Portrait Of A Peacemaker - James 3:17-18 Series

James 3:17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. 18 Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.

Introduction

God will call us His children, if and only if… How would you expect that sentence to finish? Would you ever think to finish it this way: God will call us His children if and only if we are … peacemakers? That’s what Jesus taught.

Matthew 5:9 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they (and implied – they alone) will be called sons of God.

The people back then expected the Messiah to arrive as a military leader who would raise an army and defeat Rome, but Jesus comes along and instead of raising an army of warriors, He raised an army of peacemakers.

The Impossibility of Peace

And you would think that would make Christianity hugely popular in this world – given the high premium everyone seems to place on peace. There is no end to the peace treaties, peace agreements, peace marches, peace talks, peacekeeping forces, peace protests, - to hear them talk, you would think this world is all about peace. But when you look at the results of their peace efforts, it’s pretty underwhelming. If a Miss America contestant says her goal is world peace, everyone chuckles at how naïve she is. In December of 1891, the International Peace Bureau was formed to establish world peace. In 1910 they won the Nobel Peace prize. Four years later came World War I - 30 million casualties. They called that war “the war to end all wars.” But just in case it didn’t, they created another peace-keeping organization. Obviously the Peace Bureau wasn’t cutting it, so they organized the League of Nations to maintain world peace. After that Japan attacked China, Italy attacked Ethiopia, Spain had a civil war, the USSR attacked Finland, and the world erupted in the most devastating war in human history – World War II. Just two decades after the war to end all wars came a war that dwarfed World War I –sixty million dead. Meanwhile the League of Nations fell apart because the members were fighting each other. So then they formed the United Nations. Here’s their motto: “To have succeeding generations free from the scourge of war.” That was in 1945, and not only did they fail to give us succeeding generations without war, they haven’t managed to give us one single day in which the world has been free from the scourge of war. If you visit Washington DC, you’ll see a lot of peace monuments. The reason they have so many is because they build one after each war.

And even if they could somehow eliminate war, that wouldn’t be peace. More people have been murdered in the U.S. than died in all the wars we have ever fought combined. If a hostile nation doesn’t come over here and kill us, we’ll just kill each other. If there is one thing we as humans cannot do is get along with one another.

Mankind longs for peace, they have no idea how to bring about, so what do they do? Very simple – they lower the bar of the definition of peace. They get the combatants to agree to a slight, temporary reduction in hostilities slightly, and that is considered peace. There are people who have been awarded peace prizes for their work in the Mideast. Think about that. The fact that they got peace prizes for working their magic in the Mideast should tell us one thing – this world’s standards for peace are very, very low. And yet even with that definition – still they are utterly incapable of achieving it.

The Cause of Hostility: Selfish Pride

But in today’s passage James is going to show us exactly how. We have been studying verse by verse through the book of James, and we have arrived at what I would call the heart and soul of the book. He was writing to churches that were embroiled in conflict. If James were a police officer, these people would be in jail for disturbing the peace. There were fights and quarrels and disputes - slandering one another, speaking against one another, judging one another, and in this landmark paragraph at the end of chapter 3, James puts his finger on the cause of it all.

And the cause is not what most people expect. Most people think the cause of hostility is whatever provoked that hostility. They say, “That person made me mad.” But that’s a myth. Anger doesn’t come from the outside; it comes from the inside. That annoying or hurtful or painful thing was just the catalyst that activated something that was already there in the heart.