"Saved Are the Sons" Matthew 5:9 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew 5, verse 9 is our verse this morning.

Matthew 5:9

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Last week in the news, perhaps you saw this, to protest climate change, a group of activists poured tomato soup on a priceless Van Gogh painting at the National Art Museum in London.

They filmed this and put it on YouTube and such, so it's a viral video.

People throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh's sunflower painting, and then they glued their hands to the wall below it.

The highlight of the video, if you were to ask me, was a security guard ripping the people in their glued hands off of previously aforementioned wall.

So if you uh are also like me, you look at climate change and you're like, ah, it's a complicated thing.

You know, energy policy is complicated and goes across continents and war zones.

And, you know, I I don't know what the right thing to do is.

Uh but I don't want to be on the side of the people who throw soup on Van Gogh paintings.

So whatever side that is, I'm not on that side.

Uh that's kind of that was my takeaway of the video.

Those people not on that side.

Uh there's a probably a, and that's not an invitation for you to all tell me what I should think about climate change after the service.

Frankly, not all that interested.

There is a pretty, though, broad.

Wow, that could literally mean anything.

There is a pretty broad gap between destruction and peace.

It is the devil who destroys.

It's the devil who is a destroyer.

So much so that you can look at a complicated situation and see if one side is promoting destruction, I'm not with them.

Tearing things down is the work of the devil.

Building things up is the work of God.

It is Christ who makes peace, it is the devil who brings war.

And this is a basic axiom of human existence.

Those who work for peace receive the blessings of peace.

The prophecies of the kingdom are that of swords being turned into plowshares.

The prophecies of the future time on earth where Christ reigns is a period of peace.

When Jesus comes to earth, the angels proclaim peace on earth.

It is the devil who brings war and destruction.

It is the devil who roams about looking for those whom he can devour.

The devil destroys, the Lord builds.

The Lord is the Prince of Peace.

Melchizedek was on the side of peace.

The king of righteousness was a minister of peace back in Genesis against the king of Sodom, which was out there for war and kidnapping and destruction.

That's the basic archetype in the background of the Bible.

Destruction is bad, peace is good.

And so, in that sense, the beatitude in verse 9 here is the first of the beatitudes that is not absolutely upside down.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

That is a normal way the world operates.

We prefer peace over war.

We prefer peace over war.

What is unusual about this beatitude is that it is the last of the internal beatitudes here.

The last one, or the last two, depending on how you navigate verses 10 and 11, are all about how you're responding to external force.

The next two, which we'll look at over the next few weeks, are blessed are those who are persecuted.

Blessed are you when others revile you.

So those are things that don't originate in you, they originate outside of you.

And so kind of the trajectory of these beatitudes has been building towards this one.

This is the last in this flow of how you are to conduct yourself in this earth.

It's kind of a crescendo in your heart.

And we've noticed how all these are in your heart.

These are all attitudes.

They're all dispositions that are inside of you.

They're internal.

They're not focused on what you do on the outside.

And we've made that point over the last, I don't know, eight weeks or whatever.

We're not talking about what you do with your hands.

We're talking about the disposition and the attitude in your heart.

How you think of yourself, your general disposition in relationship to God and your own sin in relationship to the standards of righteousness that God commands of you.

How you conduct yourself in this world is the overflow of what's going on in your heart.

And this is the peak of these beatitudes right here.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

That's the internal truth in your heart, the attitude towards peace.

If there weren't so much peace-breaking, there wouldn't be so much of a need for peacemaking.

But we do live in a world that is wrecked by sin, and hence this beatitude to pursue peace, as Paul will tell the Romans, as much as it is possible with you.

And so for an outline this morning, I'll give you a three-step peace process.

A three-step peace process.

Feel free to nominate me for the Nobel Peace Prize immediately after this sermon.

This peacemaking is the height, really, of the overflow of what's happening in your heart.

If you've followed the flow of the Beatitudes, remember the Beatitudes begin with you being poor in spirit, you recognizing your spiritual depravity, you recognizing your spiritual lowness, recognizing your spiritual bankruptcy.

