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If you think about the state of the world currently, would you use the word peace to describe it?

What about your life. Is your life peaceful?

Would you consider yourself to be a peaceful person? 

Do you bring peace to your places of influence? 

Is your home a peaceful place? What about the places in which you spend time outside the home? 

How have you experienced peace this week? 

What might prevent you from experiencing peace in the coming week?

I believe God is concerned about these things. He is a God of peace. As we will see, the deliverance of people into the experience of peace was a primary objective in Jesus coming to earth, sacrificing himself, and resurrecting into new life.

This new life is a life of peace, and we are invited to join Jesus in this experience. So, what is it?

What is Peace?

In the Bible, peace describes the ideal human state:

It is much more than the absence of conflict: it is wholeness. Not only to the individual, but also to entire communities and relationships. It is total well-being, prosperity, and security that is associated with God’s presence among his people. 

In the OT, the presence of peace signified God’s blessing in the covenant relationship. It is the Hebrew word, Shalom, which means everything is as it should be. 

The absence of peace signified the breakdown of that relationship due to Israel’s disobedience and unrighteousness.

In the NT the word peace includes the idea of “rest” as well as the OT ideas as I already mentioned. 

Jesus told his disciples the night before he was crucified:

John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Peace is, in short, a desirable state of being. Peace between God and us, between us as individuals, and within our community. It is a state of rest and wholeness.

When we talk about peace, we can often minimize it to simply the absence of conflict. 

We use terms like, “Keep the peace.” We want people to get along, and we believe that getting along means there is peace among us. Or, we might think of a peaceful environment as a place that is quiet and calm. Or, after a long bout of conflict between adversaries, when the fighting stops, we might consider that to be a time of peace.

These definitions are about a particular sort of environment. In order to experience this sort of peace, we need the environment to be a certain way. We need the absence of conflict, noise, or danger. 

These are elements of peace, but it’s so much more than that. In this understanding, peace is the result of things being just right.

However, as we will discover, when you experience the peace offered by God through Christ, it will be something that carries you, that brings transformation.

Rather than peace being a product of your environment, peace will transform your environment.

This is the idea of being at rest. Not because the circumstances are conducive for rest, but because the presence of Jesus is with us. 

Philippians 4:6–7 “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” 

The peace of God is a gift that will protect you from being overwhelmed by the troubles of this world. 

Your circumstances will be bearable because God’s peace is with you. Remember the questions I asked at the beginning:

How have you experienced peace this week? 

What might prevent you from experiencing peace in the coming week?

With the understanding of peace as wholeness and rest, ask yourself those questions again. 

I’ll rephrase the questions…

How have you received God’s gift of wholeness and rest this week? 

What might prevent you from receiving God’s gift of wholeness and rest this coming week?

Keep thinking about those questions as we look at how Jesus brings peace.

How does Jesus bring peace?

As I read earlier from John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” Jesus brings peace in a different way than the way of the world.

Human efforts to bring peace inevitably lead to more conflict, oppression, destruction. We cannot agree as a human race on the means to peace. 

As long as sinful humans are in power, regardless of how “Christian” the laws or leaders may be, there will be conflict because there will be disagreement, defiance, and rebellion. 

The way of peace for Jesus is not by a brutal squashing of all defiance or through coercion, but through transparent vulnerability which makes defiance against Jesus and the church pointless. 

The only defiance or threat to the church we need to be concerned about is our own defiance that claims I can have peace on my own terms. That I can bring peace to my life by setting everything up just right. 

That is not the way of Jesus. His way seems backwards to the world. It is a way of sacrifice, of vulnerability.

The way of Jesus is peace through death and resurrection.

It is through submitting to death and resurrecting to new life that brings peace that will never end or be affected by evil. 

It is the peace that brings about reconciliation between God and humanity, which is the primary source of all conflict. But this can only come through sacrifice.

Isaiah 53:4–6 says this about the Messiah: “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” 

We cannot wait until all is right, until we have done all that is required of us. Peace does not come this way. We cannot produce it. We receive it.

