======================================================================== HOW DO WE MAINTAIN INNER CALM AND OUTWARD COMPOSURE？ by Alan Martin ======================================================================== Summary: This sermon emphasizes the importance of experiencing the peace of God, which leads to wholeness, integrity, and balance in life. It discusses the significance of maintaining inward calmness and outward composure through the power of grace, the Holy Spirit, and the Word of Truth. The message highlights the need to discern between the thoughts of the flesh and the mind of the Spirit, allowing believers to live in peace, tranquility, and harmony even in the midst of difficulties. Topics: "Peace of God", "Living in Harmony" Scripture References: Romans 8:6, Hebrews 5:14, Ephesians 6:16, Romans 12:2, James 3:6, Galatians 5:16, James 1:21, Philippians 4:7 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This sermon emphasizes the importance of experiencing the peace of God, which leads to wholeness, integrity, and balance in life. It discusses the significance of maintaining inward calmness and outward composure through the power of grace, the Holy Spirit, and the Word of Truth. The message highlights the need to discern between the thoughts of the flesh and the mind of the Spirit, allowing believers to live in peace, tranquility, and harmony even in the midst of difficulties. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Good morning. There was a slight recording issue at the church this morning. I accidentally chose a setting that caused a 35-minute message to be able to be viewed in one minute, and it's quite comical, but I don't think I'll send that to you. But I do thought that those of you who aren't able to be with us deserve to hear the word of the Lord today. So let me give you kind of a Cliff's Note version of what was on my heart. It's a follow-up and a follow- through from last week where I talked about the peace of God is that wholeness in your life where the grace of God and the work of God's Spirit and word in your life produce this integrated life, there's integrity, things are in sync, they're balanced, there's harmony, so that it's going well with you, and that synchronization of grace at work is just in your mind, in your thoughts, in your conversation, in your emotions, it affects you physically, it affects all your relationship. It is genuinely the peace of God guarding your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. That's what he came to do, that God's people through Messiah would live in peaceful dwelling places, in undisturbed places of rest where life is whole. There are not areas in your life that are difficult at taking away from you, problematic, because God's grace is producing the peace of God in you, Jesus said, and it's a peace that he gives, not as the world gives. So with a peace we can experience a wholeness in life and integrity and balance in life that can be enjoyed even when times are difficult, even when there's tribulation, when external circumstances would seemingly contradict the possibility of things being whole. But because of God's grace at work in us, we can see God directing us in a proper way to respond so that things go well with us. And we looked at a verse last week, 1 Timothy 1, where Paul said, first of all, I want men in every place to live, to pray, offer prayers and petitions and request and intercessions and thanksgivings for kings and all those in authority and even all men. And he requested this so that believers would live a calm and quiet life or peaceful and quiet life in all godliness and reverence. Then Paul follows that by saying, this is good and pleasing to God who wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. God is pleased when we, his people, have that inner calmness and that outward composure that is produced in the life of the believer, the inner working of the Holy Spirit and the Word of Truth renewing our heart and mind. He doesn't like it. It's not pleasing to him. It's losing it when we freak out, when we're out of sorts, when we're out of control. The first word in that passage that we would live a tranquil and quiet life, the first word is inward because when you are inwardly calm and serene, you're undisturbed. There's a clarity because when there's agitation and disturbance on the interior of our life and our thoughts and our emotions, it produces a cloudiness. Just like when water is disturbed, it picks up sediment and the sediment causes there to be a lack of clarity. It's cloudy. It's muddy. There's too much debris. And when we encounter difficulties in this life, if we have not found the power of grace to remain calm, serene, and tranquil, old emotions, old thoughts, old experience will be stirred up internally. And that disturbance creates a lack of clarity. And it's not a safe time for us to speak or to make decisions because we're not seeing clearly. Only when our eye is single will our whole body be full of light. When we have a debris field floating internally, when we're wrestling with a storm