From there you go to mourning over your lack of standing before God, recognizing you don't have the righteousness that is necessary for you to be in a right relationship with God.

If you were to die and stand before God for judgment and he were to ask, why should you go into heaven?

You have nothing to say.

You have no currency that can buy your way in.

You have nothing that God is after because you are spiritually bankrupt.

From that you move to the third beatitude, the meek.

And that's, remember with the word for surrender, the person who submits his life to God.

The person who gives up fighting against God, like Jesus tells Paul, why do you kick against the goads?

That's what this person has ceased to do.

He's now surrendered.

And that this is the beatitude of conversion.

It's that this third one, where the person is converted from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from death to life.

This third one, the person has come to saving faith and submitting their life to God.

With the fourth one, you're now starting to turn your eyes up.

You're hungering and thirsting for righteousness.

Now that you're a Christian, you desire a righteousness that is beyond you, it is not yours, it's an alien righteousness.

The book of Romans says it's a righteousness that's outside of you.

It's not intrinsic to yourself.

You don't possess this righteousness.

That's the first beatitude, is you don't got it.

And this fourth beatitude is that you want it.

You desire it badly, and you desire it through the person of Christ.

The fifth beatitude, then, is the merciful.

Because you're dependent upon a righteousness that's from outside of you, that has the changing effect in how you view others.

You cherish mercy, not justice.

You thrive and drink in and feast on mercy, and you dispense it to others.

This has a sanctifying effect in verse 8 of purity.

You become sanctified.

You are pursuing holiness, not worldliness.

And that leads to verse 9.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

You desire to see this kind of peace given to others.

The first step of that peace process is recognize that sin declares war.

There is war in the world because there is sin in the world.

This goes back to the very beginning of the Bible.

The wages of sin is death.

This is what God tells Adam and Eve in the garden.

You can eat whatever you want, don't eat that tree.

Adam and Eve ate that tree, and the moment they ate that tree, they died.

Now, of course, they lived in human terms for another nine centuries, but the moment they ate that tree, they died spiritually.

Sin produces death.

They disobeyed God.

The wages of sin is death, and God had told them, the day you eat of it, you will most surely die.

The devil said that wasn't true.

Remember, he's a liar, he's a destroyer, the devil is okay with death entering the world.

That was his agenda, that was his goal.

The devil wanted to bring destruction and death into the earth.

And he succeeded through lying to Adam and Eve.

And so, because of that, the wages of sin is death.

Wages is what you deserve.

Now we understand that the free gift of God is eternal life.

It's not the wages of our own actions, otherwise, we would never have eternal life.

What we deserve is death.

Because what the currency we have is sin.

So the wages of sin is death.

Sin creates enmity with God.

It's not just that sin causes death with you.

That wouldn't be enough to cause global calamity and global war.

Sin doesn't cause only death with you.

Sin causes death with you and enmity with God.

So sin you recognize is not a thing.

People ask, you know, did God create sin?

No, sin isn't a thing.

This pulpit is a thing, this remote is a thing, my Bible is a thing, I'm a thing.

You know, God creates things.

He creates, you know, with things that you have touch, mass, in other words.

But concept, sin is a concept, and sin is at war against God.

Sin is anything contrary to God and God's nature.

And so sin by definition is hostile to God.

It is opposed to God.

It is contrary to who he is.

God is holy, and God doesn't create holiness.

Remember, he is holiness.

Sin is anything opposed to God.

And so when Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they weren't supposed to.

Sin enters the world.

Death enters the world through their action, which is opposed to God.

And because of their death introducing action, they are now hostile towards God.

Sin creates a separation because sin by its virtue, by its necessity, is a separation from God.

It's hostility towards God.

That's what it is.

And so wherever there is sin, there is destruction and there is death and there is hostility towards God.

Sin is enmity with God.

And God reinforces this, by the way, in Genesis 3, 15.

God comes up to the serpent and to the woman and to Adam in the garden, and he gives them the curses of their action, and he tells the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman.

