“Christian Resolutions_2020, Part 20” by Romans
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We are continuing in our Series, “Christian Resolutions_2020,” and our fine-tuned focus on the Fruit of the Spirit which are, at once, both Foundational to and manifestations of Christian Resolutions. This is part 20 of this Series. We have so far reviewed and examined Love and Joy, the first two Fruit. Today we continue in our review and examination of Peace.
Last week, as you may recall, I opened with a definition of Peace, which included it as a salutation found in all of the Apostle Paul's epistles. And in its capacity as a greeting, we saw how Jesus greeted His fearful disciples when He first appeared to them after His resurrection. “Peace” was the very first word He spoke to them in His resurrected state. Specifically, He said to them, “Peace be unto you” (John 20:19).
Tonight, I would like to bring to your attention, that on His last night on earth, as He was basically giving His disciples parting thoughts and instructions, one significant thought included “Peace.” He said to them, “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” (John 14:27).
The turmoil and grief and confusion and fear that the disciples experienced when Jesus was arrested by a mob, and tried and convicted in an illegal and rigged trial, condemned, scourged, crucified and buried, were all cushioned by Jesus, both before and after, with His imparting to them His Peace. “My Peace I give unto you,” before it all happened, and then in the Upper Room behind locked doors for fear of the Jews and the Romans, His initial greeting is “Peace be unto you.”
But let's go back to His parting thought of Peace, and examine that through the pen of Alexander MacClaren. He writes of this: “CHRIST'S PEACE: ‘Peace be unto you!’ was, and is, the common Eastern salutation, both in meeting and in parting. It carries us back to a state of society in which every stranger might be an enemy. It is a confession of the deep unrest of the human heart. Christ was about closing His discourse, and the common word of leave-taking came naturally to His lips;
just as when He first met His followers after the Resurrection, He soothed their fears by the calm and familiar greeting, ‘Peace be unto you!’ But common words deepen their force and meaning when He uses them. In Him ‘all things become new,’ and on His lips the conventional threadbare salutation changes into a tender and mysterious communication of a real gift. His words are deeds, and His wishes for His disciples fulfil themselves.
I. So we have here, first, the greeting, which is a gift. ‘Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you.’ We have seen, in former discourses on this chapter, how prominently and repeatedly our Lord insists on the great truth of His dwelling with and in His disciples. He gives His peace because He gives Himself; and in the bestowal of His life He bestows, in so far as we possess the gift, the qualities and attributes of that life.
II. His peace is inseparable from His presence. It comes with Him, like an atmosphere; it is never where He is not. It was His peace inasmuch as, in His own experience, He possessed it. His manhood was untroubled by perturbation or tumult, by passions or contending desires, and no outward things could break His calm. If we open our hearts by lowly faith, love, and aspiration for His entrance, we too may be at rest; for His peace, like all which He is and has, is His that it may be ours.
The first requisite for peace is consciousness of harmonious and loving relations between men and God. The deepest secret of Christ’s peace was His unbroken consciousness of unbroken communion with the Father, in which His will submitted and the whole being of the man hung in filial dependence upon God. And the centre and foundation of all the peace-giving power of Jesus Christ is this, that in His death, by His one offering for sin for ever, He has swept away the occasion of antagonism, and so made peace between the twain, the Father in the heavens and the child, rebellious and prodigal, here below.
Little as these disciples dreamed of it, the death impending, which was already beginning to cast its shadow over their souls, was the condition of securing to them and to us the true beginning of all real peace, the rectifying of our antagonistic relation to God, and the bringing Him and us into perfect concord.
My brother, no man can be at rest down to the very roots of His being, in the absence of the consciousness that he is at peace with God. There may be tumults of gladness, there may be much of stormy brightness in the life, but there cannot be the calm, still, impregnable, all-pervading, and central tranquillity that our souls hunger for, unless we know and feel that we are right with God, and that there is nothing between us and Him. And it is because Jesus Christ, dying on the Cross, has made it possible for you and me to feel this, that He Is our peace, and that He can say, ‘Peace I leave with you.’