of thoughts in the end time, we're not in that word, that Greek word that describes this inner calm. When we're inwardly calm by the power of the Holy Spirit's help, we can be outwardly composed. Because if we're troubled on the inside, we're going to make trouble or cause trouble on the outside. If we're stirred up on the inside and we lose it in the battle of our inward thoughts and emotions, we're going to lose it on the outside. Our speech will be affected, our countenance, possibly even our actions. So for the believer to experience that inward calm and that outward composure where your thoughts are chosen, they're ordered, they're carefully thought, and they're filled with grace. They're full of God's peace. They're full of God's mercy. They're a testimony to Him because they are empowered thoughts. The Spirit of Christ in you, guarding your heart and mind, is maintaining a calmness interiorly, and it manifests itself in this beautiful composure, a spiritual composure. You know, we're always amazed when we see someone that seems to have it all together, especially if it's a younger person who we think might have reason to be nervous or intimidated by the situation he's in, rise to the occasion and manifest a composure that seems beyond his level of experience or beyond his years. That is pleasing to God. As a matter of fact, Paul told the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 4.11, they should make it their ambition to lead a tranquil life because that inner serenity, that calmness and order of Spirit producing that beautiful composed life, conversation, character, and conduct is of great worth in the sight of God. Just like the woman whose beauty is not merely outward and physical, but it's the hidden beauty, that hidden manner of the heart of that meek and quiet Spirit that Paul said is of great worth in the sight of God. That meekness of Spirit, that restraint, that power under control that is characteristic of our Lord Jesus. He said, take my yoke upon you and learn of me for I am meek and lowly of heart. Meekness characterized the Lord Jesus. He only said what his Father told him to say. He only did what his Father showed him to do. He lived a life restrained by the proper reverence and fear and love of his Father. And this life, this meekness of Christ, that the power of the Holy Spirit, we live in the restraint of grace-empowered help, produces a beautiful life, a wholeness for us that is pleasing to God. And today, I wanted to direct my thoughts to how do we experience this as believers in the midst of the world we live in, where we encounter many difficulties, daily difficulties and situations that without the power of grace and the work of the Spirit within us, unsettle us and cause us to be disturbed, to cause it to lose it, lose control, to speak that which is unwholesome, to respond in ways that are unhelpful and only make situations worse. How do you discover that power of grace that help from God to remain inwardly calm and outwardly composed? Well, in Romans chapter 8, Paul mentions that actually we have the mind of the Holy Spirit and the mind of the Spirit is life and peace. The mind of the Holy Spirit is that wholeness of God. With the Spirit's help, things are integrated. Things are balanced. There is a proper response. There is a harmony where the grace of God actually teaches us the things that we should deny and the things that we should receive. And He guides us into this life where we can love life and see good days, keeping our tongue from evil and our lips from corrupt speech. We can turn from evil. We can do good. We can seek peace, this wholeness of God. We can pursue it. And the eyes of the Lord will be upon the righteous because He's so pleased when through looking to Him, He keeps us in perfect peace. He keeps us together. He keeps us whole. He keeps our life ordered and balanced and in sync, properly responding to difficulty, even making the struggle we face when we encounter tribulation and difficulties, making those things work together for good for us. Well, we have to learn the mind of the Spirit. Those who live according to the flesh, that the better translation would be those who are in the state of the flesh, mind the things of the flesh. Those who are in the state of the Spirit, mind the things of the Spirit. And the mind of the flesh is death. It's sin. It misses the mark. And the wages of missing the mark and life out of sync and disordered and chaotic and confused is death. It doesn't produce life or wholeness and certainly not the peace of God, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace. The order and the power of God is there in the mind of the Spirit, who's able to show us how to fully integrate and order all of our thoughts and our emotions in a way that produces a wholeness, a life that God desires for every believer. So for you and I, it's a matter of learning which is the mind of the flesh and which is the mind of the Spirit. We know that these two minds are in opposition to each other from what Paul wrote in Galatians. The flesh wars