Transcription
[Music] greetings to you in the Lord. Uh, I've been sharing with you, uh, a little bit about peace and the, the depths of the meaning of the word. Uh, sometimes we can use the word superficially, um, but in the scriptures, the word has a very, very rich meaning. And I've, uh, come to the point of talking about Jesus as our peace. Since, uh, Jesus was sent to us by God the Father, uh, to bring peace on Earth, and he himself is the Prince of Peace. Uh, he is the one who actually enables us to enter into a well-balanced relationship with God, and he's the one who teaches us how to walk in righteousness, uh, with God and, uh, with others. And therefore, he is our Shalom. Actually, when we say shalom to each other, we don't realize we're actually offering Jesus, uh, to other people.
St. Paul tells us in Romans 5:1, "Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." So that just summarizes what I've said, um, that it is, uh, through Jesus that, uh, we have been brought into right relationship with God. So Jesus is the source of our peace. He is the one who provides forgiveness for the human race. And if there's anything we need more than air, it's forgiveness, uh, for all our sins and faults and failings, not just individual, uh, but collective and national and international as well. Um, and therefore, by providing, uh, forgiveness, uh, which we can also, uh, give his forgiveness to others as well, we maintain, uh, peace and harmony upon the Earth. And therefore, the more we live this, the more we actually show ourselves to be true sons of God. Sons of God means true family of God. Okay.
Now, when you examine the teaching of Jesus, because he is our peace, he shows us the way of peace. Now, that's a big subject in the Bible, and I'm just hinting at it. He shows us the way of peace, and on this way of peace, he teaches us the priority of love. That if love is not the motive for our thoughts and our words and our actions, uh, both personally and socially and nationally and internationally, it's not going to work. Love has got to be the center because God is love, and God is peace, God is joy, God is mercy. So when we say, you know, love, joy, and peace, we're actually saying that God is actually the center of it all. So if you go to 1 Corinthians 13, you have the whole chapter there in which Paul, uh, describes what, uh, this love actually is. And he tells us in 1 Corinthians 14:1, that we must want love more than anything else because that is the key to being able to live in peace with God, with ourselves, and with others. It's actually extremely important.
If you, uh, go back to the Old Testament again, I want to go back to two readings that you can find, uh, during the Christmas season. One is Zechariah 9:9-10: "Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O Daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king comes to you, triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey." Now, sometimes we keep that as an Easter reading, but just as important, uh, for Christmas. "I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion will be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth." Uh, now the river is usually the Euphrates, as far as the Bible is concerned. Okay. So he will command peace. Now, that doesn't mean that he stands on a pedestal and orders us all to to get into peace. Not at all. It's that in his own person, he pays for peace between individuals and God, and, uh, all of us among each other. And that if we're all living in union with him and with the Father through him, then he is ruling with peace. That's the command, uh, ruling with peace.
So you have this the same message given, uh, in the prophet Micah in chapter 4, uh, and we'll come from verse 2: "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways." Now, his ways are love, joy, and peace, and of course, that encapsulates justice and righteousness and everything. Uh, "that we may walk in his paths." So if, uh, individuals and nations are actually walking in the path of peace, then there is peace on Earth. "For out of Zion will go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." So the, the holy scriptures came to us, uh, through the people of this land, and also the Messiah Jesus came to us through them, the Word incarnate as well. "He shall judge between many peoples and decide among strong nations are far off." In other words, that redemption was to become universal. It was to go to all nations, and by now, it has reached all nations. "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore." In other words, if we have truly experienced the peace of Christ, war is just not something that is on the horizon. It just doesn't exist because we're involved in reconciliation, we're involved in bringing people together, uh, we are involved in forgiveness, in mercy, in compassion, and love. So, uh, there's no possibility of war. War is outside of that, uh, completely.
And so when we say that Jesus commands peace, it is because he paid, paid for the reconciliation between God and man. He paid for it with his incarnation, with his life, and with his death and unspeakable suffering. That debt of Jesus, in which he said, "It is finished," or "Paid in full," that purchased peace for us on Earth. That made it actually possible for us to be able to live in peace with ourselves, with God, and with each other. When he rose from the dead, his resurrection released this gift of peace to the world. And the very first thing that Jesus said when he met his disciples was, "Shalom, peace be with you." And so he was releasing peace into the world. And when the Holy Spirit descended at on Pentecost Day, that actually confirmed the gift of peace that was given to us. Because we as human beings are not just material, we're not just flesh, because of that, our needs are not just material. Our greatest needs are, in fact, spiritual. Our greatest need is to have this peace eternally, not just for now, not just for a short time, but to have it eternally. Um, and so Jesus is the only person who can give us this eternal peace.
