The peace named third among the fruit of the Spirit isn’t quietness or freedom from difficulty. Paul named the wholeness of a life rightly anchored: the kind of settledness rooted in trust that God reigns and that nothing can finally separate the believer from Him. This peace doesn’t depend on circumstances calming down. It is what holds when they don’t. The Spirit grows it the way fruit grows, slowly, in believers who have learned to live as people whose citizenship is elsewhere.
Twenty-one men in orange jumpsuits knelt on a beach along the Mediterranean coast of Libya. Behind each one stood a masked member of the Islamic State. Twenty of the men were Coptic Christians from Egypt, construction workers from small villages, most of them from Al-Our in Minya Governorate, who had been working in Libya to support their families. They had been kidnapped in two separate raids in December 2014 and January 2015. They had been held for weeks. They had been tortured. They had been offered, repeatedly, the chance to deny Christ and convert to Islam.
None of them denied Him.
The twenty-first man was not Egyptian. He was Ghanaian. His name was Mathew Ayariga. He had not been Coptic. When his captors asked him whether he too was a Christian, he looked at the twenty men beside him, at the calm in their faces, at what they were carrying that he could see and they could see, and he said, “I am a Christian and I am like them.” He chose, in that moment, to belong to whatever was producing what he saw in them. He chose to die rather than deny a Christ he had only just received.
The video showed all twenty-one men killed within minutes. The words on their lips at the end were the simplest words a Christian could say. Pope Francis, speaking afterward, summarized them in one phrase: Jesus help me.
What the world watched was not bravery. Bravery is what you have when fear is also present and you push through it anyway. What the world watched was something else. It was peace. The kind of peace that has nothing to do with the situation a person is in. The kind that holds in the only place it has ever needed to hold: in the certainty of who you belong to and where you are going.
Within a week, on February 21, 2015, the Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria formally added their names to the church’s roll of martyrs. The Coptic tradition has carried that list for nearly two thousand years. These twenty-one are the latest names on it.
The article that follows is about that peace. The threshold these men crossed is the extreme one, the kind most of us will never see. But every believer will face their own thresholds in time, quieter and smaller, no less real to them when they come. The same Spirit who grew that peace in twenty-one men on a beach grows the same peace in believers facing diagnoses, funerals, panic attacks, layoffs, broken marriages, and the ordinary chaos of a life lived in a fractured world. The peace Paul names third in the fruit of the Spirit is not a peace reserved for martyrs. It is the peace that, when it has had time to grow, can hold a person at any threshold, including theirs.
So what kind of peace is Paul naming when he lists it third in the fruit of the Spirit? Where does it come from? How does it differ from the many shallow versions of peace the modern world has on offer? And how does the Spirit grow it in a life? Slowly, patiently, until the day it has to hold something the believer never thought they could face.
Why Peace Comes Third
Paul’s order isn’t accidental. Love stands first because it’s the governing fruit, the root from which the others grow. Joy stands second because joy is the immediate consequence of being loved. Peace stands third for a reason that connects to both.
Love received from God produces joy. Joy in God produces peace. Peace is what happens to a life that has settled the question of who loves it and who reigns over it. Where love is the root and joy is the early visible sign that the root is doing what it’s meant to do, peace is the deeper, slower fruit: the settledness that develops as the believer increasingly trusts what love has secured.
This is why Paul links peace so consistently to the work of Christ in his other letters. Romans 5:1 makes the architecture explicit:
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 5:1)
Peace begins with being put right with God. Everything else Paul names in the fruit of the Spirit grows in soil that has been first made peaceful by Christ’s work.
That sequence matters. Peace in Paul’s framework isn’t first about how the believer feels. It’s about where the believer stands. The peace that becomes a felt experience in everyday life (the peace that holds through chaos, through suffering, through the moment on the beach) grows out of a peace that has already been settled at the foundation. Christ has reconciled the believer to God. The war is over. The standing is secured. What flows from that, over time, is the peace that begins to live inside the believer’s daily experience.
This is also why peace can’t be third on a different list. It belongs where Paul put it: after love, after joy, before the more outward-facing fruit that come next. Peace is the hinge. It is the settledness in God that makes patience possible, that makes kindness sustainable, that makes faithfulness durable. Without it, the rest collapse under pressure.
