July 18, 2021 Sermon - The Fruit of the Spirit: Peace
Shalom. Has anyone ever said that to you? Any guesses at what that means? If you have an idea, please type it in the chat. In English we say “Hello” and “Goodbye”. The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison, the so-called inventor of the lightbulb, who put hello into common usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say "hello" when answering.
His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, thought the better word for answering the phone was "ahoy!" Whenever my dad, who was a professional artist, used to answer the phone when I was growing up he would say, loudly, “Parker here!” That always both scared me and impressed me. It left no doubt in the mind of the caller who they were talking to. It also impressed upon me and others in the house that there was no doubt who was the boss.
The word “Goodbye” is a mash up of 4 words that at one point were commonly said. Those 4 words were “God be with ye”, pronounced “Go BE Wi YE”. So that in itself is a blessing, giving your goodwill to the person who was leaving your presence. May God be with you - keeping you safe, keeping you in His will, keeping you on the receiving end of life’s blessings. Kinda nice.
Check chat - ideas on Shalom. Some folks have shared that they think shalom means...
So yeah, shalom is all about peace. It’s all about deep, rich, life-impacting peace. It’s not just the absence of war or misery or anxiety or suffering. It’s the presence of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Peace. True biblical shalom refers to an inward sense of completeness or wholeness. Although it can describe the absence of war, the majority of times it’s used point to an inner completeness and tranquility.
In Israel today, when you greet someone or say goodbye, you say, Shalom. You are literally saying, “may you be full of well-being” or, “may health and prosperity be upon you.”
Now in the John 14 passage that Lazio read, Jesus says “... the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. 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. John 14
The greek word here is not shalom, but it’s a close relative. It’s Eirene pronounced “i-ray'-nay”. You may have heard the English word “irenic” which means “aiming or aimed at peace”. For sure you’ve heard the name “Irene” which means...peace.
In this passage, when Jesus refers to “leaving his peace“ with the disciples, again he uses the Greek word for irenic, and here it means…
security, safety, prosperity, felicity (intense happiness, because peace and harmony make and keep things safe and prosperous)
And Jesus says that he does not give his peace in the way that the world gives peace. What might He mean by that? What does peace look like in our world?
In the world, there are multiple forces influencing any sense of peace that there might be. But, sadly, there is really no stability in the peace that the world offers. There’s no war at the moment? Great. But, well. there’s a pandemic. The pandemic is nearly over. But, well, there’s a new variant, the Delta variant and now the Peru variant. So we will never locate peace on this planet. The peace the world has is fickle and short-lived.
According to Will and Ariel Durant, in their book “Lessons of History”, there have already been approximately 268 scattered years without war over the past 3,421 years.
That is in fact the nature of anything and everything that the world offers… It is not stable, it is fleeting, it is ultimately unsatisfying, and is very often just not what it appears to be.
But the peace that Jesus gives us, which again is an aspect of his character, his very own self, is a shalom or a sense of the irenic that burrows it’s way deep down into our lives.
It is the peace that comes through the most stable and trustworthy of relationships, your and my relationship with God.
When Jesus says: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. He’s really talking about something very profound. He is speaking of the salvation that His death and resurrection will achieve for his disciples—total well-being and inner rest of spirit, in fellowship with God.
All true peace is His gift, which the repetition emphasizes. I do not give . . . as the world gives. In its greetings of peace the world can only express a longing or wish. But Jesus’ peace is real and present, and available to all who know Him.
Like every aspect of our character, and every Fruit of the spirit, it gets tested by real life. And what is going on inside of us most often gets tested by things that go on outside of us.
Our character often gets tested by external factors. It’s like when you’re carrying a drink and someone bumps up against the drink. Depending on how full the glass is, something might spill out of that glass. But what spills out of us when people bump up against us?
In real life, this can be measured by things like: how short a fuse do we have? Do we get angry easily? Is our sense of peace easily disturbed by external factors. Or has the peace of God truly found a home deep inside us, so that it takes a great deal of external aggravation to ‘get our goat’, or to disturb us?
Whatever the challenge to our peace, when our lifestyle is one of living close to Jesus, spending lots of time in His Word, lots of time in communion with God and prayer, whatever the challenge to our peace, we will hold onto our peace.
So external factors can impact our peace. Here’s another one. Many would say that Toronto does not have the best transportation system. In reality I found that that depends on where people live in the city.
The further away we live from the subway, the more steps there are toward getting to the subway. The subway of course is not impacted by traffic, which is a huge variable in the city.
But buses and street cars, subject to the same traffic, by and large, that other traffic is on the roads, are notoriously late or overfull, or the whole ground-level system can seem terribly mismanaged. I’ve lived in Toronto almost my whole life, and that never changes, unless somehow the subway gets closer
The TTC tests us. Other people test us. Virtually all of life tests us. And the tests test our character - how we respond when things go south. So you could say that the fruit of the Spirit is constantly growing in us, and constantly being challenged. So we rarely get a glimpse into our own personal growth.
