Welcome to another lesson of the Mini Bible
College and this series of messages on the
Sermon on the Mount.
The Bible says that God was in Jesus
Christ, reconciling the world back to Himself, no
longer keeping a record of their sins.
That is indeed good news.
God has called the disciples of Jesus Christ
to be ministers of reconciliation too.
But what does that mean?
Well listen carefully, because our teacher will explain
that in today's lesson.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall
be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit
the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain
mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they
shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be
called the sons of God.
These are seven of the eight Beatitudes of
Jesus, with which He began His teaching on
the mountaintop.
That teaching we call the Sermon on the
Mount.
We have seen that this was a retreat
where He was recruiting disciples who would be
a part of His solution, part of His
answer to the problems in the multitudes of
people around the Sea of Galilee.
He has been ministering to them, perhaps thousands
of them, and withdraws from the crowd and
organizes this little retreat further up the mountainside
with His disciples.
He invites personally people to join Him at
this retreat, and the essence of the teaching
given in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, as
we have seen, is to show these disciples
He has invited to this retreat how they
can be the salt of the earth, the
light of the world, His solution, and His
answer to the problems represented by those multitudes
of people who have every problem imaginable.
The multitudes represent the people with all its
problems, and the people with Jesus at this
first Christian retreat represent His solution, His answer
to the problems of this world.
We have made several observations about the beautiful
attitudes with which He begins this teaching.
We have said that four of them are
coming attitudes and four of them are going
attitudes.
Between the fourth and the fifth Beatitudes, there
is a kind of spiritual division that separates
the coming attitudes from the going attitudes.
The first four have to do with coming
to Him and being aligned with Him, getting
the right attitude toward Him and the right
attitude toward ourselves.
These are the coming attitudes.
Then, beginning with blessed are the merciful, which
means those who are filled with the unconditional
love of God for this hurting and lost
world, you have the last four attitudes, which
we have called the going attitudes.
If you are going to be merciful, a
channel of God's unconditional love, toward whom is
that love going to be directed?
You see, that takes you off the mountaintop,
back into the multitude.
As you love, you love with a pure
heart.
Now we shall see, as we look at
the seventh attitude in this study, that this
is also an attitude that has to be
expressed in the stream of humanity right in
the middle of the people and the problems.
The one we will focus on in this
study is blessed are the peacemakers.
We have also made the observation that these
beatitudes come in pairs.
They can be seen in couplets.
Blessed are the poor in spirit who grieve
or mourn over the fact that they are
poor in spirit.
Those two go together.
Blessed are the meek, those who come and
take the yoke of Christ, and then once
they accept the bit, once they accept the
yoke of Christ upon their life, they hunger
and thirst for what is right, as the
apostle Paul did.
They hunger and thirst to know what it
is the Lord would have them to do,
and He, God, fills them with it.
Then they became merciful, channels of His unconditional
love, and while they express this unconditional love
of God toward the hurting and the lost
people of this world, they do so with
a pure heart, a heart that has been
catheterized of all sin and selfishness and ulterior
motives.
This is coupled with blessed are the merciful.
The promise is that these people who love
with a pure heart see God, which means
they see God work because God works through
them.
He expresses His love through them.
The seventh attitude is blessed are the peacemakers.
This word really is blessed are the reconcilers.
Blessed are those who are the agents of
God's reconciliation.
Reconciliation is one of the great gospel words.
We find it later in the epistles of
Paul.
I believe one of the finest statements of
the gospel of Christ and what it means
to be a minister of that gospel is
found in 2 Corinthians chapter 5.
In this magnificent passage beginning about verse 12
or 13, we have one of the greatest
statements that the apostle Paul makes about the
gospel and the ministry of that gospel.
He is responding, frankly, to the accusation that
he is crazy, that he is insane.
What they say is that he is beside
himself and he is defending himself against that
charge.
They accused Paul and Jesus of being beside
themselves.
The Greek word is actually eccentric.
What they really accused Paul of, they also
accused Jesus of.
