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We’ve all stepped into a conflict hoping to bring peace and walked out having made things worse—turns out we didn’t understand the system as well as we thought. Jesus calls the peacemakers blessed in Matthew 5:9, promising they shall be called sons of God, so the question worth sitting with is: what kind of peace does He actually have in mind?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
When have you tried to bring peace to a situation and accidentally made it worse? What did you learn about your own understanding of how peace actually works?
The sermon contrasts earthly peace (comfort, safety, no conflict) with God’s peace (reconciliation, belonging at the Father’s table, even amid brokenness). Which one do you naturally default to seeking? How might that shape the way you try to be a peacemaker?
In Ephesians 2, Paul describes Jews and Gentiles being brought together as one people—people who would have actively despised each other. Who are “those people” in your own life or community that you’d find it hardest to call family? What would it look like to extend God’s peace to them without asking them to become like you first?
The sermon mentions that the zealots in Jesus’ time thought they could achieve peace by overthrowing Rome and defending their turf. How do we do the same thing today—trying to achieve peace by force, control, or insisting others conform to our way?
If the church is meant to be a dwelling place of God’s peace and a visible picture of His kingdom to the world, what does your local church community reveal about what peace actually looks like? Where are the rough edges, and how might God be refining you through them?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, tonight we turn to yet another beatitude. And this one is one that, depending on your experiences, you probably have very different pictures of what it means. And that’s, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Let’s go ahead and start by actually looking at it. We see in Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
Now, I have to admit from a churchy background, I hear peacemaker, and I think of that book known as The Peacemaker. And many of us who have been involved in churches that have implemented it have bad experiences from that book. And so I think of all the programs and stuff that have been burdened upon people to allegedly be peacemakers. But we’re going to actually think about what Jesus has in mind here.
Maybe you don’t have that experience, but you’re coming from the world, and you’re thinking of different ways that we think of accomplishing peace. And some of those are equally bad. You think of times that you’ve been told to keep the peace, and what “keep the peace” meant was just allow bad things to happen. And so we often have these pictures, and they’re not necessarily great pictures of what it means to be those who are peacemakers. But when Jesus talks about being a peacemaker, he’s talking about giving people a taste of what is to come in the kingdom of God. And so that’s where we want to be tonight.
But if we try to do it on our own—and that’s why I love that this falls on Pentecost—if we try to do it on our own, it doesn’t work out well. I was reminded of our attempts to create a more peaceful world this week when I was reading a headline. And it was just a headline. I was doing something else, but I had to stop and read it. It was about how scientists had made these hyper-aggressive hamsters.
Now, you think of a hamster, right? Here’s a hamster. You think of a hamster—I don’t think of that as a hyper-aggressive creature. But these particular hamsters apparently were genetically altered, and they thought they had figured out a way to create more peaceful hamsters. They were trying to understand how creatures are more or less aggressive, trying to ultimately, of course, I’m sure, understand human behavior.
So, they had genetically altered these hamsters, and they thought they’d altered a gene that would cause the hamsters to be more peaceable and get along with each other better. And instead, they took a creature that, generally speaking, is relatively peaceful and turned that creature into a creature that would just go charging at another hamster. They would attack each other’s hands and legs and just get into huge brawls. And so now we have killer hamsters. What a contribution to the world, killer hamsters. I’m sure a movie is coming to us soon about that.
And this was the striking quote in the article, I thought. The professor who had done the research said, “We don’t understand this system, the genes they were editing, as well as we thought we did.” Yeah, I think that might be the case.
But if you’ve ever found yourself in any kind of conflict and you think, “I know how to solve that conflict, I’m going to help bring peace to those around me,” and it backfires. And I imagine all of us have had that experience where we’ve tried to be peacemakers, and it hasn’t worked. The thing that I think we probably all could say is, “I don’t think we understand this system as well as we thought we did.” We think we understand how to do it. But oftentimes, we’re not even really sure what true peace looks like. And as we try to find that peace, and even if we have an idea of what at least peace for us would be, we end up creating more discord instead.
So what does it mean to be a peacemaker? What does it mean, “Blessed are the peacemakers?” Well, we need to look at what Jesus did regarding peace. And as we look at what Jesus did and what He sends His Spirit to empower us to do, then we start to understand what true peace and what truly being a peacemaker looks like. So let’s come before our God, the only one who can bring true peace, and ask for His guidance as we reflect on this tonight. Will you pray with me, please?
