1-16-2022

         Good Morning All,

                    Ephesians 6:23; “Peace be to the brothers, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” 

    Peace, the ever-elusive dream. Take a second and think of all the songs, poems, novels, etc. that have been written about peace and the desire for peace. If you were to ask most adults; peace would be one of the top five wishes or dreams that they have. Yet as we speak of our hope for peace, what is it that we are really wanting? What is peace and how do we get it?

    Too often, we look for peace in the world or in our nation or community. As we look for this; we look outward to other people or other situations in order to find peace.  The truth is that we have to find peace in our selves first.  Unless we have inner peace, we will never have external peace.

     For most of us, inner peace is hard to find because of stress. The stress we find in our lives can make peace seem like a distant, foggy dream. We stress about our jobs, our children and grandchildren, our health, our loved ones’ health, we stress about the weather, the price of crops, the cost of health care, how things are going in the community or church and the list just keeps growing. Sometimes we look at it and think that all this must be some sort of sign of the times.

    We often look at the events of the world and see it as a sign of the times; a sign of the coming of the end times. We look at the Bible and Jesus never spoke of stress so now that we experience stress that must be proof, right? Jesus may not have spoken of stress, but he did speak of trials and tribulation, burdens, pains. What we call stress, Jesus referred to in other ways. In other words, stress is not a sign of the times; stress is a sign of life.

    Stress exists because sin exists. Sin causes the stress and the worry we experience. Sin causes us to fail to trust in God’s promises of comfort, of sustaining us, of maintaining us, of giving us peace. Peace will never come from the outside. Peace will only come when we trust God and have faith in his promise. True peace comes to us from God, and we have it because of faith that God will take care of us. We will still face the stresses of this world; that is just life. Yet we can live in peace with God because of Jesus. Because of the peace with God, we know the stresses of this world will not prevail. We will still experience them, but we can have inner peace from God. Even as the world seems to spin out of control, we can have peace as a blessing from God.

Gracious Lord, we long for peace but rarely find it. We often look in the wrong places. Forgive us when we fail. Bring us into your wondrous light and peace. Guard us and protect us from the devil’s aim to disrupt our peace. All this we ask in Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret