How to Experience The Spirit's Power in Your Life (Part 3)

"After they had prayed, their meeting place was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly."  Acts 4:31

There is one purpose for God's power:  to bear witness to the truth--Jesus Himself.
Because there is one purpose for God's power, there is one purpose for seeking God's power.
Because there is on purpose for seeking God's power, there is one experience of God's power.

Now this one experience, for one purpose, may be manifest in different ways...but it will achieve the very same and only goal:  to point people to the risen Savior, the Lord Jesus.

Whether you speak in tongues, heal the sick, cast out demons, teach a Sunday school class, home school your children, write a blog, wait tables--whatever you do to make Jesus known will have God's power.  Whether spectacular or regular, there will be power, if you want to make Jesus known.

Do you want to make Jesus known?  By that, I don't mean to argue about Jesus, or to try to prove He is who He said He is.  I mean do you want people to experience Jesus in you, the very Spirit of the Risen Jesus in your body?

Think of it this way.

You and I could meet, if you wanted to.  The best way for you to share who I am with someone is to have them meet me for themselves.  Now you could show them my blogs or books, or pictures.  You could introduce them to my wife and children and best friend.  But nothing surpasses them meeting me in person.

You know how you can see a picture of someone, even a very good picture, and then meet them and feel that kind of disorientation of who they actually are?  They seem taller, or shorter, than what you thought.  They seem friendlier, or more serious, than their picture.  Their voice doesn't quite match what you thought it would sound like.  All of this is because you're dealing with someone who is alive, and thus beyond your imagination and control.

Jesus is alive.  He isn't just bible stories, movies, or sermons.  He is a person.  And He's in you, if you believe in Him.  People experience Him in you by you introducing Him to them.

This is how:
1. Ask the Spirit of Jesus to permeate everything you think, say, and do, so that when people encounter you they will encounter Him in you.

2. Thank Him for doing it, because it is written, "If you asking anything in agreement with God's will, He hears you, and if you know that He hears you in whatever you ask, you know that you have received what you have asked of Him."  It is Jesus' will that you make Him known, that you will be His witness. So you can thank Him for doing what you asked.

3.  Bear witness to the truth.  Again, Jesus said, "For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.  All who are of the truth hear my voice."  It is also written, "Those whom God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son."  These two verses together mean that your purpose for being born again by the Spirit is the same as Jesus' purpose for being born by the Spirit:  to bear witness to the truth.  So do what Jesus did, and you will experience the same power He did.  Bear witness to the truth.  This is something you can do all day, everyday, no matter who you are, where you are, or what you are doing.  There is no situation where you don't need to bear witness to the truth.  Jesus said, "All who are of the truth hear my voice."  Those who seek truth will find Jesus.  Those who are open to hearing the truth are open to hearing Jesus' voice.

If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that He died for your sins and rose from the dead, and you want to experience the Spirit's power to make Jesus known, in you and through you, pray this prayer with me,

"Father, in the name of Jesus, fill me with Your Spirit, so that I can make Jesus known.  Thank you Father.  I will bear witness to the truth."

That's it.  You have the Spirit's power in your life, and you will experience it as you bear witness to the truth.

Tell me about your experiences in the comments section.  (And follow me, so we can continue to share these experiences.)

How to Experience The Spirit's Power in Your Life (Part 2)

"You will receive power when the Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses...to the ends of the earth."~The Lord Jesus, to His followers, before He ascended into heaven.

What does it feel like to experience God's power?
Before we can answer that question, we have to make clear what power is, and what it's for.

Power is ability to achieve a specific purpose.

So, if you are powerful, you feel capable of achieving whatever you set out to achieve.  You feel bold, courageous, confident, and capable to do what you are setting out to do.  This is the key to your experience of God's power:  if you are setting out to do God's will.

And what is God's will?

According to Jesus, it's to be His witnesses wherever you are on earth.

If you haven't experienced God's power, it's because you aren't setting out to do God's will.

Plain and simple.

