Beatitudes 7

In this update, I mentioned something that I've been studying for, well, probably a couple years now, the concept of societal psychosis, which is an actual term. I mean, it's actually something that psychologists talk about, sociologists talk about, historians talk about. Psychosis is where the person becomes so disoriented, they're out of touch with reality. So they make up things. Societal psychosis is illogical, and it's filled with fear and anxiety. In fact, one of the reasons for it is that society becomes filled with anxiety and fear. And as that anxiety and fear builds within that society, they become more and more disjointed, and they become more and more angry, and they become more and more violent.

And they lose touch with reality. I think transgenderism is one of the greatest psychosis ever happened in the history of humanity. When you talk about out of touch with reality, that's just out of touch with everything. So this societal psychosis, and in fact, I have two more books I'm going to buy here soon and read them because they're fascinating. They're basically studies. One was done during a man who lived in the 1930s, and he watched the development of communism and Nazism. And another was done by a study on that that's been much more recent. But how you have an entire group of people collapse into a psychosis.

They are actually mentally ill. One picture I saw recently in an article I was reading showed thousands of Germans in the Nazi salute. Of course, the question was, how did the most educated, most probably at the time, some of the most intelligent people on earth, they were producing all kinds of sciences. How could they end up like this? And in the middle of these thousands of people giving Nazi salute, there's one man just standing there like, you know, this is nuts.

And he was actually in reality, and everybody else wasn't, but it seemed real to them. And as I've been studying this and thinking about it, and thinking about how that fear and anxiety, trepidation that just fills people, so that you're just afraid all the time.

And what that drives them to become, and first of all, they're also very negative. They just become negative about everything. And it drives them into this mental state, which is actually mental illness. It's also sometimes called the epidemic of madness because it gets spread from person to person by the way people act. Now, we know a lot of that is because the world is influenced by Satan, who is absolutely insane.

So there's that influence of all. But in thinking about that a lot lately, and I'm going to prepare a sermon on it here sometime in the future, but that sort of ties in to the next of the Beatitudes I want to talk about. Because let's go to Matthew 9, or Matthew 5, and verse 9.

So here I am giving these two series of sermons, one on how to be sane, and now they're on prophecy, which makes you feel insane. So, you know, we have to balance all this out as we go through this. Matthew 5, verse 9. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Okay, the children of God will be peacemakers. And yet you and I live in this world of absolute conflict. I mean, there's conflict in everything. There's conflict at work, there's conflict in the home, there's conflict with your neighbors. Sometimes there's conflict within the church. There's just constant conflict. But we're supposed to be peacemakers.

Now, this isn't a sermon like many of you maybe think where I'm going. I'm going to say here's seven ways to be a peacemaker, okay? Because, you know, you've heard sermons on that before on how the things we can do to be a peacemaker. But the blessing here isn't just knowing the steps of how to deal with conflict.

What he's talking about here is a blessing from God. Remember as we go eat through each of these, it's about a blessing from God. And in these blessings, we change. We become something else. So blessed are the peacemakers. In fact, one of the fruits of God's spirit in Galatians is peace. So in other words, to be a peacemaker in the way that Jesus is talking about here, you first have to have some kind of internal peace.

And actually, that's where our conflicts are all the time. As human beings, we're in an internal conflict, you know, a lot in life. We're in some kind of conflict with another person, with our spouse, with this, the neighbor, with our job, with what we watch on television.

We're just in conflict with everything. Everything's making us upset. Everything's making us filled with anxiety. Everything's making us, uh... Well, head toward psychosis is what it's doing. And it's, you know, even in the church. I can remember, if you go back 40 years ago, some of the sermons given on prophecy made everyone feel with such anxiety that there was sort of a psychosis in the church.

So there's some people laughing and shaking their yes. Russ knows what I'm talking about. You know, prophecy is supposed to motivate us and understand God and give us faith and see the future as it happens. But if we're just all the time making really bad decisions in life, like, why should I get my teeth fixed?

