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Summary: How do you find peace in a contentious relationship?

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1 Peter 3:8 Finally, all of you, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic, love as brothers, be compassionate and humble. 9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. 10 For, "Whoever would love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech. 11 He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it. 12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."

Introduction

If God appeared to you today and said, “I have chosen you to be in charge of keeping the peace at Agape” – what would you do? How would you accomplish that task? If God said, “I have created a certain degree of unity at Agape, and I have selected you to be in charge of seeing to it that nothing ruins that unity and harmony.” How would you get that task done? I hope you have an idea how to answer that question because God has said that to you.

Ephesians 4:3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

That is something God requires of every person in this church. So this passage we are studying today is of crucial importance, because God is giving us instructions on how to do this.

Seek and Pursue Peace

We found last week that the incentive God offers for doing this is life and good days. Life and good days are something that everyone wants but few people find. But here we learn a sure-fire way to obtain good days. And there are two parts to it – a negative side and a positive side. The negative side we looked at last time – turning your soul away from the evil of an angry, vengeful heart and keeping your tongue from vengeful or deceitful speech. Scripture calls us to hate evil. If someone sins against me and I respond with some form of retaliation, I’m not hating evil – I’m loving evil and hating the person. If I hate the evil, I will hate it in my heart even more than I hate receiving it.

So on the negative side we reject vengeance. But just doing that will not be enough. Peter is also quick to include the positive side at the end of verse 11. Do not just turn from evil, but…

11 He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it.

On the positive side we must do good and pursue peace.

Effort

There are a lot of different kinds of peace; the kind referred to here is peace in the sense of peaceful relationships. To seek peace and pursue it means to work and strive and labor and pray and do everything you can do to have harmonious, peaceful, reconciled relationships.

When someone strikes you on the cheek you turn the other cheek, but you do not just turn the other cheek. You also work to repair whatever is broken in the relationship. It is not enough to just forgive and forget; it is not enough to just overlook an offence; it is not enough to just avoid retaliation or bitterness in your attitude. It is not even enough to respond to the person with words of blessing. All those are crucial, but from there we must take the next step and roll up our sleeves and start working hard at restoring the broken harmony.

And Peter uses the words seek and pursue to describe that effort. Those two word-pictures convey both thought and energy. When you are seeking something – trying to find something, you are racking your brain trying to figure out where it is. You are checking this place, not there; then another place, not there; then another place, and another – and you just keep searching place after place until you find it. So searching, or seeking, is an effort to try to figure out where the thing is so you can get it.

Pursuit, or chasing, is a little different idea. There you know where the thing is, you just need to get enough speed to catch up to it. It is out there ahead of you, and to get it you have to turn on the jets and run fast enough to overtake it.

Both those terms paint a picture of the peaceful relationship as being elusive. It hides from you, and then when you find it, it bolts and you have to chase it down. Peaceful relationships will not fall into your lap. They will not evolve. They will not appear out of thin air. And when you do the hard work of developing them, they will not stay that way indefinitely any more than your garden will stay weed-free by itself – even if you repay evil with blessing.

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