Father, we want to be a people who bring peace. We want peace in our own lives. We want peace for those whom we love. Yet oftentimes, we bring the opposite of peace. We bring conflict and strife. We bring it into our own lives. We bring it into the lives of those around us. Lord, it seems like at times, we think we’ve found the secret to peace, and instead we’re creating killer hamsters all around us. But as we read Your word tonight, would You convict us and guide us by the power of Your Spirit that we might be those who truly are agents of Your peace? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
What does Jesus’ peace look like? What does that peace that we’re called to be an example of truly look like? Well, I think if we turn to Ephesians chapter two, as Paul reflects on the work of Jesus, we get a pretty good picture of what that peace looks like. Let’s take a look there.
Paul says, “Therefore, remember that at one time, you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision, by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no more hope, and without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He himself is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down with His flesh, in His flesh, the dividing wall of hostility.”
Jesus has broken down the hostility for us. And we see that, and Paul wants to be very clear on this as he’s writing to the Ephesians. The Ephesians are by and large Gentiles, so not Jews, not part of the Old Testament people of God, but rather people who were outside of those promises we read about in the Old Testament, at least initially. So people who were looking out from the outside world, trying to find some kind of solution. They’d heard the gospel, they’d come to believe, and Paul says, “You were the outcast, you had no sense of God’s peace.” And yet Jesus has brought that peace for you.
You who weren’t circumcised, you hadn’t gone through the ceremonies of being part of the people of God. And yet, and yet, by Christ’s work, by the cross, you’re reconciled. He says, “So no matter how much you might be someone who’s rejected by God, but you might be somebody who, for all the reasons in all the human wisdom about God’s will we could come up with, should just be cast aside.” Despite all that, God has offered His peace to you.
He’s talking about a peace that’s different than the peace that you and I often think about. I think about peace, what does peace mean? Peace means uninterrupted time to think about something or to work on something or to read a book, time that just nothing goes wrong, there aren’t any notifications, there aren’t any problems or crises, it’s just peace. Maybe in some parts of the world, unfortunately we see this all too much in the news, peace means not having anyone that’s going to try to kill you in this moment. Those are the sorts of things that we think of as peace. And yet, what Paul’s describing here isn’t any of that.
What Paul’s describing is a peace that these people are going to experience in the midst of ordinary broken life where they very well may be facing death, they may very well be facing persecution, they may very well be facing just the normal troubles and toils of life. But in that, that’s where we find God’s peace. Take a look at Micah chapter five, verse five. We’re told, “And he shall be their peace. When the Assyrian comes into our land and treads in our palaces, then we will raise against him seven shepherds and eight princes of men.”
Well, we started that passage with peace, but if you notice that passage doesn’t sound very peaceful. The Assyrians are coming. That’s not what I think of as peace—the Assyrians coming, being attacked by the enemy, people that want to kill me. Last time I checked, that’s not how I define peace. So what’s being talked about there? Who’s this He that’s going to bring this peace? Well, if you go back to verse two, it’s the Messiah. You see, one of those passages we love to read right at Christmastime, the foretelling that Bethlehem would be the place where the Messiah would be born—that’s this passage just a few lines up—that the Messiah would be born in that little bitty town of Bethlehem. And so it’s a foretelling that the Messiah is coming.
But war’s still coming. Wasn’t the Messiah supposed to conquer and vanquish and make everything good and peaceful? And we’re told here that He’s going to be our peace, and yet, and yet there’s a broken world. What are we being told about? We’re being told about a different kind of peace. We’re being told about not a peace in which everything in the world suddenly is peaceful and it’s like being sent on a wonderful vacation to wherever you dream of going, wherever you’ve been thinking, “Wow, when I get on vacation, I want to go here.” Not talking about that kind of peace.
Talking about something much deeper, that in the midst of current strife, in the midst of all the troubles of the world, God is with you. The one who’s in charge of everything is with you in the challenges and the brokenness. He Himself becomes our peace.
Again, Paul says in Colossians chapter one, “And through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross.” I often feel like I want to complain to God, “Why aren’t things more peaceful? Why aren’t things running more smoothly? Why is it so difficult?” And then you read Colossians one and you see, where did that peace come from that we experienced? Where does that reconciliation happen? It happens in Jesus’ blood, His blood on the cross.
