Telling the Truth for Women

Jill Briscoe: Today we're going to talk about, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God." How appropriate. They shall be called the Sons of God, for God is the peacemaker, and we need to tell other people, to tell the people that are trying to find out about peace, about him.

And so we're going to talk about peace today, and we're going to talk about the cost of peace, the place of peace, and the process of peace. How can we be the peacemaker? Because it doesn't just talk about peace.

The sense of what Jesus was saying at this point was, how can we, having come to know peace ourselves, become like God, like Father, like Son? How can we be peacemakers? For he is our peace, he is our peacemaker, then how can we mirror his character as we work to reconcile people to each other? And what a needy ministry that is.

And I'm hoping as you listen today, that you'll just plug in on a personal level, will you? And sort of open yourself up inside as you listen, and see if you can hear the Spirit of God instructing you very practically, giving you a handle on something you can do in a situation between two warring factions.

Now, if you don't know any warring factions, then I'd like to meet you afterwards, because it'll probably be a first. But I'm sure all of us can think of situations in our lives, perhaps in our family, perhaps in our own family, or perhaps in our extended family, or perhaps in the family of the neighborhood, or in families of your friends that you know, or in the cultural situation that you find yourself in and your extracurricular activities during the week, where somebody needs to be the peacemaker.

And you know, one of the problems with sticking to our rights as we so jealously guard them, is this right to privacy. And we do have a right to privacy, but it stops us sometimes, I think, being a peacemaker. We are so shy of intruding into somebody else's private affairs, that we would rather not infringe, and we back off. And yet the Christian is called to take whatever flack they might have, and make the effort anyway, and be the peacemaker that God wants us to be.

Now, Billy Graham said, "Jesus didn't leave a material inheritance to his disciples. All he had when he died was a robe which went to the Roman soldiers, his mother, who he turned over to his brother John, his body, which he gave to Joseph of Arimathea, and his spirit, which returned to God his father. But Jesus willed his followers something far more valuable than gold, far more enduring than land holdings, and more to be desired than palaces of marble. He willed us his peace."

What a beautiful quote. John 14:27, key verse, "Peace I leave with you." Jesus speaking. "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not therefore your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

And you know you can go to sleep on that verse, and you can wake up on it. And whether you face hospital tests, or trauma, or emotional pain, or whatever it is that faces you as you begin your day, you can take John 14:27 with you into your day, and remind yourself of this promise that Christ promised you his peace. Christ was a very peaceful person.

He was a together person, and of course that's what the word really means. An inner togetherness, an orderliness inside. Augustine it was, that defined peace as the tranquility of order. And I love that definition. The tranquility of order. Think about that.

I remember bringing a young man to Christ years and years ago in our street work. And he was the young man that went back into the pub the next day to try and tell his friends a little bit of what had happened to him. He didn't know why he wanted to tell them. He didn't know anything about being a Christian, seeing he was one day old in Christ. But as he sat looking into his beer, one of his friends said, "Is anything wrong, Trevor?"

And he looked up and he said, "No, everything's right. Everything's right. I'm together inside. I'm together inside." Are you together inside? That's a sort of description of peace.

Now, in the last 4,000 years, there have been 300 years of peace in the last 4,000 years. And the 300 years of uneasy peace has been disturbed by little wars somewhere. There has never been a time on this planet since sin entered the heart of man, when war did not exist. Maybe it was the war between Cain and Abel, when brother rose up to kill brother. But from then on in, it's been a sad story.

And man, who was made to be a peaceful creature, has searched for the peace that he lost ever since. I was watching a very interesting movie with my husband on television. It was about the making of the atom bomb. It took me back to the traumatic mushroom cloud that appeared on our newspapers and in our magazines and in our nightmares, and perhaps has done ever since.

And it was the story in this movie of a Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, who of course, was the supervisor of the creation of that bomb. He was the young scientist who struggled through the making of it. And you can imagine what was happening internally in his conscience as he put together the most destructive force that the world had ever known up to that point.

When he was in front of the congressional commission reporting that the bomb was ready to be used and dropped, a member of Congress said, "Dr. Oppenheimer, is there any defense against this awesome new weapon of war?"

"Certainly," the young man replied.

"And that is?" the congressman asked. The audience waited in subdued silence.

