Peace through Jesus

Blessed are the Peacemakers

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Who really wants to be a peacemaker anyway? A peacemaker in a marriage is usually the one who has to swallow his or her pride. Who wants to say, “You’re right, and I’m wrong,” to keep the peace in a marriage? A peacemaker amongst neighbors is the one who has to rake more, shovel more, and put up with more. A peacemaker among opposing political views? Who really wants to do that to keep the peace between neighbors? To be a peacemaker can be scary!  It means following the example of Christ. Who can take such a risk especially in today’s world?

And yet, Jesus attaches the blessing of happiness to those who are peacemakers. Jesus can say that from his own experience. He was happy to bring peace to this world. After all, he is the Prince of Peace. This title rightfully describes Jesus because he made peace between God and all the people of the world.

Talk about a struggle! It wasn’t easy. He had to resist temptation, he had to resist the urge to strike back, he had to put others first, he had to go the extra mile, he had to suffer, and ultimately he had to die. But all of his sacrifices were necessary to establish peace between his Father and the world. Jesus was a successful peacemaker, and he was happy to do it. And you can be happy that he did it too!

To be a peacemaker is not easy. It wasn’t for Jesus, and it won’t be for you either. It isn’t easy to be the peacemaker between quarreling siblings. It isn’t easy to be the peacemaker between angry neighbors. It isn’t easy to be the peacemaker in a contentious marriage. It isn’t easy to be the peacemaker when grudges are involved. It isn’t easy to be the peacemaker when that involves saying, “I’m sorry.” But Jesus never said it was going to be easy. He did say, though, that he will bless your peacemaking efforts. Just take one glance at all of the blessings attached to Jesus’ peacemaking—forgiveness, joy, and peace just to name a few.

How can I be happy if I don’t take sides? That’s the point. True happiness comes when you do take a side—God’s side. To be a peacemaker is to be a reflection of Jesus. Peace through Jesus! To be a peacemaker is to take to the world the peace that Jesus has brought to you. And there is no greater joy than that!

Where is contentment to be found?

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A farmer who had lived on the same farm all his life began to long for something better. He finally decided to sell it. He listed it with a real estate broker who promptly prepared a sales advertisement for the farm. The ad, of course, listed all the farm’s advantages: ideal location, modern equipment, healthy stock, and acres of fertile ground.

When the farmer saw the ad in the paper, he hurriedly phoned his real estate agent. “I’ll buy it!” he exclaimed. “It’s exactly the place I’m looking for!”

Contentment is a matter of perspective. How many times have you lived out the cliché, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone?”

There is a place where contentment is found, and you don’t need to take a religious pilgrimage to find it. Look at the people, possessions, and pleasures in your life and see them not as your own but “on loan” from God. He gives them to you for a purpose. He wants you to take care of them, and to manage them faithfully.

Some people have received talents from God that are most appreciated by the company’s upper management. Other people have received talents that are noticed most by two-year-olds as they live securely in a loving home. Both kinds of people can be content.

“Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” one Bible writer happily urges. “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:4,12-13).

Contentment is a happiness and appreciation that comes from God tapping you on the shoulder and saying, “I’d like you to do something for me. It’s not the same as everyone else is doing, but I know you can do it well. Here’s what I want you to use.”

Rejoice! No matter what the circumstances, you can be content when you see what you have as a gift from God. Part of that gift is the purpose behind it, an improvement project that improves not just the gift, but also the one to whom it is given.

How to worship

How do I worship God?

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Worship, most of us think, is something that happens in a church setting. And it does. But it does not start or end there.

It is better to say that worship is something that happens in our heart. It’s what happens when God speaks to our heart and our heart responds to God.

For worship to take place, we have to hear God’s message of love. We call it the gospel, which means “good news.” God tells us that good news in his Word, the Bible. He tells us how he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to win forgiveness of sins for us and give us eternal life.

When God’s good news reaches our heart, it lifts the weight of guilt from our soul. It makes us happy because God loves us and he cares for us. Our happy response is to love him back and to say, “Thank you, God!” And we praise him. Also, as with other good news, we want to share it with others.

That is worship. Because it starts in our heart, we can worship anywhere. We just need to keep in mind that it has two sides: God speaks to us, and we respond to God. Another way of understanding worship is that it is everything we do because of our faith in Jesus.

The impact of worship multiplies when we join in worship with other Christians. That is where a worship setting comes in. In church in person or online, God talks to us through Bible readings and preaching. The worship service is designed to remind us how much we need Jesus and how he has filled our needs. He lived a perfect life that God the Father credits to us. Then he took upon himself the punishment we deserve for sin when he died on the cross. He proved our eternal joy when he rose from the dead, assuring us of a new life in Christ!