Shalom: The Word Behind the Word
The word Paul uses for peace in Galatians 5:22 is eirene, the Greek word for peace, the basic vocabulary of his world. But behind eirene, in the way Paul and his readers heard it, sat the much older Hebrew word shalom.
Shalom is one of the richest words in Scripture, and one of the most consistently flattened in modern usage. We hear “peace” and we tend to think of quietness, calm, the absence of conflict, an internal emotional state. Shalom is far more than that. It means wholeness. Completeness. Soundness. The flourishing of a life or a relationship or a community when everything is in its right place and rightly ordered before God.
When the Hebrew prophet speaks of peace, he often isn’t talking about feelings at all. He’s talking about a world in which the lion lies down with the lamb, in which the swords are beaten into plowshares, in which the wounds of God’s people are healed and they are gathered home. Peace, in this register, is the whole biblical vision of God restoring His creation.
Paul reaches for this word (through eirene) and places it in the fruit of the Spirit because the Spirit is the one bringing that wholeness into the believer’s life now, in advance of the day everything is fully restored. A believer in whom shalom is growing is a believer whose life is beginning to look, in small ways, like the kind of life it will look like in full when God has finished what He started.
This means Christian peace is not Stoic detachment. It’s not emotional neutrality. It’s not Christian zen. It is the wholeness of a person whose life is being put back into right relationship with the God who made them, and the relational, emotional, and outward expressions of that wholeness as it gathers strength over a lifetime.
It is also why peace is something Paul can command without sounding cruel. He can write from prison:
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6-7)
The command isn’t to feel calm under all circumstances. The command is to live in the wholeness Christ has already secured.
Peace With God, Peace Of God
The New Testament draws an architectural distinction in two of its most-quoted passages about peace, and the distinction is worth pausing on.
The first, Paul writes to the Romans:
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Romans 5:1)
The second, Paul writes to the Philippians:
“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)
The prepositions matter. Peace with God is positional. It’s the settled fact of the believer’s reconciliation to God through Christ. It is finished, secured, immovable. Nothing the believer does or fails to do can undo it. It happened at the cross.
Peace of God is experiential. It’s the felt, lived reality of that settled position coming into the believer’s daily experience. It guards the heart and the mind. It surpasses understanding. It doesn’t have to make sense in the situation to be present.
The two are not the same, but they’re inseparable. The peace of God grows in believers who are settled on peace with God. The believer who is rattled about their standing before God, uncertain whether they have actually been forgiven, second-guessing whether the cross was enough: that believer will find the peace of God hard to access. Not because God is withholding it, but because the soil where it grows hasn’t been settled yet.
The twenty-one men on the Libyan beach were not first peaceful and then standing on Christ’s work. They were standing on Christ’s work, and the peace was what the world saw because of where they were standing. That sequence cannot be reversed. Peace of God flows from peace with God. The believer who has not settled the first will struggle to access the second.
Peace That Has Reach
The peace Paul names is not only internal. It moves outward. It affects the people around the believer who carries it. Scripture is unambiguous about this horizontal dimension.
Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, did not say “blessed are the peaceful.” He said:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:9)
Peace in Christ’s economy is something a believer makes, actively, in their relationships, in their communities, in the spaces they occupy. The Spirit grows the kind of peace that doesn’t stay in the heart of the person who has it. It overflows.
The book of Hebrews instructs believers to “strive for peace with everyone” (Hebrews 12:14), to pursue it actively, even when the situation makes it hard. Paul tells the Romans, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18). Peace in the New Testament is a posture toward others, not only a state inside the believer.
There is also a deeper, witnessing dimension to this. When a believer’s peace is genuinely the peace of God, when it holds visibly in circumstances that should have unraveled it, the world notices. It notices in the way the world cannot help but notice. Mathew Ayariga noticed. He had walked through the same kidnapping. He had endured the same torture. He had been offered the same opportunity to convert to Islam and save his life. But what he saw in the twenty men beside him (the wholeness they were carrying, the unshakeable settledness, the peace they refused to trade for safety) moved him to step into it himself. The peace of God is contagious in a way the world’s substitutes are not.