"Peace," the eminent scientist replied softly. "Peace." Is there any defense? Peace. Peace in the individual heart, peace in the family, peace in the neighborhood, peace in the town, peace in the city, peace in the country, and peace in the world. But it starts with peace in the human heart individually. Everybody's searching for peace.

Billy Graham has a whole list in his Secret of Happiness book, if everyone made a lot of money, we'd have peace. Have you ever heard anybody think that? If only I had a lot of money, then I wouldn't have to struggle and worry and I'd have peace. If all the arms were destroyed in the world, if all the guns were collected in a heap and destroyed, maybe then we'd have peace. Yet Cain killed Abel without a gun.

And you know, it's amazing what you can do with your bare hands. And if you ever doubt that, go to the movies and see some of these ghastly things if you want to. I don't want to and I don't do it. But I do see some of these movies on television or see the pictures that come off them, and the incredible violence that's perpetrated on one man against another with his bare hands defies description.

Maybe it's in the bottle, that's where peace is, but it doesn't last. The effects wear off. Maybe it's in knowledge, yet all the degrees that we get aren't enough. Maybe it's in the religions of the world. These wild new exotic ideas, these mind warping cults. And yet still, people that get into those things know that they haven't arrived and there's no peace.

Maybe it's in secure relationships. And where are you going to find them in this day and age? George Barna says, "It's going to get worse. We'll remain a society struggling with self-doubt and low self-esteem. As technology advances and the deterioration of social skills continues, America will feel increasingly isolated, Americans. Measures such as cohabitation will not fill the gap. Our dominant obstacle to emotional attachments will be our fear of being hurt and our unwillingness to sacrifice material comforts and leisure experiences in exchange for new relationships."

So, people search for peace all over the place, but they don't find it. The simple fact is there can be no real peace in the world until we have peace with God. Now we know that, but does the world know it? This tranquility of order only comes because Christ made our peace through the blood of the cross.

And Colossians 1:20 says, "Christ made peace by the blood of his cross." Romans 5:1, "We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Ephesians 2:14, "He is our peace." Just turn to Ephesians for a moment, because that's one of the most important passages. And I don't have time to take it to bits for you, but it would be a very rich study for yourself. I would recommend it to you.

Ephesians 2:14. Let's start a little bit back, verse 12. "Remember that at a time," and Paul is speaking to the Ephesian Christians, "you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace. And in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near, for through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit."

Marvelous, marvelous passage. He came to break down the hostility. He put to death the hostility. He has made peace. And you and I are to keep the unity of the peace. If peace is broken, somebody has deliberately broken it because peace has been made. We don't have to make peace, Christ made it. Now what we do with sin is get busy breaking it. And as Christians, we are told to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

So, this peace with God is where it begins, and that's what we need to tell people. And when people come to me and say, "Can you help me," as they often do, "with this relationship, with my marriage relationship, with my relationship with my children?" My first question is, "Have you made peace with God yourself?" And they often say, "Well, what's that got to do with him and her and them?" And I say, "Well, it's got more to do with them than you realize, because unless you have the Prince of Peace in your heart, there is absolutely no way you can be a peacemaker in this particular situation. You can try, you can come out with little techniques, you can counsel, you can learn how to do that, but without the Holy Spirit's work, reconciling. For Christ did it, and now the Holy Spirit is here to do it through us. Then without him, it's not going to work.

So this is the peace of God that we all need to know. Do you know this peace? Have you asked Christ to forgive your enmity, your hostility against him, and to bring you back to him, to be reconciled to God, because that's where peace begins? This peace passes all understanding, the Bible says. It says that this peace garrisons your heart and mind. And that word garrison, keep your heart and mind through Christ. And the word keep is garrison. This peace of God will put a garrison like peace soldiers, like a peacekeeping force around your heart, your emotions, and your mind.

I was reminded of Dr. Wood's testimony from this pulpit when he stood to testify to open heart surgery. And it was incredibly powerful and moving to me, to hear a top surgeon himself who has operated on many a heart describe what it was like himself to be laid out on that operating table ready for five bypasses. Massive, massive operation.

Now what did he say at the end of that testimony? "You had better be ready, for your turn will come," he told us. And that was a warning prophetic message. You had better be ready. Do you know the God of peace? Do you know the God of peace? And it really struck me that he had been able to make sure there was peace in his own relationship with God before he faced that very risky operation where they stop your heart. You can't operate on a heart that's beating and hopefully can get it going again. As he described making peace with his God, and making peace with his wife, making peace with his children, making sure that all the relationships in his life were right.

