You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2023.
I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13
What’s robbing you of your joy? I love the story of Christmas and all it’s plots that we may miss. Take Mary for instance. She was a young teenager in an obscure town. Her only hope for claim to fame would be marrying the man of her dreams.
Then the angel showed up and everything changed. She found out she was pregnant, but not by Joseph, by the Holy Spirit. From that point forward her life would never be the same. Yet what amazes me is her attitude. She doesn’t scoff in unbelief. She doesn’t argue with God about His decision. She sings a new song of praise and joy!
Too often we allow things in our lives to rob us of joy. Unmet expectations, criticism, negative self-talk, failure and more can take away the joy God wants us to have.
In Paul’s letter to the Roman believers he prays that they (and us) would experience joy and peace. Simply stated, peace is that attitude we have about what’s going on around us. We can be full of fear or faith, we can act in courage or hide in despair, we can move forward or slip back to where we were.
Joy on the other hand is an attitude of the heart. Peace relates to the external, joy empowers the internal. So, where to we get joy? When life goes south, when those you trusted abandon you, when life deals you a critical blow it’s hard to have joy in your own strength.
You can’t just decide to be joyful. But that’s where God comes in through the power of Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit is control of our minds our focus changes from despair to joy.
Our enemy Satan works overtime to find ways to kill our joy. He knows we are forgiven. He knows we will be in heaven someday if we have accepted Jesus. He can’t change our destiny, but he can change our outlook if we let him.
Don’t allow life circumstances to kill your joy. God’s Holy Spirit is ready to fill you with joy, but not just any joy, joy overflowing. Imagine that. By relying on the Holy Spirit you overflow with joy and when you do some of that joy will touch those around you.
For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. Ephesians 2:14 NLT
Without Christmas there would be no Easter. Without sacrifice there can be no forgiveness. Without love, there can be no unity. Without unity there can be no peace.
Hours before Jesus was brutally murdered he knelt in the garden to pray. He prayed for strength for the upcoming test of endurance. He prayed for a way out. He prayed for the unity of his followers.
He could have prayed for our courage since we would experience hatred because of his name and even be killed because we were his followers. But he didn’t. He prayed for unity.
It’s important to remember that unity does not mean uniformity. He never asked that we would think alike, act alike, speak alike and like all the same things. In fact, one of his followers, the Apostle Paul, says that divisions among us can be useful for the health of the body (1 Corinthians 11:19).
Jesus prayed for us to be unified because he knew the Father was a God of creativity. While we are all made in his image, we are certainly different from one another! How boring would life be if everything in nature was green. The grass, the water, the sky, the rocks the trees?
God knew what he was doing when he created us in his image and consequently with a creative component. Ironically, perhaps, it’s our differences that make unity beautiful. I like to think of unity in the way illustrated by an orchestra. Each instrument playing its part but in harmony with those around it.
Jews and gentiles? Gay and Straight? Black or white? Republican or Democrat? The body of Christ is made up of all of these. The unifying factor isn’t heritage or denomination or ethnicity or orientation. The unifying factor is Jesus. The result is peace on earth and goodwill to those in whose God finds favor.
Jesus came to be the example of how we can live in unity. His birth in the manger was to be one with us. His death and resurrection destroyed the walls of hostility so that, different as we are, we can live in solidarity because of him. Unity is not uniformity, but unity is peace and peace is power.
Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests. Luke 2:14
The peace-robber of fear has a cousin named doubt. Doubt has been used by the enemy of our souls from the very beginning.
The seed of doubt was planted in the mind of Adam and Eve in the garden. It was doubt that fueled and extra 20 years of wandering in the wilderness.
It’s doubt that keeps us from seeing the peace that the angels promised the shepherds that night on a lonely hillside outside of Bethlehem.
On Christmas’s day, 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a 57 year old widowed father of six sat in his office. His mind was cluttered with doubt. His wife had died. His oldest had been severely wounded in the Civil war. His country was being torn apart.
As the sound of Christmas bells wrestled with the doubts in his mind he penned this poem which has become a popular Christmas Carol:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men
And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
It’s no secret we live in troubled times. Hate is strong. The darkness of conflict is evident in our homes and globally.
But our peace as Christ-followers transcends the evil of this world and reminds us “God is NOT dead.”
Global peace on earth will not happen until the return of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Until then, those of us who trust in him as our Savior can experience peace and share that peace with others.
Lord, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished you have done for us. Isaiah 26:12
Of all the ‘peace-robbers’ we face, fear is perhaps the strongest and most crippling. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear of abandonment. Fear of dying. Fear is a driving force that has kept great books from being written, relationships that never happened, songs that have never been sung, careers that were never pursued.
Pastor Rick Warren writes, “Fear is a self imposed prison that will keep you from becoming what God intends for you to be. You must move against it with the weapons of faith and love.”
When the prophet Isaiah wrote concerning the coming Messiah he writes, “Lord, you establish peace for us; all that we have accomplished you have done for us.” (Isaiah 26:12) The crippling effects of fear can be lessened (at the least) or even destroyed when we focus on the Prince of Peace, the one empowered by God himself to keep fear in check so that we can move forward to be all He wants us to be.
The absence of fear is peace and living in peace allows us to see the situation more clearly. Fear blinds us to opportunities, peace allows us to see opportunities. Fear imprisons, peace frees. Fear deceives, peace tells us the truth. Fear is debilitating, peace is energizing.
So, how do we get this peace when fear seems to have a stranglehold on our mind? We rely on the source of peace. The source of our peace isn’t trusting your heart. The source of peace isn’t education or money. The source of peace isn’t trying harder or making lifestyle changes. The source of our peace comes directly from the Prince of Peace.
He creates in us peace of mind and peace of mind builds confidence, helps us to think through a problem, keeps us stable on unstable ground and brings a healing oil to a troubled soul.
Billy Graham states that ‘fear flees in the light of God’s love’ through our Prince of Peace. God doesn’t want us to be prisoners of our fears. He wants us to thrive. He wants us to use the gifts and resources He’s given us. He wants us to feel the peace that passes all understanding.
This Christmas season focus on the Prince of your Peace instead of your fear. The shepherds heard this message loud and clear, ‘Fear not! For today, in the city of Bethlehem is born the Prince of Peace!”
You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in you. Isaiah 26:3
We make thousands of decisions every day based on trust. So much so that we don’t even give them much thought. Have you ever lay in bed thinking, “I wonder if gravity will work today?” When you get to the office do you ‘check’ your chair to make sure it’s not broken? Do you spend your day focusing on making sure you are breathing? Do you carry a stethoscope with you to regularly check to be sure your heart was still beating?
Hopefully, your response is no. In fact, you may have read those examples and wondered what I’m thinking! We live our lives in peace in these areas because our past has taught us that we can trust certain things like gravity and bodily systems to work in certain ways.
Peace is a choice. We can live in peace in the midst of struggle or we can can respond with fear, worry, anger or a host of other emotions. When we view our struggle as something in our control, and we don’t feel we have the ability to overcome, all sorts of peace-robbing thoughts and fears enter our minds.
These thoughts destroy peace in our relationships, our sleep or our daily lives. We can choose peace in a situation when we know in our hearts that we can trust the outcome, not because we have a solution, but because we know who can and will handle the struggle on our behalf.
That ‘handling of the struggle’ may not mean it’s removal but it assures us that in the midst of the battle we will have an inner strength because we trust the one who loves us beyond measure and promises to always be there for us.
Live in peace based on the almighty power of Jesus, our peace giver, our Prince of Peace.
Mike Fisk & Built with Grace 