The Only Way to Happiness - Be a Peacemaker
Notes
Transcript
And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:
And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
Introduction:
Introduction:
God is the God of peace.
Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.
Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you.
Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.
Peace is a very popular theme in the Scriptures.
In fact, there are 400 direct references to peace in the Scripture.
In fact, the word peace appears 1,882 times in the Word of God, making it one of most popular themes in the Scriptures.
The Word of God opens with peace in the garden of Eden, and it will close with peace in eternity.
Peace was interrupted on this earth by the introduction of sin, but at the cross peace was once again made a reality.
And whoever places their faith in Christ alone will, once again, have the ultimate peace of being at peace with God.
Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
However, the most obvious fact that fills our minds and our world now is that we do not live in a time and a world that is filled with peace.
I would say that there is no true peace on the earth for two reason.
First, because of the opposition of Satan and the disobedience of man.
The fall of the angels and man established a world that is without peace.
Satan and man are engaged in a battle with the God of peace for sovereignty.
Peace is so scarce that one person suggested:
Matthew, vols. 1-4 (The MacArthur New Testament Commentary) Chapter 19: Happy Are the Peacemakers (5:9)
“peace is that glorious moment in history when everyone stops to reload.”
In 1968 a major newspaper reported that there had been to that date 14,553 known wars since 36 years before Christ.
Since 1945 there have been around 70 wars and nearly 200 internally significant outbreaks of violence.
Since 1958 nearly 100 nations have been involved in some form of armed conflict.
With all the well-intended efforts to make peace on the earth in our modern times, few people could honestly say that our world is a world of peace.
The fact is that we do not have economic peace, religious peace, racial peace, social peace, family peace, or personal peace.
There seems to be, in our society, no lack of marches, rallies, protests, demonstrations, riots, and wars.
Disagreements and conflict are the order for day.
No day in modern society needs peace the way that our society needs peace today.
However, the ironic truth is that as much as our society needs to have peace, our society does not honor those that try and seek or try and make peace.
Our society seems to be a society that often lauds the powerful and exalts destruction.
The man that is exalted by the world is not the meek, but is the macho.
The model of man in our society is not self-giving but is self-serving; not generous but selfish.
Not gentle, but cruel, not submissive but aggressive.
The seventh beatitude calls God’s people to be peacemakers.
He has called us to a special calling to help restore peace that was lost at the fall.
The peace for which Christ and the rest of the Scripture call is not the peace for the which the world strives and knows.
God’s peace has nothing to do with politics, armies and navies, forums of nations, or even councils of the Church.
It has nothing to do with statesmen, negotiations of truths or treaties.
God’s peace, for which the Bible speaks, never evades issues.
It knows nothing of peace at any price.
It does not gloss or hide, rationalize or excuse.
It confronts problems and seeks to solve them.
Listen, this is not a peace that will be brought by kings, presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, or international humanitarians.
It is the inner personal peace that only He can give to the soul of man and that only His children can exemplify.
I want us to notice, and we will not get through them all today, four realities of God’s peace that are reveled to us: Its Meaning, Its Maker, Its Message, and Its Merits.
I. The Meaning Peace
I. The Meaning Peace
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
What does it mean to be a peacemaker.
The fact is that the peace of which Christ speaks is much more than just the absence of conflict and strife; it is the presence of righteousness.
Listen, only true righteousness can produce the relationship that brings two parties together.
Men can stop fighting without righteousness, but they cannot live peaceably without righteousness.
Righteousness not only puts an end to harm, but it administers the healing of love.
That is why the Beatitudes that came before this one speaks about being holy because only holiness will produce real peace.
The Jewish term “shalom” is an expression that wishes “peace” and expresses the desire that the one who is greeted will have all the righteousness and goodness God can give.
When a Jewish person says “shalom” he is wishing another more than the absence of trouble, but all that will make for a complete, whole life.
God’s peace is not narrowly defined.
It is much more than the absence of strife; it encompasses all of the person, it is positive.
Peace is never true peace until all of the problems have been resolved.
When problems are not truly handled, the conflicts merely go underground.
And then underground they tend to fester, grow, and break out again.
I am reminded of an account that Jesus told in the Gospels.
I find that this illustration that Jesus gave fits the narrative of what is true peace and what is just a mask.
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.
Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.
Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.
You get the point!
The idea is that when a demon is removed from a place and then he returns and he may find the place clean, but he does find the place occupied with that which is right and good.
So what happens?
When the demon comes back he brings seven other demons with him and when they moved back in the last state, Jesus said, was worse than the first.
The point is that when he try to get rid of some things that are not good, but you do not replace it with things that are righteous, then the original bad is going to come back and will come back with a vengeance.
And the point is that when treaties of peace are made that are not replaced by righteousness; then the problems, though hidden underground, just grow and get worse.
That is why true peace is not just that absence of conflict, but it is the presence of righteousness.
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.
That is the idea.
God’s way to peace is through purity.
And that is why only God’s true people can bring peace because only God’s people are truly pure.
Because we need to understand that true peace cannot be attained at the expense of righteousness.
Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord:
Here is the meaning of true peace; truth and righteousness.