Just a side note...I have been using a personal spiritual growth measurement and evaluation method, that I developed with Bill Ryan, with all kinds of tools for personal growth as a disciple of Jesus, including in the area of the fruit of the Spirit. If you want to talk about that, let me know. Those who have been connected to this process have been pleasantly surprised that they’ve been able to see measurable growth in themselves, even during this pandemic.
But normally it’s really hard to see ourselves for who we are. That’s one reason that we need close, honest and kind people, trustworthy people in our lives. They can help us to see our growth, and they for sure end up being part of our growth.
Our other passage today is from Romans, and it speaks of the Kingdom of God:
17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, 18 because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and receives human approval. Romans 14
So here Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, and He talks about the Kingdom of God having to do not with external things, but rather with the heart, the condition of the heart: righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
The realm of God’s reign, the place where God reigns is on the inside, through faith in Jesus. And as things like righteousness, peace and joy grow in us, we more and more reflect the values of the Kingdom and the nature of the King.
Luke 17:20 Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, ‘The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, 21 nor will people say, “Here it is,” or “There it is,” because the kingdom of God is in your midst.’
There are three popular views of Jesus’ words here, that the kingdom of God is in your midst (or as other translations say: “within you (or among you)”: Those views are
1) the kingdom of God is essentially inward, within a person’s heart;
2) the kingdom is within your reach if you make the right choices; and
3) the kingdom of God is in your midst in the person and presence of Jesus.
The best of these interpretations, it seems, is the third: Jesus was inaugurating the kingdom as He changed people’s hearts, one at a time.
There is this personal benefit that we experience in knowing Jesus. For me it was one of the most overwhelming aspects of becoming a disciple of Jesus; that of having Peace. Before I knew Jesus I lived pretty much in perpetual anxiety. Always depressed; rarely if ever satisfied with life.
I was cynical, negative, and I chose to try to numb these feelings with marijuana. I spent a lot of my youth before coming to Christ trying to mask my pain. But as millions of others can testify as well, coming to know Jesus brought me into an experience of peace that I had no idea existed. I thought life was only pain and fear and anxiety and misery. I know that may sound weird to you if you know me well, because that is the opposite of the way I am now.
But the peace of Jesus, the presence of Jesus in a human life, brings us to a place of calm. As we learn to trust more and more, as we experience God’s faithfulness over and over again, we become people of peace.
And it’s as people of peace, who know and live in relationship with the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. As people of peace we can, just by living as faithfully as we are learning how to live...we can show others what it’s like to have peace.
Peace can be understood as the fruit/outcome of reconciliation. If you are born again, meaning that you have trusted in Jesus alone as the One who died for your sins, and you have received Him as your Lord and Saviour, you have peace, because you have been reconciled to God. That would be quite enough to spend a lifetime wrapping our heads about.
But there’s more. Amazingly, there’s more.
2 Cor 5:18 And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. 19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them.
And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. We become reconcilers. We receive the gift of salvation, of life that comes from the hand of God, and we live that gift. We become that gift to others. As the scripture says: “God has given us this task of reconciling people to him”.
So of course, this is huge. It goes far beyond having personal peace. That grace we experience from God is intended by God to be passed on to others, so WE OURSELVES actually become HOW God brings others into His peace through knowing Jesus.
And we see that not only have we benefited from this personally by being included through the sacrifice of Jesus in the promises of God, we have been made, and are called to behave as reconcilers.
What an amazing privilege. What an honour that you have been chosen by God to lead people to peace through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
God wants us to pass along the blessings we have received from Him. He wants those blessings to go through our lives to others.
Every gift God gives you he gives you to bless you and he gives it to you to pass through your life to others.
Does He give you his kindness and patience? Absolutely. He gives it to you for you and he wants it to pass through you to others.
Does He give you his love and demonstrate his love to you in tangible ways? Absolutely. He gives it to you for you and he wants it to pass through your life to others.
When He was on earth He went through some of the worst things a person could ever go through, and He didn’t lose His peace.
So one way to have peace, a way that a lot of staff and community members here can talk about, testify to, is to open your life to Jesus.
To consider His offer of His own peace that He makes to you and to me and to everybody who is willing to receive it.
See, when you don’t have peace, a lot of the reason for that can be that you don’t forgive yourself for things you’ve done.
Jesus offers to forgive you completely everything you’ve ever done, and to even heal you, over time, of the effects of the bad things that have happened in your life.
He can do that because He totally gets what it is to live a hard, hard life - He did that Himself on this planet.
And He can do that because He’s actually God, in the flesh. Offering to forgive you, offering to hold you, offering you His love and His deep and abiding peace.
Does He give you his grace? His unmerited favor. Unearned, undeserved. Yes!
Does He give you His peace? Absolutely He gives it to you for you, and he wants it to pass through you to others.
So may we be bearers of good news. In our conduct may we be used by God to demonstrate His loveliness, His goodness and His beauty.
And may each of us continue to grow in the likeness of Jesus. May the fruit of peace continually grow in us. Amen.
