Peace On Earth

Welcome to the lookout weekly podcast.

So uh so today, as we jump into the word, today is the first Sunday of Advent.

And if you follow the historic Christian calendar, it's a it's a journey at the as we come to the end of this year, it's a it's a time of the year where we turn our attention to Jesus, um, both to remember what it must have been like to anticipate his first coming, and then to remind ourselves that not only did he come once, but Jesus Christ is going to come again.

And so there's a place of anticipation that we must hold as the people of God.

It's actually very important that we learn how to wait.

We wait patiently, we wait with endurance, and we remind ourselves that God is not apart from us, he is with us.

And so we're gonna turn to the scriptures here in a moment.

Before we do, I just want to invite you to join me this morning and uh to share some silence and just to become aware together that we are in the presence of Jesus and in a time of a lot of noise, a lot of activity.

Can we just close our eyes for a moment?

Put your just feel your feet on the floor, take a deep breath, and just become aware of Jesus together.

Let's just be here for a minute.

We thank you, Jesus, that you are closer than our next breath.

That you are near.

And today, Jesus, just like we say, we rejoice in the gospel.

Praise the Father, praise the Son, praise the Spirit through you.

We bless your name, Jesus.

Amen.

I'm gonna make a request.

Graham, could you could you run out and get me a bottle of water real quick?

I forgot my name.

Thank you.

Um Isaiah chapter 9, verse 6.

Isaiah 9:6

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder.

And his name shall be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Luke 2, verse 12.

Luke 2:12

And this will be the sign to you, you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling claws lying in a manger, and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly hosts praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.

So as we enter this Advent season, what we're doing together is we're gonna zero in on this theme of peace together.

It's part of the waiting that happened for hundreds of years before Jesus entered the scene.

The prophet Isaiah wrote that there was coming a day that there would be a baby born.

And not only would he bring peace, but he was given a title, which was Prince of Peace.

And upon his arrival, this became what the angels were most excited about.

It was almost like they were waiting for this one chance to get to blurt it out to the universe.

A multitude of angels were had been waiting for all of history, for all of time, for the moment that Jesus would finally incarnate, that Jesus would finally be birthed into this world, and they couldn't think of anything better to say than glory to God, peace on earth, goodwill towards men, peace, it's finally possible.

So the angels, this is what got them going.

And uh and at the holidays, this time of year, it's not a phrase that's unfamiliar to all of us.

In fact, I would say the opposite is true.

We become so familiar that oftentimes this phrase peace on earth, it's very easy for us, especially in the church, for this phrase to lose its potency and to be uh associated with sentimentality, right?

So we associate uh peace now more with peppermint lattes than we do with a profound revolutionary announcement of a new world order that has now taken place through the incarnation of the Son of God into flesh.

And so we have to do the hard work of recovering how the concept and the experience and the reality of peace actually cuts us to our core.

It cuts through superficiality, it cuts through the veneer that we so often live in in our day and age.

And there's a lot of things that we do in our culture to try to get at this idea of peace.

It's a craving in our hearts, it's a craving in the hearts of every man and woman and child and every type of philosophy and world religion tries to get at it in its own way, right?

I know for me, for those of you guys who are morning persons, one of the things one of the things I like for me is my morning cup of coffee and reading on the couch.

It's my time of peace and quiet, right?

Who else likes peace and quiet around here?

I love peace and quiet.

Um, but the problem is as soon as it's interrupted, oof, it's not so peaceful anymore.

And so it's it's maybe not even fair to call it peace and quiet because of the anger that rises in my heart the moment I'm disrupted, right?

It's false peace.

But I still love it, especially if you throw a little chemex in there.

Woo! Little single origin from Ethiopia.

I just lost half of you here, okay.

There's a cry from everyone for world peace, and everyone has a theory about how we get there, still awaiting in its fullness.

Uh, we have images of VW Vans from decades ago still advocating for there's got to be a way for peace, there's got to be a way through the conflict that we see.

Yoga instructors uh promise a sense of inner peace, but more as the result of a technique.

If you do your positive affirmations, if you stretch in this way, if you breathe deeply, that is your pathway to the peace that you're looking for.

Um when we uh when we uh when we go to bury the dead and uh and move through transitions at the end of life, we have a phrase that we say, rest in peace.

And it's a phrase that uh that we use as a as an encouragement, as a well-wish.

