Guard Your Peace

Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash

“Keep yourself free from the love of possessions and be at peace with what you have.” – Hebrews 13:5a

You see a commercial on TV or an ad on a website, and there it is: the thing you never knew you wanted, until now. It promptly and firmly embeds itself in the back of your mind (and those clever online ads keep showing it to you—especially if you clicked and took a closer look the first time), and you find yourself thinking about how you might use it, where you might keep it, when you could wear it, or how you’ll pay for it.

That’s a pretty familiar experience for me, and maybe it is for you, too. After all, we’re advertised to constantly, with slick, targeted pitches, fine-tuned by focus groups for one purpose: to reel you in. That’s just a part of life today.

But when I read Hebrews 13 recently, verse 5 taught me to see all of that in a new light. “Be at peace with what you have,” the author urges us.

Peace.

These advertisements and the desires that they cultivate within us disrupt your peace. Through them, the prospect of the next thing slams into your contentment like a rock hitting the surface of a pond, unsettling everything. The peaceful water is gone, replaced by the choppy ripples of covetousness.

If you have any kind of collecting hobby, try to keep up with the latest personal devices, buy books you could never hope to get around to, are always surprised at the amount of clothes in the closet that still have their tags, or never met a tool you couldn’t imagine a need for, you’ll understand this. You're never quite at peace with what you have. You're always daydreaming of or on the lookout for what’s next, the newest thing.

“Keep yourself free from the love of possessions and be at peace with what you have.”

This reminds me of two words of advice from Richard Foster’s classic guide to spiritual practices, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. He ends his chapter on Simplicity with ten very practical principles, including:

1. Learn to enjoy things without owning them. “Many things in life,” he writes, “can be enjoyed without possessing them. Share things. Enjoy the beach without feeling you have to buy a piece of it. Enjoy public parks and libraries.” When the desire to own something new floods your mind and steals your peace, maybe the first question you need to ask is, “Could I use this or enjoy this without having to own it?”
2. Reject anything that’s producing an addiction in you. Foster has more in mind here than drug or alcohol addiction. He mentions coffee, Coca-Cola, chocolate, TV. “Any of the media that you find you cannot do without, get rid of… Refuse to be a slave to anything but God.” If a desire for more and more is disrupting your peace, you may to consider if you’ve been fueling that desire by repeatedly indulging it, and it’s produced a sort of addiction. Is it time to go cold turkey?

You’re going to be bombarded today by images and messages trying to whet your appetite for something else. I hope that we’ll all begin taking steps to guard the contentment and peace in our hearts and minds from the world’s assaults.

You can listen to this week's devotional right here!