Crisis is coming back. And then 30 years later, your teeth all fall out. Right? So there's an unwise decision-making taking place because we don't understand what daily Christianity is. And we don't understand what prophecy is supposed to do.

Prophecy is very important, but it's supposed to motivate us and fixate us on something that God is doing. So, how do we have this peace? Because this peace is something that is produced by God. Blessed are the peacemakers. And peace is a product of God's Holy Spirit. So this is something that comes from God.

It's something you and I just can't manufacture. And being a peacemaker, yes, there's steps on how to be a peacemaker. And you know, when you're in conflict with somebody, you can do all the right things and go home feeling absolutely frustrated and angry. Because they didn't do the right thing.

Now what do you do? Well, I've been the peacemaker. There's no peace. So now next time I talk to the person, I'm carrying a club. I mean, how many movies are there? Some nice, peaceful guy and somebody hurts him or robs him or does something to him.

And all of a sudden you find out he's some ex-con or some ex-Special Forces guy that now goes nuts and kills everybody in town. Right? Or all the bad guys. No. He goes after all the bad guys and kills everybody. Because now he can let loose the anger and hatred he has inside of himself.

Or you have to explore what this peace even does. I mean, does it being filled with God's peace mean that you just don't care what anybody does to you? And you just let people abuse you? Is that what it means? What does it mean to have inner peace in the way that blessed are those who are peacemakers, who they will be the children of God?

First of all, we've got to remember that this kind of peace comes from God. I can't give you five steps to have peace in your life. I can only give you encouragement on how to have a relationship with God so that you learn this peace. Because you have to learn it and it has to come from Him. John 14. This is interesting. This is what Jesus told his disciples on the night that he was about to suffer the greatest violence. He wasn't going into a peaceful situation. They were going to come to arrest him and they were going to torture him and they were going to kill him.

And he tells them in verse 27, he says, peace I leave with you. My peace. Shalom, peace is common. It's a greeting. It's a way to say goodbye in Hebrew. Peace was a blessing. But he says the peace I give you, or I leave with you, is from me. Jesus says it's my peace. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. In other words, he says peace is the basis that helps us develop that we don't live in fear and anxiety.

Now fear and anxiety are normal human reactions. We all experience that. But he's saying here it's this peace from him. He says it will help you not be afraid. It will help you not be troubled. So there's a peace. There's something that settles us that can only come from God. And how many times do people destroy their lives trying to find some settledness? That becomes the basis for a lot of alcoholism, drug addiction. They're trying to find peace. A settledness within themselves because they're faced with insanity every day in the insane world that we live in.

So this is something that must come from God. Now it seems like we would all say, yes, that's what I want. I'm going to go right now, I mean, I'm going to go home and just pray, God, give me peace. But the truth is that when God begins to give us that peace, we actually resist it.

Because of our corrupted human nature, we actually resist the peace of God. And there's reasons why. Let's go to James. You know, I read this in going through one of the Beatitudes here, but I'm going to read it again. Not the whole passage as I did before, but parts of it. Because this tells us something very important about why peace isn't easy. Because we're talking about the peace that's inside of us.