Now the serpent brought sin into the equation, and what God is declaring here is that there will be enmity in the earth between all of the offspring of Adam and Eve and God himself through sin.

Adam and Eve are going to strive with sin and against sin.

That's the word that's used in Genesis 3, Genesis 4, Genesis 6, Genesis 8, Genesis 9, and repeatedly throughout the book of Genesis is this concept of striving, conflict, fight that is in the world because of sin.

People fight each other because of sin, they fight the devil because of sin, and they are separated from God because of sin.

Now you see this in a very real sense back in Genesis 2.

When sin enters the world, remember God is walking there in Genesis 2 and then Genesis 3, and he calls out to Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve are hiding from God.

So sin brought bad theology with it.

Did you notice?

Hiding from God?

Come on now.

How are you gonna get away with that?

But that's what sin does.

Sin makes you stupid, it makes you not think logically, it makes you think you can hide from God, that you know, if you're hiding a bush, God maybe won't see you.

It creates enmity with God.

It gives you the desire to hide from God.

You know, you see this today with people who say, you know, I don't know if God exists or not.

I choose not to think about it.

Well, that's hiding from God.

Is there a more important thing for you to think about than if God made you and made the universe?

I mean, that it's tough to come up with something more important than that.

And yet people just decide, I'm I'm gonna hide from God.

I won't look at him, he won't look at me.

God and I have a truce.

We've gone our separate ways.

That's the garden.

Do you get that?

That is hiding behind the bush, hoping God doesn't see you.

It's the person who says, you know, I just don't believe in God.

And the problem isn't you don't believe in him, the problem is that you don't hate him, the problem is that you hate him.

And whenever somebody tells me I don't believe in God, that is always my go-to answer.

I don't believe in God.

I always, you know, on the airplane, on the chairlift, on the metro, that's my go-to response.

The problem isn't that you don't believe in him, the problem is that you hate him.

And almost always the response is, how can I I don't even hate him, I don't even believe in him, I can't hate him.

It's like, see?

That is the expression of hatred right there.

That I refuse to even acknowledge his existence.

It's not through lack of evidence.

It's that sin drives you from God.

That's what sin does.

It creates this enmity.

You don't even want to look at his face because of how much you love sin.

God, of course, for his part, is at war against sin.

He will ultimately crush it.

And this is what he tells the devil, the rest of Genesis 3.15, by the way, there is going to be strife and enmity on the earth, but I will crush through the offspring of Eve, I will crush the head of the serpent.

The devil will lose.

Sin will be defeated.

But in the meantime, it most certainly rains.

It most certainly rains.

Secondly, sin declares war, but Christ makes peace.

God makes peace between God and man through Jesus Christ.

Christ is the one who is the peace broker.

He is the mediator between God and man.

Now God is the one who initiates peace.

It's God's idea to create peace.

God designs the plan for peace from before the foundation of time, before he creates the first molecule, before day one of creation, God has planned in his mind the plan of redemption.

He's decided to redeem mankind by sending his son to the earth to be the savior of the earth.

The son will be the savior by becoming a human being, by taking on a human nature.

So this is God's plan before the beginning.

Revelation 13 describes it as the lamb's book of life, the book of life of the lamb who was slain before the foundation of the earth, with all the names that are written in that book of those who will be saved.

In other words, before God even made time, before he made the first day of creation, God had planned that Christ would come as a lamb.

That's his two natures.

He's the lion, he's the eternal son of God, he's the lamb, he's a human who will surrender his life to be the one who makes peace.

The Passover lamb was the sign of peace between God and man.

Remember, the destroyer, if you recall the Passover Lamb, was going house to house and he was killing the firstborn.

That was the destroyer.

And yet those that had the lamb and the blood of the lamb had peace in that house.

The destroyer passed over their house.

The plan before the foundation of time was that Jesus would be that peace maker.

He would be the one that achieves peace.

Now the Old Testament had other sacrifices too.

And they had the peace offering.

That's a very common sacrifice in the Old Testament.

Sometimes rams or birds would be offered as a peace offering.

