Righteousness and Peace Kiss Each Other
Lisa Cooke
“Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
– Psalm 85:10
“And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.”
– Isaiah 32:17
Peace. That wonderful quality of calm and serenity that can be so difficult to maintain in the turbulent days of our lives, is linked with righteousness, not with circumstances. This is good news for those of us who seek for the peace of God to rule in our hearts (Colossians 3:15). We may not be experiencing peaceful feelings due to outward conditions or events, but we have been graced with the possibility of an internal state of peace which can remain unaffected by what goes on around it.
This internal state of peace is regulated by righteousness, our right standing with God. We tend to forget or ignore our position as righteous before the Father in our day-to-day existence. Our challenge, then, is to be spiritually minded as opposed to being carnally minded as we navigate the life journey we are traveling. To be spiritually minded is life and peace, Romans 8:6 tells us, and this is the goal set before us by the Holy Spirit.
Righteousness to the spiritual mind is being accepted in the Beloved. We have faith in the work of Christ on our behalf concerning our sin that separated us from God, thus bringing us into this acceptance. 2 Corinthians 5:21 reads, “For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” Our confidence in all that Jesus has lived and died and lives again for can be an “undisturbed resting place” (Isaiah 32:18) for our conscience, for our souls. But this wonderful reality must have the priority in our everyday thinking to be able to work its full benefit in our lives. We must give righteousness its rightful place in our understanding of who we are in Christ. We are to “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24).
Jesus made “peace by the blood of His cross” so that we “who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds He has now reconciled in His body of flesh by His death, in order to present us holy and blameless and above reproach before Him…”(Colossians 1:20-22). Being holy, blameless and above reproach before God is the basis for the kind of peace that passes our understanding. Allowing this “peace of Christ to rule in our hearts” (Colossians 3:15) means we have exalted what Christ has done for us above whatever comes our way in the world.
Being righteous before God our Father brings a “quietness and trust” in the face of the trauma and drama of our lives. It generates a confidence in the promises that God has made to us, knowing that we belong to Him and He does not lie to His children. Our sense of wellbeing is directly related to our acceptance and comprehension of our righteousness before God through Christ. Let us fully accept this free gift we have received from the nail-scarred hands of our Savior and in doing so, honor Him who gives us His peace.