by Sam Snyder
Have you heard the news lately? It’s not good news, in fact the news has been bad lately. Very bad. War with Syria seemed imminent a couple of weeks ago. This Sunday I heard that two churches were bombed in Pakistan and a mall in Kenya leaving a staggering death toll and hundreds injured. Where is the “peace on earth”?
How do we reconcile the fact that we preach a “Gospel of Peace” and yet we find ourselves surrounded by a world that is far from peaceful? Is “world peace” just a pat answer saved for America’s pageantry competitions or for comic book heroes yet unknown in the real world? Did Jesus just die only to make peace between individuals and God and not between mankind as well? Isn’t peace suppose to be part of the Kingdom of God?
I raise these questions because I think you know that God actually does desire peace on earth and that He has made a way for peace between Himself and humanity and between people with each other through Jesus Christ. Not the kind of “peace” that is worn as worn as a symbol, or wished for in a pageant, but the deep, abiding, reconciling, and restoring Shalom of God’s Kingdom that brings wholeness out of brokenness!
I ask these questions, because I think that maybe you, like me, are longing for God’s Shalom. I find myself longing for God’s Shalom more each day. I look at the pain and brokenness of our world and I long, no ache, to see God’s Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. So, what do we do?
Three thoughts have been going through my mind this week as I have been wrestling with this longing for God’s peace.
1. Pray for Peace:
As Christians who know that God’s Kingdom is advancing and that God’s kingdom is not about physical things but about justice, joy, peace, and power we should PRAY for Peace. This should be part of our daily prayers! Just as we should daily be asking for God’s Kingdom to come and for His will to be done, intentionally asking for the PEACE that His Kingdom brings in the world around us: our relationships, our ministries, our countries, and our world.
Are we actively praying for peace and leading others to do so with us?
2. Promote Peace
Knowing that we are “called to peace” we should promote peace wherever we go. Places should enjoy the supernatural blessing of God’s peace because we are there! When Jesus sent out His 72 disciples in Luke 10 He told them to look for a person of peace and to stay with them and bless their house with peace. What happens when you enter a place, do you bring the peace of God that surpasses all understanding or do you rile things up and cause division?
3. Pursue Peace:
When God’s people were taken captive to Babylon they weren’t told to hold grudges or to seek to revolt, but to seek the peace of the cities to which God had carried them into exile. Do our churches and ministries have philosophies of ministry that are informed by the need to pursue the peace of the cities where we are? This doesn’t mean that we should seek to avoid conflict, but that we should invest ourselves in seeking the long lasting peace and prosperity of the city and that might mean confronting systems of injustice, chaos, and division within our own hearts and minds as well as within our communities.
We have received so much peace from God. We have an inner peace, peace with God and peace with others through the reconciliation that God brings through Christ. We are called to be people of peace who pray for, promote, and pursue God’s peace, not only in our lives personally, or in our churches, but in our cities and around the world.
I pray that God’s peace that surpasses understanding would guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus and that our lives and ministries would be transformed as we pursue, promote, and pray for Christ’s Shalom to make our broken lives and broken world whole.
