Is "Personal Peace" A Good Thing?

Francis Schaeffer, my spiritual mentor, used to warn about what he saw as a pernicious temptation for Christians in the West: personal peace, along with the affluence that made the pursuit of it possible. The problem is that life has gotten to busy, margins to slim, and stress so constant that personal peace seems less a temptation to avoid than a respite to be embraced. We can even come up with spiritual sounding justifications for pursuing it. The true solution to these pressures, though, is carefully planned cycles of rest.

Personal peace, in contrast, is an attempt to keep from having to walk by faith, an escape from everything that is different from us as if our comfort is the final standard of all that is obedient for a believer.

It is foolish to try, but sometimes I try to imagine what Christ went through to enter my world: From an infinite, all-encompassing omnipresence to be a fetus in a womb, as the deity of all life to a slow, agonizing death by crucifixion, the One who spoke far-flung galaxies into existence yet was disblieved by the ones he came to love. My mind boggles.

- Denis Haack, from the latest edition of Critique magazine, in an article called, "Pushing Beyond Comfort Zones"

Critique is a magazine that you all really should check out. Denis does most of the writing and it's superb. Sign up to recieve this in the mail by clicking here.