Because unless you, I don't know, maybe you live out in the country, have no neighbors, you're an introvert, you have no neighbors, there's no news, and you know, life is absolutely perfect and you have no conflict. But for everybody else, inner peace is a battle all the time, isn't it? I mean, you have it, but then you lose it. There's constantly something that's coming into your life to take away your inner peace. Now, that can be other people and external circumstances. When we find out what peace is from God, it doesn't take away all the external circumstances. It helps us be able to deal with the external circumstances. It helps us deal with the fear. It helps us deal with the anxiety. It helps us to deal with the problems that we have because of external circumstances. But that means it has to be internal. But there's also part of us, inside every one of us, that resists that internal change. And here's why. James 4, verse 1. Where do wars and fights come from among you? It's interesting. He's talking to the church here. James wrote this letter to the general churches, all the churches. That's why it's called a general epistle. It actually wasn't written to the world. It was written to the church. And he uses some exaggeration here to describe the conflict that was happening inside the church. He says, do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? He says, here is why you have such a hard time with peace, he tells them. It's why the whole world has such a hard time with peace. But we have to understand this first. You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. Now, they weren't murdering each other in the church. But there was hatred, which is the spirit of murder. Once again, he's using it hyperbole here. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. He says, first of all, you didn't even go to God and ask God to help you. You just think you know the answer to everything. And the answer to everything is that what? You get everything you want and you have control over every circumstance. That's what we want. Total control and we get what we want. He says, but you don't go ask God. But then when you do ask God, you ask and you do not receive because you ask amiss that you may spend it on your own pleasures. In other words, we are driven by a selfish answer to every problem. Now, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it's true that many times our answer to every problem is a selfish one. And he says, so you don't go to God because you already know the answer, what you want, and when you do go to God, you've already decided what the answer should be. And so you don't get an answer from God. He says, adulterers and adulteresses, so there were sexual sins going on in the church. Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. So he says, what you don't understand is this is the way everybody is. This is the whole way of the world. Everybody is motivated by, if I could just get control of everything, and everything I could get what I want in every situation, and everything worked out the way I want it, then I would have peace.

And the thing is, that's not possible. And if you could do that, you would just ruin the lives of everybody else around you. None of them would have peace. If I could just be the emperor of the world, everybody would have peace. No, you would. Nobody else would. So here's the problem. The peace God wants to give us, we naturally resist, even with God's Spirit. We'll sometimes sort of resist the peace of God. I'll have peace when this person pays what they did to me. And God says, hmm, let this one go. No! Then you won't have peace. See how we'll do that? But I was wronged. God says yes. But don't try to get payment out of this one. Let this one go. No! Okay, I won't try, but I'll think about it every day. I'll be angry every day. Because I'll think about how they need to get punished. And so you have no peace. Now, it takes a long time to work through these problems. Is it hot in here? It is warm in here.

It takes a long time to work through...huh? Oh, the women aren't?

Oh, yeah. And maybe it's just because I have a jacket on.

So what we do is we don't do something. We don't commit an act of war or confrontation or argument. But what we do is the internal peace is not there. We have no internal peace. So we're miserable. Of course, the other person's winning the war, aren't they? Because you're the one who's miserable. The other person's won, but we hold it inside. You and I have to be willing to give up control to have peace, and that's the opposite of how we feel. To give up control means I'm not in control now. You have to have certain control of things. I mean, I'm not saying you just give up all control of your life and become a doormat. But you give up the spiritual aspects of your life to God. You give them up. God, you control the spiritual aspects of my life, not me. Let's look what James...or...let's go to...see where I want to go here now. Isaiah. This is an interesting verse in the Old Testament. Isaiah 57. So here, we're not talking about just, okay, it's a nice day and I'm feeling peaceful. You know, sitting out on the back porch, watching the birds in the yard, and drinking some coffee, and I feel peaceful. That's good, and that we need those times in life. But the peace of God helps us become peacemakers.

Now, you can't always control the other person. In fact, most of the time you can't. And you can't even get what you want the other person to do. And much of the time you can't even get the other person to do what's right.

So you have to have inner peace even when the other person's wrong. And that's hard. And that's not easy, and it's not something you could just have. It takes a long time to go through that. And then a new situation comes along. And especially if you've been abused in some way or hurt in some way, now you have to learn peace. The peace of God in another situation. This is a lifelong process. Blessed are the people who learn peace so they can become peacemakers.

Isaiah 57, verse 19. It's a weird thing here because the sentence is connected to what was being said before. But then he sort of flips this sentence into a direct point. He says, I curate the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace to him who is far off and to him who is near, says the Lord, and I will heal him.

