Shoes of Peace
By: Sarah Jenkins
To my sisters who live near and abroad. May these thoughts encourage you, as they encouraged me:
Do you know what it means to prepare your heart? The bible says “…prepare your hearts for the LORD, and serve Him only, and He will deliver you...” (1 Samuel 7:3 NKJV).
Preparing our heart is when we take TIME both praying and thinking. It’s what gives us a firm foundation, so that when our soul wants to give sway, it doesn’t. There is a pause of time we have before every hardship. It helps us prepare how we will respond - a little pocket of time. These times are important. We seize these times to think and pray so that we will be prepared for our trials.
Jesus seized these pockets of time to prepare Himself for His hardships. For example, in Matthew 26, He knew He was about to die. His closest friends didn’t comprehend it; He was carrying this burden alone… as He went into the garden and kept walking by Himself. In the still night, He walked. This pause in time would prepare Him for His hardship full of sorrow. He was going to prepare Himself. He started sweating what was like drops of blood, and He spoke to God. As He quietly spoke to God, He was working through His thinking by accepting God’s will for Him through His prayers, and He was calling on God, His Father.
Jesus calls God “Father” as He prays. This was part of how He prepared.
This point may seem insignificant to us, because we are so used to calling God “Father”, but there’s so much here to talk about. Calling God “Father” wasn’t their custom back then. No, people didn’t call God Father until Jesus taught them to. As Jesus was asked by people how they should pray, Jesus tells them. He starts His model prayer by calling God “Father”. What a shock this must have been for the people of that time! But this is the way Jesus taught people to pray. To bring God to a personal level, and this is what God wanted. We can see that in Jesus’s final prayer for Himself; He calls on God in the garden alone. There is a closeness He shares with God when going through hardships, and He gets his firm foundation through God. God is going to get Him through whatever lies ahead.
“Father…” He says.
“Father, let not my will be done, but your will be done.”
A person who prepares their heart sets their mind on God’s desires. “Let not my will be done, but your will be done” Jesus said.
It wasn’t always “easy” for Jesus to be this way. It didn’t just come “natural” to be set on doing the will of His father. Remember just before this event, just a few chapters before this, Peter tried to get Jesus to not do the will of God? He tells Jesus to stop talking about dying. Jesus couldn’t hear that kind of talk: “Get behind me Satan!” Jesus says. “For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of men” (Matthew 16:23). He had His mind made up, and He wasn’t going to let anyone take control of the direction He was determined to go. He wasn’t caught off guard by any of the events in his last hours. His mind was prepared for them because of the time He spent making himself ready. So, Jesus’s last hours were trials for Him.
But what does this mean - everything is always a trial? No, sometimes there are temptations - this was something Jesus was also aware of. Remember, He told people it was a good idea to pray, “Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil.” This request was made in His model prayer. As followers of Christ, we anticipate that there will be an urge to sin that might be unexpected, and only God our Father knows how to move us from that path before it even comes into fruition. We anticipate temptations and make ourselves ready. Our dependency is on God for these things, not ourselves, and as a result of that, we experience peace.
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians will help us understand this—and it sums all this up so perfectly. He says our feet need to be, “fitted with readiness for the gospel of peace.”
We are ready as we walk like Jesus. In our sorrows of hardship we walk to God. Our prayer life acknowledges how helpless we are by ourselves. Our dependency is on God, not ourselves. When everything feels out of control, everything is in complete control with God. When we feel pathetic and call on God, it results in strength: “This poor man called, and the LORD heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles” (Proverbs 34:6). The Bible also says, “The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him and He delivers them” (Psalms 34:7). Our good Father keeps us from temptation when we ask for His help.
As we go to prepare our hearts for our trials, we need to know our good Father extends Himself to us- that He leans in with every prayer we say, no matter how quietly we speak; there is nothing like that kind of peace! This is the readiness that we have; through our Father who helps us in all life’s challenges.
“Peace to you from our Lord and Father Jesus Christ.” Paul also would say. Peace to you sisters, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!