The God who made the whole world, who could simply declare peace and wipe out all those who bring any kind of discord into the world and just live by Himself in perfect harmony without anything to mess it up, came into the world and brought the opposite of peace to Himself so that we could experience peace. In the Talmud, in the oral tradition of the rabbis, they actually said that peace was one of the names of God. In Isaiah, we’re told that one of the titles of Jesus is the Prince of Peace. He becomes our peace.
Blessed are the peacemakers. Well, who’s the ultimate peacemaker? Jesus Himself. He comes and brings peace. And not just some kind of appeasement that sort of settles things in the moment, but a costly peace, a peace that costs His life—that you and I might experience peace.
But we say, “I want that peace in the moment. I want that endless vacation where everything is nice and smooth. I want the peace where those who oppose me, those who criticize me, those who attack me, those who get promotions over me, those who do better than I do, I want all those people to be vanquished and that everything’s gonna be good for me.” That’s what I want when I think of peace.
But you know, the problem is when we think that that’s what we can achieve and somehow then after that, then we will experience true peace, the problem is it doesn’t actually get us anywhere. Just a few years after Jesus’ ministry, after He descended into heaven, Jerusalem would be destroyed. And you know how it got destroyed? By those who thought they could achieve peace by themselves. They looked at the Roman Empire and they said, “This Roman Empire is cruel. This Roman Empire is tyrannical. It demands too much of us. It doesn’t allow us the freedom to worship our God the way we want. We are going to overthrow this Roman government and we’re going to have peace.”
The very people who said that said, and the reason that we’re gonna do this is because we are sons of God. We are those who are loyal to our God, and because we’re loyal to our God, we’re going to go fight and we’re gonna go kill those awful people and achieve peace for ourselves.
You know who didn’t join in that rebellion in Jerusalem? The Christians. Not because they were being treated wonderfully by the Romans, but because as they reflected on who Jesus was, they saw that that wasn’t going to ultimately bring them peace.
So often that’s how I feel like I’m gonna bring peace. I’m going to muscle my way into, I’m going to force my way into, I’m going to outwit the others and everything’s going to be good. What happened to those who thought they were going to do that? Many of them were slaughtered by the Romans. In their attempt to achieve peace, they experienced the ultimate in discord. And for those who weren’t slaughtered, for those who managed to escape, they were exiled. They could never go back to their homes. Jerusalem was a barren waste. The temple that they wanted to defend was destroyed. All because they were looking for the wrong kind of peace.
They were valuing earthly peace and thinking if I can achieve earthly peace, that will—and I’m bringing it about—then I can go around and say I’m a son of God because I have brought about peace. And Jesus knew this was coming. He foretells it in His ministry. And many of the people listening to Him in that moment, as He’s preaching through the beatitudes, many of them were thinking in these very terms. He knew that. That they thought a peacemaker—and they thought those who bring about peace by force. Because they were valuing the wrong kind of peace.
And He said no, but the kind of peace you need to value, the kind of peace that’s ultimately going to fulfill you is the sort of peace that I’m bringing for you, the sort of peace that brings punishment for sin against me so that you can experience peace with your heavenly Father. And this is far better than the sorts of peace that we achieve in the world.
If you think about it, let’s say the rebels had succeeded. They had overthrown the Roman government. But have they ever been genuinely at peace with Rome? Caesar never was, “Oh, okay, I didn’t realize you didn’t want to be ruled over by me. Okay, that’s really nice. Let’s be friends now. Let’s go do scientific exploration into the parts of the world that aren’t known together now.” No, that’s not what He was gonna say.
At best, had they succeeded, Caesar would have said, “It’s not worth any more of my soldiers to fight you. So I’m gonna go stand over here and you stand over there and we’ll go our own way.” Oftentimes in the world, that’s how we’re thinking about peace. When we’re thinking about how we’re gonna achieve it on our own, we’re thinking, “I’m going to achieve a place where the people around me will leave me to my own devices.”
And that’s not the kind of peace that God achieves for us. That’s not the kind of peace that we have with God as we trust in our Savior. As we trust in Jesus, we’re not merely getting the sort of peace where God says, “Okay, okay, I’m not gonna punish you.” We’re getting the sort of peace where God says, “I love you.” Not the sort of peace where, “Okay, now you can be my hired hand, but now you can be at my table as my family.” And that’s a very, very different kind of peace.