Another requisite is that we must be at peace with ourselves. There must be no stinging conscience, there must be no unsatisfied desires, there must be no inner schism between inclination and duty, reason and will, passion and judgment. There must be the quiet of a harmonised nature which has one object, one aim, one love; which-to use a very vulgar phrase-has ‘all its eggs in one basket,’ and has no contradictions running through its inmost self.
There is only one way to get that peace-cleaving to Jesus Christ and making Him our Lord, our righteousness, our aim, our all.
Your consciences will sting, and that destroys peace; or if they do not sting, they will be torpid, and that destroys peace, for death is not peace. Unless we take Christ for our love, for the light of our minds, for the Sovereign Arbiter and Lord of our will, for the home of our desires, for the aim of our efforts, we shall never know what it is to be at rest. Unsatisfied and hungry we shall go through life, seeking what nothing short of an Infinite Humanity can ever give us, and that is a heart to lean our heads upon, an adequate object for all our faculties, and so a quiet satisfaction of all our desires.
‘Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?’ A question that no man can answer without convicting himself of folly! There is One, and only One, who is enough for me, poor and weak and lowly and fleeting as I am, and as my earthly life is. Take that One for your Treasure, and you are rich indeed. The world without Christ is nought. Christ without the world is enough.
Nor is there any other way of healing the inner discord, schism, and contradiction of our anarchic nature, except in bringing it all into submission to His merciful rule. Look at that troubled kingdom that each of us carries about within himself, passion dragging this way, conscience that, a hundred desires all arrayed against one another, inclination here, duty there, till we are torn in pieces like a man drawn asunder by wild horses. And what is to be done with all that rebellious self, over which the poor soul rules as it may, and rules so poorly?
Oh! there is an inner unrest, the necessary fate of every man who does not take Christ for his King. But when He enters the heart with His silken leash, the old fable comes true, and He binds the lions and the ravenous beasts there with its slender tie and leads them along, tamed, by the cord of love, and all harnessed to pull together in the chariot that He guides. There is only one way for a man to be at peace with himself through and through, and that is that he should put the guidance of his life into the hands of Jesus Christ, and let Him do with it as He will.
There is one power, and only one, that can draw after it all the multitudinous heaped waters of the weltering ocean, and that is the quiet, silver moon in the heavens that pulls the tidal wave, into which melt and merge all currents and small breakers, and rolls it round the whole earth. And so Christ, shining down lambent, and gentle, but changeless, from the darkest of our skies, will draw, in one great surge of harmonised motion, all the else contradictory currents of our stormy souls. ‘My peace I give unto you.’
Another element in true tranquillity, which again is supplied only by Jesus Christ, is peace with men. ‘Whence come wars and fightings amongst you? From your lusts.’ Or to translate the old-fashioned phraseology into modern English, the reason why men are in antagonism with one another is the central selfishness of each, and there is only one way by which men’s relations can be thoroughly sweetened, and that is, by the divine love of Jesus Christ pouring into their hearts, and casting out the devil of selfishness, and so blending them all into one harmonious whole.
The one basis of true, happy relations between man and man, without which there is not the all-round tranquillity that we require, lies in the common relation of all, if it may be, but certainly in the individual relation of myself, to Him who is the Lover and the Friend of all. And in the measure in which the law of the Spirit of life which was in Jesus Christ is in me, in that measure do I find it possible to reproduce His gentleness, sympathy, compassion, insight into men’s sorrows, patience with men’s offences, and all which makes, in our relations to one another, the harmony and the happiness of humanity.
Another of the elements or aspects of peace is peace with the outer world. ‘It is hard to kick against the pricks,’ but if you do not kick against them, they will not prick you. We beat ourselves all bruised and bleeding against the bars of the prison-house in trying to escape from it, but if we do not beat ourselves against them, they will not hurt us. If we do not want to get out of prison, it does not matter though we are locked in.