Uh but the truth is uh dead the dead can't rest in peace.

Only the alive and the complete are able to experience peace.

Peace is reserved for those who are living in the presence of God.

And so while it makes us feel good, it's not technically accurate that just because a body is laying there means it's at peace.

Peace is a is an experience, peace is a reality that we are invited to live into for all of time, and that only comes through Jesus Christ.

Marketers promote peace of mind if we just buy their product or their service.

It's why you guys are spending an insane amount of money right now for this next month, because there's something that's just dangling on a character.

If I just get that one extra thing, if I get that thing, I'm gonna, it's finally gonna be it.

It's gonna unlock the peace I've been looking for.

I won't have to worry about that part of my life if I have that gadget or that thing.

So the the the wild thing is, and you guys know this, the wild thing is that despite these promises, despite these pursuits within our culture and our day, there still seems to be the experience of chronic anxiety, of sleeplessness, that is it's still, we're still, as a culture, we're not able to sleep at night.

There's a there's conflict inside of us relationally, there's division, fear, there's a sense of restlessness and unease.

And though peace can sometimes be experienced in moments, it it tends to be more episodic than it is a lifestyle lived with God.

And so you might be able to catch a sunset and experience a sense of euphoria that brought a sense of, wow, everything is right right now.

Maybe that sense came to you when you checked your checking account last Friday, as you do every other Friday, and the moment that your your checking account was full again, you experienced peace for about two hours until that all just went out again.

But for that moment, you're like, that's it.

Payday.

It's that moment when you're around the dinner table and everyone's actually enjoying each other, and you're not having to like get into the hard stuff and you're actually laughing at the same jokes and you're telling stories from long ago.

It's that kind of sense, but but for so often, so often we can trace it to moments, but what about the deep lived experience of peace that we all crave?

If Jesus came as the Prince of Peace, why is it that we don't experience all the time continual peace?

And why is it that some people who are going through in such intense suffering oftentimes are the most content and settled?

And those who on the outside look like everything is lining up, the stars have aligned, they've figured out life, they have hacked their way through life, everything's going up, career's going up, kids are getting into college, everyone's behaving and looking good.

Um, but when you when you peel back the layers, so often there's a there's a level of everything is right, but I am still unsettled from the inside out.

How is that possible?

And it kind of a driving question that we can ask together is how might we enter into the peace that was promised in Christ?

And so we are gonna take a look at that for a few weeks next week.

I have the privilege of welcoming our former senior pastor, uh Pastor Walt Robertson, uh, to preach next week.

To talk about peace.

God's intention for us, here's why this matters, God's intention for us, for every single one of us here, is to bring us a peace, to bring us into peace, to reintroduce us to peace, that we might live as peacemakers on this earth.

He didn't call us to be peace peacemakers and then expect us to live without a sense of the peace he came to bring.

So together we're gonna journey into this, and we can't journey into peace without first journeying into shalom.

Because when we open the scriptures and we start to explore what actually is peace, is it a feeling?

Is it a destination?

Is it the absence of conflict?

So the scriptures, when we open the scriptures, it has much different definition than we tend to get to in our day and age.

So we have to look at this word, shalom, which is the Hebrew word that oftentimes is the placeholder for peace.

So shalom means this.

Shalom means completeness, wholeness, well-being, and harmony.

Completeness, wholeness, well-being, and harmony.

And in ancient Israel, shalom was is both a greeting, shalom, and it was a blessing, shalom.

And it expresses a desire for holistic well-being upon others.

It's it was communal and focus, not just for individual peace, but for the nation as a whole.

Okay?

It's when our lives and world come into the right order.

And I want you to kind of flag that word, the right order.

It produces a sense of rightness.

But the opposite is also true.

When things are out of God's order, we are left with restlessness.

So so much of shalom is about coming into right order.

And it's kind of a placeholder image.

I love this Japanese form of art called kinsugi.

Have you guys ever heard of this?

It's a Japanese form of art where uh a piece of pottery would be shattered and the artist would actually reassemble it back into its original form, but every seam was was uh adhered with with gold.

To remind us, the art would then call our attention to how all the cracks are filled, not just with what it was, but something even better.

And it was a return to original shape, original design, the original ordered piece that it was intended to be.

This is much like what Shalom is.

When God created the world, he hovered above the chaos we read in the scriptures in Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

He hovered above what was unfinished.

It wasn't necessarily bad, it was just unfinished.