against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh. These are in conflict with one another so that you do not do what you want. So we, this is what often causes a turmoil within the believer is the, and a confusion as to which thoughts we're to receive and be led by. The word confusion itself means where things are fused together in a way that they cannot be separated. And this is a problem for those that have not developed the ability to separate the thoughts of the flesh from the mind of the Spirit. How do we as a believer learn to consistently separate what the thoughts of the flesh are from the thoughts of the Spirit? Well, the writer of Hebrews gives us that information. Hebrews chapter 5 says that the infant being still on milk is untested or inexperienced in the word of righteousness. Now what is the word of righteousness? The word of righteousness is that word spoken by God that produces righteousness. But that, but a person inexperienced and untested in certain situations has not learned to discern the word of righteousness because when God speaks His word and you believe the word He has spoken, receive it and respond on it, that produces righteousness. But that discerning and receiving the word of righteousness takes time because Paul goes, or the writer of Hebrews that is, goes on to say, but solid food, which is the word of righteousness, solid food is for the mature who by constant use or continual practice, in other words, developing the habit, they have, they had developed that habit of being able to separate good and evil. They have their senses trained to discern good and evil. So it's possible through training and the Greek word there is where we get the English word gymnasium through a consistent intentional training in seeking to discern or to train your senses to discern the voice of the flesh or the thoughts of the flesh and the mind of the spirit, which always speaks the word of righteousness, you become experienced, tested, proven in making a separation between the thoughts of the flesh and the thoughts of the spirit. And those who walk according to the spirit are consistently detecting, identifying the thoughts, the mind of the Holy Spirit, and it begins to transform our own thought pattern because the Greek word for the mind is the idea of a mind that has been trained, discipled, so that the mind frame has been built through habitual practice. The person habitually detecting the word of righteousness, that which the Holy Spirit is speaking will develop the ability to trust the word the spirit is speaking and believing the word the spirit is speaking is that faith that overcomes the world. Faith born out of the word of righteousness spoken to us by the Holy Spirit shows us the way of escape so that we don't succumb to a time of temptation. We know that God is faithful. He doesn't allow us to be tempted above what we're able to bear, but along with the temptation, he provides a way of escape so that we can bear up under it. Oftentimes it is the word of righteousness, that word spoken by the Holy Spirit in the midst of our temptation or tribulation that allows us to believe in the word of righteousness, be led to the truth, and experience freedom and victory through faith, through faith in the word of righteousness spoken by the Holy Spirit. This is what we need to train ourselves to detect because in the same book of Hebrews chapter 4 verses 12 it says that the word of God is living and active and it's sharper than any two-edged sword piercing deep even to the dividing of soul and spirit. There's that ability again shown there to divide is this thing that I'm struggling with is its origin in my soul or is this these thoughts are they from the spirit of God. We need to be able to divide that and discern and detect what's going on. It is the word of God that does that. It penetrates deep when we're in a time of confusion, when we're unable to separate the thoughts that are stirred up within us and we we're not detecting which is the way of righteousness. We're under a spiritual attack and our thoughts are not clear. The word of God penetrates that dividing us under soul and spirit, joints and marrow and is able to judge the thoughts and intents of the heart and the word judge there is krino. It's ability to separate out to actually poke out that which is right. The thoughts of the heart can be discerned, separated. The thoughts and intents of the heart can be separated so that you can distinguish which are the thoughts that are the mind of the flesh and which thoughts are the word of righteousness spoken by the Holy Spirit to guide us into truth and bring us into the way of escape simply by believing the word of righteousness, the victory that overcomes the world. You're already familiar that Paul spoke about the war that all of us are engaged in and have to deal with. We don't wrestle against flesh and blood. Our struggle is with principalities and powers, with rulers and high places and these principalities and powers are given permission by God to war with us, but their warfare is through influence. They