So if that’s what peace looks like, and if that’s what Jesus’ peace looks like, what does it then mean to be one of those blessed peacemakers? What does it look like to actually live that? We can’t go to the cross for other people. Sometimes we’ll take this too far and think, “Well, okay, if that’s the route, then I’m going to give my life and I’ll help some other people like Jesus helps.” But we can’t because we’re not the Savior. We can’t do what Jesus has done, and we don’t need to because His work is complete.
So what does it look like to follow Him? What does it look like to be a peacemaker in this moment? Well, if we turn back to Ephesians chapter two, Paul helps us to think about that. And if you notice when we are reading those last few verses, Paul uses some interesting phrasing. He keeps using the word “both.” Take a look, we can see that again in the next verses.
He says, “For He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross thereby killing the hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, for through Him, we have both access in one Spirit to the Father.”
Notice those “both”s there. Now you might be thinking, “Well, who’s the both? Is Paul talking to two people?” Well, he’s not talking to two people, he’s talking to two types of people. He’s talking to Jews and Gentiles in the church. And he’s saying, “What Christ has done is for us both, whether you’re Jew or Gentile.”
Okay, that’s nice. Doesn’t really challenge us today. Well, you think, okay, if I went around the room here and said, “What’s your heritage of your family?” Maybe you’ve gone onto ancestry.com and you’ve signed up and you’ve sent DNA and you got back that chart and it tells you you’re so much Polish and so much Irish and so much this and so much that. You think, okay, so God brings some people together. Doesn’t really challenge us in the same way, maybe in this moment.
So what does it mean that God reconciled Jew and Gentile? It means to take people who hated each other and bring them together as one people. Who is it that really grates us? Who is it that really annoys us? Who is it that we just can’t stand? What kind of people just really get under our skin? I’m not gonna even list examples, but put a blank in your head and think, “I’m gonna fill that in.” I’m on the one side and those people. Those people I usually like to not hang out with. Those people that I really would prefer not be sitting next to me at church. That’s the sort of people that Paul’s talking about. That’s the experience of what Jesus does. He doesn’t just reconcile other people that we get along with okay. He reconciles the people that we don’t get along with. The people who are, for lack of a better word, our enemies.
And in that, it’s transforming to us and it’s counter-cultural because our culture doesn’t like to do that. If anything, I feel like our culture embraces the idea of us versus them as much as we possibly could. We have different us versus thems, but all you have to do is turn on the TV and you can hear it constantly over and over again how there’s this group and that group is bad and then there’s this group and this group is basically—you can hear the angelic choir singing around them because they’re so good. And of course, whoever’s presenting is in the group with the angelic choir singing and they’re so good.
We feed that, that division, that wall of hostility that Paul’s referring to. And it may not be the exact wall that they were experiencing in the time, but the principle is the same. Jesus brings us together. Many in the ancient world valued the concept of oneness and unity of being brought together in some form. Certainly, if you know the ideas of Plato, Plato thought ultimately everything could be brought together into a single unifying principle.
But the ancient world, just like the modern world, was looking in the wrong places for it. There were lots of ancient cults in the Greco-Roman world that claim to offer the key to having that unity, to experiencing that oneness, and then by that extension, to experience peace. We’re called to something different. What does it mean to be a blessed peacemaker? What does it mean when Paul’s talking about being reconciled and brought together as one? It’s very different.
You know, the interesting thing about many of those groups that said they were going to somehow or another bring everyone together, what were they doing? They were saying, “Well, if you can be like us, we’re special. If you can be like us, then you will experience peace, and then we can all be one. If you had the mysteries that we have, if you knew the secrets that we know, all would be well.”
Sometimes we want to act that way too. I want to say, “Well, if you were just like me, the world would be so much easier. If everyone were just like me. I mean, really, it would be just so easy. You know, just why not? I mean, everyone would have the right opinions about everything. You know, everyone would know the right baseball team. Cubs, you know, all the fans in Wrigley would always wear red all the time instead of just half of the fans or so.” Everyone would have good taste in colors. Everyone would have good taste in food. There would be a potato at every meal. I mean, it would be a great world because everyone would be sensible, right?
I mean, of course, I’m speaking tongue in cheek. I know if there were a bunch of me’s, I’d really get on my nerves even more than I do right now, because it wouldn’t be peace. But I like to think that it would be.