The peace offering is something that, think what a peace offering is.

You make a peace offering when you don't have what's in you to make peace, but you're trying to do something to demonstrate to your professor that you want peace.

And I say professor there because I had a professor at the University of New Mexico who used the language of peace offering, my calculus professor.

I was failing calculus, and he would tell me, Oh, it's hopeless, man.

It is hopeless.

He had a low view of athletes in calculus, as he should have.

I was like, I just need to stay eligible through the semester.

Can you work with me?

And he's like, you can provide peace offerings.

That was his language.

Like, these little assignments here and there, that's your peace offering.

And I will maintain, I will keep my wrath at bay as long as you're offering peace offerings.

If I would have had it in me to make peace, I could have made peace.

But I didn't have it in me.

All I had in me was to make peace offerings.

And so the Old Testament has these perpetual peace offerings the Israelites offered.

But they could never satisfy the wrath of God.

So what the book of Hebrews says, if they were able to satisfy the wrath of God, they wouldn't have had to be offered every year.

But Christ is the final peace offering.

His blood is better than the blood of bulls and goats because he has it in him to actually make peace.

He's the mediator.

He represents both sides of this affair.

He represents God and he represents man.

Truly God, truly man.

That's the sides of this war.

Sin dwells with mankind, holiness dwells with God.

Jesus comes from heaven in perfect holiness, takes on human nature without taking on human sin, leads a perfect life from that perspective.

So he is our advocate because he's human and he's from heaven.

He can be our true mediator.

This is why Ephesians chapter 2, verse 14 says that he himself is our peace.

Ephesians 2:14

Christ represents peace in his own body.

Now, in the context of Ephesians 2, that's talking about peace between Jew and Gentile.

That God has made dividing walls to keep people basically out of his kingdom.

Christ tears down that wall to provide the pathway into his kingdom for both Jew and Gentile.

That means he is our peace.

But that phrase, he is our peace, it's so much even richer and deeper than that.

He is our peace demonstrates that he is the fountain of peace.

Peace comes from him.

He's the author of peace, he originates peace, it flows, he is our peace.

It flows from him.

It comes out of him.

Peace was his idea.

This is why when you talk about the plan of redemption, it's incredible to understand that Christ is its author as God and also its enactor.

The idea that he would be the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

That was his plan.

And now he does it in time.

This is why Colossians 1.20 says that he can make peace with us through the blood of his cross.

That's how he makes peace.

In order to have peace, you have to have the sacrifice here.

The sacrifice has to be pure.

That's true in the Old Testament.

You can't offer, you know, you've got a three-legged cow, you can't offer that as your peace offering.

No, the sacrifice has to be pure.

It also has to be costly.

You were only allowed to sacrifice a bird if you couldn't afford something more in the Old Testament.

For a sacrifice to make peace with God, it has to be pure and it has to be pricey.

Jesus, in his death, checks both of those boxes.

He was sinless, he was holy, undefiled, never once sinned, so he's the perfectly pure sacrifice.

And he was costly.

Peter says his blood had value exceeding that of silver and gold and riches and jewels.

He is, to use the language of Matthew, the pearl of great price.

His sacrifice is both pure and costly.

It's his own life, it's his death on the cross.

In that sense, Jesus is the poxramana.

You know, the idea of peace coming to earth through the Roman Empire.

The Roman Empire brought peace to earth.

They connected all the countries in the earth with roads and with a common language and a common currency and common laws.

That set the stage for Jesus to enter the world, bringing an actual peace to mankind.

The roads the Romans made, that the Roman soldiers would use eventually to send an army to Israel to crucify Christ, those are the same roads that took the gospel to the world.

Jesus truly is the peace that comes to the world.

I say the poxramana because it was that's how the Romans viewed themselves.

The Romans viewed themselves as the pinnacle of civilization because they were the first to bring standard rules and laws and peace and roads and currency and all that to the world in their mind.

And Jesus flips that on its head and uses the he reverse navigates the thing to bring peace to the world through it.