And there was chaos, and he, as he hovered above it, he created meaning and order out of the chaos.

And and he invited Adam and Eve to live in his world in right relationship with him, to be to commune with him, to abide with him, to walk with him in the cool of the day.

And you guys, many of you know the story of how what happened was as they were abiding with God, they along the way were deceived by Satan in the garden.

And he he planted a seed of thought that would cause them to turn away from the one who would bring peace.

And it is upon their turning away that a fracture happened.

He they turned away their attention from God, the perfect alignment with God.

And a fracture happened in themselves in the world.

We call that sin.

And what happened was something intrinsically broken in the relationship between them and God and the ordered world that God created them to live in, because God wanted them to live a flourishing life, but that cannot happen outside of the abiding presence of God.

The deepest peace in Shalom that we need and we were made for happens in communion with Him alone.

And so they were sent from the garden outside of Shalom.

And God, this is what He would start to put in the works and lay the foundations to bring back Shalom, which would end up with the prophets foretold, and the law was pointing to a day in the future where God and flesh would come through and make all things right.

But for the moment in time, they were living in a broken reality and they're trying to pick up the pieces to make order in themselves, but they were living in a disordered world, and much of our life and much of us know what that feels like to live in a disordered world.

So much of what we experience is not because we don't have access to God, it's because we haven't yet, as people and as a world, come into alignment with the order of God.

Disorder happens in a lot of ways.

It happens with God.

So since sin separated us from God.

Sin separated us from the ultimate source of significance and security and belonging.

Those things are all meant to be found in God.

And when we're when we're fractured in that relationship, we look to all kinds of things to satisfy those core cravings of our hearts.

So we're disorder with God.

And when we're disordered with God, we become disordered with ourselves.

And some of you know what this feels like to be stuck in your mind, to be stuck in your heart, to be entangled from the inside out.

You're not sure who you are or what you're supposed to do or what you're supposed to be or what is the calling and life.

And sometimes it can just feel like a lot, like nothing is quite lining up.

And by the way, I'll take a moment to caveat this as well.

When we talk about anxiety, especially in the church, not just because you experience anxiety does not mean that you are in sin or you don't have enough faith.

Okay?

There's some anxieties that are very holistic, that are very, very real effects of chemical imbalances or things going on in our body.

I just want to say to you, um, pressures off.

If you've ever felt shame that you deal with anxiety, uh, I want to say our hope here as a church that this is a safe place to work through doubt, depression, those types of things, okay?

This is a safe place.

There's nothing wrong with you.

And I believe that the promise of God, I believe that the promise of God is that we align, as we align ourselves with Him, as we journey towards Him and come under His lordship and rulership, it's good news not just for our spirits and our ultimate destiny, our eternity.

It's good news for our minds, it's good news for our hearts, it's good, it's good news for our bodies.

When we come into alignment with God, I believe that his desire is to free us from anxiety and depression and illness on every level as we align with him.

And sometimes that takes time, and sometimes we need help in different ways, but I just want to speak over you.

This is a safe place, but Jesus is still the Prince of Peace as well, and he wants to deliver you peace, I believe.

So we experience a disorder in ourselves, misplaced identity.

Who am I?

And then what happens is when we we when we're lacking a sense of intrinsic identity that spills over into relationships and it disorders relationships.

And this is what results in blame shifting, unforgiveness, division, and on a larger level, injustice, abuse of power, exploitation has major effects, and and this affects ultimately the whole earth and the nations of the world, which is why we experience on a large scale world conflicts, divided interests, corruption.

So deep peace, though, is a sense of rest that comes not from momentary relief, but trust that Christ is King.

And as we turn to Him, our lives and world are ordered rightly.

When the angels announced peace on earth, they were announcing a new world order, and that has several layers to it.

Here's why this is important.

Oftentimes on earth we are busy trying to, in our strength, order our lives in such a way that it creates for peace.

We want to solve world peace, we want to solve conflicts and national peace, but that's not where it starts.

Peace always starts not just with what's happening out here.

Peace always starts with what's happening right here.

Between you and the Father.

Between the Father and you.

Right here.

True peace is a person offering a relationship.

Okay.

So Ephesians 2, 13, this is where Paul gets this, he gets at this when he's laying out the message of the gospel.

He says in Ephesians 2, 13, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law, uh, the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, therefore thereby killing the hostility.