But if you are in any way setting out to do anything that is inherently God's will, you will feel God's power in accomplishing that goal.  Put another way, if you want to be Spirit filled, you have to use Spirit filled skills.  By Spirit filled skills, I mean skills the Spirit will fill!  Or things that are inherently according to the Spirit's will.

For example, Jesus said, "When He, the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide you into all truth."  This means the Spirit is the source of truth, and of understanding truth.  But He's not just the source of truth.  According to John, "The Spirit is truth."  And Jesus said, "For this cause I was born, for this cause I have come into the world:  to bear witness to the truth.  All who are of the truth hear my voice."  So the Spirit of truth is truth, and guides us into all truth--the truth that we are supposed to bear witness to, just like Jesus was born to do.

If you want to be Spirit filled, use this Spirit filled skill:  bear witness to the truth.

But what is truth?

According to Jesus, "God's word is truth."  And according to Jesus, He Himself is "the Truth."

Which leads us back to Jesus' last words to His disciples.

Click HERE for part 3.

How to Experience The Spirit's Power in Your Life (Part 1)

"You shall receive power when the Spirit comes upon you..."  
~The Lord Jesus, to His followers, before He ascended into heaven, and sat at the right hand of God

As a follower of Christ, you have a superpower, The Super Power, The Spirit of the Almighty.  Jesus promised you this power, This Person, who would empower you and be your power.  By "power" Jesus meant "supernatural, miraculous, divine power."  I want to share with you what this power is and how you experience it.

GOD'S POWER IS THE SPIRIT IN YOU.
It is written, "God's eternal power and divine nature, though invisible, have been clearly seen through the things God made, so that we are without excuse."  God's power is eternal, unborn, undying, infinite.  This is the power of God, and this is the power Jesus promised His followers.  What this power is can be seen in the life of Jesus, our role model, who was supernaturally born, and who supernaturally lived.  The same is true for you, if you believe in Jesus.  You were supernaturally reborn, and you supernaturally live as Jesus did, as it is written, "As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the children of God."  It is written again, that "...as many as received Him, as many as believed in His name, He gave the power to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."  As Jesus was Spirit born, you are Spirit reborn.  And as Jesus was filled with and led by the Spirit, your birthright as a child of God is to be Spirit filled and led.  That's what this power is:  the Spirit of God in you, as your life, leading you and empowering you, as it is written, "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you received from God."  If you believe in Jesus, the Spirit of God lives in you.  This is God's power in you.  This is how you experience it.

GOD'S POWER IS EXPERIENCED BY ASKING FOR IT.
It is written, "If you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?"  God gives His children His Presence and Power when they simply ask for it.  It's that simple.  In the same way that you asked God to forgive you for your sins, and received forgiveness just for asking, so you receive the Spirit's leading and power just by asking.

"Is it really that easy?"  Yes, it really is that easy, if you believe what Jesus said.
"Then why is it that when I ask, I feel the same, and nothing seems any different?"

We'll get to that in the next blog. (Click HERE  for part 2.)

God's Anger and Ours (Part 4)

How could God have a real personality and not see what we see when we are sinned against, not thinking of sin as a theological abstraction, but as something that happens in a relationship?  This leads me to the core of what we've been thinking about together.

***

One modality used in therapy is CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  One way to approach therapy in this modality is  Albert Ellis' "A-B-C Theory."  

A=Activating Event

B=Belief about A

C=Consequent emotion and action.

Most people only see the connection between A and C, and they think A causes C.  For example, "I am angry (C) because my girlfriend doesn't help out with the dogs (A)"  As a future therapist, I would  help clients focus on or see the "B" belief that they are not putting into the equation, such as "If my girlfriend doesn't help with the dogs in the way that I want her to, she doesn't care about me."

So, cognitive behavioral therapy posits that it is not events that cause emotions and actions, but our thoughts and beliefs about the events.  If a brother received a phone call (activating event) stating that his sister had been in a horrible car accident, he would feel (consequent emotion) distress and thus want to get to where she is (consequent action.) But if the police called back (activating event) and said "Sir, we're sorry to distress you, we actually made a mistake.  Your sister is completely fine.  We had inaccurate information...," the brother would feel relief (consequent emotion) and thus thank God (consequent action.)  The only thing that changed in the brother's experience is what he believed about the activating event.  

