I. The region:where the ruling power touches and takes effect. "Your hearts." The heart, as it is called by a metaphor common to Scripture and the language of ordinary life, is the regulator of the whole man. It means the will and the affections, as distinguished from the intellect. It is the choosing faculty, as distinguished from the knowing faculty. It is that in man which fastens impetuously on an object loved, without waiting in all cases for a decision of the judgment whether the object be worthy. It is by the heart that the attitude is determined, the path traced out, and the impulse given. When the heart is drawn in one direction, the whole man follows. The rush of an evil heart's affections, like other swollen streams, will not yield to reason. When God by His Word and Spirit comes to save, He saves by arresting the heart and making it new.
II. The reign:the manner in which the heart is possessed and controlled. "Rule." The word translated "rule" in the text occurs nowhere else in the Scripture. It is borrowed from the practice of the Greeks at their great national games; and relates to the prize for which the athletes contended in the stadium. The prize giver exercised over the runners or wrestlers a kind of rule. By the display of the prize he held, he led, he impelled them. They felt the impulse, and gave their whole being over to its sway. The word which designated the power and office of the president is the "rule" of our text. This is the kind of rule which Man's maker applies to man's heart.
III. The ruler: the power that sways a human heart, and so saves and sanctifies the man. "The peace of God." (1) It is God and no idol that should rule in the human heart. (2) God's peace holds a heart from sin, and rules it in holiness.
W. Arnot, Roots and Fruits,p. 415.
The Peace of God and the Peace of the Devil.
The word "peace" is that which is most frequently employed in the Scriptures to set forth the blessedness of the righteous. Peace suggests the idea of what is calm, deep, tranquil, unruffled, something that may be in its nature divine and in its character permanent.
I. Religious peace may be denominated the peace of God, because, in one sense, or in some of its higher elements, it is that for which God made and constituted man at first. It is an approach towards the realisation of God's original idea of the happiness of humanity, for it springs from intercourse with God.
II. Religious blessedness, as now experienced by humanity, is the peace of God, because it is the result of His merciful interposition for man, as well as the realisation of His original idea respecting him. This blessedness is referred thus directly to God, because it is by God's grace that it is possible; because it is by the gift of His Son that it is procured; and because it is through the application of His truth that it is produced. It consists in the hope of forgiveness of sin and the exercise of filial trust and confidence, through the restoration and re-establishment of those ruptured relations which sin had broken.
III. The blessedness of the spiritual life in man is the peace of God, because in addition to its including something of that for which God Originally designed him, it is that which is immediately imparted or produced by God's Holy Spirit, and is thus in some degree of the nature of a divine donation.
IV. Religious peace is "the peace of God" because it is sustained, nourished, and enlarged by those acts and exercises, private and public, which bring the soul into contact with God.
V. There is, however, the peace of the devil, of the world, of sin, of the flesh. It is quite possible humanity may go to sleep in death under the peace of the devil, apparently as quietly and calmly as those who fall asleep in Jesus. The peace of the devil consists in the destruction of all that is noblest and finest and greatest in man. Just such a contrast is there in the heart of man, between the peace of the devil and the peace of God.
T. Binney, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 605.
References: Colossians 3:15. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxviii., No. 1693: F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 19; W. Page, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 171; F. W. Robertson, Sermons,3rd series, p. 130; J. H. Wilson, The Gospel and its Fruits,p. 259.