You guys can feel free to get excited at any point in time here.

And he came and he preached peace to you who were far off, and peace to those who were near, for through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and the members of the household of God.

Come on.

And so this is the gospel that that Jesus in himself, he himself.

Is our peace.

He himself is your peace.

Peace is not a concept.

Peace is not a feeling.

Peace is not just a destination.

Okay?

Peace is a person who has given himself to you, saying, Come abide in me, come let me abide in you, and let me bring you into my order, into the in into the influence of heaven.

You guys know that peace exists where heaven has influence in our lives.

And so Augustine said it like this You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.

And this is so true that there's a certain restlessness that we are given to that can only be satisfied in God alone.

And when we know, when we understand, when we enter into this and realize that God in his flesh broke down the dividing wall of hostility.

So the wall that separated us from God, it's demolished in Christ.

And because that wall is demolished, the wall that separates us from each other is now demolished because he's given us power for forgiveness and for unity and for love and the bond of peace to actually have a full effect in our relationships.

This is the good news.

It's not just about us and God, it's about what our lives exude in the lives that we live and the relationships that we have.

When we understand that God has made all things right between him and us, it permeates, it overlays on top of us in such a way that it causes us to rest a little bit.

That's what it should do.

Because the things I so long for, the deepest things in my heart, I've been fully satisfied in him.

It eliminates the question, am I enough?

Do I have enough?

Am I gonna make it?

And settles us back into I have been, I have full access to the Spirit of God, to the throne room of heaven, not by my own doing or because I figured anything else out, but because a way has been made through the body and the blood of Jesus Christ.

Thank you, Jesus.

Thank you, Jesus.

Thank you, Jesus.

Thank him right now, just across the room, thank him.

We thank you, Jesus.

And so when that takes hold of us, it's by the Spirit of God, guys.

You can't study this.

It comes by the Spirit of God taking hold that we away has been made.

That was broken, it was shattered, a way has been made, and in him, my fullest sense of identity, my fullest sense of what I was made for is complete in him.

So you can take the world now and give me Jesus.

So it's peace with God that leads to order from God and heaven's order.

Because we need heaven's order in our life.

You need heaven's order in your finances, you need heaven's order in your business, you need heaven's order in your marriage and in your parenting, you need heaven's order in your neighborhood, and all the work of your hands.

We need the plumb line of the peace of God.

And what happens is when we live, when we learn to live without the deep sense of peace with God, then we're driven at our core to find relief in other ways.

We live in a constant sense of needing to find, to achieve, to look further for that security significance of belonging.

That something is missing and it's up to us to have to find it.

And this is what I believe is part of symptomatically what we experience on this side of heaven.

Robert Maholland says it like this quote, worry arises when we are driven by our need to order and control our own lives.

So worry arises when we are driven by our need to order and control our own lives.

So much of the unrest that we experience is because we have expectations of our lives that it should look a certain way.

And it's up to us to figure out how to do that.

And all the pressure is on us to achieve some level of the order that we think.

It's so it's like when the bowl is broken and we think, I know how to, I know how I'm gonna put this together.

I know exactly what this needs to do to look right.

But that's not how peace with God works.

That's not how alignment with heaven works.

It works by saying, God, would you show me your order?

I'm gonna come into alignment with your order and surrender my will back to your will.

And so instead of me trying to order my life to make for peace, I peace can only be accessed when we order our lives around the will of God.

Dallas Willard says, peace is not the absence of conflict.

It's shalom or fullness of life.

Peace, listen to this, peace is a rest of will that comes from the divine assurance about how things will turn out.

Peace is a rest of will that comes from an assurance about how things will turn out.

And that means a lot of things.

That means that peace does not mean a problem-free life.

Peace does not mean complete certainty in life.

In fact, that's what I love about Christianity.

Christianity gives so much room for mystery and paradox, for multiple things to be true at the same time.

Peace does not need everything to be resolved.

Peace is the assurance that the order has been made in heaven on my behalf, and so I can rest assured that no matter the outcome, that I am in relationship with God, and He will redeem all things on this side of heaven.

The divine assurance of how things will turn out.

So what happens is a sense of peace is when we notice that in our lives what we believe about God and what now is true about us affects us in such a way that we can almost feel the grip of our souls and our wills coming undone.

You can almost feel your will opening up and saying, God, I don't understand, but I'm relaxed in you.

This is painful, but I'm relaxed in you.