And when you look at the Gospels, uh, you will find aspects of peace that you mightn't have associated with the word peace. For example, in John 14:1-3, Jesus said, "I have made a place for you in heaven." Now, the "you" is you as an individual, you as a group, you as a nation, you as humanity. "I've made a place for you in heaven." And in John 14:6, he told us, "I've shown you the way to heaven. I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life." And in John 14:27, he says, "I give you my own peace. Okay, listen to him. Peace I leave with you; my own peace I give to you. It's not like the world that's not the peace I give to you." See, the world says peace is the sensation of conflict. That's not it. You can have peace in the middle of conflict. You have had soldiers die in peace in the middle of war, for example, because their own hearts were at peace with God. So Jesus said, "It's not a cessation of conflict that I'm actually giving to you. I'm giving you something that you hold in the depths of your being. You hold it as your own possession, and it is something that I paid for."
Some of you might have a question in your mind at this point, and if you have, I want to try and answer it for you because there's a particular text in Matthew chapter 10:34-36 that seems to contradict everything I've said. We have to look at it. Jesus said, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man's enemies will be those of his own household." Now, you're going to say to me now, that contradicts everything you've said. And the answer is, no, it doesn't. You have to know that when Jesus spoke to the people of Israel in the first century, that it was the end time for the covenant of Moses. Society was falling apart. There were all kinds of sects, uh, of the religion that they had, and there was immense conflict. Okay. So when anyone individual decided to come to Jesus and to be a disciple of his, he would receive the peace of salvation and the peace of God in his own heart. But if he went back home, and he happened to be from a family of Pharisees or Sadducees or Zealots or Samaritans or any of the other groups, there was going to be huge trouble at home because they were not going to accept this because the scribes and the Pharisees and these people actually rejected Jesus. So while the individual would have peace in their hearts, they would have conflict at home, and they would have to know how to deal with the conflict, hence become a peacemaker, hence become somebody who lives this peace by forgiveness and reconciliation, if you, if you can.
Okay. Jesus was talking about the sword of division and the sword of separation that comes into a family when a person gives themselves to God. The price that the individual pays for the wonderful gift of peace that Jesus gives them is this horrendous pain and conflict in their own family. In the age that we're living in, where there's so much loss of faith, even among Christians, if one individual in a family has a deep experience of God, it shows up the conscience of everybody else. It shows up their lack of faith. It shows up, uh, maybe the immorality that's in their lives, and there will be immense conflict. The sword of division comes down immediately. There are many, many, many people who can tell you, uh, that because they have had an experience of God in their lives, that they have been rejected outright by their spouse or their children or both. There are many stories like that today. So what Jesus was saying was, peace is a very expensive gift. You have to treasure it. You have to understand its depth. You have to understand its eternal value. And you have to understand that not only did Jesus pay a high price to bring peace on Earth, but that you yourself might have to pay a high price also for receiving this peace. But then you become the source of intercession for that family and, and the source of forgiveness and grace going out to them. So you actually become a conduit of God's redemptive graces going to that family, and maybe in the future, others will actually come to know the Lord as well.
So the struggle, uh, that is involved is absolutely immense, and it's going on all over the world. This, this division that comes into families. Now, why is this division there? It's because behind the whole thing is this enormous battle, uh, going on for planet Earth, for the soul of planet Earth. It's going on in the heavenlies, and it's going on on the earth. In other words, it's going on among the spiritual powers of darkness in high places, as Paul speaks about, and it's reflected on the earth as well. And that is an immense struggle for the soul of planet Earth. It's a struggle between light and darkness, a struggle between God and the demon, it's a struggle between good and evil, a struggle between love and hate, a struggle between life and death. And we see it played out on and, uh, in politics and on the world stage all around us. The struggle that's going on between life and death, between good and evil. And we've even arrived at the stage where Isaiah said was very dangerous, and that is that good can be called evil, and evil can be called good. That means there's huge deception around. So this battle is, uh, led by Michael the Archangel on the good side, and by Satan, the rebellious angel, on the evil side, as you can see from the Book of Revelation chapter 12.
So the, the battle that's going on is massive. And the final peace that will come upon the Earth is when we all accept Jesus as our Savior and Lord, all of us together. But none of us can escape the conflict because it goes on inside of us. We individually have to choose between light and darkness, good and evil, God and Satan, love and hate, life and death. All of us have to do that. All groups have to do it. All families, all nations have to do that as well. And in choosing light, life, and love, we are choosing God, who is life, who is light, and who is love. Okay. The decision that every single individual makes affects the future of humanity. And if we want a future in which our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will know God and have peace on Earth, then our part in this struggle is actually terribly important. And so if we choose to be peacemakers on the earth, if we choose, uh, to do what Jesus did when he was on the earth, to pay a price to have people living in peace and to have God's righteousness on the earth, then I think that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph will have a happy Christmas. We usually greet one another with a happy Christmas. We forget that we should give them a happy Christmas. And a happy Christmas for them is that we will take this gift of peace, that we will absorb it, and not just enjoy it, but that we'll pay the price that it can take place on the earth. Thank you for listening. SL Hispanic Day live. Goodbye. God bless you.