They said of Jesus, he is beside himself.
They accused Paul of being eccentric.
And what they mean by that is everybody
has a center around which your life revolves.
What they're saying about Paul and what they
said about Jesus was this.
You have another center, Paul.
They said of the Lord, you have another
center around which your life revolves.
It's not the same center around which our
lives revolve.
So you're eccentric.
Your life has a different center than our
lives have.
As Paul defends himself against this accusation in
2 Corinthians 5, he says in so many
words, there's enough evidence to convict me.
You are right.
I'm eccentric by your standards.
I do have another center around which my
life revolves.
For many years, my life revolved around self.
Even if it was self-righteousness with which
I concerned myself, my life revolved around the
center of self.
But when I met Jesus Christ on the
road of Damascus, my life found a new
center.
The center around which my life revolves now
is Christ.
He speaks of his life in terms of
his relationship to Christ.
He uses expressions like by Christ, in Christ,
for Christ, through Christ.
His whole life is centered around Christ now.
And he says that he's making this defense
not because he has a need to defend
himself, but that those who take pride in
what is seen rather than what is in
the heart might be answered.
As he gives his defense of his sanity,
he says, For if we are beside ourselves,
it is for God.
Or if we are of sound mind, it
is for you.
For the love of Christ constrains us because
we judge thus, that if one died for
all, then all died.
And he died for all, that those who
live should no longer live for themselves, but
for him who died for them and rose
again.
Therefore, from now on, we regard no one
according to the flesh.
Even though we have known Christ according to
the flesh, yet now we know him thus
no longer.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is
a new creation.
All things have passed away.
Behold, all things have become new.
Notice the use of the word reconciliation from
this point on.
Now all things are of God, who has
reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ and
has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
That is, that God was in Christ reconciling
the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses
to them, and has committed to us the
word of reconciliation.
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ as though
God were pleading through us.
We implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled
to God.
For he made him who knew no sin
to be sin for us, that we might
become the righteousness of God in him.
We then as workers together with him also
plead with you not to receive the grace
of God in vain.
For he says, In an acceptable time I
have heard you, and in the day of
salvation I have helped you.
Behold, now is the acceptable time.
Behold, now is the day of salvation.
You can put this magnificent passage of Paul
in 2 Corinthians 5 together with the seventh
beatitude, because when Jesus said, Blessed are the
peacemakers, what he really said was, Blessed are
the reconcilers.
Blessed are the ministers of reconciliation.
Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5 that
when Jesus Christ died on the cross, God
was in Christ at that very moment, reconciling
the world unto himself, no longer charging their
trespasses against them, because he charged them all
against Christ.
In Isaiah 53, verse 5, he says, The
chastisement for our peace was upon him, and
by his stripes we are healed.
By that, Isaiah meant that all the chastisement
we deserve because of our sin was laid
upon him.
All we like sheep have gone astray, we
have turned every one to his own way,
and the Lord has laid on him the
iniquity of us all.
Paul is saying the same thing, but he
is putting it this way.
When Christ died on that cross, he made
it possible for God to be reconciled to
this world and for God to reconcile the
world to himself.
The biggest problem that the Bible addresses is
this problem.
There is a divorce between God and man.
God and man have become alienated through sin.
That is the story of Genesis chapter 3.
That's the bad news.
But the good news, the gospel, is that
God has become reconciled to man, and he
has made it possible for every man and
woman and young person in this whole world
to be reconciled to him.
He made that possible when Christ died on
the cross.
From the time of Christ's death on the
cross, God has not been charging the sins
of sinners against them any longer.
He has become reconciled to them, and he
has made it possible for them to be
reconciled to him.
That's the miracle that happened to Paul on
the road to Damascus.
He was really alienated from God until then.
Paul was not one with God when he
was trying to have the first generation of
the church put to death.
But when he met Jesus Christ on the
road to Damascus, he became reconciled to God.
He experienced the miracle of reconciliation.
But at the same time, he not only
experienced a miracle, he also had a commission
that was given to him.
