no longer think so. I think it is the arrangement Paul is describing. Peace ruling in one heart was never meant to be a solo performance, and some seasons it has to be borrowed.

Set Colossians 3:15 beside James and something uncomfortable happens. James has the wisdom from above as first pure, then peaceful, gentle, reasonable, and says the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace (James 3:17 to 18). Paul has peace as a verdict settled inside one chest. James will not let it stay there.

His peace is not only received. It is sown, out in the open, in dirt, with consequences in other people’s lives that only surface months later. And he puts it directly after the other wisdom, the earthly and demonic sort that breeds jealousy and selfish ambition and, in his blunt phrase, confusion and every evil deed (James 3:15 to 16). So peace, for James, is not the milder of two moods you might happen to be in. It grows out of a different wisdom altogether, and yields a crop a jealous heart cannot produce however calm it manages to look from outside.

Put the two together and the test sharpens on me. Paul tells me to let this peace rule in the room nobody else can see into. James tells me that if it really is ruling in there, a harvest turns up somewhere else, in a relationship I sowed into rather than argued over, in a person whose week is easier because of something I did not say. Peace that never gets past my own ribs, that rules beautifully in private and grows nothing anyone could point at, has not yet done what either man means by the word. That one costs me. Left to myself I would far rather be peaceful than be a peacemaker.

If I am teaching this to children, or to a room with children in it, I do not open with the umpire. I start where they already are: cross with someone at that very table, over a toy or a turn or who got the bigger half. I ask them where the crossness is, and they point. Usually to the chest, which is roughly where Paul puts it too.

Then I tell them peace is not weather. It does not float down like snow the moment everybody behaves. It is more like a dial they are allowed to turn, slowly, on purpose, while the row is still warm. Nobody has to stop being upset in one second flat. They are just allowed to reach for the dial.

I will not tell them peace always arrives the instant they ask, because that is a lie half of them will catch me in by Thursday. What I tell them instead is that the verse does not say make peace. It says let. And children understand let, better than adults do. Let go of the rope. Let your sister past on the stairs. Nothing has to be manufactured. Something only has to stop being barred.

And then the sentence I would send them home with, if I only got one: you were called into one body. Not you ought to be nicer, which they have heard a thousand times and can already tune out. You belong to the same thing as the person you are cross with, right now, whether either of you is enjoying it. That is the part that will still be true when they are forty and the argument is a serious one. One notch on the dial, at enough tables, over enough years, is very nearly what peace ruling a house looks like from the inside.

• 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.