If you were able to describe our works in one word, would you choose the word “peaceful”? I’m guessing there are a lot of other words that come to mind before peaceful. Your list may include words like, chaotic, broken, unstable, frightening or disintegrating.
As a nation, we have lost confidence in our government, medical institutions, and scientific exploration. And many have lost confidence with the church, which is at a all-time low with attendance.
Right now, the world is anything but peaceful
But we all desire and need peace. So many people look for peace in superficial things, including drugs, alcohol, entertainment and money, and yet still feel empty.
The truth is we’ve been looking for peace in all the wrong places and the world cannot offer us true peace, We need a peace that isn’t of this world,
Otherworldly peace is what Jesus offers us. Palm Sunday, a week before He was to go to the cross, suffer and die. Jesus took His disciples aside and gave them an amazing promise saying “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.
What a remarkable promise
Think about what Jesus was going through when He made this promise. Be had spent the last three years of His life hounded by the haters and suffocated by persecutors and oppressed. There was constant pressure on Jesus’s life.
Despite all of this, Jesus had peace. It is this peace that He invited His disciples and by extension, us to share in.
Still Today, Jesus offers the world three minds of peace.
1, Peace With God
Jesus offers us peace with His Father. In Romans 5:1-10, Paul tells us that all human beings begin as enemies with God and that it is only through faith in Jesus that we can have peace with God. It is Jesus’s death and Resurrection that made this peace possible.
Jesus knew this was the case. He knew His death was the only way to reconcile a sinful people with a righteous God. But He wept to God, because He experienced and understood the same feeling as the people around us. But He still prayed “Not my will be done but yours.” This is what Jesus came to do and it is why, hanging on the cross a week after giving His disciples His peace, He could proclaim “It is finished!” This war is over. Peace between God and humanity is now possible.
2.The Peace of God
Jesus also offered His followers the peace of God. Earlier in John 14m Jesus gives an interesting instruction to His disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” This is a daunting command and I would imagine all of the disciples wanted go do was ask, “How?”
The answer is found in Isaiah 26:3, “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in you.” Jesus is saying that our minds are crucial to experiencing God’s peace. With our minds fixed on Him, we can be a peace in this chaotic and anxious world,
Paul tells us this in Philippians 4:8-9. He tells the Church, “Finally. brothers and sisters, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy -think about such things.
The result is “The God of peace will be with you.”
3. The Peace God Will Bring When Jesus Returns
We are offered the peace Bod will bring when Jesus comes back to dwell among us.
It’s no coincidence that one of Jesus’s titles is “Prince of Peace.” We are promised that the world won’t have true, lasting peace until Jesus comes again. But when He does, Isaiah 11:6 tells us strange things will happen,
“The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; The calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf together; and a little child will lead them.”
Isaiah is saying,
There will be peace that our minds can’t yet fathom. Deep lasting transcendent peace. A piece this world can’t explain or recreate.
But it’s a peace that makes perfect sense if you know Jesus.
At the very end of John 16, the very end of Palm Sunday, Jesus gives His disciples a powerful promise. Today, over 2000 years later, Jesus extends to us that same transcendent promise of peace saying,
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart. I have overcome the world” -John 16:33
From Pity to Praise 