Apply A-B-C theory to what I asked my pastor--about what God sees when I sin--or to questions about God's anger, judgment, and reaction to sinful people.  What we as a church seem to be teaching is that God's thoughts or beliefs about sin are drastically different from ours, misunderstanding verses like "My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts; as high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above your ways, and my thoughts about your thoughts."  We take this verse to mean that when we see black, God may in fact see white, or that God is arbitrary.  C.S. Lewis made it clear that this is illogical.  People would ask Lewis if God obeyed His own commandments, for example.  Lewis replied that God neither obeys nor creates His commands.  They are an expression of what He is.  God is not simply good, He is goodness.  So His commands (and thus emotions, which comes from his perceptions) are not arbitrary.  This is crucial to understanding God's anger and ours.

It means quite simply that God sees adultery like we see adultery.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that God is actually more hurt and angry than we are, that he feels things perfectly, and thus more intensely than us. For example, when David committed adultery with Bathsheba, God CONTINUALLY referred to Bathsheba as "Uriah's wife."  That sounds like God saw adultery exactly as it was.  He didn't take into account that David was "a man after his own heart," or that Bathsheba may have been lonely, etc.  He saw what David did for what it was, an evil act against God, Bathsheba, and Uriah--even against Israel, even against the unborn baby that died as a result of David's sinful act.  God saw and felt what we see and feel about an adulterous act.  Nathan's illustration to David to convict David of his sin makes the point even more.  David was furious about the illustration Nathan gave him, as any sane reader would be.  In other words, emotions have to be transferrable if they are real.  Nathan's illustration, and God's response through Nathan, showed that God saw and felt about adultery just as any person should see and feel about that evil act.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we should take our feelings, multiply them by a bazillion infinities, and make that what God feels.  But I am saying that our emotions are reflections of his, so that when God perceives an evil act, He feels what we feel about it when we are in our right minds--He feels it even more so.

Again, as Christians, we say things like, "Well, God knows my heart...only He knows our motives...etc."  Apply this to my wife walking in on me having sex with another woman.  Does God see...the blood of Jesus?..."my heart/motives?"--which are....what exactly?...as I'm having sex with another woman and my angry wife watches?  Does God see "a hurt little boy who doesn't really know how to love because his mommy never loved him and so Olatunde tries to find love in women?"  Is that what my wife sees?  I'm sure every adulterer or adulteress has "sexual/emotional baggage."  I'm sure the slave masters who beat and raped black people had "baggage."  I'm sure Hitler had "baggage."  But does this change what God actually sees, perceives, feels, and does?  

Consider two illustrations of ABC Theory:

Illustration 1:

Activating Event:  Hitler puts Jews in gas chambers.

God's Belief about what Hitler did:  ????

God's consequent emotions and actions:  ????

Illustration 2:

Activating Event:  God's temple is being misused

Jesus' Belief: Zeal for God's house

Jesus Consequent emotions and actions:  Make a whip and drive out the money changers?

In these illustrations, I'm highlighting the false way I believe we as Christians tend to think about God's perceptions of sinful actions.  In illustration 1, we all know Hitler's actions were inexcusably evil, but we struggle to believe that God perceived those events like we do.  In Illustration 2, we use this example a lot to show that Jesus got angry, but I think we make his anger out to be a kind of Sunday school lesson; we don't believe that Jesus really felt genuine anger, like the anger we feel, but a perfect anger.  I'll say more about "perfect anger" in the climax of what I'm writing.