We are in a season of anticipation. We think of this season as waiting for the arrival of baby Jesus in a manger. 

But there is another time of anticipation that we usually associate with Easter.

I want to bring us into the night before Jesus was crucified.

John 13:2–5 “The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” 

Notice what prompted Jesus to wash the feet of the disciples. He knew that the Father had put all things under his power. 

It also says that Jesus came from God and was returning to God. 

He knew that what was about to happen, the betrayal of Judas. The abandonment of his closest followers and friends. His death by crucifixion. The experience of being forsaken by God as he took on the sins of the world. 

His environment was worse than any of us could imagine.

But, he knew that this would not end in separation from God. It would end in glory, in a renewed body that will live forever.

In fact, the way that it would end well, the way in which his peace would become reality, was to go all the way through the experience.

The way to peace is death and resurrection, something we cannot do, but because of Jesus, we can and will experience it.

What does he do with this power and this confidence of resurrection? He washes the disciples feet. Even Judas, the one who was about to betray him.

This act of service was no small act. Washing feet was the job of a slave. Jesus was demonstrating the way to peace. We must go the way of Jesus. He said to the disciples, “unless I wash you, you have no part with me… Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.”

The confidence Jesus had to serve and sacrifice came from a certainty that God had put everything under his power and that he was going to return to God. 

We can have this same confidence. We can stare our troubles in the face and we can say, “The peace of Christ is my rest.”

Jesus told his disciples later that evening, as we read at the end of John 16 “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.” 

Jesus challenges us to stop turning toward ourselves as the solution. It is Christ who has overcome the world. We receive his gift of peace and live according to it.

Let’s look back at Isaiah 9:2 “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.”

Isaiah is saying that the arrival of the Prince of Peace means we are no longer in the dark. The trouble is still around us, but now we can see it and the way through it clearly. 

Jesus himself is our light to the way of peace. Not only his teaching, his miracles, or his way of life. It’s his death and resurrection, his lordship over our entire lives. Every step we take is brought to light by the Prince of Peace, the giver of rest.

He brings peace through making us into a people with a view towards eternity, a resurrection life that cannot be taken no matter what comes at us.

How do we experience peace?

Remember, the underlying meaning of peace is the idea of rest. It is wholeness, not lacking anything. 

We experience peace by understanding that the troubles of this world are temporary, knowing that they are powerless over us. 

This requires a daily turning towards Jesus for our source of peace.

Going back to this evening conversation between Jesus and his disciples. 

In John 15:4–7: Jesus said, 

“Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” 

The experience of peace requires reminding ourselves of what is true and staying close to God’s instruction and promises, allowing his word to transform us. 

I suggest starting the new year with a daily Bible reading plan. A plan that prevents you from picking and choosing what you want to read in the Bible. 

This is important because the Bible is meant to reshape your thinking, your way of experiencing the world. 

It requires reading all of it, not just the bits you think are useful for solving problems. 

Experiencing the peace of God also includes expressing it in our relationships with one another.

In caring for the weak and helpless:

Psalm 41:1–3 “Blessed are those who have regard for the weak; the Lord delivers them in times of trouble. The Lord protects and preserves them— they are counted among the blessed in the land— he does not give them over to the desire of their foes. The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.” 

In forgiving those who have done us wrong:

Romans 12:17–21 “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” 

The church has for too long been a place of judgment. We examine the Bible and compare what it says to how others are living. 

This is not the way of peace. It is not the way of Jesus.

Rather, we experience and share God’s peace by loving and seeking to benefit those with whom we find ourselves at odds. Even those who threaten our well-being.

This is not an easy life. The peace of Christ is not the result of everything being just right. Rather, the peace of Christ is the way that everything is being set right. It is the source of making things right. 

Out of our dependence on Christ flows life and light, making an environment of struggle, conflict, and pain an environment of peace.

Let’s go back to those first questions:

How have you experienced peace this week? 

What might prevent you from experiencing peace in the coming week?

Let’s reframe them once again:

How has the peace of Christ transformed your week?

What might prevent the peace of Christ from transforming the coming week?