can suggest thoughts, they can attack us with thoughts and ideas and the ability to discern the source of those thoughts and the nature of those thoughts is critical because we cannot extinguish the flaming arrow, which is a thought attack from the enemy. We cannot extinguish a flaming arrow before we can distinguish that it's an attack thought from the enemy. When the word of righteousness is spoken to us by the Holy Spirit and when through training our senses we can detect that these thoughts are attack thoughts, they are from the enemy and they're sent to influence in the wrong way to deceive us, to lead us off the path or to obscure our view and trust in our Heavenly Father to cause us to speak or react in a way that misses the mark, that it's not wisdom from above, it's not pure, it's not peaceable, it's not full of mercy, it's not full of good fruit, it's not impartial, it's not sincere, it's just natural, earthly, can even be demonic, argumentative, combative, defensive, usually because we're stirred up on the inside, we're not, things are not whole, we're not at peace, the peace of God is not guarding our heart and mind, our thinking is clouded, our emotions are stirred and we end up saying and doing the wrong thing and with the tongue as the instrument, a world of evil among parts of the body, which itself is sets the whole course of nature on fire and itself is set on fire by hell, in it when we're stirred up and agitated and cloudy in our thoughts, and we're not, we have lost that serenity, that tranquility, that calm, our tongue becomes one of the very sources of flaming arrows that attack other people, set on fire by the enemy, designed to create fire and disturbance and confusion and havoc in the lives of those around us, instead of what is pleasing to God by the power of His Holy Spirit in us, our remaining calm, serene and tranquil interiorly and only speaking with an ordered composure, weighing our words, weighing when we should speak them, weighing how we should speak them, even considering the tone, because words aptly spoken are like apples and golds in a setting of silver and the tongue has power of life, the tongue of the wise commends healing, but that wisdom comes from above, it will never come from the mind of the flesh, the thought of the flesh, those thoughts war against the mind of the Spirit, the mind of the Spirit that life in peace is able to keep our lives in sync, ordered, in balance, whole, that's the thought of the Spirit that are spoken to us, that are powerful and that are able to separate soul and spirit and penetrate even deep to the dividing asunder and judging, enabling us to separate the thoughts and intents of our heart, so that we can recognize, okay, this is an attack thought, this is a strategy of the enemy and listening to the word of righteousness, we do what Paul encouraged the believers to do in Ephesians 6, we take up the shield of faith, hearing the word of righteousness spoken by the Spirit, we believe the word of righteousness and through believing the word of righteousness, we extinguish the attack thought, the flaming arrow and it does not end up producing its intended result, it does not cause us to lose it, to act out, to get stirred up and then lose our composure in the Lord, this is a process that is possible for every believer, but it is a process that the writer of Hebrews says, requires constant training, who through constant use have trained their senses to discern good from evil, God is good and the words from God are the word of righteousness, which the infant, the inexperienced lacks discerning, it takes continual exercise, intentional and constant practice, it takes forming the habit of recognizing the word of righteousness separated from the thoughts of the enemy, the mind of the flesh that is constantly at war against the mind of the Spirit and those who learn to be led by the Spirit, who hear the Spirit speak the word of righteousness to them and who believe in the word of righteousness and allow that word of righteousness in the Spirit to lead them, those who walk by the Spirit, they stop fulfilling the lust of the flesh, that's the lust of the flesh, the desires of the flesh, that's what's causing the wars and quarrels within us internally and amongst believers and amongst the people in our lives, desires corrupted by the flesh, corrupted by sin, produce in the believer all kinds of things that disturb, that create disorder, that cause us to become out of sync, out of balance, to miss the mark, we miss what is best in allowing those thoughts to have their way in us, but when through constant practice, through training our senses to discern those are thoughts and desires of the flesh, this is the word of the Spirit, this is the word of righteousness, that person is led by the Spirit, those who are in the state of the Spirit, they mind the Spirit, they are enjoying because they're living under the influence and the grace of the mind of the Spirit, that's what the grace of God does, it trains us, it raises us like children, teaching us to deny ungodliness and