Month: June 2017

A Permanent Peace

I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world. John 16:33

Right after the promise of peace comes the promise of trials and sorrows. Peace isn’t the absence of sorrow. Peace doesn’t demand a stiff upper lip or a zen-like tranquility. Peace just means that we know that God is not against us. We were God’s enemies, and now we aren’t. God made peace between us by Jesus’ death on the Cross. If He did that, we know that He is for us. He is in our favor. He is on our behalf. He cares about what happens to us. He loves us.

Peace gives us confidence that God is not punishing us when terrible things happen. He isn’t attacking us. He doesn’t hold any concealed weapons and He isn’t looking for an opportunity to take us down.  Because we have a permanent peace accord.

Sometimes the enemy has some really good ammunition – sin we’ve committed, sins that have been committed against us. Death. Disease. Loss. The world falls down around us and the enemy unleashes his claws. He suggests that God is not good, that God isn’t for us, that He is actually against us. He implies that our painful circumstances mean that God has abandoned us.

Peace disarms the enemy. Peace takes all the fire out of his ammunition. It renders every missile a dud. How can it do that? Because peace assures us that God sits with us in the ashes and broken glass. He weeps with us over our heartbreak. When God says He will never leave us or forsake us, He means that He won’t let us walk through the dark valley alone. God isn’t just sitting by and waiting for us to get a grip.

At Bethlehem, Jesus entered fully into our pain and sorrow, to share it with us, to take the weight of it off our backs and transfer it to His own. He carried it all the way to the Cross, where He became the mediator of this peace. And now He stands as the witness next to the throne of grace in heaven to intercede on our behalf, providing mercy and grace in our time of need (Hebrews 4:16).

After He rose from the dead, Jesus met His disciples on the beach for breakfast. How did He greet them? He said, “Peace be with you” (Luke 24:36). It’s not a wish or a hope.  It’s a fact, a condition. Peace exists with you. Peace is with you. Right here. Right now. Jesus brings peace with Him, it accompanies Him, and He is with you – always. So take heart. Do not be afraid. Peace has overcome all the sorrows and trials of this world.

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. If you do this, you will experience God’s peace, which is far more wonderful than the human mind can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.  Philippians 4:6-7

The Cross and the Cup

Maybe you’re familiar with the anti-bullying curriculum that encourages kids to be bucket fillers instead of bucket dippers. The idea is that our choices each day either add to the good things in someone else’s bucket, or they take away from them by our hurtful actions and unkind words. While I appreciate the character qualities, there’s just one problem – I don’t want to carry a bucket. The burdens of life are heavy enough. I don’t need anything else to lug around.

Carrying around a bucket makes it a lot more likely that I’m going to live with the expectation that life, and other people, owe me something. But you don’t have to live very long before you run smack into the reality that life feels very little obligation to you. Instead, life places a lot of demands on you. What if that’s actually the point? Not that life should fill us up, but that we should pour ourselves out into life.

There’s another problem with a bucket. Actually the problem is more me. More often than not my tendency is to peer into my bucket and decide that it’s not full enough. I feel a lack more often than I feel the fullness. There’s something about these buckets of ours that makes their emptiness weigh far more than that which fills them. So our blessings quickly become light as air, while the empty space weighs heavily on our hearts.

I’m afraid it’s also human nature to spend an awful lot of time peeking at other people’s buckets and deciding theirs are fuller than our own. And that just multiplies the weight of the emptiness and divides the joy we have in what our buckets already contain.

What if instead of trying to fill a bucket, we choose to live in the freedom of fullness? When you are filled to the brim with the enoughness of Christ, you are already full. There’s nothing to carry around in the hopes of filling it. There are no unmet needs, no unfilled obligations. Anything that is added simply causes to you overflow.

At the Cross, we can exchange our rusty buckets for the Cup. The Cross, where Christ gave us His everything and met our every need – past, present, and future. The Cup, which held His blood that was poured out as a confirmation that God’s love is an everlasting, do-whatever-it-takes kind of love.

Now when we come to the Cross, we come to the fountain of living water – Christ Himself – and we are cups. He fills us completely with His complete fullness. Then we offer the fullness that is in us to others – in the same way that Christ took the Cup and offered it to His disciples during the Last Supper.

Our capacity is tiny compared to the fullness of God. We can’t possibly hold all that He gives us. And still He pours into us continually, more than we can hold. The only way to relieve the pressure is to be poured out. We will never run empty because Christ is an eternal spring that will constantly renew, refill, and refresh us as we overflow His goodness into life around us.

I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. Matthew 25:35