Romans 5:1

Peace with God — not the peace of God. One preposition, and it changes the subject entirely.

The peace of God, which Paul writes about elsewhere, is something you feel: a settledness that guards your thinking. This is not that. Peace with is a treaty word. It is what two parties have when a war between them ends. And it carries an assumption most modern readers never consciously accept, which is that there was a war.

That assumption is the difficulty of this verse, not the promise in it. We are prepared to believe we are inadequate, tired, or falling short of our own standards. We are much less prepared to believe we were on the wrong side of something. Paul has spent four chapters establishing exactly that, and he does not soften it here; he simply announces that the hostilities are over.

Then the tense, which is the part to take home. We have peace. Not we may have it, not we are working toward it. It is done, and it was done by a verdict — justified — handed down about you rather than achieved by you. Nothing in the sentence is contingent on how the week went.

Which means the thing this verse asks you to stop doing is renegotiating. You cannot improve a peace that was settled by someone else's decision, and you cannot forfeit it by having a bad Tuesday.