This seems problematic, but I'm yielded, I'm surrendered to you.

And it grips us.

It's an inside job, it comes from the inside out.

So peace with God affects peace with ourselves.

This in turn then starts to work out.

This is where peacemaking comes out.

It starts to result in peace with others, shalom in relationships.

When we are settled in ourselves through Christ, we are able to see others through the same compassion and forgiveness.

When you know that you are forgiven by God and He does not see you through the lens of shame and regret, he does not hold your sins against you.

He's not holding your sins against you.

This is such good news.

Because when you get that, when we live with a sense that my sins are forgiven, that means I can look at my neighbor, the ones who sin against me, and I can look at them through a lens of shalom, saying, God has not hold my sins, he doesn't hold my sins against me.

I'm not going to do the same for you.

Shalom is something we can begin to extend in compassion, in forgiveness.

And that's this is how you know when somebody isn't quite living at peace with God or themselves, the most judgmental people towards others are typically very judgmental towards themselves.

The people who make others feel ashamed oftentimes are the ones who feel the most shame.

We can only give what we possess.

And you cannot give what you do not possess.

You live out of the your being with God.

And so whatever inner condition that you're living in is the gift that you give to the world, for better or for worse.

And so this is why when we live at peace with God, it results in the way that we treat others, which is why peace in the Bible is always linked to justice.

It's not just a privatized individual experience of calm and zen.

Okay?

Can we make sure that gets uh settled into this morning?

It's not just a sense of you uh levitating on your in your living room during your quiet time or whatever.

Peace always is linked to justice.

Where there is not justice, there cannot be peace.

And the lack of peace is actually not inherently always bad.

It's a sign point point, it's a signpost with an arrow pointing to the order that God wants to bring on earth and in our relationships.

And this is this is very important.

Jesus, even Jesus, the way that he ministered peace as the Prince of Peace is that he had to first disrupt false peace.

How many of you guys know you can live in false peace?

Our world is built upon false peace.

This is what Jesus did.

He had to disrupt false peace.

He went into the temple, and it seemed like a very peaceful, orderly.

Here's where you buy the doves, here's where you get your animals for the sacrifice, you're gonna do this, you're gonna pay for this, you're gonna come in here, you're gonna make a sacrifice, everything's gonna be right between you and God.

Bless you, go in peace, right?

It was there, there's a system at work.

This is how systems work.

And and he came in and and he he saw right away that this was a system built on keeping people marginalized.

It was keeping the poor people poor.

It was about some people not having the ability to have full access to God.

He said, No, this is this is outrageous.

He flips over tables and the money changers' tables.

He says, No, my father's house will be a house of prayer for all nations.

You do not keep them out, you do not make them pay for what I'm making the way for.

And so Jesus had to up and he had to disrupt something that was currently happening.

And he even said to his disciples in another place, like, hey, listen, um, just so you know, I did not come, you think I came to bring peace.

I didn't come to bring peace, but to bring a sword.

What?

That sounds very un-Jesus-y.

Right?

That is not a Jesus type of thing to say.

Like that's the type of thing you would edit out of the Bible later on if you're trying to tinker with it, mess with it.

Let's get this thing palatable.

You edit out the peace, the part where the Prince of Peace says, I did not come to bring peace but a sword.

And to divide fathers from sons, and he went through this whole thing.

Okay, what was he saying in this passage?

He was not saying that he was not the Prince of Peace or that Shalom wasn't his thing.

What he's saying is, your idea of peace is not my idea of peace.

And you're building your lives on a false sense of peace.

And listen, I am here to expose allegiances, idols, any attachments that take you away from my order and following me as your primary allegiance in life, because that is what is going to bring peace.

So I will gladly separate you and upend the parts of your life that will not lead to wholeness or completion.

Are you guys with me?

And so that's the thing.

The way that Jesus ministers peace in our life is sometimes allowing certain parts of our life that are actually bringing false comfort and passivity.

He allows them to be upended so that we can reorder our lives and sonship under the influence of heaven.

I had one woo in the front.

And this is so important because so much of our lives are built on, there's there's there's parts of our human experience that are built on false peace.

Our nation, there's parts of our nation that were built on false peace.

There was a whole slave trade that everybody was kind of happy economically, everything was going well except for it was built on the backs of black men and women.

Right?

That had to be upended.