***

Click HERE for Part 5

God's Anger and Ours (Part 3)

Jesus made a comparison between earthly fathers and the heavenly father, saying, "If you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give  good things to those who ask?"  Again, as a father, I know what this passage means in a way I didn't before I had children.  When my children were babies, I would go out of my way to warm bath water for them, prepare warm towels, do everything to make bath pleasant for my new-borns, who hate being uncovered. But still, they would scream like they were being tortured.  If you heard them, you would think I was being cruel.  Quite the opposite was happening.  I say all of this to show you that I get glimpses of how God feels by the experiences he puts me in.  As a husband, I get glimpses of what Christ the Bridegroom feels about His Bride.  I get glimpses of God's love, grief, joy...and anger.

I'll give you another illustration of something God showed me about His anger.  I was a music major, a composer.  (Now, remember the principle of double descriptions, of thinking relationally--you can't think of me as a composer without thinking of my compositions.) If a composer writes a symphony and goes to the performance of his symphony, he is usually acknowledged by the conductor at the end of the performance.  But listen.  If the conductor or orchestra doesn't play what the composer wrote, what the composer traditionally does is this: when the conductor acknowledges the composer, he will deliberately get up, turn his back to the conductor, and walk out, instead of taking a bow!  Why?  Because in his mind, what the audience just heard is not what he wrote!  So he will not honor it or acknowledge it.  In fact, he regrets ever letting them play his piece. 

Now think of that in relation to God's words about creation before he flooded the earth!  God, the divine composer, was seeing something that he did not write!  And he regretted what he saw.  He gave us a piece of music to play, our very lives, and we played something he did not write or intend.  As a composer, I know EXACTLY how this feels!  I had to do a senior recital where my compositions were played.  When people played what I wrote, it felt like heaven. When they didn't, it felt like hell.  I was angry when people took what was in my head and made it something that never came into my head.

Click HERE for Part 4

God's Anger and Ours (Part 2)

God has gone out of his way in scripture, in Christ, and in sending His Spirit, to give us first hand glimpses of how he experiences things...including anger. As Christians, we sometimes overcomplicate God's emotions and personality, while ironically telling people we have a "personal relationship with God."  We say over and over again that God is a person with a mind, emotions, and will, but we then make him aloof, or if we allow Him emotions, we somehow act as if his emotions are drastically different from ours.  I'll give you an example.

When I was a teenager, I asked my pastor "what does God see when I sin?"  My pastor said, "He sees the blood of Jesus."  Now that sounds all good...I guess...theologically, but it sounded, and still sounds, stupid to me.  That's because my pastor was thinking of "sin" or "sinning" abstractly.  But sin isn't abstract.  It is an act in a relationship.  If my wife walked in on me having sex with another woman, she wouldn't see "the blood of Jesus."  I also don't think her first emotion, or even her primary emotion, would be "hurt."  She would be furious, and rightly so.  I would also if I walked in on her having sex with another man, after I've given her 16 years of faithful marriage.  So, does God not see things as they are?  When he sees an adulterous act, is he less angry about it than I or my wife would be?  Not according to this scripture in the New Testament: "Marriage is honorable among all, and the marriage bed is undefiled, but adulterers and fornicators will be judged."  What kind of God wouldn't be angry with adultery?

Click HERE for Part 3

God's Anger and Ours (Part 1)

"What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."

A.W Tozer

I believe what comes to our minds when we think about God's anger, judgment, and reaction to "sin" says a great deal about how we perceive not only God, but the gospel and our salvation.  Because of this, as a future marriage and family therapist, one who was trained to think systemically/contextually/relationally in a way that assumes what is called a "double description," I strive to always think of God as the Supreme Ultimate Person, The Personality, Personality Himself. 

In marriage and family therapy, and systems theory, a "double description" is the assumption that everything should be thought of in literally relational terms. 

For example, we tend to say someone is a "born leader."  As a systemic thinker, double descriptions suggest that you CANNOT have a "born leader" without "born followers."  So, double descriptions assume that there is ALWAYS a complimentary relationship with any label we tend to give:  LEADER/FOLLOWER, DOMINANT/SUBMISSIVE, ETC.  Applying this to personality--thoughts, emotions, and will always have objects and cannot be thought of apart from their objects.  I'll get more into that as I delve into the heart of the issue.

