Coming to Peace by Controlling Your Mind

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Dove flying.

I want to give us today some keys to controlling our mind and entering the peace and the joy of God.

First, it comes from a psychology viewpoint, and I think they really did a good job, so I'm just going to read it to you.

This suggests that the highest form of peace lies in releasing the need to be understood, admired, pitied, or known, because these desires tie your internal state to external factors that you cannot control.

When you crave admiration or recognition, you often subconsciously perform a version of yourself designed to get approval.

Letting go of this desire allows you to act based on your own authentic values, rather than trying to satisfy an audience, which significantly reduces the mental exhaustion of constant social negotiation.

Relying on external validation, whether it's someone finally understanding your pain or admiring your success, makes you emotionally unstable and fragile.

If your worth is assigned by others, it can be taken away by them.

When you stop reading others to validate your reality, however, your self-worth becomes self-generated and unshakable.

Seeking to be understood or pitied stems from a desire for others to mirror our internal feelings.

When you release this expectation, criticism or misunderstanding loses its power to ruin your day.

You also no longer feel the need to explain or to send yourself to people who may never intend to understand you anyway.

According to the self-determination theory, autonomy and self-acceptance are the core drivers of well-being.

True peace isn't about being invisible or isolated, it's about being grounded in your own identity, and you no longer feel that you are required to be validated by others.

Now, many people have approached this same problem, and so I want to tell you another way that someone helped me long ago, when I was a young man, to learn to begin to control my own mind and emotions, and the fruits have been very good, and I'll tell you about them as we get closer to the end of this message.

One of the keys to controlling our mind is to realize that most of us have a civil war going on inside, of desires and fears that we won't get those desires or needs met.

For instance, will I be one of the popular people at work or school?

Will I be promoted at work?

Do my parents love me?

Does my spouse love me?

Do people respect me?

Do they think I'm pretty or good-looking?

First, we have to decide to end the almost constant back and forth many of us have in our mind and emotions.

We need to decide to end the civil war within and let the peace of God and the joyful life that God intends for us to start to dominate and enter us.

Here's some advice that I got, and I want to share it with you.

Once we decide to go ahead and fight that civil war and win it, one of the ways is to rise up as a warrior of God that he created us to be and to be alike in pleasure and pain, praise and blame, joy and sorrow, to be a person of discernment and to leave the pairs of opposites behind.

This may sound radical, but as you leave this push and pull on your mind and emotions, you enter peace, something that most of us don't have.

When we come to peace, we will gradually be flooded with the joy and energy and intelligence of God.

I have lived this way for more than 50 years, and it works.

I want to give you a little teaching that comes out of a book that Nancy and I wrote called Welcome to the Family Business that illustrates this pretty well.

There are two characters, Conal and Skye, and Conal is giving Skye a lecture because she's caught up in the civil war.

Conal is a little older and wiser, and he's going to give her some hints on how to end that war and to enter into God's peace.

They sat down near a stream.

Conal said, "Don't try to do anything," he said, not sharply, almost casually, "Just sit."

She glanced over. His blue eyes were calm, almost amused, as if he already knew that she would eventually understand.

She remembered feeling slightly foolish, like she should be doing something better than sitting on a rough slab in the woods.

"Stop filling the space," he added after a moment. "Let it be empty."

She bristled at the word. Empty sounded like loss, like absence, like being left.

"I don't mean empty like nothing," he said, as if he had felt the resistance before she spoke it.

"I mean empty like a cup, expecting to be filled."

They sat there for a long time, long enough for everything else to fade—birds, water, wind higher up the slope.

Her breathing, which she only noticed once it slowed.

And then, without warning, something shifted. The effort stopped.

The part of her that was always managing, bracing, interpreting, and proving stepped aside.

It just wasn't needed anymore.

The space it left behind did not feel hollow.

"That is it," Conal said as they faced the stream. "Don't chase it."

She didn't ask what it was. Asking felt unnecessary. Words would have been clumsy there.

Later, he stood, pulling something from his pocket—cash, folded once.

"Here," he said, placing it in her hand and closing her fingers around it. "Hold this."

She looked at him, confused, but did what he said.

The bills were still warm from his pocket.

"Now," he said, sitting back down, "Say, give it to me."

She blinked. "What?"

"Say, 'Give it to me.'"

So she looked at him and said, "Give it to me."

And each time she said it, the words felt stranger, almost embarrassing.

She opened her hand and closed it again, fully aware of the money resting there.

"I already have it," she finally said.

"I know," he replied.

But she said it again anyway, "Give it to me."

Something in her chest tightened, not from effort, but recognition.

The absurdity of it. The unnecessary strain. The way her body still wanted to take what was already hers.

"You're fighting for something that was never withheld," he said.

"That's what people do with God.

They beg for affection, which was given at creation.

They fear rejection from a love that never left."

She went still.

"You know the lines," Conal said, looking at the water. "You had me at hello."

She glanced at him.

"That's God speaking," he said. "You had Him at hello."

A new thought about God landed in her, small but alive, like a seed just planted.

They never talked about it again, not directly.

And she never told anyone else. The moment felt too exposed.

But she carried it along inside of her.

And she found a new stillness and a peace and a joy and energy that she'd never had before, though it took a while to unfold.

And if you will try these things—and I have lived this way for a very long time—you will find that you're not part of this horrible fight in the society around you.

So you rise above it in a way that leaves you free to interact.

You don't retreat from life.

But you will win more of life's battles with much less effort and be much happier in the meantime.

And you'll have long periods of rest, which most of us rarely ever get.