Will you kindly turn with me to the
Word of God in St. John, chapter 14,
and we are going to meditate a while
on verse 27, where our Lord tells the
twelve disciples, Peace I leave with you.
My peace I give you.
I do not give to you as the
world gives.
Do not let your hearts be troubled, and
do not be afraid.
Christ's legacy of peace.
To say that peace is one of the
most elusive of all human quests, I guess,
is to say the obvious.
Despite all social amenities, all our organizations were
tackling the problem of dis-peace, whether in
individual hearts, on the domestic or social, national
or international fronts.
Despite the kind of modern drugs that we
have to bury our fears, and to sleep
away through our troubles, we have come to
a point in life where I believe we
are realizing more than ever before that peace
is one of the most elusive of all
phenomena.
I guess all that I have indicated now
is a humbling commentary upon human nature on
the one hand, and upon the real measure
of human progress on the other.
Dis-peace reigns all over the world, as
you and I meet in this peaceful house
of God this morning.
Dis-peace rules.
Time was, of course, when men thought of
peace all too largely in terms of simply
the absence of hostility.
Peace includes that.
I came across, some of you know, we
are going to change our residence fairly soon,
and I've been packing some books.
I came across an old book written by
a theological liberal who thought better of things
and went on to write a book called
On to Orthodoxy.
A very clever man, really, D.
R.
Davies.
He was writing back in the thirties, and
in the course of writing he said this.
He was bewildered at things, and this is
what he wrote.
There have been 286 wars in Europe during
the last 300 years.
But if you go further back, he says,
since the year 1100 A.D., England has
spent half her time in war.
During 6,000 years of human history, there
has not been one single day of universal
peace.
Since the year 1500 B.C., over 8
,000 peace treaties have been signed and sealed
and documented, and they've remained in force for
an average of approximately two years before being
broken.
It's amazing, it's amazing how elusive peace is.
Now, Davies there seems to be thinking of
peace, of course, almost exclusively in terms of
the absence of evident hostilities of warfare.
All that he says, of course, bespeaks of
unbelievable tragedy, but we have long learned that
the absence of organized warfare between nations does
not necessarily mean peace.
We know of such a phenomenon as the
Cold War, and it can be as unnerving
and as horrifying as anything involved or involving
hostilities.
Some of us have lived through one or
even two world wars, and I, for my
part at any rate, having passed through one
of them, would say that the terrors of
the Cold War can be as devastating as
the tragedies of the Hot War.
Not all will agree with that, but at
any rate, a Cold War can be a
very horrible experience.
Despite all this, however, our text enshrines the
words and promise of one who claims to
be the donor of peace.
It's a remarkable claim, really.
Did we not come to the New Testament
via the Old?
Had we not been introduced by the Holy
Spirit in such places as Isaiah and I,
to one who was going to come into
the world, who would be indeed the prince
of peace?
This might take us by surprise.
But God had promised that one would come
into the world who would rule over peace,
and who would dictate peace or its absence.
So the same prophet Isaiah says, There is
no peace, says my God to the wicked.
The peacebringer and the peacemaker and the peacegiver
does not give his peace to the wicked.
That is one reason why many people do
not have peace today.
They're fighting God.
They're at loggerheads with their Creator.
They're moving in the wrong direction.
They're doing the wrong things.
They're the wrong kind of people.
They haven't been remade and reborn according to
His image.
But our Lord says, Peace I leave with
you.
My very own peace I give you.
And to make it quite sure that they've
got the point, He says, I don't give
you the kind of thing the world gives
you.
But I'm giving you something on the basis
of which I command you, Do not let
your hearts be troubled.
Cease being afraid.
May I remind you, my friends?
May I remind you to the glory of
God?
And eleven of those twelve disciples were never
afraid.
At least as far as the record goes.
And if the human history that we have,
it may in measure be apocryphal, I don't
know.
But the tradition that we have speaks of
the eleven of them, each in his own
way, laying down his life deliberately for the
cause of the gospel.
They took their Lord at His word.
Let's look at this passage, let's look at
this word, it's a very precious one.
First of all, we must say a word
about the challenging circumstances that surrounded the disciples
when Jesus gave them this promise.
Some of you may be facing challenging circumstances
today.
Well, of course, someone or other is always
moving the difficult way, the difficult road.
But the wonderful thing is that our Lord
Jesus Christ has provision for the difficult path.