Where marriage and family therapists differ from traditional psychologist is that MFTs tend to view pathologies relationally.  They don't believe in an "identified patient," i.e., a schizophrenic individual.  They believe in schizophrenic families, borderline families, bi-polar families, etc. 

As a believing upcoming marriage and family therapist, my fundamental double description would be Creator/Creature, or God the Father/God's believing Children. 

• We see this with Jesus, who NEVER thought of Himself outside of a relationship with God--"If you've seen me, you've seen the Father; I and the Father are one." 
• We see God Himself NEVER thinking of Himself outside of a relationship:  "Let US make man in OUR image."  "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  I will be known by this name forever." 
• We also see this double description with how people defined themselves in scriptural genealogies:  "the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God."  "John and James, the sons of Zebedee."

Applying all of this to God, applying the Tozer quote and what I'm saying about double descriptions, for me the key is to always think of God's emotions and responses to be as personal and relational as our emotions and responses...though of course Gods' personality is perfect, eternal, and immortal.  So when we think of "sin," or "sins," we should think of actions in a relationship, not mere theological abstractions.  For example, in the first commandment, "I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt; you shall have no other gods before me," God is being very practical and relational, very personal and even emotional.  Think about it.  God is making a relational claim on Israel's allegiance, as their very own God, as the God of their fathers, who promised in the life of Abraham that he would deliver them from the slavery he foresaw.  What other god had been to them what God had?  Who heard their cries for deliverance in their 400 years of bondage?  Which Egyptian god cared for them?  

There is a passage that touches me to the point of tears.  It illustrates the very real and personal nature of God in relationship to His people:

"Again the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord. They served the Baals and the Ashtoreths, and the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines. And because the Israelites forsook the Lord and no longer served him, he became angry with them. He sold them into the hands of the Philistines and the Ammonites, who that year shattered and crushed them. For eighteen years they oppressed all the Israelites on the east side of the Jordan in Gilead, the land of the Amorites. The Ammonites also crossed the Jordan to fight against Judah, Benjamin and Ephraim; Israel was in great distress. Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord, “We have sinned against you, forsaking our God and serving the Baals. The Lord replied, “When the Egyptians, the Amorites, the Ammonites, the Philistines, the Sidonians, the Amalekites and the Maonites oppressed you and you cried to me for help, did I not save you from their hands? But you have forsaken me and served other gods, so I will no longer save you. Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you when you are in trouble!”But the Israelites said to the Lord, “We have sinned. Do with us whatever you think best, but please rescue us now.” Then they got rid of the foreign gods among them and served the Lord. And he could bear Israel’s misery no longer."  Judges 10:6-16

Do you feel the genuine emotion of God in this passage?  Israel had been unfaithful over and over and over again, and God delivered them over and over and over again.  Look at verses11-14.  I hear genuine hurt underneath the genuine and justifiable anger of God to his unfaithful people.  And beautifully in verse 16, God is watching his repentant people who are accepting their punishment, and He can't bear their misery.  As a father of 7, I get a glimpse of how God's anger is expressed with his children.  Scripture uses the discipline of imperfect earthly fathers to illustrate the perfect discipline of God the heavenly father.  As an earthly father, though imperfectly, I know how it feels to be angry and hurt when my children do things that are wrong to each other.  

Click HERE for part 2.

God's Anger and Ours (Part 5)

Some people think God's beliefs about sin/sins/evil has changed for some reason, that when God sees a woman commit adultery against her husband, or a man kill his child, this activating event is perceived/believed differently by him than it is by us, and thus God's consequent emotions and actions are vastly different.  Even using biblical sounding language like God "raining down wrath" puts God's anger in a kind of theological category beyond what we experience.  I believe "God's wrath/fury/raining down" is anger like we know anger to be--but of course coming from a being who is perfectly powerful and able to feel and express anger in a way that transcends us.  But I don't think His anger is different from ours in the sense that it is almost opposite of ours, as if our anger and his has no correlation what so ever. 