And so it is not external calamities, but the resistance of the will to these, that makes the disturbances of life. Submission is peace, and when a man with Christ in his heart can say what Christ said, ‘Not My will, but Thine be done,’ Oh! then, some faint beginnings, at least, of tranquillity come to the most agitated and buffeted; and even in the depths of our sorrow we may have a deeper depth of calm.
If we have yielded ourselves to the Father’s will, through that dear Son who has set the example and communicates the power of filial obedience, then all winds blow us to our haven, and all ‘things work together for good,’ and nothing ‘that is at enmity with joy’ can shake our settled peace. Storms may break upon the rocky shore of our islanded lives, but deep in the centre there will be a secluded, inland dell ‘which heareth not the loud winds when they call,’ and where no tempest can ever reach. Peace may be ours in the midst of warfare and of storms, for Christ with us reconciles us to God, harmonises us with ourselves, brings us into amity with men, and makes the world all good.
II. Secondly, note here the world’s gift, which is an illusion. ‘Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.’ Our Lord contrasts, as it seems to me, primarily the manner of the world’s bestowment, and then passes insensibly into a contrast between the character of the world’s gifts and His own. That phrase ‘the world’ may have a double sense. It may mean either mankind in general or the whole external and material frame of things. I think we may use both significations in elucidating the words before us.
Regarding it in the former of them, the thought is suggested-Christ gives; men can only wish. ‘Peace be unto you’ comes from many a lip, and is addressed to many an ear, unfulfilled. Christ says ‘peace,’ and His word is a conveyance. How little we can do for one another’s tranquillity, how soon we come to the limits of human love and human help! How awful and impassable is the isolation in which each human soul lives!
After all love and fellowship we dwell alone on our little island in the deep, separated by ‘the salt, unplumbed, estranging sea,’ and we can do little more than hoist signals of goodwill, and now and then for a moment stretch our hands across the ‘echoing straits between.’ But it is little after all that husband or wife can do for one another’s central peace, little that the dearest friend can give. We have to depend upon ourselves and upon Christ for peace. That which the world wishes Christ gives.
And then, if we take the other signification of the ‘world,’ and the other application of the whole promise, we may say-Outward things can give a man no real peace. The world is for excitement; Christ alone has the secret of tranquillity. It is as if to a man in a fever a physician should come and say: ‘I cannot give you anything to soothe you; here is a glass of brandy for you.’ That would not help the fever, would it? The world comes to us and says: ‘I cannot give you rest: here is a sharp excitement for you, more highly spiced and titillating for your tongue than the last one, which has turned flat and stale.’ That is about the best that it can do.
Oh! what a confession of unrest are the rush and recklessness, the fever and the fret of our modern life with its ever renewed and ever disappointed quest after good! You go about our streets and look men in the face, and you see how all manner of hungry desires and eager wishes have imprinted themselves there. And now and then-how seldom!-you come across a face out of which beams a deep and settled peace.
How many of you are there who dare not be quiet because then you are most troubled? How many of you are there who dare not reflect because then you are wretched? How many of you are uncomfortable when alone, either because you are utterly vacuous, or because then you are surrounded by the ghosts of ugly thoughts that murder sleep and stuff every pillow with thorns?
The world will bring you excitement; Christ, and Christ alone will bring you rest.
The peace that earth gives is a poor affair at best. It is shallow; a very thin plating over a depth of restlessness, like some skin of turf on a volcano, where a foot below the surface sulphurous fumes roll, and hellish turbulence seethes. That is the kind of rest that the world brings. Oh! dear friends, there is nothing in this world that will fill and satisfy your hearts except only Jesus Christ. The world is for excitement; and Christ is the only real Giver of real peace.
III. Lastly, note the duty of the recipients of that peace of Christ’s: ‘Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’ The words that introduced this great discourse return again at its close, somewhat enlarged and with a deepened soothing and tenderness. There are two things referred to as the source of restlessness, troubled agitation or disturbance of heart; and that mainly, I suppose, because of terror in the outlook towards a dim and unknown future. The disciples are warned to fight against these if they would keep the gift of peace.