Shalom, shalom to someone who's near to me and someone who's way out there. Because when you come to me, I will heal you and there will be peace. The peace starts between us and God. That's where the peace begins in terms of the beatitudes. This isn't I have books at home, you know, really good books by business leaders. How to deal with conflict in the office, right? And they work, but they don't create inner peace in the people that are having the conflict. It doesn't solve the ultimate problem in that all the wars, as James says, comes from within us. So God says, I want to give you peace. This is where it comes from. Because you know why? We see God get angry in the Bible. But you know what's interesting about God? His anger is always because of one thing. It's always against evil. If he was angry because every time we showed him disrespect, who would be alive in this room? If we got angry every time, or he got angry just because every time we don't obey, and he said, that's it.

Who would be alive? He gets angry at evil, and he gets angry when someone follows Satan to the point that they actually rebel against God. They hate God. But understand that anger is gone the moment he deals with the situation. In other words, he's not an angry being. His anger has focus. His violence has focus. You know, yes, God told ancient Israel there was a tribe. He said, you go kill all of them. And he says, why? He said, because they sacrificed their own babies to Satan. And he says, I can't bear with that anymore. I can't bear hearing the screams of these children being burned. I can't do it anymore. You go kill every one of them.

The evil had reached the point. Now, God still has a plan for those people. But understand, yes, his anger can lead to what we consider violence. It's just punishment on his part against evil.

We, on the other hand, have a— ours comes from all over the place. We have a hard time seeking peace because we live such dysfunctional, chaotic lives so much at the time. Because we are slaves to worry and stress and anger and frustration. And here's what you have to do to start breaking this slavery. Every day—and you can come up with a hundred reasons why you can't do this every day—every day, you have to take some time to remove yourself from everything that's going on around you. And you have to take time—and I mean that means computers, cell phones, everything. And it's amazing. Oh, yeah, I can do that. Yeah. Go an hour without your cell phone and see if you don't get the shakes. Some people do. Mentally, they're just, you know, I gotta look, I gotta look. You separate yourself from everything and you go spend that time with God. And if it feels uncomfortable, that means just keep doing it every day. 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half hour, hour, whatever you can do. Some people do it, you know, some in the morning and some in the evening. 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening. It has to be planned out. It has to be done. And unless there's an absolute emergency, that time with God supersedes everything. Husband and wives, you have to help your spouse be able to have that time. Because you have a better marriage. The more peace they have with God, the more peace you're going to have with each other. Philippians 4. So you have to take this time and you have to separate. You have to, whatever it is, where you can separate from everything.

Philippians 4. Here Paul says in verse 6, Be anxious for nothing. Oh wow, that's easy for you to say, right? If anybody had anything to be anxious about, it was Paul. You talk about a tough life. He says, Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. So he says, You have to go ask God for this. You have to take your anxieties to Him. You have to spread it out before Him. And there may be things happening in your life you have to pray about every day for a year. Right? I mean, life isn't lived in a one hour. It's not like the old television shows were. The old mystery shows, right? Everything was solved in one hour. Every case was solved in one hour. The bad guys always went to jail. That's not life. Life is we struggle all the time.

And that's not bad. That's part of the process of being converted. It's in the struggle that we learn. And when we have this piece, and we get it, we say, I want to go back to that. We keep wanting to go back to that piece. Because we know someday that's the way we'll be all the time. When we're changing with God, we'll be at peace all the time. The reality is, right now we're not. We have to face reality. But we can't experience it more and more and more. Now, he says, you go and you let God know all these things. You talk to Him about it. You pour out from your heart and mind what you think and what you feel. And then he says, in verse 7, and, because this is all one sentence in Greek, and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Your hearts and minds will be guarded from all this other stuff by the peace of God. It's interesting, as I covered this week, we finally did our 15th Bible study on Ephesians. Finally got through the book of Ephesians. And the last part of that Bible study was on the armor of God. And how the Roman soldiers had to put on special sandals so they could march through all kinds of terrain. In other words, you can't move forward without your sandals on. It doesn't matter what armor you have on. You know, you have your helmet on. Yeah, good. No, I can't get it in the head, but if you can't walk, it doesn't matter much. And what was on their feet? The gospel of peace. Peace between them and God. That's what Paul was saying. We move forward because there's peace between us and God. When there's not peace between us and God, we're not moving forward. He says the peace that surpasses understanding. You know, I have to say there's been times in my life at three in the morning, I've been struggling and struggling with something, and asked for the peace that surpasses understanding. And suddenly I feel peaceful. And I can't tell you why. Because it surpasses understanding. I can't tell you why. And you realize, oh, God did something there. I woke up the next morning, still had the same problems, but it was different. And it was because the problems changed. It was because God does something.

