e180 Is God’s Peace Running Through You? (a peace like a river kind of thing)

Here’s the gist, human. I find myself growing beyond spiritual ultimatums like “I am at peace” as if peace in God is a static condition. For me peace is a tributary of God’s nature, his spirit running through my heart. And I have to listen for it.

Moving water takes its cue from its Creator. God navigates our choices, our mental roadblocks, our psychological debris from the past, our grief, our fear of failure, our fear of anything, everything. It’s pretty clear. Rivers shape landscapes. This is why God turns our attention to it. So we can more deeply understand how he moves. 

Join us. E180. Is God’s Peace Running Through You? (peace like a river kind of thing)

Faith to Witness 99, motivating us to hear God and share the Shepherd. 

As a child finding my way through elementary school, I have distinct small town memories that shaped my idea of fun, friends, competition and challenge. The town I lived in had a downhill slope from the elementary school to the beginning of downtown at the other end. When we had a summer rain storm, we all knew what it meant. Stick races. Our little band of rain bandits would make our way to the school, picking our sticks along the way. Stick racing would begin, from the top of town to the bottom. We would each tag our stick with an identifying mark so we could track them. We would follow along, cheering the stick brigade through the gutters, beyond the swirling drains across from the welding shop, to debris all along the way that kept the sticks from progressing. I learned stuff about life by watching how the rain water navigated what was in front of it, and the lesser mobility of our sticks that followed through it. It taught me about being prepared for anything. And the power of water.

I hold close to my heart the movement of that gutter river. And the anticipation, the joy a summer rain delivered. I adored it. And since that summer over summer over summer, I have held close the power of water—in a pool, in a country stream, a river, and on the ocean.

My heart is a riverbed. God’s peace runs through it.

I’m Kathryn Bise, your host.

Jesus says he is the living water to the Samaritan woman at the well: 

John 4: 13 

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Jesus says that the water he gives will “well up” into eternal life. It literally means to “overflow from within.” I read somewhere that rivers act as the planet’s arteries supporting thousands of species and sustaining civilizations with water, food, and transport. 

So this is time well-spent, isn’t it? To embrace how God created rivers, and likens them to his peace.

God’s Peace Like a River

It’s easy for me to remember the lyrics from the hymn “peace like a river” but it takes on new meaning as I struggle through the grief of losing my dog. 

Five days after we let our sweet wheaten girl go, on the evening of day five, there was a two-hour period around dusk when my heart felt something different, a little calmness trickling through it. Not rushing, not overtaking, but trickling. My thoughts swelled with surrender to my grief, wanting to brim over into more tears, but my heart stopped to listen to the sound of that trickling, a trickling of the spirit. Like I said, it didn’t take up my whole heart. But it felt like God was navigating my pain, that he was making his way through and around the river rocks of grief, shock, denial. He gave me a reprieve from crying. A reprieve from all the tragic feels of the flesh. For about 120 minutes.

God was finding the river-way through my heart.

Isaiah 66:12-13 

“For this is what the Lord says: ‘I will extend peace to her like a river, and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream; you will nurse and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees'”. 

God is using a river as a powerful metaphor for how he will bring peace to Jerusalem. And that he will bring wealth like a flooding stream. 

What I am feeling in how God moves me through my grief could not be more accurately described. And it is teaching me so much about how Holy Spirit moves from within. That how God transforms us is not like the flood of Noah’s ark. He promised to never do that again. 

God refers to the natural order of his creation all the time in his story. We have many references to the power of the river dynamic to represent God’s peace.

In the beginning, God sustained the original garden with it:

Genesis 2:10: “A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters”

The nature of the river to sustain and transform a human, and bring joy to God’s dwelling place:

Psalm 1:3: “That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.”

Psalm 46:4: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells” 

That justice does well to move like it:

Amos 5:24: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” 

How the spiritual river works in us from within:

John 7:38

38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

And in the end, that the river flows from God’s throne:

Revelation 22:1: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” 

These verses illustrate the river as the divine source of spiritual sustenance. The power of God’s movement.