Here, the circumstances are familiar to most of
you, but I ask you to bear with
me nevertheless as we just face what we
have here.
The glory of the Savior's promise, you see,
can only be properly appreciated insofar as we
share and bear in mind the peculiar circumstances
in which they were uttered.
First of all, He had recently announced to
His disciples His own pending departure from them.
To quote His own words, to be with
the Father.
Their once bright sky had become ominously overcast
and deeply clouded when their Master broke their
peace one day and announced quite seriously that
He was leaving them.
For all their lives had been built around
Him, that is, around His physical presence, not
spiritually.
It was He in person who called them
to Him.
He in person had led them along.
He in person had spoken to them, heard
their own problems, disentangled many of them.
He had been with them physically, close at
hand.
And now it shook them to the very
core when He says to them, I'm going
away.
Looking at the facts from the remote and
more objective vantage point of history, we may
well conclude that the dread and fear that
gripped these men was not only unnecessary but
even wrong.
That's hindsight.
They were in it.
And when He said to them, I'm going,
to my Father, it was more than they
could take.
The fact is that the announcement of our
Lord's imminent departure seems to have had such
a disturbing effect upon the company that they
scarcely heard anything else He went on to
say.
And I find here an important principle quite
apart from the truth itself.
It always pays us, it always repays us
to let our Lord finish what He's saying.
Hear Him through.
Don't base what you believe on one little
bit of information unless you've got the whole
passage and the whole thread, may I say,
the whole tapestry of the gospel as your
back closet.
See that Jesus has the opportunity to say
all He wants to say and then understand
the significant one statement in the light of
the whole.
You know what happened here?
They were so thunderstruck by these words, I'm
going away, that their ears became absolutely closed.
Do you wear earplugs, any of you, at
any time?
Well, okay, they put their earplugs in.
They didn't hear anything else He said.
And He Himself had put this in a
context which made it even beneficial to them
if they only accepted it.
He says, it is expedient for you that
I go away.
It's even for your profit, men, if you
believe me, I'm going to make it profitable
for you.
But they didn't hear that.
Had not the Holy Spirit brought back those
words to them again, they might well have
been forgotten.
They became so absorbed with what they deemed
of as a pending tragedy of His departure
they heard no more.
And so we have this very dark and
dismal picture at this point in the Gospels
of the comforted remaining uncomforted.
The comforted acting as comfortless.
Largely because they did not hear what He
said.
He'd made the provision.
He'd made the promise.
He'd repeated the promise.
And He built so many things, as it
were, building blocks of truth one above the
other to make an edifice of truth that
should sustain them in any exigency.
They didn't hear it.
I'm going away.
That's the one thing that they heard and
they couldn't now hear anything else.
It was therefore a desperately dispirited group that
Jesus was addressing in our text.
I shall not add words to words this
morning in order to bring that out.
I trust it is obvious just from the
little that we've said.
They were dispirited.
They were sad.
Their spirits were sagging.
And our text is a jewel set in
the midst of a whole series of precious
and comforting words that were aimed at bringing
hope to them, making provision for them as
He goes to be with the Father.
God be praised that the Savior did not
leave them to stew in their own fears.
Unnecessary though those fears were, He didn't say,
Oh my, you're always the same.
You don't hear what I'm saying to you.
So just go on.
Just stew in your own troubles.
He didn't do that.
Isn't it wonderful that we have a Savior
like that?
I know of many times He could well
and justifiably have said that to me.
All right, if you're deaf to me, go
on, you stupid fellow.
But He doesn't do that.
And out of His infinite grace and compassion,
He bears with them and He kind of
adds words that are unnecessary to the sheer
grammar of the occasion.
People would charge our Lord with tautology here,
with saying the same thing more than once,
and it's unnecessary.
Just as a preacher is often charged.
But however, He had His reason, and one
reason was this.
They hadn't heard anything.
And He wanted the word to get right
through because He wanted them to be the
comforted people of God.
So we have this, this, this, this word
about the glorious, the generous gift of peace.
Peace I leave with you.
Oh, you silly people, why are you so
distracted?
The words that were meant to bring you
peace have brought you the opposite.
Look, look, He says, listen, listen.
Open your minds and open your heart.
I want you to have peace.
Peace I leave with you.
My peace I give to you.
I'm not giving you what the world gives,
which is the very opposite.
But I'm giving you something infinitely better.
