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I. The Fruit of Peace
I spent some time early this last week going through all 247
references in the Bible… on peace… I put 72 references into this four
page handout that we will study here this Wednesday evening. What
struck me was how clear the Bible is when it defines what God means
when he offers us peace. Let me test your knowledge….
As you sit in your seat this morning would you say you are at peace?
Think about your life…
Is your life full of the God's promised peace?
God actually gave Moses a blessing that the priests were supposed to
speak often to Israel. For centuries the Israelites hung on to every
word of this blessing as God's special promise to them. It goes like
this…
Numbers 6:22 Then the Lord said to Moses, 23 “Tell Aaron and his
sons to bless the people of Israel with this special blessing: 24 ‘May
the Lord bless you and protect you. 25 May the Lord smile on you and be
gracious to you. 26 May the Lord show you his favor and give you his
peace.’ (NLT)
What was God actually promising them? If you are familiar with where
Numbers shows up in the Bible, you know that Israel, at this point are
wandering around homeless, in the desert and would be for some time to
come. By the time they leave the desert everyone over the age of 40
will have died…. except for Moses and Caleb.
If they are looking for God's peace to mean they will get along with
everyone they meet on the way to the Promised Land…they are going to be
vastly disappointed.
The next few centuries will bring battle after battle…. war and
death will plague them continually right up to the 21st
century… In the 1940's… six million of the people who received this
promise died cruelly. Their Holy city has been leveled 21 different
times.
Did God forget his special blessing to them? Did He promise them
peace and then back out on his promise?
That's where this handout was eye opening to me… When you look at
the word unfolding in Scripture:
There is a peace from bad outer circumstances that God promises some
people at a certain periods of time. Because of sin in the world it is
usually short-lived.
I had somebody ask me this week… How can this person treat me so
badly… why does God allow them to? My response was; Almost every bad
thing that happens to any of us… happens because of someone's sin… God
has chosen not to force our actions but to allow us to choose to say
yes or no to temptation.
I could only find a couple of verses that could even be stretched to
suggest that God's peace is connected to what is happening around us.
I found four pages of Scripture, ( and I left that many more
unprinted), that suggest that God's promised peace is what takes place
inside us.
When I asked the question earlier:
Is your life full of the God's promised peace?
…some of your minds went immediately to your present life
circumstances and you were struggling to match God's promise of peace
to the outside chaos in your life.
Hear me when I say: You can't possibly deal with the chaos on the
outside unless you fully know what it means to have God's peace on the
inside!
I was amazed to find that, from the earliest Old Testament
passages…. the peace of God you have/ or don't have on the inside is
directly connected to a right relationship with God. I wasn't surprised
to find that as a Biblical truth… you expect that in the New Testament…
I was just surprised how clear it is in the Old Testament as well..
Job 22:21 "Submit to God and be at peace with him; in this way
prosperity will come to you. (NIV)
Psalm 119:165 Those who love your instructions have great peace and
do not stumble. (NLT)
Isaiah 32:17 The fruit of righteousness will be peace; the
effect of righteousness will be quietness and confidence forever. (NIV)
Isn't that something…we know a Fruit of the Spirit is PEACE in the
New Testament but who ever thought that the fruit of peace was listed
in the Old Testament and so clearly linked to our righteousness? (Our
willingness to live in line with Gods commands)
I need to make sure we get this: God's peace and right living are
linked at the hip. You don't get one without the other.
Psalm 85:10 Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness
and peace kiss each other.
I saw a movie about a Mafia hit man who was murdering his enemies
during the week but faithfully going to confession on the weekend.
That's an extreme example of how we sometimes live our lives. We
live lifestyles that we know certainly wouldn't qualify as righteous…
yet we expect God to overlook our sin and fill us with his peace. It
just doesn't work that way… This is a repeated statement:
Isaiah 48:22 "There is no peace," says the LORD, "for the
wicked."
This cute little saying is actually very biblically accurate..
No God - No Peace! Know God - Know Peace!
It's no accident that when the Savior of the world is prophesied he
is given a very specific name.
Isaiah 9:6 For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The
government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful
Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 7
His government and its peace will never end…
You and I understand….