This is why peace in the New Testament is so often connected to the gospel itself. Paul calls the gospel “the gospel of peace” (Ephesians 6:15). When the gospel is preached, peace is being announced: peace with God, peace among people, peace as the whole shape of life under the reign of Christ. The believer in whom the peace of God is growing becomes a small visible argument for the gospel they have received. The peace is the testimony.
How Peace Grows in a Life
None of this is something the believer produces. The peace Paul names is fruit, and like the other fruit Paul names, it grows from rootedness in the Spirit who produces it. The Spirit grows it in His own timing, in believers whose lives are increasingly settled in trust of the God who has secured them.
Peace grows in proximity to the Spirit, over time. There is no shortcut. There is no formula. There is only the patient work of the Spirit in the believer whose life is bound to Christ, and the soil conditions where that growth tends to happen most reliably.
The Spirit grows peace where the believer is settled on God’s sovereignty. The peace Paul names doesn’t grow in a heart still trying to control what isn’t theirs to control. It grows where the believer has come to rest in the conviction that God reigns over their story whether they can see how or not. That conviction takes time to settle in deep enough to actually change how a person carries their day. But where it has settled, peace grows. The believer no longer has to verify that everything is going to work out. The believer who serves the King on the throne already knows that the only outcome that finally matters has already been secured.
The Spirit grows peace where the believer rests in what Christ has already settled. The cross is the bridge Jesus built across the chasm the Fall opened between humanity and God. Returning to it should be a return to gratitude for that bridge, not a perpetual return to sin-awareness. Scripture is explicit on this point. God Himself says of His people in Christ, “I will remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:12, 10:17). Believers who carry their own remembered sins more weightily than God does find peace harder to access, not because the peace isn’t available, but because they are insisting on a debt that has already been cleared. Peace grows in the soil of remembered grace, not in the soil of remembered shame.
The Spirit grows peace where anxiety is taken honestly to God rather than performed away. Paul’s instruction in Philippians 4 (“do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God”) is not an instruction to suppress anxiety. It’s an instruction to bring it. Honestly. In prayer. The peace that surpasses understanding flows toward believers whose anxieties are being genuinely lifted to God rather than hidden behind a Christian veneer.
The Spirit grows peace among believers who carry each other’s burdens in real fellowship. The horizontal dimension of peace is not abstract. It happens in the practical work of Christians being honest with each other about what is hard, praying for each other, sitting with each other in waiting rooms and at funerals and in the dark stretches no one else sees. Isolated Christians find peace slower because the Spirit grows it, partly, through other believers.
The Spirit grows peace where the believer remembers their citizenship is elsewhere. The Christian’s home country is the Kingdom of God under the reign of Christ. The throne in heaven is not vacant. What is happening here, however hard, is not the whole story. Believers whose eyes are genuinely on what is coming, and on the King whose return will set everything right, find peace growing back even when the present is hard. The Coptic men on the beach were not despairing about what they were losing. They were anticipating what they were about to receive. The peace was rooted in their citizenship.
All of these are soil conditions. None of them is causation. The Spirit causes the growth. The believer’s part is to stay where the Spirit is working.
Paul, writing from prison, summed it up in a single sentence: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7). Notice the verbs. It guards. It surpasses. It is the Spirit’s gift, not the believer’s achievement. The believer’s part is to receive it, by trusting, by resting in what Christ has settled, by praying honestly, by living among other believers, by remembering where home is. The peace does what only the Spirit can make it do.
That is the peace the Spirit grows.
Key Takeaways
- Peace stands third in Paul’s list because it’s the settledness that develops as the believer increasingly trusts what love has secured and joy has confirmed. Without peace, the rest of the fruit collapses under pressure.
- Christian peace is shalom: wholeness, completeness, the flourishing of a life rightly ordered before God. It is not Stoic detachment, not emotional neutrality, not the absence of difficulty.
- Peace with God (positional, secured at the cross) is the foundation for peace of God (experiential, growing in daily life). The first is finished work; the second is the Spirit’s ongoing work.
- Peace has a horizontal dimension. It reaches outward, makes peacemakers, and bears witness to the gospel. When peace genuinely holds, the world notices.