I was very, very challenged. And then he described how the peace of God garrisons his heart and his mind as he lay there, as he said, wearing only an IV. I tell you, it's times like that we need to know the peace of God garrisons our heart and mind. And this peace passes understanding. You can understand all sorts of other sort of peace when you're not facing open heart surgery, when everything's hunky-dory and, you know, your life's all in place, then of course you can have peace. But what about when life is falling apart?

You see, peace is not the cessation of hostilities or trauma. Peace is peace in the middle of it. That's the peace I'm talking about. That's the peace that God talks about. Psalm 27, "Though war shall rise against me, in this will I be confident. Though war shall rise against me, in this shall I be confident." It's like having a hedge around you, so that those that would besiege us are kept at bay.

This is what God desires for us. This is his inheritance. He left it with us. Remember he left his body to the soldiers. He left his mother with John. He left his spirit with his father, and he gave us his peace. Now this isn't peace at any price. Let's start and get practical at this point.

Peace isn't appeasement. Okay? Peace isn't appeasement. And I don't know, I think somehow your personality comes into this somewhere. If you're a mother, what sort of a mother were you, or are you? Peace at any price mother? I tended to be a little like that. I couldn't stand the confrontation. I'd always be anticipating it. And I'd try and get there before war broke out. And I'd try and start and put into effect peaceful resolutions before anything needed them, because I hate conflict.

Personality conflicts, I find that very difficult to live among and to cope with. In fact, my sister said to me once, "Jill, life is too short for me to fall out with people." I thought that was a wonderful thing, I've always remembered it. Wonderful person, my sister, and she's lived by some of those principles, "Life is too short to fall out with people. I will live in peace."

And maybe your personality lends to that, or maybe your personality is very warlike. Maybe you're not part of the solution, you're usually part of the problem. And maybe that's because of your personality. "Let's have a fight," is what you love to do, because that's how you're made. Well, whether you're made one way or another, the peace of God can make you peaceful, but it doesn't mean that you're going to be a peacemaker who appeases people. Peace of God was not at any price. It was at immense cost.

And that's the first thing I want to talk about, the cost of making peace between people. Once you have the peace of God, you want them to share it, and you want to see peace spill over into their families, in their relationships. This is going to be a costly thing. Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked about cheap grace. Stott says there's such a thing as cheap peace.

And cheap peace won't produce what you want it to produce. Peace at any price, let's forget about accountability, let's forget about repentance, let's forget about restitution, let's forget about asking for forgiveness, let's forget about confronting. That's cheap peace. And the problem with a peace that lasts is it's a painful thing.

They tell you, I think we human beings do not want anything to happen in our lives that that hurts us. You know, I don't like pain. I don't know about you. I'm I'm not for one, you know, give me pain. We'll be talking about some people that literally begged to be martyrs. Not me. No, thank you. No, I I hope and pray that will never happen to me because I don't like pain.

And it takes pain to produce peace, because there's no such thing as a cheap peace that's going to last. For example, the pain of apologizing. Have you ever had to apologize to someone? You know, that's a pain in one sense, and it feels like a pain in another sense. There's the pain of being misunderstood as you apologize, as you try and make peace, perhaps if you're at fault. There's the pain when you're not at fault of trying to be a peacemaker and have your efforts thrown back in your face. There's the pain of rejection. All this pain comes into being.

Stott says, and this is a new thought, and some of you are going to wrestle a little bit with this, because I certainly did. He says, "Sometimes there's the nagging pain of having to refuse to forgive the guilty party until he repents." God forgave us only when we repented. I think think this through. God forgave us only when we repented. Jesus told us to do the same.

Now I struggled with this. I thought, "Now wait a minute. We have to forgive whether people repent or not." But when you think of repentance as a gift, it makes sense. You are offering as a free gift somebody forgiveness. If they don't accept it, how can you forgive them? They will only experience forgiveness as they accept it. Reconciliation will only happen when two parties are involved.

Luke 17:3 says, "If your brother sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him. If he sins, rebuke him. If he repents, forgive him." We have to always be willing to forgive, but we cannot forgive until somebody accepts the forgiveness that we offer.

"How can we forgive?" Stott says. "The sin is neither admitted nor regretted." So there's going to be a lot of pain.