So don't let your hearts be troubled and
do not be afraid.
Now let's analyze this a little.
First of all, mark the simple statement concerning
the gift He bequeathed them.
Peace I leave with you.
My peace I give to you.
It is left as someone would leave something
in his or her will to a relative
or a friend, and it is given as
you would give something significantly valuable to a
friend.
And the two thoughts are brought together.
Peace.
Possessors of the divine revelation in New Testament
times, that is, the Jewish rabbis, had long
recognized what Greece and Rome had not, that
peace was a far bigger thing than the
absence of hostility between people.
The leading Jews had gone well beyond that,
and their own great salutations and shalom meant
infinitely more than that.
But I'm not going into that this morning.
Even they, even they had no real understanding
of what Jesus was saying.
However versed they might have been in the
Old Testament, however well they understood something of
shalom, they fell short of the knowledge of
what our Lord was really saying.
Peace I give you.
My peace I give to you.
In the New Testament, this positive content became
gradually spelled out, so that peace was seen
to include much more than anyone had ever
conceived of.
I just want to throw two or three
thoughts out together this morning, and I cannot
dwell on them.
In the first place, peace meant being in
a reconciled condition with God, a reconciled relationship
with God.
Peace is the end of hostility.
And basically, basically, biblical peace is the end
of hostilities with God.
We're not fighting Him.
There is a title to a book, Fighting
God.
Have you ever read it?
Fighting God.
Well now, peace starts when you down arms,
and you stop fighting, arguing back.
You stop fighting.
You hand over your sword, and you let
God be God in the sense in which
God alone is God.
And you take the place of a creature
and of a sinner.
God is God.
And you, through the blood of the cross,
through the work of Christ, and the ministry
of the Holy Spirit, you become reconciled to
God.
You know that word atonement.
We speak of the death of our Lord
Jesus as the atonement for our sins.
Just say it slowly, and you can see
what it means.
It means at-one-ment.
That's what atonement means.
Our Lord died to make us at-one
with God.
And peace is being at-one with Him.
We are united in our thinking, in our
spirit.
We have turned around to be moving in
His direction, living the kind of life He
wants us to live, serving the kind of
purpose He had for us, even when we
were born and before that.
And very significantly when we were reborn.
But peace is more than that.
It starts there, being reconciled to God.
Peace means now, fellowship with God.
It's not just God and I moving in
the same direction.
But we're talking together.
Not as equals, because I'm still a creature.
And I know of no one else who
is any more than a creature.
And if you're walking with God, it's good
for you as it is good for me
to remember that we're creatures still.
But we're walking with God.
And He means us to be walking, not
in the peace of silence, but in the
peace of getting on together.
He being the Lord, we being what He
meant us to be.
His children sharing in His thoughts, listening to
His wisdom, going His way.
This is peace.
But there is even more to it than
that.
Believing in God and communing with Him, this
peace expresses itself in terms of hope as
it looks into the future.
And you see, this is where peace flourishes.
Walking with God, talking with God, communing with
God.
What has the future to frighten us?
Because years ago when I heard an American
preacher speak about the little girl going in
the train across the country, coming to the
Rockies, and little kid was sitting in the
corner of the carriage and someone said, she
was alone, aren't you afraid going through these
dark tunnels?
Oh no, she said, my daddy's at the
engine.
He was the driver apparently.
And of course she didn't mind going through
the dark.
What can there be on the way?
What trouble can there be ahead?
Her daddy was at the engine.
Sweet simplicity.
But she expected all to be well.
And there is a hymn we have in
our Welsh Presbyterian hymn.
We expect a bright tomorrow.
All will be well.
Why?
Because our Father is at the controls and
our Savior is at the right hand of
the Father and the Holy Spirit is given
to us to bring us home according to
the promises.
All must be well or God is not
God.
Jesus bequeathed such a gift to his disciples.
He left it behind.
This is his dowry.
This is his gift.
This is what he made out of them
in his will.
Dear old Matthew Henry, oh there are some
great modern commentators today.
Thank God for that.
Quite a large number of excellently gifted men
and women who write about Scripture, who expound
the word.
But some of the old ones are very
good.
Dear old Matthew Henry is one of them.
You know he has a way of saying
things occasionally that really take your breath away.
Listen to this.
When Christ left the world he made his
will.
His soul he bequeathed to his Father and
his body to Joseph of Arimathea.