- Peace is fruit the Spirit grows. The believer’s part is to stay in the soil conditions where the Spirit works: trust in God’s sovereignty, gratitude for what Christ has settled, honest prayer, real fellowship, eyes on the Kingdom.
Questions Worth Sitting With
Peace in the New Testament is shalom: wholeness, completeness, the flourishing of a life rightly anchored in God. Tranquility is an internal emotional state, often manufactured through technique, distraction, or favorable circumstances. Peace can be present in circumstances where tranquility is impossible. It’s the difference between a believer who is calm because the situation is calm and a believer who is at peace because the situation has nothing to do with where the peace is rooted.
He’s not telling them to suppress anxiety or to feel ashamed for experiencing it. The Philippians 4 passage instructs believers to take anxiety to God in prayer (honestly, specifically, with thanksgiving) rather than to manage it on their own. The peace that surpasses understanding is the Spirit’s response to that honest exchange. Believers who try to perform peace without bringing anxiety to God find the peace harder to access. The path runs through the prayer, not around the feeling.
No. Fear is often a healthy human response to real threat. Peace in the New Testament can coexist with fear in the same way joy coexists with grief. What changes when the Spirit’s peace is present is what the fear can do. It can no longer dictate where the believer stands, whom the believer serves, or what the believer chooses. The Coptic men on the Libyan beach almost certainly experienced fear. What they did not have was anxiety about their standing before God or panic about where they were going next. The peace was deeper than the fear and outlasted it.
No. Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers.” Peace is something believers make, actively, often by addressing what is broken. Paul instructed believers to “strive for peace with everyone” and to “live peaceably… so far as it depends on you.” That’s language of effort, not passivity. Christian peace is not avoidance of hard conversations or quiet acquiescence to injustice. It is a settled internal state from which believers can engage difficulty without being controlled by it.
No. Peace is fruit, and fruit grows slowly. The Spirit is the one growing it, on a timeline that’s His. A believer in a hard season without much felt peace is not a believer the Spirit has abandoned. The right response isn’t to manufacture calm or assume something is wrong. It’s to stay close to the One who grows the fruit: settling on God’s sovereignty, resting in what Christ has settled at the cross, taking anxiety honestly to prayer, staying in fellowship, remembering where home is. And trusting that the Spirit is still at work, even when the harvest feels far off.
When Peace Feels Out of Reach
For many of us, the peace Paul names isn’t where we’d say we are right now. We’re tired. We’re anxious. We’ve watched people we loved walk through hard things without the visible peace the Spirit grew in the men on that beach. We’ve prayed for peace ourselves and felt nothing settle. The article you’ve just read describes a fruit we wish we were carrying more visibly than we are.
That’s honest. The Spirit isn’t surprised by it. He’s the one growing the fruit, and growth is slow. The believer in a hard season without much felt peace is not a believer the Spirit has forgotten. Peace is not a measurement of where you stand with God. It’s the long-term outcome of being shaped by His Spirit in a life rooted in Christ. It grows on a timeline that is His, not ours.
If you’re in a season where peace feels thin, the move isn’t to manufacture it. You can’t. The move is to keep yourself in proximity to the One who is the source of it: the Spirit, who grows the fruit, in His own timing, in lives bound to Christ. That proximity has practical shape. Trust in God’s sovereignty. Gratitude for what Christ has already settled at the cross. Honest prayer that doesn’t pretend. Fellowship with other believers. Eyes lifted toward the Kingdom that is coming. But the activities aren’t the point. The proximity is the point. The Spirit produces the peace. Your part is to stay near enough for Him to do it.
And when the hard moment comes (and one will come), you may find, as the Coptic men found on that beach, that the peace was there all along. Not because they had reached for it in the moment, but because the Spirit had been growing it in them through years of ordinary Christian life. The growth is hidden until it is needed. That is how fruit works.
The peace Paul named third in the fruit of the Spirit grows quietly, anchored in who God is and what He has secured, holding through whatever the believer is walking through. The harvest isn’t your project. The Spirit is the gardener. He is patient. And the peace will come.
Christ reigns. Christ restores. Christ will return.
Longing for Christ, learning to wait faithfully.
Your brother in Christ,
Duane