Where there is true peace there is righteousness, holiness, and purity.
Trying to bring harmony by compromising righteousness forfeits both.
Jesus made this striking announcement.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
Now at first glance that seems to be the antithesis of the seventh beatitude.
But the meaning of Christ is that the peace that He came to bring is not peace at any price.
Because there will be opposition before there is harmony; there will be strife before there is peace.
Listen, being peacemakers on God’s terms requires being peacemakers on the terms of truth and righteousness, to which there will be fierce opposition.
When believers bring truth to bear on a world that loves falsehood, there will be strife.
When believers set God’s standards of righteousness before a world that loves wickedness, there is an inevitable potential for conflict.
But that is the only way.
Because until unrighteousness is changed to righteousness there cannot be godly peace.
And, listen, the process of bringing our true peace will be difficult and costly.
Because truth will produce anger before it produces happiness; righteousness will produce antagonism before it produces harmony.
That is why, I believe, that the beatitudes are a progression.
A person who does not first mourn over his own sin will never be satisfied with the righteousness of God.
Because true peace only comes when sin and disunity are replaced with righteousness.
If disunity and sin are are not replaced with righteousness, then the suppression of the sin and disunity, that is in the form of peace, will only bred greater sin and disunity later.
Listen, the talk of peace without talking of repentance of sin is to talk foolishly and vainly.
The corrupt religious leaders of Israel thought that you could have peace without righteousness, but the prophet said:
For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they fall among them that fall: in the time of their visitation they shall be cast down, saith the LORD.
Because regardless of the particular circumstances, where there is conflict there is sin on one or both parties.
And if you separate the conflicting parties from each other but do not separate them from sin, at best you will succeed only in making a truce.
Peacemaking cannot come by circumventing sin, because sin is the source of very conflict.
Until a person acknowledges his enmity with God, it makes no sense to offer him peace with God.
Listen, and this is a very big issue, Biblically.
We need to understand that the Gospel message that says that, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” is so false.
Because that type of gospel only tries to bring about a truce with God; not true peace because of righteousness.
Where there is no righteousness, there is no true peace with or from God.
When Jesus was speaking to the woman at the well in John 4, He did not offer her a truce with God, He offered her peace with God.
And He offered her peace with God by preaching righteousness.
But He did not present to her peace with righteousness without first showing her the unrighteousness of her life.
Listen, that is the sword that true peace brings.
The woman at the well did not understand the words of Christ when He said:
There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink.
And, of course, as this conversation started this woman could only think on the physical and not on the spiritual.
Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.
Jesus brings this to the spiritual:
Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.
Again, she brings it back to the physical.
The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?
“I mean, how are you going to give me to drink, you do not have anything to draw out the water.”
Jesus, again, takes it to the spiritual.
Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again:
But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
Again, the woman, only interprets the words of Christ from a physical standpoint.
The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.
This woman was starting to get a little excited.
In the first century what the women of the house did was that they came to the town well each day early to draw enough water that she would need for the baking and the washing of the day.
But this woman, who Jesus had an appointment with from all eternity, was there at the sixth hour, verse 7 tells us.
That would be about 12 noon by our clock.
Right in the middle of the hottest part of the day.
Why would she do that?
Because, as we will see, she was an outcast in the town because of her lifestyle.
And she would rather come in the middle of the hottest part of the day rather face the ridicule and gossip from the other women in the village because they disapproved of her lifestyle.
So when Jesus said that He could give her water that she would never thirst again, she said, “Yea, I will take that, so that I do not have to come here anymore.”
But, still thinking on the physical.
So Jesus says:
Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither.
Jesus is confronting her on the level of her sin because Jesus knows that there cannot be true peace without righteousness.
And that there cannot be righteousness with facing unrighteousness.
The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband:
“I do not have a husband, what has that got to do with me getting this water so that I do not have to come back here everyday.”
For thou hast had five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that saidst thou truly.
So, first He confronted her immoral living.
Then He confronted Her about her false ideas about worship.
Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father.
Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews.
And what Christ was doing was going at this woman at the level of her sin.
A person who is not willing to disrupt and disturb in God’s name cannot be a peacemaker.
To come to terms on anything less than God’s truth and righteousness is to settle for a truce.
Which, by the way, confirms sinners in their sin and may leave them even further from the kingdom.
Jesus said, “so, you believe that you are in the kingdom? Well, let’s talk about that.”
Are you a peacemaker?
Not meaning are you a person that is always trying to settle arguments and make people happy with other people again, at all costs.
Because those people in the name of love or kindness or compassion try to witness by appeasement and compromise of God’s Word will find that their witness leads away from Him, not to Him.
God’s peacemakers are will not willing let sleeping dog lie if it is opposed to God’s truth; they will not protect the status quo if it is ungodly and unrighteous.
They are not willing to make peace at any cost.
Listen, God’s peace only comes God’s way.
Being a peacemaker is essentially the result of a holy life and the call to others to embrace the gospel of holiness.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Happy are those that are true peacemakers.
They will not sacrifice truth or holiness for compromise or a truce.
The Beatitude Attitude of Kingdom living is a person that brings about true peace because they approach true peace by a life of righteousness.