That is to say, casting the exhortation into a more general expression, Christ’s gift of peace does not dispense with the necessity for our own effort after tranquillity. There is much in the outer world that will disturb us to the very end, and there is much within ourselves that will surge up and seek to shake our repose and break our peace; and we have to coerce and keep down the temptations to anxiety, the temptations to undue agitation of desire, the temptations to tumults of sorrow, the temptations to cowardly fears of the unknown future.
All these will continue, even though we have Christ’s peace in our hearts, and it is for us to see to it that we treasure the peace, ‘and in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let our requests be made known unto God,’ that nothing may break the calm which we possess.
So, then, another thought arises from this final exhortation, and that is, that it is useless to tell a man, ‘Do not be troubled, and do not be afraid,’ unless he first has Christ’s peace as his. Is that peace yours, my brother, because Jesus Christ is yours? If so, then there is no reason for your being troubled or dreading any future. If it is not, you are mad not to be troubled, and you are insane if you are not afraid.
The word for you is, ‘Be troubled, ye careless ones,’ for there is reason for it, and be afraid of that which is certainly coming. The one thing that gives security and makes it possible to possess a calm heart is the possession of Jesus Christ by faith. Without Him it is a waste of breath to say to people, ‘Do not be frightened,’ and it is wicked counsel to say to men, ‘Be at ease.’ They ought to be terrified, and they ought to be troubled, and they will be some day, whether they think so or not.
But then the last thought from this exhortation is-and now I speak to Christian people-your imperfect possession of this peace is all your own fault. Why, there are hundreds of professing Christian people who have some kind of faint, rudimentary faith, and there are many of them, I dare say, listening to me now, who have no assured possession of any of those elements, of which I have been speaking, as the constituent parts of Christ’s peace. You are not sure that you are right with God. You do not know what it is to possess satisfied desires.
You do know what it is to have conflicting inclinations and impulses; you have envy and malice and hostility against men; and the world’s storms and disasters do strike and disturb you. Why? Because you have not a firm grasp of Jesus Christ. ‘I have set the Lord always at my right hand, therefore I shall not be be moved’; there is the secret. Keep near Him, my brother; and then all things are fair, and your heart is at peace.
I remember once standing by the side of a little Highland loch on a calm autumn day, when all the winds were still, and every birch-tree stood unmoved, and every twig was reflected on the steadfast mirror, into the depths of which Heaven’s own blue seemed to have found its way. That is what our hearts may be, if we let Christ put His guarding hand round them to keep the storms off, and have Him within us for our rest.
But the man who does not trust Jesus ‘is like the troubled sea which cannot rest,’ but goes moaning round half the world, homeless and hungry, rolling and heaving, monotonous and yet changeful, salt and barren-the true emblem of every soul that has not listened to the merciful call, ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’”
To this, Matthew Henry adds, “Peace I leave with you. When Christ was about to leave the world he made his will. His soul he committed to his Father; his body he bequeathed to Joseph, to be decently interred; his clothes fell to the soldiers; his mother he left to the care of John: but what should he leave to his poor disciples, that had left all for him? Silver and gold he had none; but he left them that which was infinitely better, his peace.
“I leave you, but I leave my peace with you. I not only give you a title to it, but put you in possession of it.” He did not part in anger, but in love; for this was his farewell, Peace I leave with you, as a dying father leaves portions to his children; and this is a worthy portion. Observe,
1. The legacy that is here bequeathed Peace, my peace. Peace is put for all good, and Christ has left us all needful good, all that is really and truly good, as all the purchased promised good. Peace is put for reconciliation and love; the peace bequeathed is peace with God, peace with one another; peace in our own bosoms seems to be especially meant; a tranquillity of mind arising from a sense of our justification before God.
It is the counterpart of our pardons, and the composure of our minds. This Christ calls his peace, for he is himself our peace, as we read in Ephesians 2:14. It is the peace he purchased for us and preached to us.”
Allow me this brief aside to read Paul's entire thoughts on this: “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace;” (Ephesians 2:14-15).