God Navigates His Peace Through Our Free Will

So let’s briefly consider five types of river currents within the context of how God navigates our free will.

Laminar Flow: Smooth, straight-line water movement, typically in deeper, slower sections.

Turbulent Flow: Chaotic, fast-moving water often caused by obstructions, creating rapids, riffles, and boils.

Eddies/Eddy Lines: Areas where water rotates or flows upstream, usually found behind obstacles or on the inside of bends.

Undertow/Undercurrents: Powerful, often invisible downward or backward currents that can pull swimmers under, particularly near dams or submerged hazards.

Surface Currents: The fastest-moving water, usually found in the center of the river. 

Moving water takes its cue from its Creator. God navigates our choices, our mental roadblocks, our psychological debris from the past, our grief, our fear of failure, our fear of anything, everything. It’s pretty clear. Rivers shape landscapes. This is why God turns our attention to it. So we can more deeply understand how he moves. 

Let God Shape Our Spiritual Landscape

The Congo River is the world’s deepest recorded river, with measured depths reaching over 220 meters (720 feet) in certain areas. The river is deep enough to submerge Manhattan’s Met Life Tower. 

We often strive for a life that is deep. 

The Nile River is widely considered the longest in the world, stretching approximately 6,650 kilometers (4,130 miles).

We often strive for a life that is long.

So, how about the Jordan River in Israel? Because some of the most amazing, powerful scenes in God’s story happened on this river, yes? The river that Joshua led the chosen people through to the Promised Land, the river Elijah parted, then was taken to heaven, the river that was home to John the Baptist’s ministry and the baptism of Jesus to ordain the beginning of his ministry. Yet this river is small, and shallow, averaging 90–100 feet wide and a depth of 3–10 feet. But God. A God who created rivers to nourish, to sustain landscapes and to represent his power and his glory. 

We should stop striving and let his river run through us.

National Geographic characterizes the impact of a river like this:

“Rivers are important for many reasons. One of the most important things they do is carry large quantities of water from the land to the ocean. There, seawater constantly evaporates. The resulting water vapor forms clouds, which carry moisture over land and release it as fresh water in precipitation. This fresh water feeds rivers and smaller streams. The movement of water between land, ocean and air is called the water cycle. The water cycle constantly replenishes freshwater sources, which is essential for almost all living things.”

(A link to the article and credits are here: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/understanding-rivers/

I am learning that when I call for God’s peace, I think of how God moves through my life, transforming my spiritual landscape within the vast scope of his mighty means:  the power of rushing water to the gentleness of a meandering stream. It doesn’t happen all at once. It is a spiritual recycling.  

Jesus is the living water. He continues to create a new route for my heart, slowing my river roll, re-channeling the pace of my water-logged grief to make me stronger. He releases me from the paralyzing obstacles of the grief I stubbornly hang on to, coaxing me to move on with him downstream, and upstream, in my life. 

God’s River Moves Us Downstream 

I am learning so much about God’s peace through the lens of grieving. I find myself growing beyond spiritual ultimatums like “I am at peace” as if peace in God is a static condition. For me peace is a tributary of God’s nature with his spirit running through my heart. And I have to listen for it.

Because, oh, how God navigates my free will. Not just in grieving. In all of it. 

My wrong choices, my faltering steps, my indecision, and the flesh vs spirit debris left along the way of my human condition. 

Oh, how God navigates your free will. Your wrong choices, your faltering steps, your indecision, and the flesh vs spirit debris left along the way of your human condition. 

So hey human, listen for God’s rushing water, listen for the trickling, fall in to his meandering. Listen for the moments when he brings you through, when he brings you forward in the middle of a moment, the dead center of a challenge the human condition brings to your life. As he shapes the landscape of your soul, God is finding, he is shaping the river-way through it.

His peace. His river.