…. that Jesus government would be over the Kingdom of God, his peace
that would never end would be among those who would become citizens of
the kingdom. You know, now, that the only way you and I qualified to
become citizens of the Kingdom of the Prince of Peace is because he
took our sin penalty on himself and died in our place. His defeat of
sin, and death, and satan, and hell, and his resurrection from the dead
provided eternal life for all who will believe.
Now we can grasp the meat of Isaiah 53… imagine how hard it would
have been for a Jew to understand 600 years before Jesus was born:
Isaiah 53:5 ..He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed
for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon
him, and by his wounds we are healed. (NIV)
John the Baptist daddy caught what was coming in his prophesy in
Luke 1:
Luke 1:78 Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from
heaven is about to break upon us, 79 to give light to
those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to
guide us to the path of peace.” (NLT)
You get the picture that I'm trying to hammer home? Those who sit in
darkness and those who follow the path of peace are at opposite places
in life. God spends so much time trying to draw this line of
distinction. I wouldn't/couldn't be a biblical preacher and not try to
draw the same line, in the same way…
Isaiah 48:17-18 …“I am the Lord your God, who teaches you what is
good for you and leads you along the paths you should follow. 18 Oh,
that you had listened to my commands! Then you would have
had peace flowing like a gentle river and righteousness
rolling over you like waves in the sea. (NLT)
We have never really defined the word PEACE. The word doesn't mean:
the absence of conflict. When Jewish people greeted each
other with "shalom" they weren't saying, "May your life be free of all
hostility"
OT Peace- the tranquility of order… having things lines up the way
they were designed to be.
NT Peace- Resting in God because things are lined up the way they
were designed to be.
The best illustration I could think of was the healthy human body.
It is an unbelievable complex design fashioned by God to accomplish a
very specific set of functions. When all is in the "tranquility of
order" the human body is amazing in what it can achieve.
When something enters that system that is not part of the design
specification of the Creator, the whole system can shut down in
amazingly short time. We call this intruder:
Dis-ease
From a biblical viewpoint…Disease is a lack of peace in the human
body…a break in the "tranquility of order"
The insertion of what was not intended to be part of our system can
break our bodies down and even kill us in a very short period of time..
This is exactly what happened to us on a spiritual level. God's
original design was flawless. We were created to have perfect communion
with him.. We found it natural to completely depend on him as our
Creator and Heavenly Father. The idea of rebelling against our loving
Father was completely foreign to the system.
Then along came the dis-ease of sin. Sin broke down -in short order-
all God had designed for our personal relationship with him.
The only thing that could restore the tranquility of order in our
spiritual lives would be to purge the dis-ease of sin back out of our
spiritual system.
That's why God became a man and died for our sins…to open the
doorway to restoring our spiritual "tranquility of order"… We
understand statements like:
"the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by
his wounds we are healed."
You could make a case here… that this particular Fruit of the
Spirit…cost Jesus his life…. Yes they all did…but this
one is specifically said to have brought about Jesus death on the
cross.
Colossians 1:19-20 For God was pleased to have all his fullness
dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things,
whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through
his blood, shed on the cross. (NIV)
Jesus died to bring back into order… the disorder of our spiritual
lives. His death provides the pathway for us to reunite with God in
communion, to live righteous lives where were are not filled-up with
spiritual dis-ease…. To restore the tranquility of order to our souls…
Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we
have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
However….What you are going to see on these sheets on Wednesday
evening is a warning on God's part…almost a pleading… that now that you
have "restored spiritual order" provided by Jesus death and
resurrection… and since the peace of God and unrighteous actions can
not co-exist….it would make no sense at all for the child of God to be
resting in peace over here…. and over here…. to be dabbling in the very
sin he has been rescued from.
The fruit of peace is designed to move us away from our sinfulness
and dis-ease and more and more into spiritual health and actions of
righteousness.
1 Thessalonians 5:23 Now may the God of Peace make you holy in
every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept
blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again. (NLT)
If you are crying out for spiritual order (peace) on the inside… the
only pathway to there… is to repent and turn from sinfulness on the
outside!
Prayer….
Conclusion:
2 Thessalonians 3:16 Now may the Lord of peace himself give you
peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you.
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