Matthew Henry writes of these verses: “We have now come to the last part of the chapter, which contains an account of the great and mighty privileges that converted Jews and Gentiles both receive from Christ. The apostle here shows that those who were in a state of enmity are reconciled. Between the Jews and the Gentiles there had been a great enmity; so there is between God and every unregenerate man. Now Jesus Christ is our peace.
He made peace by the sacrifice of himself; and came to reconcile, 1. Jews and Gentiles to each other. He made both one, by reconciling these two divisions of men, who were wont to malign, to hate, and to reproach each other before. He broke down the middle wall of partition, the ceremonial law, that made the great feud, and was the badge of the Jews' peculiarity, called the partition-wall by way of allusion to the partition in the temple, which separated the court of the Gentiles from that into which the Jews only had liberty to enter.
Thus he abolished in his flesh the enmity, (in verse 15). By his sufferings in the flesh, to took away the binding power of the ceremonial law (so removing that cause of enmity and distance between them), which is here called the law of commandments contained in ordinances, because it enjoined a multitude of external rites and ceremonies, and consisted of many institutions and appointments about the outward parts of divine worship.
The legal ceremonies were abrogated by Christ, having their accomplishment in him. By taking these out of the way, he formed one church of believers, whether they had been Jews or Gentiles. Thus he made in himself of twain one new man. He framed both these parties into one new society, or body of God's people, uniting them to himself as their common head, they being renewed by the Holy Ghost, and now concurring in a new way of gospel worship, so making peace between these two parties, who were so much at variance before.
2. There is an enmity between God and sinners, whether Jews and Gentiles; and Christ came to slay that enmity, and to reconcile them both to God. Sin breeds a quarrel between God and men. Christ came to take up the quarrel, and to bring it to an end, by reconciling both Jew and Gentile, now collected and gathered into one body, to a provoked and an offended God: and this by the cross, or by the sacrifice of himself upon the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. He, being slain or sacrificed, slew the enmity that there was between God and poor sinners.
Back to Matthew Henry's original comments before this cross-reference, picking it up where we left off: “This Christ calls his peace, for he is himself our peace, as we read in Ephesians 2:14. It is the peace he purchased for us and preached to us, and on which the angels congratulated men at his birth, in Luke 2:14.”
2. To whom this legacy is bequeathed: “To you, my disciples and followers, that will be exposed to trouble, and have need of peace; to you that are the sons of peace, and are qualified to receive it.” This legacy was left to them as the representatives of the church, to them and their successors, to them and all true Christians in all ages.
3. In what manner it is left: Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. That is, (1.) “I do not compliment you with Peace be unto you; no, it is not a mere formality, but a real blessing.” (2.) “The peace I give is of such a nature that the smiles of the world cannot give it, nor the frowns of the world take it away.” Or, (3.) “The gifts I give to you are not such as this world gives to its children and votaries, to whom it is kind.” The world's gifts concern only the body and time; Christ's gifts enrich the soul for eternity: the world gives lying vanities, and that which will cheat us;
(4.) What use they should make of it: Let not your heart be troubled, for any evils past or present, neither let it be afraid of any evil to come. Note, Those that are interested in the covenant of grace, and entitled to the peace which Christ gives, ought not to yield to overwhelming griefs and fears. This comes in here as the conclusion of the whole matter; he had said (in John 14:1), Let not your heart be troubled, and here he repeats it as that for which he had now given sufficient reason.” Christ gives substantial blessings, which will never fail us: the world gives and takes; Christ gives a good part that shall never be taken away.
(5.) The peace which Christ gives is infinitely more valuable than that which the world gives. The world's peace begins in ignorance, consists with sin, and ends in endless troubles; Christ's peace begins in grace, consists with no allowed sin, and ends at length in everlasting peace. As is the difference between a killing lethargy and a reviving refreshing sleep, such is the difference between Christ's peace and the world's.
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “Christian resolutions)_2020, Part 20.”
I fully plan at least one more Installment in which to review and examine Peace, the third Fruit of the Spirit. God willing I will bring you that to you next week. I hope as many of you as are hearing my voice, or reading my words will join me for that.
This Discussion was originally presented “live” on May 20th, 2020.
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