We have to pray for this. All these blessings come with a struggle. That's what's so interesting as we go through. Remember, everyone we've gone through says, well, this is a struggle. You hunger and thirst after righteousness. I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I'm blessed because I mourn. Yeah, because you get comforted. I'm blessed as a peacemaker when I have to deal with conflict all the time. Yeah. Because a blessing comes from inside, from God doing something in our hearts and minds. This is conversion. Conversion is more than just doing things. It's God living in us. It's God living in us. I'm working on a sermon already for Pentecost where we're going to be talking about this. It's God in us. That means you have to go also in this period of prayer, a long time with God, you have to get answers from Him. Hebrews 13. Hebrews 13. You know, sometimes people say, what should I study? And I'll ask them, what's on your mind? What's on your mind? And I'll say, look, I still use the old fashioned concordances so I can look up the Greek and Hebrew words, what they mean. But you can go online and you can type in, scriptures about conflict at work. And there are sites that will pull up 30 scriptures about conflict at work. All you have to do is not just read those scriptures, but get out your Bible and read the context in which those scriptures are written. Why? What is being said? Why it's being said? And the meaning behind it. And you can spend days, you can spend a week going through those 30 scriptures, praying about it, studying it, and you'll come away with an answer.

You'll come away with an answer. It took some work to do it, but you have to let God talk to you. You have to go through the scripture like God talked to you. Hebrews 13, verse 20. Now may the God of peace, who brought up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, here's what this is sort of a blessing that's being given. It's the way in Hebrew and Greek they would actually give a blessing on the people. May the God of peace do this to you, make you complete in every good work to do his will, working in you what is well pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen. It's a blessing with an amen, like a prayer. So we have a blessing that says, may the God of peace work in you to do what his will is. We have to go ask for this. We have to go pray for this. This is that time of peace we seek every day with God. And sometimes you need it more than others, don't you? But you know, it's so easy to skip your daily time of peace with God because, oh, I don't know, I got caught up in watching cats on YouTube. Or whatever.

I get caught up watching things on YouTube. I have to admit, it's not cats. But it's stuff is equally unimportant when compared to this peacetime where God makes peace with you.

The Sabbath is a peacetime. Sometimes we don't get the Sabbath. We don't keep it correctly because we don't understand. This is God's peace with us. He's making peace with us. Christ is making peace with you. Remember, he was resurrected on the Sabbath. That's a vital teaching that we do not recognize as much as we should. We know he was resurrected on the Sabbath. We don't think about he was resurrected on the Sabbath. You don't think that was planned? The seventh day is made holy at creation. And Jesus Christ is resurrected on the seventh day. You don't think those two events are connected in God's plan? Of course they're connected in God's plan. Because there's peace being done, and it's for his death, as we read, that we are able to have peace with God, his death and resurrection.

So we're supposed to find peace with God on this day. And that's a vital part of this day, that we are to find peace with God. Now, a couple other things to remember is, you know, you have to avoid needless conflict.

And I remember as a kid punching a kid, and like two seconds later I'm thinking, boy, was that a bad idea. There was no need for this conflict. I could have ended this differently than what's going to happen now. We don't have to rush into conflict all the time.

