The Advent of Peace – December 15, 2013

Suggested Reading: Isaiah 9:1-7

Peace is so elusive.

Most people want it, but they don’t know how to get it. The world promises peace, but rarely delivers.

Peace as an ideal or a feeling is admirable, but fleeting and hard to pin down. Just when you think you have it, it slips through your fingers and disappears. Political peace is difficult to achieve and precarious, easily upset by the vagaries of circumstance or the emotions of individuals.

God offers peace, but not as the world offers it: not as an abstract ideal, a political compromise, or even as a subjective experience. God offers peace grounded in a person. Jesus is the Prince of Peace.

When the angels announced the birth of the Messiah to the lonely shepherds on the hills outside of Bethlehem, they announced peace on earth and goodwill to men.

Men expected the Messiah to bring peace to their world, but they thought it would be peace through superior firepower. They expected a political Messiah who would bring them military victory over their oppressors, their enemies.

What they did not anticipate was that the Messiah Himself would be peace. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of peace between God and man because He is God and man. Ever since the Garden of Eden, man and God had been divided, separated from the time when man rejected God and chose to seek knowledge and satisfaction apart from Him.

True peace is grounded in peace with God. The fundamental source of tension and division does not come from outside of us, but is the rupture of relationship between each of us and our Creator. We were created to be with Him, to live in perfect, unbroken relationship with Him and each other, but you and I have never experienced that in full.

When Jesus was born, peace was born. In His life, He demonstrated a life of perfect peace. He was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was angry at times, and suffered greatly, but never lost His connection with the Father. In His death, He made a way for us to boldly approach the throne of grace. In His resurrection, He killed death and showed us the power of the peace that is coming when death and separation are forever dead. In His ascension, He sent us the Spirit of peace; the Spirit that causes love, and joy, and peace to flow from within us.

Through the Spirit we are the peacemakers, the children of God, carrying on the work of our Lord and Brother Jesus. We receive comfort and peace from the Spirit and we become conduits of this peace and ambassadors of reconciliation. Through us, God preaches the Good News of the Prince of Peace born that first Christmas.

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Questions:

Are you living in a broken relationship with God? With others?

How can you respond to Jesus, the Prince of Peace today?

How can you be an agent of His peace today?