Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.” (Matt. 5:9)
If you are like most people in the United States in the 21st century, you are an extremely busy person. In fact, your life may be so busy that it borders on chaotic.
Perhaps you sit down sometimes, like I do, at the end of the day just before bed and say, “Wow. What a day. Is there any relief in sight?” In my case, with a family that includes four children and an ever-growing ministry, there often is no relief in sight.
We all go from one crisis or problem to another, and it is indeed chaotic to say the least. It reminds me of the television commercial from the 1980s where the frazzled woman screams, “Calgon, take me away!” The next scene portrays her soaking in a huge bubble bath, all her problems just a distant memory.
It seems that, amid all of the problems we face every day, very few of us really find peace. That state of being where we are right with God and right with our fellow man, and everything is on an even keel, appears to elude us. All we see are troubles and trials.
Let me clarify something here. All of us have troubles and trials; no one is immune from that. The difference is that some people are able to have peace in the midst of their troubles and trials.
There is no one reading this book who does not have some degree of difficulty, and most of you are likely to have a great deal of difficulty. But while many of you are searching for peace, some of you have found it.
Let’s look at the attributes of a peaceful person. Peace is not the absence of conflict. You might be thinking, “If I could just make all of my problems go away, I would be OK.” You will never be able to wish all of your troubles away. The Bible says in Job 14:1 that this life is “full of trouble.” There will be conflict as long as you live. You might think that’s depressing, but you can have victory along with your problems.
Look at II Tim. 3:1-7. “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
That is an accurate description of the day in which we live, and if you think it’s going to get better you are mistaken. The fact of the matter is that we live in the last days, and as we get farther along in the last days we get farther from God’s creation.
Have you ever thought about that? What we are living in now is not God’s perfect plan for this age. This isn’t the way He created things. His original plan was for Adam and Eve in the garden, all alone, with obedient children and no in-laws. I trust you are laughing a little bit at that last statement, but God did create a perfect world. What happened? Adam and Eve willfully disobeyed God, and it all went downhill from there.
So God started with perfection, and He will end with perfection when we are living with Him forever, but in the meantime we must live with the consequences of man’s choices. That is what produced everything we see around us.
Adam and Eve had the choice to live in perfect harmony with God and never die. God did not design death, just as He did not design sin. He wanted them to have a wonderful time in the garden. But Adam thought he was smarter than God, and his sin brought the curse. We are left with the results of that curse.
So as long as we are stuck in this world between perfection and perfection, we will have troubles. Why? Because sin destroys everything it touches. It twists people’s thinking and causes them to do things God never intended them to do. If it’s bad now, what will it be like when our young children are grown? If we can’t escape conflict, we had better learn to deal with it, and that means teaching our children some principles for how to live.
Peace is not the absence of conflict, nor is it compromise with conflict. On one side you have the standard of God’s holiness and perfection, and on the other side is the world that is anything but holy. So the world tells the church crowd, “You are the problem. If you would be more like us and stop preaching against our sin, we would all get along.”
Thus, the church is asked to come over toward the world and compromise its position, It’s interesting that in a compromise situation, the one in the position of strength must always give up some of that strength and come down to where the other side is. What the church should be saying is, “Hey, world, we know there is conflict. Why don’t you, through the blood of Christ, come over and join with us?” But we usually choose to let the church be more like the world for the sake of getting along.
Too many of us do this every day with our children. A lot of you moms and dads have made a deal with the devil in the past few days, only in this case the devil is a four-year-old. We compromise for the sake of peace.
Another popular line of thinking is, “If I can make it through this week...” We don’t solve anything or fix the problem. We just want to survive the moment.
We’ve taken a few moments to consider what peace is not. So what is peace? Peace is the attitude or condition that comes when a person is right with God and right with man. There are a few dozen other definitions of peace, and I struggled to narrow it down, because there are several different levels of peace. The Bible speaks of national peace, spiritual peace and some other things, all of which give the impression of soundness.
When we talk about a sound idea or principle, we are usually saying that it is solid or complete. It gives the idea that you’ve got it together and you are whole. You’ve figured it out.
I know very few people who have it all figured out. You can probably think of more than one occasion in which you’ve seen someone and thought to yourself, “I wonder if he is as together as he appears to be.” There are many people who, underneath a very smooth and orderly presentation, have conflict galore in their lives. But there are some who actually live their lives at home the same way they do in public. Their outward portrayal is a true reflection of who they are.
Those are the people who have found peace. Things do not exacerbate them or get them riled up for no reason. Nothing inflates or deflates them. Through good times or bad times, they stay on a pretty even keel.
Most of us are not like that. We are either way up or way down, and we can’t seem to find that constant level that isn’t too high or too low.
There are more than 400 references in the Bible to peace. Rom. 12:18 says, “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.” Heb. 12:14 says, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” You cannot see God if you don’t have peace.
James 3:16-18 says, “For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.” The opposite of peace is confusion, and the Word of God has answers for those who are confused.
Let’s look at the author of peace. According to I Cor. 14:33, “For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.” The author of confusion is the devil, and the author of peace is God. If God is in the middle of something, there is a level of peace about it. Satan seeks to cause confusion, and it is evident in every aspect of our society.
Think about this for a moment. The predominant features of a rock concert are darkness, noise and smoke. The same is true for a battle zone. A church service should be the antithesis of that; it should be peaceful (although peaceful doesn’t mean dead). It should be encouraging, not confusing.
In the New Testament, God is described six times as the God of peace. Gideon built an altar to the Lord and in Judges 6:24 he called it “Jehovahshalom.” That means “God is peace.” One of the terms used to described Him in Isa. 9:6 is “Prince of Peace.”