His clothes fell to the soldiers.
His mother he left to the care of
John.
But what should he leave his poor disciples
who had left all for him?
Silver and gold he had none.
But he left them what was far better,
says Matthew Henry, his peace.
My peace I donate.
I will to you my followers.
Now then this gift that is bequeathed by
Jesus is doubly qualified.
Positively and negatively.
You notice how careful Jesus is here.
He really wants to get it across.
Positively he qualified the initial statement with the
pronoun my.
My peace I give to you.
It's not I'm just giving you peace.
But I'm giving you my peace.
Now they all knew what he was talking
about because they had seen that amazing peace
of his exemplified throughout his life situations even
in death.
Sorry, not in death at this time but
in prospect of death.
He knew that death was astride his pathway
and they saw how he still had peace
and composure and was determined to see it
through even from this vantage point.
That simple qualification would suffice to disabuse any
of them of any notion that he was
thinking of an external condition which implied the
absence of turmoil or even of a subjective
condition without turmoil.
Because you see the circumstances surrounding Jesus were
always full of turmoil after the opening few
months of his ministry.
It was reasonably peaceful for the first four,
five, six months maybe.
But when the first four, five or six
months had gone we cannot say exactly.
Turmoil began.
People began to argue and bicker and question
and doubt.
And not only that, they threw stones and
they tried to get rid of him.
Even in Nazareth, his own home, they tried
to kill him.
They did all sorts of things to waylay
him until at last the very leaders of
the nation plotted that he should be put
to death.
They decided they must get rid of him.
His circumstances were circumstances of turmoil.
You know, you and I often miss this
other ingredient in our Lord's experience.
He was troubled in his own soul.
And we've got to understand this reference to
peace against that background.
Jesus himself often experienced inward turmoil of a
kind.
Listen to this, John 12, 27 and 28.
My heart is troubled.
And what shall I say?
Father, save me from this hour.
You see, he could see the cross.
He knew what was coming.
He knew all the horror of it before
it was there.
And we read that his heart was troubled.
He said so.
It isn't the commentary of the disciples.
It's the confession of Jesus himself.
His disciples recognized this fact more than once.
And they referred to it themselves as, for
example, in John 13, 21, where we read,
after he had said this, Jesus was troubled
in spirit and testified, I tell you the
truth, one of you is going to betray
me.
He was troubled in spirit.
He acknowledged in Gethsemane that his soul was,
quote, very sorrowful, even unto death.
Matthew 26, 38.
Whilst the inspired record refers to that also,
as a condition of being sorrowful and troubled.
Evidently then, Jesus was not immune to inward
commotion.
And we sometimes equate peace with the absence
of inward commotion.
What then was this heart of his peace?
Brothers and sisters, I believe it is this.
If you quarrel with me, tell me some
other time.
But I believe it was this.
It was the fact that he walked with
the Father, spoke the Father's word, went to
do the Father's will, and he knew that
the Father was pleased with what he was
doing.
This was the heart center of his peace.
It was the knowledge that he was pleasing
to the Father.
Men scowled at him.
They got angry.
But he saw beyond men's scowling faces.
He saw the Father's smile upon him.
And because the Father smiled, because he was
well-pleasing to the Father, and he knew
that, and the Spirit witnessed to that in
his human experience, that was peace.
There was a commotion within him of being
troubled, and outside it was dark and dismal
and horrifying and terrifying.
Nevertheless, he had peace.
And so he was able to plan his
own death.
He set the motion.
You read through the Gospels and you see
that it's Jesus that determines the plan.
Of course, he arranges it to coincide with
the feast in Jerusalem, but it's he who
arranges the program.
He moves forward step by step according to
his will.
You see, he had this peace.
He was moving with God, and God was
pleased in him.
And of course, this is what God said
at least three times.
This is my beloved Son, in whom I
am well-pleased.
Peace is the knowledge of that.
You can take the turmoil, you can take
the sting.
I have letters every other week that are
very stinging, and some that are quite opposite.
I had one waiting on my desk this
morning.
I didn't like it at all.
But listen, my friend, there is a place
of peace if you're doing what God has
called you to do, going where God has
called you to go, being what God has
called you to be, you can be at
perfect peace and sleep in it.
The gift of his own peace, which he
thus bequeathed, he also qualified negatively.
Not as the world gives goodbye to you.
I'm not going into that because my time
is running through, but let me come to
say this.