And sort of an extension of that, then, is that oftentimes we think that peace is going to come about when we defend ourselves and our rights and our privileges. But the way of Christ is one where we lay those things down for others. What does it look like to actually be those who bring peace to others? What does it look like to be those who usher in the transforming power of God’s kingdom? Something that the world can’t even picture.
Isn’t it hard to fathom what it will be like someday when Jesus returns? And there actually is complete peace. I try to imagine it, but I can’t even imagine what it’d be like just to have peace for a moment in our current world. You think about the ongoing war. We hit day 100 of the war in Ukraine this week. And if you’re like me, I feel like every day I have to open up my social media in the morning. I go onto Twitter and I look at some of the feeds of journalists over in Ukraine and see if something horrific happened. And of course, the answer is yes, there’s all kinds of horrific things happening. And if there hasn’t been a nuclear bomb dropped, I guess that means that we made it for another day.
And then you take it a little bit further. How do you get to peace from where they are right now? How do you achieve peace? Well, the Russians as they attack say, “Well, we’re achieving peace.” What do they call some of the troops that they send? Peacekeeping troops. And what do they mean by peace? They mean we’re going to send in troops who have enough strength that we will subdue those who aren’t like us and we will make them like us or we will kill them. And then there’ll be peace because everyone will be like us.
Now, let’s say they succeeded. Would there be peace? No, there wouldn’t because, would there be a new reason to divide? There’d be a new reason to hate one another. They’d find something we always knew as human beings. But in that moment, think about what’s being described. That’s not peace, that’s war. That’s conflict, the opposite of peace. And thankfully, most of us don’t command armies. And so we’re not making decisions. Am I gonna send troops in and invade my coworker’s cubicle? That’ll teach ‘em. We’re not thinking about those sorts of things. And yet, we do it in little ways. And the problem becomes the same.
I think about the war in Ukraine and I think, okay, let’s say tomorrow all the nations assisting Ukraine gave them enough weapons, they drive the Russians all the way back to their borders, and then we fund enough funds to rebuild all the buildings that have been destroyed. Everything is as good as it could be. Does that bring peace? Well, in a sense, but not in another sense. Because why? Think about all the people who have died. Think of all those over there who have lost a loved one. If their house gets rebuilt, are they suddenly going to just feel peaceful feelings towards those who killed their family members? Who took away things in a life and the security that they prized and rested in like we do in our own lives, in our own families, in our own possessions? No. Won’t be peace.
And in our attempts to bring order and to somehow achieve peace in our own world, it just keeps building out and out in a vicious circle. You think about, on the other side, now you have Russian families as well who have lost family members in the war. And you can look at it and say it’s an unjust war and they shouldn’t be there. But for the average soldier sent in, their family’s just gonna think about how that soldier never comes home to the table again.
How do you achieve peace? How do we do that in our own lives when a coworker finds a way to doubt with us and gets the promotion? When someone manages to cheat at school and get a better grade than we do? When the neighbors seem to get away with everything and the subdivision code enforcers always seem to find something wrong with our house? How do you achieve peace? How do we achieve peace in our families? How do we achieve peace with our friends? It seems like it’s an impossible task.
And no matter what you do, you can always think of, “But what about all those other times?” And it often seems like the best we can do is say, “Okay, I’m not going to attack anymore.” Been reading a lot of modern European history thinking about what’s been going on over there. And you look at the countries, the parts of the former Eastern Bloc that are just frozen now, like Bosnia. It’s not even really a truly functioning country because you have two governments overlaid that have sort of agreed to coexist and not exterminate each other. We have peace, sort of.
That’s often how we do with our own friends and family as well. We find a way to tolerate, a way to survive. But Jesus calls us to something more. He calls us not to worry about our own rights and privileges, not to worry about everything being made right for us, but rather to look to the one who didn’t deserve anything to go wrong, was willing to take on death and the punishment for sin for us, to look to Him and to say, because I have peace with Him and because through Him, the Father looks on me not as the enemy, but as a beloved son or daughter, that therefore too, I can extend that graciousness to others.
It’s interesting when you think about this word that Jesus uses, “sons.” Now, some translators have translated sons and daughters now because they want to be clear. This is a promise for all Christians, men and women. But one translator points out, and I think this is so good, we should leave it sons. We shouldn’t translate it sons and daughters because there’s more to it than simply saying we’re biologically related or adopted or in any sense somehow in God’s family.