Only, remember, God only lets his anger go when it's controlled by his intellect and his love against evil. Otherwise, it's always under control. So much of the time, our conflicts really have to do with our own pride, or desire to force our will on someone else, or somebody else is trying to do that to us. And that's why being a peacemaker does not mean that you let other people abuse you. That's not what that means. That's not being a peacemaker. That's actually enabling somebody to abuse you. What it means is, is that when there's something righteous involved, you stand up, but you do it properly. You stand up, but you do it properly. And that means there can be anger involved. Not all anger is wrong. I gave a sermon about two years ago. But most of the time, our anger is wrong. You know, most of the time it's wrong, but it doesn't have to be wrong. It depends on the situation, why you're doing it, and how you're doing it.

There's also times when it doesn't matter. It'll make no difference. I mean, have you ever been in a situation where someone is saying absolutely stupid things, or absolute things that are against God, and you want to say that's wrong? And there's times, you know, I'll be someplace, and I'll say, that's... Because I love it when they say, what do you do for a living? I'm a pastor. Oh, man. Well, you probably think differently than what I've been saying. Yeah, I do. But there's other times they just want to fight, and there's nothing you're going to do to make it better. They just want to argue with you. They just want to put you down. And sometimes you say, look, you and I disagree. Peace, brother. And you walk away. Although I don't say brother. There is a time the conflict will produce nothing. It won't be a good example to anybody. No one will learn from it. And that's just wisdom. Jesus walked away a couple of times. He just walked away. There's other times He did not, and what He said was so powerful that they killed Him. You know, He said, well, they plotted to kill Him from that day forward. There's all kinds of mentions in the Scripture about how people decided He had to die. That was His first sermon. His neighbors and friends tried to kill Him. That was His first sermon. So He would say what was right. There's other times He said it's not worth the conflict. Remember the situation with Peter? He's talking about the temple tax. He said, should the Messiah pay the temple tax? And He said, well, of course not. He said, well, let's not offend anybody. Go give Him a coin. Go give Him a coin, because it's not worth the conflict. There's other things that are worth the conflict. So we avoid conflict because it's not worth what it does to us and it produces nothing. When we're in conflict, there must be a reason.

I mean, how many times with a friend or your spouse and you'll say something, a lady will say, that was dumb. I'm sorry. And it's always great when the other person says, you're tired today, aren't you? Yeah, they recognize, you're being an idiot, but that's okay. And good friends will do that. They understand there was no reason to create the conflict because the person wasn't doing this out of malice. Because we do lots of dumb things because we're just human. We know when, we also know something else as a peacemaker, we know when something's not worth harboring bitterness. Bitterness will destroy us. Bitterness is an anger or a feeling of abuse that we just think about, we won't let go of, and we despise the person. We despise them and we feel bitterness. I used this example before, but this was many, many, many years ago.

But a person one time, he had been abused by another person. The other person had done things to him really hurtful in his life. And the person died. And he said to me, I said, well, the person's dead. You can't fix the conflict. You just have to wait some day in a resurrection and you'll be in the first resurrection and then you can deal with it later. And his words were, it's as if he's reaching up out of the grave and controlling my life. He was so bitter, nothing in life had any value to him. Because a man died, he couldn't fix it. That's the great danger of bitterness. It sits inside of us and it eats us up. And once again, it's one of those things that leads to a psychosis. You lose touch with reality. A man reaches up out of the grave and controls me.

No, he doesn't. But that's how he felt. I'm not saying the man was psychotic. What I'm saying is that's the illogical mindset that eventually leads to this mass psychosis we see in our country today. Because it's an emotional problem.

I didn't mean to say he was psychotic, he wasn't. But I'm just saying that you can see how, all of us, if you keep thinking some way long enough, what it can do to you is create in you a mindset that isn't even... You're out of touch with reality. Totally out of touch with reality.

Hebrews 12, verse 14. We're going to talk a little bit about... We're going to do a little bit of, you know, in some of the Bible studies, I have the groups get together, small groups, and talk about some things. We're going to talk about peace. Peace with God, as part of the Bible study, or as the Bible study today. Hebrews 12, 14.

