Christmas Peace

Christ alone can bring lasting peace—peace with God—peace among men and nations—and peace within our hearts.

Billy Graham

Your Standing

How do you understand the term “At peace with God”? For many, I think would refer to a feeling or an idea. That statement is used in a sense of how one may feel about their current standing with God. As in “this is how I live my life, and I am OK with it, I am at peace with God”.

It’s important to know that this is a false sense of peace this not biblical peace, this is not Godly peace, this is a trick of the enemy to allow us to have false security in our own human created understanding of “Peace with God”.

Peace is not established by us, but instead given by God.

Luke 2:14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to people He favors!”

Don’t you find it interesting that the angels in heaven singled out a specific group of people. Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to people He favors. I know that we have heard on movies, and plays the term, “goodwill toward men!” some in an attempt to be inclusive wrongly interpreted this phrase. The phrase is to people he favors or people with whom he is pleased.

Who are these people God favors? Who are these people with who God is pleased? Who are these people who were given God’s peace?

They are people who accepted Jesus as the risen messiah.

Lets take a look at what Paul tells the Colossians.

Colossians 1:19–22 “For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile everything to Himself by making peace through the blood of His cross — whether things on earth or things in heaven. Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds because of your evil actions. But now He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him —”

Reconciliation. Restoration of friendly relationships and of peace where before there had been hostility and alienation. Ordinarily it also includes the removal of the offense which caused the disruption of peace and harmony. This was especially so in the relation of God with humanity, when Christ removed the enmity existing between God and mankind by his vicarious sacrifice. The Scripture speaks first of Christ’s meritorious, substitutionary death in effecting reconciliation of God with sinners; of sinners appropriating this free gift by faith; the promised forgiveness and salvation that become the sinners’ possession by grace; and, finally, reconciliation to God (Rom 5:10; 2 Cor 5:19; Eph 2:16).

Walter A. Elwell and Barry J. Beitzel, “Reconciliation,” Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 1823–1824.

Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds because of your evil actions. But now He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him —

We were given the peace of God - through the blood of His cross .

Remember that