That commission was the ministry of reconciliation.
He also had a message given to him.
That message was the message of reconciliation.
From the time this happened to Paul on
the road to Damascus, from the time he
experienced the miracle of reconciliation and received this
message and ministry of reconciliation, he went out
into this world preaching, telling us to be
reconciled to God.
Do not receive the grace of God in
vain.
Be reconciled to God.
Trust the good news that he is reconciled
to you and has made it possible for
you to be reconciled to him.
Simply be reconciled to him.
That was his gospel.
That was his message.
That was his ministry.
And that was the miracle he himself experienced.
Now that is what Jesus is talking about
in verse 9 of Matthew 5 when he
gives the seventh beatitude.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Again he is saying, look down the mountainside.
You see down there at the bottom of
the mountain all those people with all of
those problems?
Here is another reason for the problems they
have.
They are alienated.
They are alienated from God.
They are not really reconciled to God.
There is a divorce between them and God.
They have never heard the good news that
God has reconciled that divorce if they only
will believe it.
And what they need to hear is the
message of reconciliation.
Of course at that point it was a
message that God was going to do this
when Jesus Christ died on the cross.
We are on this side of the cross.
So the good news is that God has
already reconciled the world to himself including you.
Have you ever personally trusted the good news
and made your peace with God?
Have you ever experienced your own personal reconciliation
with him?
Blessed are the peacemakers.
It really means blessed are the ministers of
reconciliation.
I wonder if you realize that the gospel
of Jesus Christ is not bad news.
It is good news.
The way some people share the gospel you
would think it was bad news.
Some people practically say, have you heard the
bad news?
You're going to hell and you're going to
burn and burn forever.
That's not good news at all, is it?
That's bad news.
But the gospel is good news.
The gospel is the message of reconciliation, the
miracle of reconciliation, the ministry of reconciliation.
It is the good news that you don't
have to go to hell because Jesus Christ
went to hell and back for you.
All your sins were charged against him and
so they don't have to be charged against
you.
You don't have to go to hell because
you can be reconciled to God right now.
God is already reconciled to you.
He's been reconciled to you for over 2
,000 years.
Will you just simply believe it and be
reconciled to him?
See, that's the good news.
A man I was once speaking with told
me a story about a chaplain in the
military.
A chaplain is a man who travels with
the military and when soldiers wish to learn
about spiritual things or soldiers are already Christians,
need encouragement and prayer, they often will meet
with the chaplain.
His story went something like this.
In one battle during the war, there was
a man who had been wounded.
The battle was very fierce and men were
dying all around him.
Still under fire, the man observed way off
in the distance the military chaplain crawling from
one wounded man to another.
This chaplain would crawl up as close as
he could to the ear of a soldier
because of the noise and tell him something.
Then he would crawl to the next wounded
soldier and do the same thing.
This particular wounded soldier found himself hoping that
this chaplain would soon get to him because
he wanted to hear what the chaplain was
saying.
But this chaplain was also wounded by a
bullet himself.
In spite of it all, he continued to
crawl from one wounded man to the next
telling them something.
When he was about 30 men away from
this particular soldier, another bullet hit the chaplain
and killed him.
And so this man never did get to
find out what the chaplain was telling those
men.
Well, the man who was telling this story
to me then asked, You're a minister.
If you were the chaplain, what would you
be telling those men who were dying of
their wounds?
That is a wonderful opening for a minister
of reconciliation.
I was able to share with that man
these verses in 2 Corinthians 5 about the
miracle of reconciliation and the message of reconciliation.
That is what I believe the chaplain was
telling those men.
That is what I believe Jesus means when
he says, Blessed are the peacemakers for they
shall be called the sons of God.
The real sons of God are the ministers
of reconciliation.
A theologian said this once, so I'll say
it twice.
It is the will of the reconciler that
the reconciled should be the agents of reconciliation
in the lives of those who are not
yet reconciled.
Let me repeat that.
It is the will of the reconciler that
the reconciled should be the agents of reconciliation
in the lives of those who are not
yet reconciled.