Pursue peace with all people. That's interesting because there's an Old Testament scripture that says, pursue peace. It's quoted in the New Testament in a couple of places. This is one of them. In other words, you actually have to go get peace. It's not just happens. You have to go do it. That's why I'm saying you have to find this daily time to have peace with God. Through the Bible, through meditation, through prayer. You know, I can remember, well, you have to do exactly a half hour of prayer a day. I remember a minister saying that. Half hour of prayer and half hour of Bible study. Well, that's like saying, my wife and I have a really good relationship with me because we set aside an hour a day where I get to talk for a half hour, then she gets to talk for a half hour, and then we ignore each other the rest of the day. That's not how relationships work. This time with peace with God is to connect with God. And sometimes you'll do it and say, nothing happened. And God say, yeah, you just don't understand what happened. Come talk to me tomorrow. And then sometime during the day, something will happen and you'll realize God's involved. God says, see, something did happen. You just didn't know what was going to happen.

God is, you know, we're like little children, and Daddy walks out of the room and it's like, what happened to him? He's gone. He'll never come back. And he walks back in and you see the baby all excited again. You know, like dogs do. Little babies do the same thing. You could be gone for an hour or two days. They show the exact same excitement. Or five minutes sometimes. And it's the exact same excitement because time doesn't mean much. Well, time doesn't really mean much to God, right? He understands us. We're contained in it.

So we think nothing happened. And you'll say, ah, just wait. It will. And you go back the next day and you go back. The thing is, you have to pursue it. You have to say, God, I want to have peace with you. I want the peace that you have given to us through Jesus Christ to be in my life and me. You have to ask for it. And you have to seek it. And you have to study it. Okay. Go online. Scriptures of peace with God. Peace because of Jesus Christ.

And then study them. Now, that's not the only Bible study we do. We have to do a more, you know, we have to understand the continuity of this book, as I talk about all the time. If you don't understand the continuity of this book, you can make up anything. You can make up absolutely crazy things. I did a Beyond Today program a couple of years ago. Well, I was doing the last presidential election. Is Jesus a socialist or a capitalist? And Roku wouldn't let us advertise it, because I was such a political, just, crazy person. Because I said Jesus was neither. Because socialism and capitalism didn't exist 2,000 years ago. They're modern constructs. So, nah, he wasn't either. So, yeah, they wouldn't let us advertise the program because, man, that was some political crackpot.

Talk about how to touch with reality. Anyways, verse 14, Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord. Peace and holiness. Holiness comes from God. We can't make ourselves holy. He produces it in us, and then we follow it, we submit to it. Same way with peace. Looking carefully, lest anyone fall short of the grace of God, how do I fall short of the grace of God? Lest any root of bitterness bringing up cause trouble, and by this many become defiled. One other way we can become bitter is because of a lack of peace. Because we can't fix it with another person, because you can't. Two people who have peace with God can solve things. A person who doesn't have peace with God can't. Oh, they may be able to read the book, seven steps to peacemaking, and deal with the conflict, but it doesn't change their internal workings. This blessed are the peacemakers. Our blessed are those who have peace. Because it says they will be what? The children of God. They're the children of God. They act like God. They think like God. Something's being developed in them the way God is. That's the blessing. Peacemaking is messy, ugly, hard, and sometimes the most frustrating thing you'll ever do in your life. That's what peacemaking is. So how is it blessed? Because you become more like God as this peace is developed in us. And that means, and I won't cover this in detail because we've covered it before, we really have to forgive. Forgiveness doesn't mean you have a relationship with the person. Sometimes you can't have a relationship with the person because they're abusive and they simply will continue to abuse you. Forgiveness means you can't control me. I will not remain angry. I will not be filled with hatred. I will not. I will do that. I won't go down that route. But sometimes is the worst thing you could do to them because they want to control you. You won't let them. Forgiveness says, no, I don't want you to go to the light of fire. I hope you repent someday before God.

And I'm not saying it's pleasant, but you're not controlled by it. And that is so important. That's why it's, you have to understand this peacemaking is an active event. We have to actively do this. Look at 1 Peter 3. 1 Peter 3.

