We
have been making our way through the fruit of the Spirit. If you have the
Spirit of God, then these virtues, these fruits will be evident in your
life. They may not yet be fully mature
but they will be evident and growing. You will love God and love your neighbor.
You will have a sense of a calm delight in the will of God, rejoicing in His
work in your life and submitting yourself to His will. This is joy in the Lord.
Today, we look at peace. If you belong
to God, then the peace of God, the peace of the Gospel and peace on Earth, will
be evident in your life. We need to be
clear about what we mean by peace. I do not mean a Buddhist style of inner
peace. This sort of inner peace can be part of the fruit of peace but it is not
its essence. This is important because the Christian faith has become largely
focused on individualism, on self. Thus, it would make sense that peace would
then be described as mostly an inner peace.
But the gospel is described as the
gospel of peace. This sort of peace means peace with God and peace with men.
Only if you have truly made peace with God can you be truly at peace with other
men. And I readily admit that peace with God creates a calm delight in His
presence, something I have described as joy, which also manifests itself in an
inner calm repose, peace. But we should not confuse this calm repose, a
peaceful feeling, with peace, itself.
By peace we mean the absence of adversarial
conflict. When we make peace with God surrendering fully to His will, we remove
the means of adversarial conflict. That is, we stop warring with Him and we
start serving Him. God, Himself, was at odds with us until we submitted to Him.
He made the way for the truce by sending Jesus to be the means of this peace.
He died on the cross to put away the wrath of God against sin and sinners. This
provided a way for us to come to Him and lay down our weapons of war and
receive a complete and total pardon. When we did this, we transferred our
allegiance from the realm of the devil and self to allegiance to Jesus Christ
and His kingdom. Thus, the war between us and God ended and peace ensued.
Just as love is twofold, we are to love God and
love our neighbor, so is peace. In fact, in the Bible we are told that love of
neighbor is all of the law and gospel. If we truly love our neighbor as
ourselves then it proves that we love God.
This twofold aspect is equally true with peace.
If we have peace with God then we will strive for peace with our neighbor. If
we truly are at peace with our neighbor then it shows that we are necessarily
at peace with God. The reverse is also true. If we say that we are at peace
with God but we are not at peace with our neighbor then we are lying. If you are at
war with your neighbor then you have not made your peace with God.
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