This is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians
5, and this is what Jesus is saying
in the Seventh Beatitude.
He is recruiting reconcilers.
He is recruiting ministers of reconciliation on that
mountaintop.
When he says, Blessed are the peacemakers, that
is what he means.
Chuck Colson wrote a book called Loving God.
In that book, in chapter after chapter, he
shows examples of what he really believes it
means to love God.
One chapter has to do with a Jewish
medical doctor in Russia who did something wrong
politically and was put into a prison in
Siberia.
While he was there, his Jewish faith did
not seem to help him much.
His religion wasn't helping him.
As a medical doctor, he was being forced
to do things in the prison that would
go against the conscience of any doctor.
And he did it simply to survive and
to make his life easier.
But he hated himself for it.
So it resulted in him beginning to have
an intense hatred toward the people who were
actually making him do this in that prison.
One night he heard a believer in the
bunk bed above him praying the disciples' prayer.
And when the believer got to that part,
forgive us our sins as we forgive those
who sin against us, well, he had never
heard anything like that before, which caused him
to want to talk to the believer all
the more.
And then right there in that prison, in
the middle of the night, the believer in
the top bunk led this man to Christ.
He led him to experience the miracle of
reconciliation.
The next day the doctor operated on somebody,
and when that man was coming out of
anesthetic that evening, he shared with that man
the message of reconciliation.
And that man also experienced the miracle of
reconciliation, salvation in Jesus Christ.
The doctor was also forced to sign permission
slips to put people into punishment cells he
knew they would never survive.
But he signed the forms saying they would.
Because the doctor had this experience, the miracle
of reconciliation, he could no longer do that
anymore, so when he was told to sign
those papers, he refused.
That night, while the doctor lay asleep in
his cot, they beat him to death.
They plunged his head in with the kind
of trials they used to lay bricks.
The man that he had operated on that
day had actually been operated on for stomach
cancer, and it was not likely he would
survive.
But he did survive.
And that man wrote books and has told
the whole world about the many things that
happened in that prison.
His name was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian
author.
And that was how he experienced the miracle
of reconciliation, the miracle of new birth.
Because a reconciled person became a minister of
reconciliation to him.
That is what the theologian meant when he
said it is the will of the reconciler
that the reconciled should be agents of reconciliation
in the lives of those not yet reconciled.
In that prison camp, who else was going
to be the minister of reconciliation to Alexander
Solzhenitsyn but someone like the surgeon who had
been reconciled to God the night before?
See, that's what Jesus means when he says,
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Blessed are the agents of reconciliation in the
lives of those who have not yet been
reconciled.
We said these beatitudes come in couplets, and
they do.
This one is coupled with the next beatitude,
the eighth one.
Blessed are the persecuted because of righteousness, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And that is why the seventh beatitude is,
Blessed are the agents of reconciliation.
And the eighth beatitude is, Blessed are those
who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs
is the kingdom of heaven.
Notice it is not simply blessed are the
persecuted, those persecuted for any reason, especially because
of the things they bring upon themselves.
But it's blessed are the persecuted because of
righteousness.
Persecuted because of sharing the gospel.
They identify themselves with Jesus, Christ is their
center.
You can see why these two beatitudes go
together.
Ministers of reconciliation get persecuted because ministers of
reconciliation go where the alienation is.
They go where the conflict is.
They go where the unreconciled people are, the
people who are fighting each other.
Think of the areas where there are wars,
civil wars and severe conflict.
Ministers of reconciliation go there, and that's a
great place of danger.
And that is why these last two beatitudes
go together.
Blessed are the persecuted for they shall be
called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of
righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Until next time, God bless you.
May God give you peace and joy as
you courageously follow our Lord Jesus Christ.
And may His eternal blessings be upon you
and your family today, and this week, as
you seek to know Him better and make
Him known to others.
Now, until we meet next time, I want
to challenge you to invite someone, perhaps a
neighbor or friend, to join us as we
continue to study the teachings of Jesus Christ,
our Lord.