Bible Talks - Family Church (9:45am)
Series: Lean On Me - Sermons From Romans
Tasting God’s Peace
Sunday, 17 March 2002
Feedback:
Share using:
Post this to: Facebook · Delicious · Google · Twitter · Email
INTRO
All of us know something of warfare in our lives.
Perhaps you are of an age when you actually took part in a real war – Vietnam, Korea, or perhaps WW2.
Or perhaps, like most of us, you know of a much more personal warfare in your lives.
I knew people who got into warfare with their neighbours over a tree growing on the border between their properties.
It was in the sewer, costing thousands of dollars, no one could agree who’s tree it was.
There were rotten things said to each other, then rotten things thrown over each other’s fence, and it went on and on.
They went to the local chamber magistrate.
For years this dragged out and they lived in limbo.
They couldn’t sell up and leave, they couldn’t live there in any kind of peace or harmony… Just awful.
And when we are fighting, the present is just unpleasant, but also, the past is unresolved isn’t it?
The past gets thrown up at you, “You said this… no YOU said that,” and so on.
The past gets raked over and over every time you confront your enemy, and nothing ever seems to get resolved, in fact things get worse the more it happens.
How many of our domestic arguments are caught up trying to recapture the argument yesterday, last week and even last year, as it all gets thrown back up at us.
And whenever we are in warfare, the future is also uncertain.
That’s part of being at war, isn’t it?
You don’t know how it’s going to be resolved.
You don’t know if you will be the ‘winner’ or not.
You can’t see where the resolution is, and so you can’t know what the future holds.
Even if you do win, you’re not quite sure what that will mean:
Will you get the house?
How much of your family will be left?
How much of your bank account will be left after you’ve beaten your enemies in the law courts?
The future is uncertain.
It’s often so bleak that people increasingly prefer to settle out of court, rather than come to justice.
So while ever the war is on (whatever it may be),
the present is unpleasant, the past is unresolved and the future is uncertain.
War is a pain. Hatred, jealously, ill-will, bitterness, plotting.
It’s like a cancer that grows within us and destroys us whether we are in the right or not.
That little sketch of warfare, I think is true and I trust you recognise it’s characteristics in the battles you fight in your life.
Well, this picture of warfare is also true of the state of affairs between God and humanity.
We don’t love God, we don’t rejoice in His presence,
we resent His intrusion into our lives,
we reject His authority, and
we can even hate the very mention of His name.
And so we come to our passage in Romans 5.
We can see immediately that we are coming in in the middle of something: Paul starts the chapter with “Therefore…”, so what has led up to this?
Very briefly: In chapters three and four Paul has drawn out the central truth of the Christian gospel:
That Jesus Christ has paid the debt for our rebellion, for our sinfulness and wickedness.
Despite our deserving eternal death for all we have done,
for our ignoring of God, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are justified, we are made right with God.
How do we receive the benefits of this gift from God?
By faith. In other words, it is no longer by our attempts to obey God’s law that we are made right with Him, rather it is by a trust in the death of Jesus that we can now be right with God.
I cannot get to heaven because I am good, moral and upright, but because God has come down to me in the death of his son, paid the penalty I deserve and declared me to be right with Him.
All I do is trust in that death that happened on my behalf….
THEREFORE (5:1) since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God….There it is. The warfare has ended.
Do you recall seeing the footage that was shot at the end of WW2 in England?
Where people looked nothing like the prim and proper, reserved Englishmen. They were hugging and kissing and dancing around, joy written all over their faces!
What about our own dancing man – the man behind a tram dancing for sheer joy because the warfare was over!
The struggle, the fight, the enmity, the loss, the heartbreak – it’s all come to an end.
And that is where we are at today in 5:1 [read]
Peace has broken out.
But peace in the bible is not just the cessation of hostilities.
Peace is victory, peace is harmony.
Now, there wasn’t much peace in Berlin the night London rejoiced. There was defeat, shame, destruction.
There is no peace in defeat. Only peace in victory.
And the peace the bible speaks of isn’t the cessation of hostility. The peace of the Bible is the harmony of living together with God.
You might think you can have peace with your neighbour by building a huge 4 metre high fence.
Putting barbed wire at the top and broken glass along the top. He will never bother you and you will never bother him.
You never need to see each other or have contact with each other.
Your children don’t play with his children.
His dogs don’t come and foul your front lawn…
You are at peace… but are you?
In reality that’s not peace, that’s hostility, that’s warfare, enmity.
Real peace is when you don’t need a fence, when you live in such harmony with him that you can walk across each others land, glad to see each other!
His kids and your kids play with each other, and the gardens merge and you share the vege patch and the flowers… because you are in harmony with each other and love each other!
Peace is having no fence, not a huge, great big one.
‘Therefore, since we have been justified through faith,’
WE HAVE PEACE with God!
That kind peace I’ve just spoken of.
But notice how it comes: Through Jesus Christ.
Through Jesus paying the penalty in full we are justified.
And through being justified we have peace with God.
Jesus has won for us access to God. Access to God’s favour.
Have you ever had a brush with fame? Where you’ve met a very important or famous person? Well, Jesus has taken us into the very throne-room of God, and introduced us in such a fashion that we are not his enemies or his captives, but his friends and his family.
That is the access he has given to us, and these ideas are caught up in that beautiful word Paul uses down in v10-11, the word reconciliation. [read 10-11]
The making of friends out of enemies.
We were reconciled to God through Jesus, and we have received this reconciliation.
Friends, Christianity is NOT morality.
It has strong moral elements to it, but it’s not morality.
No, it’s relationship.
Oh that people would understand that basic truth.
So many people think that Christianity is all about doing good things, living a good life in order to please or impress God.
But that’s not what it’s about.
It’s about being in a relationship.
A relationship of peace with your Maker.
It’s not about morality, not about being good enough for God – you’ll never be good enough for God.
It’s not about living up to certain standards – we don’t live up to them, we’ve never lived up to them, and never will live up to them!
The very standards themselves – God’s standards - condemn us where we stand.
There are people who have said to me “I can’t be a Christian, I keep failing” – but that’s a good sign that someone is a Christian- recognising that you keep failing to meet God’s standards!
It’s non-Christians who don’t recognise their failure.
Others have said “I can’t be a Christian because I feel guilty” – I’m glad you feel guilty. Because we are guilty.
Feeling guilty doesn’t disqualify you from being a Christian. That’s not what it’s about.
It’s about being forgiven, being in a relationship with God, and therefore being at peace with Him.
It’s not about fulfilling laws, and rules and regulations.
The past has been resolved by God, our old enemy.
We picked a fight with Him. He was justifiably angry with us. But he paid the penalty for us so that the fight could be done away with. So that the enmity could be overcome.
So that the guilt would be dealt with.
The present takes on fresh, new meaning.
Because we have been freed from our past, we can now focus on serving God, on helping others discover that same peace with God.
And having my past resolved that that, also means my future has been made certain – a certainty based on what Jesus has already done, that settles my relationship with God eternally…
And as we consider our future directions as a church, this should urge onward with great confidence in God’s ability to do extraordinary things with ordinary people like you and me…
Let’s pray
