by Ted Wise (twise@mediacity.com)
QUESTION:
I think God and Jesus would like to give people a message - just one: Live in peace. In peace with your neighbor, with your friends, with your wife, with your children and with yourself.
ANSWER:
MFD,
Jesus certainly did teach on the subject of peace and I concur with you that we should live in peace with all of mankind. However, before that can happen, the Bible teaches that peace must begin within the heart of man by making peace with God.
Peace is not merely a feeling. Peace is that state that follows the end of a war or the resolution of a conflict. This, of course, feels differently than a state of war does. But if we seek a feeling of peace without working out the terms of surrender, we are simply looking for a heavenly tranquilizer and not the reality of peace with God. The same can be said about peace with ones enemies. I often wonder if humanity will come up with the ultimate in chemical warfare, a drug that would produce such a sense of peace that one would literally surrender everything just to feel it.
What I would like to recommend to you is that you try a simple experiment. Try to think about God for just one day. That's all, just think about God in the normal course of your day. I'm not recommending a withdrawal into the desert or meditation in some quite place. Think about God for one day as you go about your business.
One more thing you might find helpful MFD, God said this about Himself through His Apostle James, "...do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: "He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us"? But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
This passage spoke to me years ago because it made such good news of the fact that I didn't like the world very much and I didn't fit well into it. All my life I had been trying to be a friend of the world as though worldly ways were virtues. I say again: The Bible is a very unique book to a desperate soul.
One more word from James, "...Draw near to God and He will draw near to you."
Ted Wise
10 November 1997