AS I WRITE these words, I think of all the ongoing stories of conflict and unrest that dominate our news feeds: war and invasion, geopolitical strife, persecution, and every type of crime imaginable. The scope and scale of all this brokenness and sin is too much to imagine, too much to take in. Wouldn’t it be nice if it would all just go away? Couldn’t people just learn to get along, to work things out? Wouldn’t we all want to live in a world filled with peace?

Yes, that would be delightful. And it’s good to hope and pray for peace.

The question, though, is how honestly and personally we can pray such a prayer. It’s like reciting the Lord’s Prayer. You can say the words, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and move on with the rest of your day. But if we pray those words with full honesty, with the willingness to have our hearts searched and known as the psalmist once prayed, then we should be left pondering the ways we ourselves fail to do God’s will.

So it is with prayers for peace. Such prayers should go hand in hand with the commitment to be people of peace ourselves, in our homes and personal lives, in all our relationships, in our congregations. That’s the apostle Paul’s pastoral vision for the Colossians — and for us.

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LET’S CIRCLE BACK for a moment to the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. As we saw back at the beginning of our study, Paul takes the typical greeting that would have been expected in letters of his day and transforms it, investing it with spiritual significance. It’s much, much more than just “Hi! How are you doing?” or “Dear Colossians.” Rather, Paul writes, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father” (Col 1:2, NIV).

We can think of this as a mashup of traditional greetings from different cultures. As I described in an earlier post, letters of Paul’s day would typically begin with the greeting Chaire (KY-ray). But Paul swaps in the related word charis (KAR-is) instead, the word he uses for the “grace” of God. The word “peace,” meanwhile, echoes the way Jews would greet one another with a hearty “Shalom!” While we often think of peace as the absence of war, conflict, and everything bad, the biblical meaning of shalom is far richer. It’s not just the absence of the bad but the presence of the good. And not just any good, but good as God would define it. Think of the way a gracious and loving God created the world to be, a world that he pronounced to be good at every step along the way: that’s shalom.

“Grace and peace to you from God our Father,” Paul therefore tells the Colossians from the outset. Again, that’s not just a fancy way of saying hi. He’s describing what he as an apostle of Jesus wants to see in the Colossians’ relationship to one another. Here’s how he says it in chapter 3:

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. (Col 3:15-17)

He’s just finished telling them to set their minds and hearts on things above, which then entails putting off their old nature and putting on the new. They are no longer to treat each other with anger, malice, and prejudice, but with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience instead — and above all, with love, the virtue that holds all the rest together and represents full Christian maturity.

And here in these verses, he moves from love to peace, to shalom. Paul uses the language of vocation here. It’s not just, Wouldn’t peace be nice? Well, then do something about it. They were called to be one body in Christ, and that in turn means that they were called to peace. The idea of their being called in this way goes with Paul’s description of the Colossians earlier in verse 12 as God’s “chosen people, holy and dearly loved.” They are now part of the people of God, a people who still longed for the promised day of shalom. That day, Paul seems to say, has already come in and through Jesus.

Is it perfect peace? No, or at least, not yet. Paul doesn’t expect that their old ways will suddenly and entirely disappear. The Colossians will need to keep seeking the things above and putting off their old, earthly habits of thought and behavior. But as Paul said back in chapter 1, the “peace of Christ” that they are to embody has already been won by Jesus on the cross:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Col 1:19-20)

If Jesus has already made peace through his blood, therefore, if all things have already been reconciled, shouldn’t the Colossians be able to be reconciled to each other, despite their old habits of anger, slander, lying and the like?

The short answer, of course, is yes. Their new nature is a reality, even if it doesn’t always show. But that’s why Paul’s command, “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,” has two sides. On the one hand, the Colossians already have the peace of Christ, the peace Christ accomplished on the cross, the peace that now also belongs to the Colossians as believers. On the other hand, however, they have to be commanded to let that peace “rule in their hearts,” for to do so isn’t their natural way of living and relating to one another.

The word that the New International Version translates as “rule” is an interesting one; this is the only place it appears in the New Testament. Paul has, though, used a different and more intense form of the word in Colossians 2:18, where it suggested arrogant people passing judgment on others whom they deemed to not be spiritual enough. At root, the word suggests being an arbiter or umpire.

So imagine that: letting the peace of Christ umpire our relationships instead of self-centeredly passing judgment on each other. What a concept.

That’s the “peace” part of applying Paul’s greeting of “grace and peace.” What about the “grace” part? As we’ll see next, it has to do with gratitude.