John 14:27 says, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” He is the giver of peace.
But He also points out that the peace He gives is not like the peace the world gives. What is the difference? We equate peace with the absence of problems. Your job is steady, your marriage is stable, and your kids are OK. That is probably your definition of peace. You have a brief respite from trouble, and everything is good right now.
The world gives you a week like that every few months to keep you in the cycle. You have 30 days of hell, five days of peace, 30 more days of hell, and so on. Every once in a while Satan tells his demons to stop bothering you so you think it’s all going to get better.
I’ve watched marriages like this. A couple will fight like cats and dogs for six months, then they have a good week and think, “We’re fine, Preacher. We don’t need to change a thing.” Then they’re right back at each other’s throats.
Peace is not the absence of problems. Peace comes in knowing that, in spite of the problems, God is still on throne.
The world says, “I’ll give you a little break this week.” God says, “Whether you get a break or not, I’m still God and you’re still OK. I’ve got everything under control.”
There are several aspects to real peace. First, man cannot have peace without a right relationship with God. A lost person who thinks, “I don’t know where I’m going when I die,” is as far from peace as one can get. The Bible says in Rom. 5:1, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
I see lost people who sit in our church services, and you can tell by looking at them that they are not at peace. But because they are holding onto something, they would rather go through life in confusion and chaos than make peace with God. You will never have the peace of God until you make peace with God, and that only comes when you confess your need of a Saviour.
God’s peace is everlasting and unchanging, and it is directly related to your spiritual condition. His peace is completely unfazed by your circumstances.
Deut. 9:18-20 says, “And I fell down before the LORD, as at the first, forty days and forty nights: I did neither eat bread, nor drink water, because of all your sins which ye sinned, in doing wickedly in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger. For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure, wherewith the LORD was wroth against you to destroy you. But the LORD hearkened unto me at that time also. And the LORD was very angry with Aaron to have destroyed him: and I prayed for Aaron also the same time.”
God is angry with Aaron, and His wrath is about to be poured out on Moses’ people. He is ready to level Israel to the ground and start over with Moses. But the last phrase of verse 19, where God hearkened unto Moses, gives a glimpse of how great He is.
Moses was in this instance a man with perfect peace – right with God, interceding for his people. God was ready to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and Moses pled for Him to do otherwise. In the midst of so much confusion and chaos, there was a little bubble with only Moses and God.
Today there is the same kind of confusion and chaos all around us. God is still angry at the wicked every day, and His judgment will come sooner rather than later. But there is a group of people walking with God through all of this, and they have found peace.
It doesn’t matter what some Islamic terrorists do, or how high the price of gas goes. We still have God, and He has promised to meet our needs. When God gives you peace, these things are not going to bother you. He gives peace that is not changed by circumstances.
Since the beginning the devil has led an attack on peace. Our sinful nature is always battling for control. There are two voices you listen to – the one with the world’s view and the one with the Word of God. Every time you turn on your television you are exposed to the world’s view, whether it is a sporting event or some scientific program that talks about what supposedly happened billions and billions of years ago. They all think that this world is just one big accident.
Sometimes it seems like we are outnumbered, just a few people wanting to follow God against an entire world. But we have about 6,000 years of history behind us with the fingerprint of God on it. The people who would say that there is no God are dying as fast as they get here, and His Word just keeps on going.
The battle within us rages because, as Jer. 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” People tell me all the time, “Preacher, I am basically a good person. In my heart I really want to do good.” It’s a lie. Your heart is deceitful, and the person it deceives is you. People go to Hell because they think themselves to be better than they are. They think that they’re doing OK, and they’re better than most people they know, and that is what deceives them.
Pride keeps you from repentance, which keeps you from peace. If you have true peace, it’s because you realized that there are some thing you can’t handle and you need God to come into your life and take control.
II Cor. 5:18-20 says, “And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.”
When I think about people I know who do not have peace, I see blatant areas of disobedience in their lives. The ones who have peace, on the other hand, seems to be trying their very best to do right. That is not a coincidence. There is a direct correlation between your obedience to the Word of God and your level of peace.
Walking with God is the first step toward attaining peace. There must be some time that you spend alone with Him if you are ever going to have peace. How can you know His will for your life if you are not engrossed in His Word and seeking Him in prayer?
Trying to win people to Christ is another step to find God’s peace. When you have the joy of leading someone to Christ and seeing that person find the thing that he or she needs more than anything else, something inside you is rekindled. Some of you were saved a long time ago, and that moment for your is far back in your memory, but every time you open the Bible and share the Gospel with someone else it is like you are seeing it for the first time again.
The ones who are the most at peace are those who stay in the saddle and keep working together for God. Those are the people who are steady no matter what kind of trouble comes along. There is a lot less depression in people who are busy. They are usually more content.
Let the Word of God dwell in you and be your foundation. Col. 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”
Philosophy is always changing. Some of the philosophies of education I studied in the late 1980s, which were the “new” way of doing things at that time, have now gone by the wayside. Textbooks are rewritten every five years. Our television talk shows have gone through the same kinds of cycles.
When presidents, leaders, philosophers, gurus and educators come and go, the Bible stays the same. It has been relevant since the moment it was written. Men and women have been having trouble since the Garden of Eden. We’ve been having the same problems for centuries, and the Word of God has been fixing those problems that entire time.
Somewhere there is a lost person who has the same problems you have. The difference is that you can have peace through God if you are right with Him and living for Him.
