I have a word app on my phone that breaks down a daily word study from Scripture in the original Hebrew or Greek, and I absolutely love doing this. Because sometimes the English word we read is accurate, but when you look at what that word carried in its original language, suddenly you realize there is so much more sitting underneath it.
And today I want to look at peace.
Isaiah 26:3 says:
“You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”
I love the visual that Scripture gives us there — whose mind is stayed on You. There is something about a mind that continually comes back to Jesus, fixes itself on Jesus, leans into Jesus and refuses to make everything happening around it the center of its attention.
That is a life that leads to peace.
But here is where it gets really good.
When we hear the word peace, we normally think of the absence of conflict. No arguing. No chaos. No fighting. Everything is calm, everybody is behaving, nobody is sending the text that ruins your afternoon. LOL!
But the Hebrew word used here is shalom, and it’s something much deeper than simply “nothing bad is happening.”
Strong’s says shalom means completeness, soundness, welfare and peace, with the larger sense of being safe, well, whole and secure. It comes from the Hebrew family of words connected to shalem which is defined as complete, whole, full.
So imagine the Lord drawing a circle around your life.
Not a wiggly circle. Not one with a giant gap in the back where everything can sneak through. LOL! But a complete circle.
Whole.
Full.
Nothing missing from it.
That is the picture I get when I think about shalom. It is God’s peace surrounding the entirety of who we are. Our mind. Our heart. Our well-being. Our relationship with Him. It is not simply God saying, I will make everything around you quiet.
It’s a circle that is able to keep out all the noise that is happening around us and because we’ve chosen to keep our mind on Him, it cannot enter INSIDE that circle.
That is God making you whole in the middle of what may not yet be quiet.
And THAT changes the way I read Isaiah 26:3.
Because here’s another beautiful little nugget: the Hebrew actually says shalom shalom. The word is repeated. What our English translations often define as “perfect peace” is literally this beautiful doubling: shalom, shalom.
Peace upon peace.
Wholeness upon wholeness.
Complete peace.
And where does God say that kind of peace is found?
“Whose mind is stayed on You.”
There it is.
Our peace is connected to where our mind stays.
Before His Circumstances Changed
When we first meet Gideon in Judges 6, this man is not sitting on his front porch drinking coffee while birds chirp peacefully in the background. Israel is being severely oppressed by the Midianites, and Gideon is literally threshing wheat inside a winepress because he’s trying to hide what he has from the enemy.
This is not exactly what I would call a peaceful season.
He’s afraid. He’s hiding. He’s questioning God. And if I’m being honest with myself, I’d probably be doing the exact same thing Gideon was doing. Hiding.
Get this, when the angel of the Lord tells him that the Lord is with him, Gideon’s response is basically, Well, if God is with us, then why in the world is all of this happening?
Can we just stop for a moment and appreciate Gideon’s raw truth for a second?
Because that sounds a whole lot more like real life than “I’ve got my whole life all together” answer.
Lord, if You’re with me, why does this look like this?
If You’re leading me, why is this so hard?
If You spoke that promise, why am I still standing here?
I know many of us have asked those same questions in different seasons of our life.
Gideon hadn’t seen the breakthrough yet. Midian was still Midian. The enemy hadn’t disappeared. The battle hadn’t even really begun.
And yet right there, before his circumstances changed, God spoke peace to him.
“Peace! Do not be afraid.”
Come on now!! Wrapping my head around how God works and seeing life through His lens is beautiful!
What did Gideon do next?
He built an altar and called it Yahweh Shalom — The LORD is Peace.
Oh, my friends. Don’t miss that.
Gideon did not build that altar after the victory.
He built it before the battle.
There were still enemies surrounding Israel. There were still impossible odds ahead. There were still things Gideon didn’t understand and places God was about to ask him to walk that would require enormous faith and deep trust.
But Gideon discovered something we desperately need to remember:
Peace wasn’t the absence of Midian. Peace was the presence of God.
I want to say that again - Peace isn’t the absence of your circumstances....Peace is the presence of God!!
And sometimes I think we get stuck thinking that peace will come after…..
I’ll have peace after this gets settled.
I’ll have peace after I know what’s happening.
I’ll have peace after the door opens.
I’ll have peace after God answers me.
But biblical shalom says we don’t have to wait until after the story is resolved to live surrounded by the completeness of God. Because our peace isn’t coming from what’s happening around us. Our peace is coming from who our mind is stayed upon.
And get this — shalom eventually became a greeting used both when coming and when going.
Hello — shalom.
Goodbye — shalom.
I just love that visual because that to me, is the full circle!
When you walk in — shalom.
When you walk out — shalom.
When something begins — shalom.
When something ends — shalom.
When the answer comes — shalom.
And while you’re still waiting — shalom.
God’s peace isn’t reserved for one little compartment of our life where everything happens to be going well. His shalom reaches into every part of it.
So if your world feels a little noisy today, don’t spend all your energy trying to manufacture peace by getting everything around you under ‘your’ control.
Bring your mind back to Jesus.
Keep your thoughts FIXED on Him.
Lean the full weight of what you don’t understand onto the One who does.
Because Isaiah doesn’t say God keeps the person with the perfect circumstances in perfect peace.
He keeps the person whose mind is stayed on Him.
Shalom, shalom.
~Tracee
Something new is growing.
Unveiled Roots launches Wednesday, September 2nd — (Apple Podcast, Spotify, Youtube, Unfiltered Faith Substack, and more) and this is going to be about so much more than another conversation about faith.
We’re going to dig deep into Scripture and ask what a deeply rooted life in Christ really looks like. What needs to grow deeper? What needs to be uprooted? Where have we settled into familiarity instead of continuing to grow? And how do we build a faith that doesn’t just know about Jesus, but truly abides in Him and walks with Him every day?
It’s time to strengthen our roots, mobilize our faith, and put shoes on what we believe.
Join me beginning September 2nd for Unveiled Roots.
Because when your roots grow deep, freedom is unveiled.