In a worship service, believers together respond with music and song, thankfulness and praise. We pray for each other and encourage each other with God’s promises. We form a bond of Christian love and faithfulness. We work together to serve God. Therefore, each of us can say with David in Psalm 122:1 – “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD.’ ”

Let us not give up meeting together.

More Bible passages about worship, taken from the New International Reader’s Version Discoverer’s Bible:

Colossians 3:16, 17 – Let Christ’s word live in you like a rich treasure. Teach and correct each other wisely. Sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. Sing with thanks in your hearts to God. Do everything you say or do in the name of the Lord Jesus. Always give thanks to God the Father through Christ.

Romans 12:1 – Brothers and sisters, God has shown you his mercy. So I am asking you to offer up your bodies to him while you are still alive. Your bodies are a holy sacrifice that is pleasing to God. When you offer your bodies to God, you are worshiping him.

Hebrews 10:25 – Let us not give up meeting together. Some are in the habit of doing this. Instead, let us cheer each other up with words of hope. Let us do it all the more as you see the day coming when Christ will return.

What is love?

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This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. – 1 John 3:16

If you asked ten different people what love is you may very well receive ten different answers. Ask a three-year-old and his answer may be a simple “mom.” Ask a psychologist and you may have to settle in for a long and complicated response. The answer given by a fifteen-year-old girl will likely be very different than the one given by a sixty-year-old man who has been married to the same woman for 42 years.

Even though these answers may all be different, they likely all revolve around the same thing–emotion. Describing what love is usually involves describing how a person makes them feel or the committed feelings they have about a certain person.

God doesn’t talk about emotion when he describes love in his Word. He talks about action. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”

Love is defined by the greatest act of self-sacrifice ever made. God’s own Son gave up his life for you. He didn’t do it because of the way you made him feel. He did it because he knew it was the only way for you to live with him forever. He shed his blood not because he saw some great potential within you. He shed his blood because the sin within you needed to be washed away.

Jesus Christ laid down his life for you because his desire to save you eternally was far greater than any desire to preserve his own life. That selfless, self-sacrificing action is the very definition of love.

Now that you know what love is, go and love others.

Jesus is my Savior from Death

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The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:23

There is a reason that people don’t like to talk about death. Death is scary. Despite all of our medical advances, it is still inevitable. Death doesn’t discriminate in any way. It gets the rich and the poor, the fit and the unfit, the mean and the nice. Death always comes.

Why does death come for us all? It is because of one fatal condition that we share. We are sinful. Our sins make us death’s target. Our sins are not something that we can just ignore. Sin can’t fit in with who God is or with his plan for all things. Instead, sin brings death. Death is the consequence of sin.

Death is a great enemy against us. In our eyes that enemy looks bigger and tougher than we could ever defeat. But there is hope.

The Bible teaches, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God loves us. Even though we don’t deserve it because we are sinners, God loves us. All of our solutions for death come up short. But God did not abandon us to death’s destruction. In his great love for us, God provides a solution that really works. His solution is Jesus.

Jesus, the Son of God, came to save us from death. He defeated that powerful enemy. Jesus defeated death by taking all of our sins on himself. He suffered the punishment we deserved for our sins; he died on the cross of Calvary to pay the “wages of sin.” By sacrificing his holy life for us, Jesus defeated death. He proved it by his resurrection from the dead.

Now “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.” Trusting in Jesus as our Savior, the fear of death is taken away. For Jesus promises that we will live, even though we die (John 11:25). When we close our eyes in death, he will open them to eternal life. We will wake up from death to life with God in heaven where there will be none of the hurts, disappointments, and fears that we experience now.

Jesus is your Savior from death. Trust him for freedom from the fear of death’s destruction and the hope and joy of eternal life!

Read the Bible

How do we know the Bible is true?

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“Because the Bible is the Word of God, and God never lies” is the answer.  Next question: how do we know the Bible is the Word of God?  “Because it says so,” we answer.

If you don’t find that answer satisfying, we understand.  The Department of Motor Vehicles or the ticket agent at the airport doesn’t believe that I am who I say I am just because I say so.  They want proof, and the proof has to come from somebody other than me.

It’s understandable that people expect the same from the Bible.  Especially since, throughout the centuries, lots of people have claimed to have spoken or written words that came straight from God.  They can’t all be telling the truth.  How do I know that the Bible is?

