SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/28/2016 9:39 AM
My Worship Time
Focus: The Source of Peace
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 14:27b
Message of the verses: “My peace I give to you;
For those
of you who have been recently following my Spiritual Diaries from John realize
that I have been having some difficulties in understanding and communicating
about the subject of peace and so this morning before I sat down to look at
this next section from the outline in John MacArthur’s commentary on this 27th
verse of John 14 I listened to MacArthur’s sermon on this verse and it did help
me out some. In yesterday’s SD I
mentioned the verses in Philippians 4:6-7 which says “6 Be anxious for nothing,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your
requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all
comprehension, will guard
your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” I also mentioned that when
Jesus was in the garden praying to His Father right before His crucifixion that
I felt that He was anxious and that these verses were somehow related to what
Jesus was going through in the garden of Gethsemane. MacArthur, in this sermon I listened to
stated that as you look at the life of Jesus you never see Him without this
supernatural peace that He had until you get to the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus would be separated from His Father as
His Father would be pouring out His wrath on Him, the wrath that we deserved
poured out on us and this was why He did not have His peace.
MacArthur
also gave a Biblical definition of peace and as one might expect it does not
mean an absence of difficulties for when we look at the life of Jesus we see
that His life on earth was full of difficulties. Sometimes it even got Him in more
trouble. Take for instance when Jesus
was standing before Pilate and he told Him that I have the right to crucify
You. Jesus response was that he could
only do what His Father would allow him to do and this infuriated Pilate, you
see Pilate did not realize that he was only second in command and that God was
first in command. Think about Paul and
Silas in the Philippian prison in stocks after they had been beaten and left
bloody and yet they experienced that peace of Christ and were able to sing
songs of praise to the Lord which resulted in the salvation of the jailer and
his family.
In
MacArthur’s sermon he states that “The Biblical kind of peace is a certain kind
of peace that is totally unrelated to circumstances. It is the goodness of life that is never touched
by what is on the outside.” The Biblical
kind of peace is not affected by the circumstances, but it affects the
circumstances as we saw in our example of Paul and Silas in the Philippian
prison.
I wanted to
go over a word in Philippians 4:7 and that word is “guard” as this peace Paul
is writing about “will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Believers have a peace that guards our hearts
and our minds. The Philippians knew what
this meant as this city was actually a Roman city and because it was a Roman
city there were Roman guards around the city to protect it from enemies and so
this peace which is the peace that Christ gives to us (14:27b) is a peace that
guards our hearts and our minds. So we
can go on to look at this portion of verse 27 at this time.
We have
learned in various verses that God is the God of peace. Here is a list of some verses that speaks to
this: Romans 15:33; 16:20; Phil. 4:9; 1
Thess. 5:23; Heb. 13:20; cf. Judg. 6:24; Isa. 9:6; 1 Cor. 14:33; 2 Cor. 13:11;
2 Thess. 3:16). Now because God is the
source of all true peace Jesus could say “My peace I give.” I believe that we could say that this is a
supernatural peace, something that non-believers can get, only believers can
receive it and we will learn later we have a responsibility to use it.
This gift
of peace is something every Person in the trinity has a part in, similar to
salvation, for in salvation the Father chose us before the foundation of the
earth, the Son came to die for us, and the Holy Spirit gives us that effectual
call that we will not say no to. We see
in the salutations of many of the New Testament Epistles “Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” MacArthur writes and this “indicates that God
the Father and Jesus Christ are the source of peace. It is the ministry of the Holy Spirit to
impart that peace to believers (Gal. 5:22).
Like the rest of the legacy Jesus left the disciples, the ‘peace’ He
promised to give them would come in the fullness on the day of Pentecost.”
Now earlier
in this SD we mentioned how Jesus had peace, and it is this same peace that He
is giving to His disciples. I think of a
story from the book of Acts that demonstrates how Peter had peace, Christ’s
peace. First we have to go to the 21st
chapter of John where Jesus brought Peter back into the fold by asking him
three times if he loved Him. After that
Jesus told Peter how he would die for the cause of Christ, that he would be
crucified, which he eventually was. Now
Herod had just killed James, the brother of John and then put Peter in prison
and was going to also kill him after some kind of feast they were celebrating. The church was praying that Peter would be
released and so we find Peter in jail asleep.
Peter had the peace that Christ had given him and also the knowledge of
knowing how he was eventually going to die and so he just fell asleep not
worrying about his circumstances, full of Christ’s promised peace. Well the rest of the story is that an angel
came and rescued Peter and he went to the house of John Mark where the people
were praying for him and they did not believe that it was Peter at the
door. Maybe they didn’t have that same
peace that Peter had.
Spiritual meaning for my life today: I understand that peace is a supernatural
gift of God, something that Jesus had, and something that Jesus gives to me and
that helps me understand it better.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Continue to learn more about
this wonderful gift of peace.
Memory verses for the week (Romans 6:5-7) “5 For if we have
become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be
in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this that our old self was
crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so
that we would no longer be slaves of sin; 7 for he who had died is freed from
sin.”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Stephen’s” (Acts 6:9-15).
Today’s Bible question:
“Which OT book predicts Christ’s coming in the words ‘For unto us a
child is born, unto us a Son is given’?”
Answer in our next SD.
11/28/2016 10:33 AM
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