I mean, William Wilberforce in the UK had to kind of get into a system and upend and disrupt the false peace that was leading to flourishing for some and not flourishing for others.

And still today, there is injustice.

The fact that our prison system, the incarceration levels of black men are like just the percentages are so much higher than the rest of the population.

It's like I don't know how you can see that and say this is not a peaceful situation.

There's not justice that's happening here.

And and in another way, too, you can you can take the lives of the unborn and you could call it, you can repaste reproductive rights on top of that, but I'm saying it's false peace.

You can label something as one way to present us from feeling the effects of a different way, but I'm saying it's false peace.

We have so many things in our culture that are built upon false peace that keep us content.

And I think part of the way God, the Prince of Peace, has to do when he aligns us with him and he reminds us of who we are as we move out into our world, it allows us both to minister peace on a deep level and to upend things that have the appearance of peace, but do not lead to life.

And this is what it means to be a peacemaker.

It does not mean to be a peacekeeper, it does not just mean to be a kind, just an all-around kind person.

You should do that, by the way.

You should be kind.

It's a good thing.

But peacemaking has a lot more grit to it, it has a lot more discernment to it, it has a lot more perception to it.

And the peace that God came to bring is not superficial sentimentality, it leads to the life of God because He knows how to order the broken parts of our life in a way that He designed.

Come on.

And so you can imagine when the layers start to stack and you and peace with God turns into peace with God, peace with my body and my mind, holistic peace, and it starts to move out into the way that we see the world.

That it's God's will that all the nations of the earth flourish.

Do you guys know that?

That all the nations of the world flourish, not just America.

That all the nations of the world flourish.

God loves the nations, by the way.

It's his idea.

He loves the nations.

And he wants to see every nation receive their inheritance.

And this is where you know we we have to be cautious of tribalism.

Tribalism is a way of seeing the world through protecting one tribe over another.

But do you realize that God loves tribes, by the way?

He had 12 of them.

That was his idea.

He loves tribes.

But his tribes were different.

It wasn't tribalistic.

Every tribe was concerned about the other tribes getting their full inheritance.

And so it changes the way that we see the world.

God is what is your redemptive person, what is your redemptive purpose for every nation of the world?

How do we live in such a way where all can flourish?

And that comes with seeing through his eyes, not just our good ideas.

We have ways of ordering the world according to our good ideas.

I'm saying it doesn't lead to life.

The order and peace of God only comes through alignment with his thoughts and the Spirit of God.

World peace is not just about ceasefire.

It cannot happen.

It will not happen till every knee bows to the name of Jesus Christ.

And that day will come.

It may not happen in our, you know, in our experience on earth.

That day is going to come where every knee will bow at the presence of the Prince of Peace.

And so for us here today, though, as we're kind of walking and exploring this, I have just such hope in my heart that even now, for us across this room, for us as we move through the season, well, it's not, funny enough, it's not a season known for peace.

Which is somehow that happened.

Christmas season is known for a lot of things, but it's not necessarily deep peace.

There's people who are trapped in depression, people trapped in themselves, people trapped in loneliness, people trapped in emotional entanglement, people who feel stuck.

And listen, listen, if that's you this morning, I just want to say peace to you.

Peace in the name of Jesus over your mind and your heart and your body right now.

And I just want to invite you across the room, just close our eyes for a moment.

The angels announced peace on earth, goodwill towards men, that the peace project started the moment that the infant let out a cry and the divine Son of God touched earth.

They announce a new order is coming for all who will submit their lives to the rulership of King Jesus.

I just want to ask you this morning: is there anything right now that has been robbing you of peace?

It could be circumstantial, it could be health, finances, your thoughts, patterns of thoughts, you just keep you stuck.

It could be relational.

What is battling for your contentment, your rest, and your completion?

And maybe, maybe in your life, maybe on the surface, everyone looks at you and say, they seem like they have it all together, but you on the inside feel entangled, you feel broken up, a little fractured.

And whatever that thing is that comes to mind for you, I just want to invite you this morning to turn it into a prayer and to surrender it back to the Prince of Peace and say, God, would you take this part of my life and bring it into order?

To your order in Jesus' name.

Just make it a prayer this morning.

Jesus, would you bring order and shalom to this part of my life?

Show me what I need to see about you or myself or others that's in alignment with you.

Just wherever you are, just form that into a prayer.

And again, peace is himself a person, and he came to us to minister peace through his body and his blood on this morning.