A quote from C.S. Lewis perfectly and climactically captures what I'm saying.  It comes from Lewis' "Perelandra," where a character named Ransom is chasing a creature that is evil and murder personified--The Unman, who is a completely, absolutely, and permanently demon possessed man named Weston.  Ransom is chasing the UnMan in order to kill him.  This is the quote that captures God's anger beautifully:

"(Ransom) remembers seeing the Enemy for a moment looking not like Weston but like a mandrill, and realizing almost at once that this was delirium.  He wavered.  Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him--a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred.  The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt they were pillars of burning blood.  What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will.  It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument.  Ages ago it had been a Person:  but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation.  It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy.  The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.  As a boy with an axe rejoices in finding a tree, or a boy with a box of colored chalks rejoices in finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in finding the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object."

The perfect congruity between emotion and object is THE POINT  I'm making in EVERYTHING I'm writing. 

With God, there is ALWAYS  a perfect congruity between His emotions and its object. 

When God sees/experiences/perceives the activating event of "sin/sins/evil"

--meaning an action that is in violation of some relation,

His belief about that event is in perfect congruity with reality,

and His consequent emotion (anger) and consequent action (judgement--His reaction to very sinful people)

is in perfect congruity with its object.

When experiencing an undeniably evil act, God's anger, and ours, is in perfect congruity.

How to have incomprehensible supernatural peace

Don't be anxious about anything, but pray about everything, thanking God, asking for good and the removal of evil, and God's incomprehensible supernatural peace will protect your mind and emotions.
~My paraphrase of the Apostle Paul's words to the church at Philippi.

Right now, as I write to you, I'm experiencing incomprehensible supernatural peace.  It's incomprehensible because none of the things I was worried about this morning changed.  (It's now 4:34pm.  This morning I was so worried I couldn't sleep.)  It's supernatural because it's from God, a direct answer to prayer.  This is how I know that I'm experiencing incomprehensible supernatural peace.

When I worry, I'm sure I do what you do:  I keep thinking about some problem that I have no control over.  That's what was happening this morning.  I'm having a deadline issue for a new job I'm applying for, and an unexpected setback in meeting that deadline.  And I can't do anything about it because it's Sunday.  So I have to wait until tomorrow; today I'm supposed to be relaxing at home.  It's one of those situations where I did everything well ahead of time to avoid the exact anxiety I was experiencing.  This morning I couldn't stop thinking about how angry I was with the registrar's office of my university.  All I need is a conferral of my masters degree...a degree I worked hard on for 4 years...in which I have 75 credit hours, when I only needed 66...in which I have about 520 clinical hours, when I only needed 500.  My financial aid is paid.  I applied for the transcripts on April 30, 2018, well in advance of grades posting...and I requested that my transcripts would be held until my degree was awarded.  I got my transcripts yesterday (Saturday), but the conferral date wasn't on the transcripts.  (How hard can it be to write something like:  Degree conferred-May 2018?  Or Degree earned-May 2018?)  That's all I need--for a new job I just got hired for, and to apply to take my licensure exam.  But I have to wait until tomorrow (Monday) to talk to the registrar about the discrepancy.

I felt anxiety.

I prayed.

I asked my wife to pray.

Now, I'm able to write you without this issue plaguing my mind.  Nothing has changed.  In fact, I received information that increased my frustration.  But I actually don't feel stressed, and I can't explain why...other than the prayer.  I'm able to enjoy writing you, to read two new books, to watch some shows on Netflix, have good conversations with my wife, and enjoy a silent solitary Sunday...though nothing has changed.  There is no natural reason I'm not feeling anxious.  No natural or logical explanation.

For me, the key to anxiety is not being able to stop thinking about a problem that is out of my control.  And as long as the problem is unresolved, the anxiety remains, or increases.  But that's not happening.  I'm not thinking about the unresolved problems. 

How is this possible? 

This is how I'm experiencing incomprehensible supernatural peace: 

I prayed.  My wife prayed.  God gave me unexplainable peace.