What it’s saying is we have all the privileges of the ancient son. What does it mean to be a son? It meant to have the inheritance, to have authority in the household. It meant privilege before the father and before those around us. And that’s what we’re called into, to be actually not just those who sort of eke into God’s family, but those who truly are part of the household, who truly belong at the table, at the seat right with the Father. That’s the kind of peace being described.
Contrary to what the zealots thought—the group that wanted to overthrow the Roman government who thought that we’ll achieve peace by conquering and defending our own turf—they thought that would make them sons of God because they stood up for God. Because we follow the one who works in us, we see something very, very different. Take a look at Ephesians chapter two, verse 22. Just a little further than we were before.
Paul says, “In Him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”
What does it mean to be a peacemaker? It means to join hands with those who confess Christ—even the ones that get on our nerves, even the ones that are really difficult, even the ones who have the wrong opinions about stuff. To be joined by Jesus and not by all the things that we value in this world.
And in that, not just because they say, “Oh, okay, to get you so that you’re not my enemy anymore, I’ll just agree with you. I’ll get rid of everything that annoys you.”
You see, the Jews and the Gentiles that followed Jesus, they didn’t all immediately just become exactly the same. The Jews still had their ceremonial laws and many of them practiced them. They had been circumcised, they ate differently. They lived different lives than the Gentiles. And the question wasn’t, can you now live like a Gentile, but can you live with the Gentiles and love the Gentiles as your family?
That’s what Jesus is challenging us to be thinking of as we’re the church. Can we live with those who confess Christ with us even when it’s really hard? Can we do that?
You see, when we’re thinking in our normal earthly terms, we’re thinking if everyone can just finally become like me, it will be better. And so we think, okay, there’s two different metals here. There’s silver and there’s lead, and if only I could turn that lead in person into a silver person like me, it would be great.
But I love this metaphor that John Chrysostom uses. He says, it’s as if one should melt down one statue of silver and another of lead, and the two together should come out gold.
See, God could have made everyone exactly the same, but what does He do instead? He takes us and all of our differences and all our faults and failings—He knows about them. He starts purifying us. And as we join with other people who are in that same process of being purified and being sanctified and being made more like Him—even though we’re not there yet and we’re gonna have bump heads in the meantime—what does He create? He creates something far more beautiful, far more valuable than any of us individually. He takes lead and silver and creates gold.
You see, the church is a people brought to peace with God. And as we recognize that, we’re a people who then become the dwelling place of a God who’s at peace with us. Think about that for a moment. Whatever you’re going through, whatever burdens you carried in here tonight, maybe burdens about the next week and what you have to do tomorrow morning, whatever things have you feeling in turmoil.
As we’re together, and then as we part, we’re still the body of Christ, even when we’re apart. God dwells amongst us as the people of God. God dwells in us. And so that peace that used to be separated behind a curtain in a temple and separate us is now a peace that we experience in the moment.
Churches are people brought to peace with God who becomes a dwelling place of a God of peace. And then we shine that peace to the world so that as the world looks on the church, they see, yeah, we’re messed up. Yeah, we have problems. Yeah, we’re difficult. Yeah, we’re not even just lead statues. We’re lead statues with some arms broken off and some chips and scratches and we’re tarnished and imperfect.
We’re allowing the Spirit to purify us and to forge us into something very beautiful. That each and every person, whatever they might be and however chipped and tarnished and broken they are, can join in that. That’s our job as peacemakers.
As people look at us and see us being transformed, and as they see us transformed, they start to see more and more of the Father, and so they say, there is a Son of God, there is a daughter of God. They see the invitation to actually come in, to come in and experience that peace themselves.
May we be agents of that peace today. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, so often we are not agents of Your peace. We are not those who bring about peace to You but rather those who bring conflict and strife into the world. And yet we know that You are the God of peace. Would You use us in those places where we cling to conflict unnecessarily? Those places where we distance from our brothers and sisters in Christ rather than drawing closer.
And Lord, perhaps there’s someone here tonight or listening online who has never even experienced peace with You and listens and thinks that’s a nice thought. I want to pray for that person tonight that he or she might experience peace with You tonight to recognize no matter how broken and tarnished he or she might be. That You are the God who restores, the God who brings peace, the God who allowed Himself to take on the punishment for us.
May we cling to Your peace and reflect it into the world this day and every day. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
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