So again, the angel in Luke 2, verse 14 says, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is well pleased.

Luke 2:14

That is the picture of what Jesus Christ is.

He is peace personified.

He is the sinless Son of God who makes peace through taking our sins on himself.

I remember reading the book Peace Child by Don Richardson.

Perhaps some of you have read this book about a missionary in 1962, Don Richardson, who goes to Papua New Guinea and he encounters his cannibalistic tribe there, and he actually becomes friends with them.

And uh they they invite him into their village and he builds a little house.

They build houses up in the trees like squirrels, and he builds this low house.

It's only like, you know, 14 feet off the ground.

Theirs are 40 feet off the ground, but he lives among them and becomes friends with them for like a year.

Then he decides to go back and bring his wife and child.

His wife was pregnant when he when he left.

So he goes back and then comes back a time later with his wife and his child, and all the cannibals are there with you know human skulls and their spears, and they welcome his wife and him into their tribe.

And they love having him there because he brings medicine with them and he brings you know better technology and how to build houses.

They love him.

But while he's there, The tribe goes to war with a neighboring tribe.

And he's too low.

I mean, the arrows are going by his house all night long.

And he realizes why they lived in trees.

You know, they lived outside of where the kid you shot with arrows.

And so he eventually tells the tribe, I can't stay here any longer.

I gotta leave.

I can't subject my kids to this kind of danger and my wife to this kind of danger.

I'm out.

And they panicked.

And so what they did is they decided to declare peace.

And if you read the book, you remember how they declared peace.

The chief of the tribe took his own newborn child and presented it to the warring tribe as a peace offering.

And then as long as that baby was alive in the warring tribe, there would be peace between the two tribes.

That's why the concept is called peace child.

Could you imagine wanting peace so bad?

You take your baby and hand him off to your enemy and say, we'll be at peace as long as you keep that kid alive?

You do welfare checks every year.

There's high intensity on that welfare check.

Don Richardson realized, like, this is the pick, this is the inroad to the gospel for these people.

They read the New Testament and thought Judas was the hero.

Seriously.

He's like, how do you explain the gospel to people that are rooting for Judas?

And this is how.

Even in that war-torn society, they prize peace and they know it can only be truly accomplished through the gift of a child.

That's what Jesus is for us.

He makes peace between God and man.

Thirdly, third step of this peace process is to recognize that evangelists are the ones that take this peace to the world.

Evangelists are the ones who proclaim this peace.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Now you recognize as you read this verse that Jesus, only Jesus is truly the peacemaker.

Only he can make peace between God and man.

But by pluralizing this here and putting it in the flow of the Beatitudes, Jesus is giving us this kind of disposition.

Remember, these are the attitudes that mark you, this kind of peacemaking disposition that should mark the Christian's life.

It's Jesus who makes peace between God and man, but it's Christians who proclaim it.

This is what Paul means in Romans 10.

All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.

But how can you call on someone in whom you haven't even heard?

You know, in whom you don't believe, and how can you believe you haven't heard?

And how can you hear unless there is a speaker?

This is why the Bible says back in Isaiah, blessed are the feet of those who bring the good news.

It's not that your feet are actually blessed, but that phrase, it's the same word from the Beatitudes.

Blessed is the feet of those who bring the good news.

That's how you're making peace.

You want to be a peacemaker, you bring the good news from the Isaiah's language is from the mountain of God.

You bring the good news from God down Sinai, Moses style, to the Israelites.

That's how you're a peacemaker.

You bring the news from heaven to earth.

You take the news of peace.

Jesus himself went from heaven to earth.

You can't do that.

But you bring the news of the one who went from heaven to earth and died on the cross for sin, buried in the grave, paying the penalty for sin, three days later, resurrected to the earth, 40 days up into heaven, where he reigns at this moment, right now.

That's the news you bring to the world.

That Jesus came from heaven to earth for your sins, to the grave so that you can have your sins forgiven, and now is in heaven at this very moment.

And if you turn from your sin, surrender your life to God, you can have your sins forgiven and you can be at peace with God.