First, there is much more evidence that the Bible is true than most people think.  For instance, the Bible was written over a period of 1400 years by more than 40 authors.  And yet, this book tells one story and has one message–one that people of all times, places, and cultures have found meaningful.  Notice also what a “survivor” the Bible has been.  Not only has it survived thousands of years of history.  It has also been the most violently attacked book of all time.  And yet, every year it tops the best-seller list by a wide margin.

Then there are the Bible’s fulfilled prophecies.  In the Old Testament you have a large number of predictions about what the Messiah would do.  In the New Testament you find them all fulfilled in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  Read, for example, Isaiah 53 (written in the 8th century before Christ) or Psalm 22 (tenth century before Christ).  You can’t help but be amazed at how these prophecies tell the whole story of the death of Jesus centuries before it happened.

Finally, not even this will convince somebody who wants corroboration from an outside source.  And that’s really the problem.  When we ask for an outside source to vouch for the Bible, we’re really looking for a higher authority than the Word of God.  And there is no higher authority.  For instance, who could corroborate the God’s account of how the world began?  Nobody else was there!

That’s why, ultimately, the reason we believe the Bible isn’t because we can use objective, external evidence to prove that it’s true.  It’s because the Bible’s message has conquered our hearts.  In the Bible, we’ve found a book by people we’ve never met, but who somehow seem to know us better than we know ourselves.  And we find a message that meets our deepest need:  the need for a Savior from our failings and guilt.

That’s why we say that the Bible is “self-authenticating.”  Read it for yourself, and we think you’ll see what we mean.

Why does God love sinners?

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Let’s take another question first. “Why do mothers love their children?” Mothers love their beautiful babies, but they love their ugly babies, too. It’s not because of how the child looks or what the child does. Mary, the mother of Jesus, loved her son. But probably the mother of Judas, the traitor who turned Jesus over to his enemies, loved her son as well.

Why do mothers love their children? God made mothers that way. Mothers love their children. That’s the way mothers are. We call it “mother-love.” It’s an unnatural mother that does not love her own child.

God’s love is something like mother-love. God loves the people he makes. That’s the way God is. In fact, God made us so that he could love us. In the beginning God made the world. At the end of his creation he made the human race, a man and a woman. The world and everything in it is a gift from God to the human race. He made you and me in our time because he wanted to love us, too.

Because God our maker loves all of us so much, he deserves the obedience, respect, love and trust of the human race. Beginning with the first humans, we haven’t given God what he deserves. We keep cutting ourselves off from the God who made us. We are rebels who run away from God. In other words, we are all sinners.

Why does God still love us?

He loves us because that’s the way he is. God is love, and he doesn’t change. Because he loves us, he made a plan to bring the rebellious human race home to himself again. That plan is the main plot line that runs through the whole Bible.

Really, the whole Bible is the story of God’s love for sinners like you and me. Why does he love us? That’s the way he is. God is love, and he doesn’t change. No matter who we are. No matter what we’ve done.

God says: I the LORD do not change (Malachi 3:6). God is love (1 John 4:16). He describes his plan in John 3:16: God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

perfection

Perfection

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A group of special friends comes over for dinner. You spend hours preparing for the meal. You vacuum your house or apartment. You bring out the best dishes in your cabinet. You want everything to be just perfect. Any food improperly cooked or signs of a dirty house could take away from the specialness of the evening. Everything must be perfect.

Our desire for perfection can be seen not only in the home but also in the workplace. Your employer expects you to do your job well. Mistakes will cost the company time and money. If a company is to run efficiently and profitably, everything must be just so, perfect. Further, you feel the best when you have done your job perfectly. And what about your leisure time? What is it that keeps you coming back to play that round of golf again and again? Isn’t it those few perfect shots in a round that motivate you to return again and again?

The God of the universe also is one who expects perfection in the people he has created. The Bible says, “Be perfect, for I the Lord your God am perfect” (Matthew 5:48). God knows that if his people are going to be what he expects them to be, they will be perfect.

The big problem here, as we all know, is that none of us is perfect. Some of that food that we prepared for those guests doesn’t always turn out right, our house has dirt and spiders even though we clean it often. That perfect golf shot slices and ends up just off the green. The assignment at work ends up with a mistake or two. The same holds true in our relationship with God. He has given us 10 commandments. But we break them. We say harsh words. We think bad thoughts. Being the just God that he is, our God must punish us. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Fortunately, a person named Jesus came into the world. He wanted to rescue us. Thus, he lived a perfect life. And that perfect life has been credited to us. We receive Christ’s perfection as our own. Then he died a death for all the times we messed up and weren’t perfect.

Jesus is God’s perfect solution to our imperfection.