Practical Peace
“Each believer is personally united with Christ and Christ lives in each of us.” – John W. Fogal, Sr.
For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault. But you must continue to believe this truth and stand firmly in it. Don’t drift away from the assurance you received when you heard the Good News. The Good News has been preached all over the world, and I, Paul, have been appointed as God’s servant to proclaim it. – Colossians 1:19-23, NLT
You yourselves are a case study of what he does. At one time you all had your backs turned to God, thinking rebellious thoughts of him, giving him trouble every chance you got. But now, by giving himself completely at the Cross, actually dying for you, Christ brought you over to God’s side and put your lives together, whole and holy in his presence. You don’t walk away from a gift like that! You stay grounded and steady in that bond of trust, constantly tuned in to the Message, careful not to be distracted or diverted. There is no other Message—just this one. Every creature under heaven gets this same Message. I, Paul, am a messenger of this Message. – Colossians 1:21-23, MSG paraphrase
“Salvation is as eternal as God’s throne, but I must put to work or use what God has placed within me. To “work out [my] own salvation” (Philippians 2:12) means that I am responsible for using what He has given me. It also means that I must exhibit in my own body the life of the Lord Jesus, not mysteriously or secretly, but openly and boldly.” – Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, December 5 entry
Uniting the idea of Jesus as our Sanctifier with the theme of Peace is a bit unusual but hopefully sensible and practical as you think it through. Our peace with God stand or falls wholly on the work of Jesus. Either He is our peacemaker or we have no hope of peace with God at all. That this is true positionally is the doctrine of justification. Jesus’ death pardons our sin. We are taken off of war footing with God and given peace by the death of Jesus in our place. But, this positional holiness is only part of the wonder of the Christian life. Additionally, and beyond our comprehension is this reality: we are made practically holy in Christ as well. We are intended to become the place where the life of Jesus is displayed. His life at work in us. As we learn to let His life flow through us, we find peace with God practically. We do that which God wills because, Jesus is always obedient to His Father. We love the way Jesus loves because, it is in fact Him loving others through us.
Now, let me for a minute put before you a thought which has really gripped me in the practicalities of working this out in the day-to-day stuff of life. I recently heard a long time and now retired C&MA pastor interviewed on a podcast. He shared something that I’ve never heard quite this way before. He said, “Don’t let your flesh do even “good” things it will always lead to sin.” As I’ve thought about that, I have settled in my heart- he’s right. We can do ‘good’ things in the flesh(i.e. the Pharisees) but all that is done in the flesh is not pleasing to God. (Romans 8:8) We can live in a way that pleases God but that is done in Christ, that is by the Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 4:1) What this means is that we have before us a choice. We can spend our time trying harder in the flesh, a sort of self-powered religiosity OR we can live by the Spirit. To live by the Spirit is to know on a practical level the peace Jesus came to bring. And so, this means our path to peace will look like surrender. As we surrender to God, Jesus’ life becomes more our way of living. Christ in you the hope of glory. (Colossians 1:27) This reality is in fact at the practical center of the Christian life. He must increase and we must decrease. C.S. Lewis discusses this so brilliantly in Mere Christianity. In a chapter entitled, “Christianity Hard or Easy?” Lewis contends that the real struggle of the Christian life comes where we least expect it. It is not in facing a particular temptation or circumstance but in the determination of what to do with each day at the outset. Will I choose to live for Christ today or myself? Will I choose to surrender my wants and needs and ambitions and make them slaves to Christ? In the final paragraph of Mere Christianity, this is what Lewis concludes,
“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
I pray that as you reflect on the peace that Jesus brings, you experience in real living color His life in your life, for that is peace on a level unknown to mere natural life.