The Gospel of Peace, The Need for Peace!

The Gospel of Peace

The Need for Peace

Emotional and spiritual needs are by far more essential than our physical needs.

As a matter of fact, when the emotional needs are met, it is relatively easy to take care of the physical needs.

But the emotional needs of a person are met only through personally experiencing the love of God through the Lord Jesus Christ.

People need to feel the love and peace of God.

We all need to permeated with the positive emotions that come from a meaningful relationship with God.

We can endure sickness, poverty, and pain, but we cannot endure poverty of the inner man.

Pro 18:14 A man's spirit can sustain him during his illness, but who can bear a crushed spirit?

Physical healing is meaningless to the person who has a broken heart.

Prosperity does not ease the pain of loneliness.

Success is no substitute for a sense of dignity and worth that comes from the Lord Jesus.

We do not want to deny God’s desire and willingness to meet the physical needs, but we must bring it into perspective.

God created man.

He placed him in a garden called Paradise.

There were no pain, suffering, or sorrow.

Man lived in a peaceful, loving relationship with God.

That is the environment for which we were created.

We were never designed to live apart from peace, love, and acceptance.

The day Adam ate the forbidden fruit; he acquired a new capacity for the human race: the knowledge of good and evil.

With this knowledge, man now started making decisions about good and evil independently of God.

Man began to determine righteousness apart from God.

Subsequently, he rejected God’s standards and developed his own.

Hence, we have the birth of religion.

Religion has always been mean, and it is still mean.

The first religion is the same as it has always been.

It is man attempting to relate to God on his own terms.

In order to do that we must, of course, reject God’s terms.

We also must reject anyone who does not comply to our terms.

The first religion caused Cain to kill Abel.

He hated him because Abel’s sacrifice was accepted and his wasn’t.

He had labored for his sacrifice.

Logic would say that his was of more value, by Cain was operating in his own knowledge of righteousness and unrighteousness.

1Jn 3:12 Do not be like Cain, who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because what he was doing was evil and his brother's actions were righteous.

Thousands of years later, Paul said in his book of Galatians that the children of the flesh always persecute the children of the Spirit.

In other words, the religious always persecute the righteous. Why?

The religious despise the righteousness that God has chosen and given.

There is a logic to religion.

Religion is man’s attempt to be right with God and find peace in a way that makes sense to him.

Religion sees the greatest need of man as being right with God.

If someone doesn’t agree with us, he is implying that we are wrong.

Since it is essential that we be right, we must prove him wrong.

If we can’t prove him wrong, then we kill him.

That’s exactly what Cain did.

The need to be right has tormented men since the day Adam ate the fruit.

Adam started making decisions apart from God right off the bat.

“We had better make some clothes to cover ourselves, because I don’t think its right to be naked before God. We had better hide when God calls us. He’s probably mad.”

Man began to scramble to be right.

But every decision to be right, apart from God’s perspective, drove him deeper into pain, suffering, and self-imposed separation from God.

Regardless:

-         Of how pure the motives.

-         Of how sincere the intention.

-         Of the dedication to God.

-         Of how good we are.

The attempt to establish right and wrong apart from God is a rejection of God and His truth.

Rom 10:3 For they are ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God while they try to establish their own, and they have not submitted to God's means to attain righteousness.

Every attempt at being righteous with God apart from accepting His terms ultimately will have a negative effect.

As long as we’re doing everything right, we will have peace, but when we fail, we will lose peace.

There will never be an abiding sense of confidence and peace—one that lasts despite our success or failure.

The Bible says that law cannot make one righteous; it can only give him an awareness of sin.

So when you fail you will no longer have peace.

Then there is the problem of those who disagree with us.

They have a different definition of righteous than we have.

We must prove them wrong in order to maintain our peace.

The struggle is endless.

You cannot live this way.

You were not created to live this way.

God wants you to live in a harmonious relationship with Him an in harmonious relationship with people.

This can happen only when you have peace.

You can have peace only when you know you are righteous.

You can know you are righteous only when you accept the gift of righteousness through the Lord Jesus Christ.

Rom 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus the Messiah.

Peace is far more essential to Christian living than we have ever realized.

The gift of righteousness produces peace through Jesus.

Peace gives boldness and confidence to pursue a relationship with God.

Through Him we have access to grace (God’s ability) in which we stand.

When there is no peace, there will be no relationship, no confidence, and no grace to work in our lives.

And apart from grace we are limited to our own ability to serve God and live a righteous life.

We need peace!