Are you tired of fighting with God?

Are you tired of running from God?

Are you tired of hiding from God?

Do you feel like your life has no purpose?

Do you feel like you don't know what you're doing in this world or in this life?

You're at war with God.

That's why.

God made the world and he made you.

If you were in harmony with God, you would have purpose and significance in this life.

But if you're hiding from God, you're going to be mystified about a whole lot.

Are you tired of that?

Are you tired of fighting with God?

You can surrender your life to him.

You can turn from your sin and you can believe the gospel and you can be at peace with God.

But how can people be at peace with God if they don't even know about him?

If they don't even know about him.

You want to have peace in your life?

You've got to turn to Christ.

Now, for you to be right with Christ, you have to hear about him.

For you to hear about him, you have to have somebody tell you.

And for you, speaking of the Emmanuel Bible Church congregation, if you want to be that kind of peacemaker, you first have to have peace between yourself and God.

You can't make peace with somebody if you're at war with them.

You know, you can't be the age you can't be the broker of peace if you're on one side.

You have to represent both sides.

You have to be the sinner who's been justified for you to tell other sinners how they too can be justified.

Otherwise, you're the blind leading the blind.

And if that happens, they both fall into the pit.

If you want to tell people how to be right with God, you yourself have to be right with God.

You want to tell people how they can have peace in life, you yourself have to have peace in life from the gospel.

It's Romans 5, verse 10.

Romans 5:10

This is while we were still God's enemies, he made peace with us through his Son.

So think chronologically.

Jesus' death happened before you were born.

In the mind of God, you are still his enemy when he died for you.

Now you recognize that in time when you're alive and you spend some X number of years of your life fighting against God and hiding from God and running from Him, but Christ had already made atonement for your sin.

He had already died for you while you're still fighting against him.

So he has already done the work necessary for peace.

But you just haven't believed it yet.

You just haven't believed it yet.

That's what's required for you to have peace, is for you to hear about it and believe it.

The sacrifice has to be made, the righteous sacrifice has to be made before there can be a minister of peace.

So I think of Abraham and his war with Sodom.

I was reading about that this week.

It's in my mind.

I may have mentioned it a few times already.

But if you remember, in that war, Abraham encounters Melchizedek.

And Melchizedek offers peace.

But how could Melchizedek offer peace?

Because Melchizedek was first the king of righteousness.

He was already the king of righteousness.

That let him then be the minister of peace because he was righteous, he could offer peace.

Now Mchizedek has no beginning or end.

He's the only one in Genesis without a genealogy.

He just walks onto the pages right there.

He had already been the minister of peace before Abraham started fighting with Sodom.

He had already made peace.

But Abraham encounters him and believes him and submits to him.

That's how you have peace with God.

Peace has already been made through the death of Christ.

You can have peace and you can, more particularly here, proclaim peace if you believe it, if you've received it.

This is what Jesus says.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

But man, it can be costly to tell others how to have peace with God.

It can be costly to evangelize.

This is why we often don't do it.

We think if I evangelize my coworker, it could cost you don't understand how the government is right now.

Whoa.

It could cost me my job.

If I share the gospel with my coworkers, I could get in trouble.

I could get written up.

I could lose a promotion.

I could lose a job.

I could lose a contract.

And if you think that, you need to take your mind back to this beatitude.

Because it does not say happy are the promoted.

It says, happy are the peacemakers.

Happy are those who tell other people how to be right with God.

Would you rather have your promotion or see your wicked coworker be reconciled to Christ?

And what's ultimately going to bring you more joy in this world?

It's a pretty profound question.

What's your trade-off?

Why are you happy when you see others reconciled to Christ?

That's the rest of the beatitude, because you'll be called a son of God.

Now, you understand the way naming things work.

The giraffe was a giraffe before Adam called it a giraffe.

The name doesn't turn it into a giraffe, right?

You're called a son of God because you're a peacemaker, but being a peacemaker doesn't make you a son of God.

You are a peacemaker because you are a son of God.

You are a child of God.