And...

Look at verse 8. Finally, he's talking to the church here.

But on the contrary, blessing, knowing that you were called to this, that you may inherit a blessing. In other words, you want to be blessed, you've inherited a blessing. To receive the blessing, we have to have peace from God. We can't always be counter-punching everything that happens to us. Always trying to bring everybody down. In fact, he now quotes from the Old Testament. In verse 11, he says, let him turn away from evil and do good. Let him seek peace and pursue it. We're back to... You have to pursue this. See how it keeps getting quoted in the New Testament. We have to pursue God. We have to seek God. So he does this in us.

You can't solve every problem. You can't bring peace to every problem. You can't bring peace to every conflict. And you sure can't solve every conflict. What you can do is have the peace of God being developed in you so that you can be a peacemaker. And there were times when God will make peace with you personally, and Him and Christ will make peace with you. And that peace will be passed on to somebody else. And you will actually help bring peace to a situation. Because God's doing it. But always remember Romans 1218. Romans 1218.

I have to remember this on a regular basis. If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. It's not always possible because it doesn't depend on you. And if you're the type of person who loves to be agreeable, so you just want every button, you don't want anybody to argue or fight you, you want everything to be okay, you can drive yourself crazy trying to make everybody get along. And remember what Paul says, you can't make everybody get along. So as much as is in your power, you do what's right. And the rest of it, you live with. I don't like that. You know, there's disagreeing people and agreeable people. Disagreeable people don't care much. They just do what they want. Agreeable people always give in to try to create peace. Well, we can't be either of those. It's somewhere in the middle. We're disagreeable when we should be disagreeable, not just because we like being disagreeable. And we're agreeable when we should be agreeable, not just because we want peace at all cost.

Because what we can do is hurt others and hurt ourselves. There's an ESOP's fable. I love ESOP's fables. And there's one I thought of this when I was putting this together. And it's, you know, the story is, he starts the story with, back many, many years ago, men could have more than one wife. And he said there was a man who married two wives, loved them both. One was a little older than him, and one was a little younger. And he said he was a good husband to both of them. And the older wife always said, you know what? My hair's getting gray, and yours just, you know, yours isn't getting gray fast enough. So she would give him all kinds of affection. He really liked it. And she would rub her fingers through his hair, and then she'd pull out, every once in a while, a dark hair. And the younger woman said, you know, your problem, I just feel bad because you're starting to look so old with this gray hair. So when she would come up, she'd mess his hair up and give him a hug and kiss him and pull out one of the gray hairs. He loved it. He was being agreeable. So one day he looked in the mirror and realized he was going to totally bald.

Some of you figured out where that was going, right? That's what happens when we are agreeable when it doesn't depend on us. Certain things depend on us, and certain things do not. And that's why Paul says that. And that means the peace has to come from God because you can't create peace in all situations. There is a time for conflict. There's a time for confrontation. When there's a righteous issue involved. And there's a time to simply walk away. And there's a time to say, I can't fix this one. And there's a time to realize that real peace is achieved because there's peace between you and the almighty God because of Jesus Christ. That is where real peace comes from. That's the blessing that leads us to being peacemakers in every way that we can be. We're not God, so you can't bring peace to every... only God can do that. But we can try to bring peace whenever the opportunity arrives. And we do it because we are peacemakers. You and I have been called to receive this blessing. Like all the blessings of the Beatitudes, it's work, it's hard, and sometimes it's not fun. And sometimes it's not fun, but it's always worth it. It's always worth it because God does something in your life. The strangest thing and the most sad thing about this whole subject is that Jesus Christ is the greatest peacemaker that's ever lived. He died to bring peace to all of humanity. And when Jesus Christ returns, millions of people will try to kill him. They bring peace. He has to fight a war. And you know what? The peacemaker will do. He'll fight the war.

Because there's a moral issue involved here, a total rejection of God, and he'll fight the war. And then he'll bring peace. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be the children of God.