worldly lust and deny those thoughts, deny the bait, deny the luring when we're tempted, deny, resist and wrestle against the attack thoughts, the thoughts that stir us up and unsettle us and seek to cause us to react, respond, speak in ways that are not guided, not righteous, not from God's heart, not his best. When we develop this, the mind of the Spirit, the renewing of our mind begins to become rooted and establish this, and you know through Paul's words in Romans 12, that when we stop conforming to the pattern of this world and we start becoming transformed by the renewing of our mind, we begin to be able to discern what is the good and perfect and pleasing will of God. Again, we're able to begin to separate that which is the goodness and the best and the will of God for us from the thoughts and the desires of the flesh, so those who are in Christ are not in that flesh. When you're in the state of being in Christ, abiding in Christ, those who belong to Christ crucify the flesh with its passions and lust. They're no longer dominated by, they're no longer as easily influenced by the thoughts and the lust of the mind of the flesh. They are led by the Spirit. They are the sons of God. They have trained their senses to discern the word of righteousness. They can separate good from evil, and when they're able to separate good from evil, they are not confused. They're not in that state where they're unable to separate. Everything is fused together. You can't see clearly. You can't think clearly. Instead, they see a separation because they have trained themselves, their senses are trained through constant use to listen for the word of righteousness, and it's through believing in the word of righteousness they learn to live by faith. Faith comes from the word of righteousness they hear, and that word of righteousness is spoken by the Spirit. Therefore, they are led by the Spirit. They live according to the Spirit. They keep in step with the Spirit, and they enjoy that mind of the Spirit, which is life and peace. And a final thought to leave you with this morning. How do you know when you have consistently, continually, habitually trained your senses to be able to separate good and evil? How do you know you have developed the habit of listening for the word of righteousness so that now you're experienced, you're settled, you're established in living according to the word of righteousness, living by faith? How do you know? How do you know when something becomes a habit in your life? There's a simple answer. It becomes what you do naturally. See, if any man is in Christ Jesus, he is a new creation. Old things pass away. Old habits, old patterns, old ideas, old reactions, they pass away. The way you naturally did things before passes away, and all things become new. Now you naturally respond with the mind of the Spirit. That's how you know you are those who are in the Spirit. They have the mind of the Spirit. How do you know you're in the Spirit and you are not in the flesh? When you begin to naturally do the things the Spirit and the grace of God has trained you to do. And I sure hope that we can enjoy this life as a believer because when we, through the power of the Holy Spirit in us, through His grace at work in us, that deep and powerful dynamic finishing work of Christ, when we discover how to separate that which is the thoughts and desires of the flesh from the pure, peaceable word of righteousness that the Spirit speaks to us, things will go well with us, and we will enjoy the peace of God. Our lives will be whole. We won't have those some areas in our life that are going well, while other areas just plague us because they're out of order. They're out of sync. We're not recognizing that we're missing a mark in certain areas. It's the word of righteousness. If we in meekness receive the implanted word, what is that word? That word is the word of righteousness. And the word of righteousness is able to save our soul. And I'm just so grateful that God's word is so powerful, so living, and so active, and it can pierce deep, and it can teach us. It can separate the thoughts and intents of our heart and train us how to recognize what the thoughts of the mind of the flesh are, so that we can choose to receive the words of the Holy Spirit, led by the Spirit, taught by the Spirit, keeping in sync with the Holy Spirit, and the peace of God that passes understanding will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. And the things, the old reactions of the flesh that used to be natural to us will pass away. And our new natural becomes Jesus, becomes Christ-like, becomes the mind of the Spirit. Those who live this way, they are the sons of God. And I sure hope we can all experience this together. God bless you. ======================================================================== Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/EBWLIBxY5lU.mp4 Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/alan-martin/how-do-we-maintain-inner-calm-and-outward-composure/ ========================================================================