That's why you make peace with other people.

That's why you tell other people how to be reconciled to God.

And God does this through giving you his spirit.

The Bible has a lot to say about how you become a son of God.

And it's never, you never become a son of God by your own actions.

So don't read into this works righteousness.

It's not like you strive, you work hard enough, you try out, and you apply, and you have a good CV and you get hired as a son of God.

No, you're a son of God through one means only.

It says Romans 5, Romans 8.

You're a son of God because the Holy Spirit dwells in your heart.

God gave you his spirit.

It's the same spirit that energized Christ in his ministry.

That spirit dwells in you, so you become a brother or a sister to Christ.

You are adopted into his family.

Romans 8:15, you've received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry, Abba Father.

Romans 8:15

It's the Spirit Himself who bears witness to you that you are a Son of God.

So the Holy Spirit who dwells in you is the one who makes you a son of God by adopting you into the family of God.

And if you have the Spirit of God, you know that when you die, you will be with God forever and ever, because his Spirit dwells in you.

It was the Spirit of God who energized Jesus' ministry.

It's the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead.

It's the Spirit of God who ushers Jesus into heaven.

It's the Spirit of God that Jesus and the Father send to the earth to empower the church, that seals you, that gives you saving faith, that causes you to be born again in John 3, verse 15.

John 3:15

It's all the Spirit of God.

And you, because you have that Spirit, are brothers and sisters with the Lord.

He's not ashamed or afraid to call you his brother or sister, because you have his spirit in you.

Now, if you possess a spirit, you want others to be reconciled to him as well.

Because Jesus was a reconciler, he was the peacemaker.

So you, because you're part of the family of God, have the news for the family of God, and you can tell others how they too can be reconciled.

A little simple observation here.

The corollary of this beatitude would also be true, wouldn't it?

If blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who tell people how to be reconciled to God, the flip side of that would be cursed are the peace breakers.

Cursed are those who remain in enmity with God.

Cursed are those who keep serving sin.

And this is exactly what you find back in Genesis.

This is back where we began.

There is war in this world because there's sin in this world.

Jesus makes the way for peace, but if you reject that way to peace, you yourself will have God's judgment upon you.

This is why the New Testament teaches two contradictory things at first.

You know, peace on earth, glory to God in the highest, peace on earth and among those with whom he's well pleased.

Also, Jesus says, Don't think that I came to bring the peace to the earth.

No, I came to bring a sword and division.

You think, well, how can was the angel wrong?

How can they both be true?

Because there is peace that he brings to those who are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ.

They have peace.

That's what he means, among whom with whom he's well pleased.

But in his second coming, he will bring a sword.

He will bring judgment, he will send the destroyer, the book of Revelation says, who will judge those who remain at war with God.

So there is peace on earth among those with whom he's well pleased.

But there is judgment from God on those who recognize, who refuse to recognize the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If you go back to the Peace Child illustration, what do you think will happen to the person who kills that baby?

He would get the wrath of both tribes on him.

What do you think will happen in your life if you reject the sacrifice of Christ for sin?

If somebody rejected Moses' law, he died on the testimony of two witnesses.

How much worse of a punishment do you think awaits those who reject the one whom Moses' law pointed to, namely Jesus Christ?

God, we're grateful that you have given us the gospel, the news about how to be reconciled to you.

I pray for every heart here in this worship center.

I pray that our hearts would be reconciled to you, that we would experience peace with God through Jesus Christ.

It's a peace that only you offer.

It's a peace that is only available to those who himself have realized their spiritual depravity, who themselves have mourned over their spiritual condition, and who themselves then surrender to you.

So, Lord, in a sense, these beatitudes have gone full circle when we see that.

So we pray that you would make us believers in these beatitudes, not just believers in them in the abstract sense, but God, we pray that you would use us even this very week to bring the good news to other people that don't know it.

We live in a world surrounded by people who are at war with you.

And so, God, we need your mercy, we need your peace, we need your courage so we can speak to others who themselves are at war.

Use us to be instruments of peace.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now, for parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.