God expects your peace capacity to grow continually.
Isaiah 9:6-7 NKJV
[6] For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given; And the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
[7] Of the increase of His government and peace
There will be no end, Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, To order it and establish it with judgment and justice From that time forward, even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
“Of the increase of His government and peace” means his government, his reign will continue to grow.
Where God reigns, his peace is there. God can not be in the midst of a nation or his people and his peace will be absent. If there is an increase in his government, there must be an increase in his peace.
The government of God is upon your life so his peace is in our life. As God continues to reign in our lives, his peace abides in our lives. The increase of his reign is equal to the increase of his peace in your life.
God expects you to continue to grow the capacity of peace for peace because the peace you have is the peace with God and peace from God. If it’s a peace with God and from God then it’s a peace that shall know no end.
God doesn’t just want you to have peace, he also wants you to experience an increase in the peace of God.
When God takes you through a situation, he doesn’t leave you the same. He stretches your capacity for peace such that when you come into that situation you’re not the same, he has taken you through a dealing, a process.
Those periods you are believing God for something seemingly big, you are being trained and we get to lay hold on peace.
The dealing you have endured in the past is enough to carry you to ask for a much bigger favor. It takes the same level of peace to get your answers. The only change noticeable is that you have grown in capacity for peace.
You no longer appear agitated or perturbed. You have the understanding that if God cannot be moved you cannot.
So, when you grow and your needs and aspirations become complex and bigger if you have survived the smaller things, then the capacity for bigger things is here.
All you need is the peace of God at every point.
Being the Prince of peace, His government shall know no end. The word “Prince” denotes the source. He is the originator of peace.
What God wants is that His rulership, reign and sovereignty keep growing. And as they are growing His peace keeps growing in your hearts. You have peace like a river. You have a depth of peace. That is the experience that God wants from you. The peace of God that transcends all understanding. The peace that the mind cannot capture.
You have that peace.
Paul was not disturbed when there was no moon and sun for days. He took bread and ate. There is a kind of peace that can hit us and people would keep thinking we are nonchalant.
Paul told the sailors that there shall be no loss. They did not hear what Paul heard. This is why it was difficult to understand what he was saying.
He told them the One that stood by him said he would yet appear before Caesar.
There shall be no loss. Nobody’s strands of hair shall fall. That experience cannot leave Paul. He has grown his capacity for peace.
Acts 27:20-25
The essence of all this is that He has given you His Son so that you can be in peace.
Worrying does not add anything to you. When you have gotten to a point in your lives where you have anchored your lives in God, you will survive and talk like David who said, “The Lord delivered me from the mouth of lions and bears.”
Many people have entered bigger problems by not waiting on God. Two days or even one hour can make a big difference by you waiting on God.
God is eagerly waiting to see your peace capacity grow. He wants to see you at peace in the storm. He wants to see you relax and settle and your life is not scattered because of an issue in an area of our life.
God wants to see you settled doing exploits, and running with the plans of God for your life.
Those experiences you’ve had are not in vain. And that’s why you must not be in a hurry to get out and go through what is called a shortcut. Some of us have dodged/wasted the dealings of God. And it didn’t end up producing the peace of God in our lives.
We are not so sure of the process, or how long it will take but what we are sure of is the outcome. God said, “When we go through the fire, it won’t burn us, when we go through water, it will not overwhelm us”. For the outcome, we are sure but for the process and duration, we may not be sure. What assures us is the peace of God.
The kind of sleep Peter slept with soldiers surrounding him with chains in his hands and they said they would bring him out the next day for execution and he would be executed, the same way John was, that the Jews had expectations but the bible said that “God frustrated the expectations of the Jews”.
Acts 12:1-4
One way to know your peace capacity is to constantly be reassured that God is with you. And the more you get reassured over and over what that does to you is that you are growing in your peace capacity. It will now become a reality. You have the full assurance that God is with us.
Even when you miss it you are supposed to run back to God. He is ever-present. The Psalmist says he is our ever-present help in times of trouble. He is constantly and consistently present. So the more you know, the more you are reassured of the presence of God, the more your peace capacity grows. Psalm 119:165.
As you come to understand the prevailing power of God’s word, the working power and dynamics of his word and know how to access his power from his word, nothing can get you to stumble. You will not be moved. If you want your peace capacity to grow, keep getting rooted and established in the word of the Lord and keep growing.
There is a scripture that will come up in your spirit that settles your fear. Usually, when you make confessions with the scriptures, the persuasion of the efficacy of the word comes from interaction with the word of the spirit. The fact that someone else might be saying the same words you are professing does not mean you both are saying the same thing. So you have to come to a place of dealings and experience with the word of God until such persuasion is produced in your spirit man.
Some of the things that the apostles wrote were products of encounters and they made such declarations on this premise.
You cannot over-pray, rather you have not prayed enough. Pray that your joy may be full. The more you pray and understand the dynamics of prayer, the more peace you experience. The more your capacity for peace grows.
The more you are assured that you are at the center of God’s will, he has a way of settling you down.