I believe that what he really meant there
was this.
The world can't give you anything like this.
Now, if you don't quite accept that exegesis,
well, we'll talk it over sometime, all right?
But I think that's what he meant, that,
you see, the peace he gives has an
impact on the recipient.
You can't carry this peace around like a
little parcel under your arm or in your
heart and say, I've got God's peace.
You go your own sweet way.
You can't do that.
It's not a parcel.
It's not something distinct from yourself.
When the peace of God comes into you,
it is the fruit of the Holy Spirit
in you, and it impacts upon mind, heart,
conscience, will, and every fiber of your being.
In other words, it makes you peaceful.
And there are many people, you see, who
want the peace of God, but they're not
willing to be peaceful in relation to others.
You can't have it.
The jagged edges of God go in you
and in me if we would have the
peace of God.
Of course, we'll be at war with sin,
at war with evil, but not with people.
Jesus put up with Judas for three and
a half years.
Just imagine that.
At war with the very sin of Judas
and everybody else's.
But he could put up with Judas.
Peace makes you peaceful towards people.
You're never going around through your life thinking
that your business is to step on other
people's toes, socking everybody else theologically under the
skin, putting everybody else in his place, and
you as a kind of judge of all.
No, no.
You become peaceful.
And you can't have God's peace without becoming
peaceful.
Peace-making, peace-giving, peace-imparting.
I well remember how this lesson first came
home to me in something that's now history.
It was ten years after the massacre of
the Yorker missionaries.
One of them, named Chemo, was in England,
and he was talking to a group of
Christian people, and they were asking him questions
after he had spoken.
And one of the men present asked him
a question something like this.
What was it that impressed you that really
brought you to Christ?
And this dear man had no doubt at
all.
Oh, he said, it's the way the widows
came back.
Not with a spear under their cloaks, or
some plan to get rid of us, or
to hit us back.
But what they had under their cloaks, if
they had anything, was a gospel.
And the widows of the very people that
we had killed came back, and they stood
there, and they were happy in Jesus, and
they preached forgiveness to us.
They were peaceful.
And because they had the peace of God,
they were peace-making.
They were spreaders of peace.
Brothers and sisters, this is the way the
gospel moves.
If you would have the peace of God,
somehow or other, it has to have an
outlet through your life, and breathe peace upon
those who are seeking peace in God's way.
John Macefield's poem, The Everlasting Mercy, is worth
reading.
Now, I don't quote a lot of poems
from this pulpit.
My brother, Don McLeod, reads more than I
do, I'm sure.
But I can't bypass this, because it meant
so much to me.
He describes the drunkard that was Saul Cain.
He was converted.
And you know, there are two stanzas there.
They really are worth their weight in gold,
or if you think dollars are more than
gold, say dollars.
But here they are.
Oh, the man's converted now, you see.
He's a Christian.
And he was an ugly man before, spiritually.
Oh, glory of the lighted mind, he says.
How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind.
The station brook to my new eyes was
babbling out of paradise.
The waters rushing from the rain were singing,
Christ is risen again.
I thought all earthly creatures knelt from rapture
of the joy I felt.
That was conversion.
It was not, however, an end in itself,
a maze filled with true insight proceeds.
I did not think.
I did not strive.
The deep peace burned my me alive.
Oh, brothers and sisters, have you got that?
I would give all the money I've got.
There isn't much.
But I'd give it all to be the
author of those two lines.
I did not think.
I did not strive.
The deep peace burned my me alive.
I became a new creature.
The bolted door had broken in.
I knew that I had done with sin.
I knew that Christ had given me birth
to brother all the souls of earth.
And every bird and every beast should share
the crumbs broke at his feet.
That's peace.
Christ's peace.
And so the command with which I close.
Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Don't be afraid.
Now this is not a slick philosophy.
I remember hearing during the war and at
other times people singing pack up your troubles
and well, I mustn't try singing or you'll
run out.
In your own kit, bag and smile.
And you know it's the most baseless, irrational
song ever sung.
For there's no reason giving for smiling.
And packing up your troubles.
There's no basis for it.
It's just sheer emotional guts.
Sounds nice.
But baseless.
Foundationless.
But here you see there's foundation for this.
I'm giving it to you.
I'm going to die to procure it.
I'm going to rise again to seal it.
I'm going back to the Father and the
Holy Spirit who is a counselor no less
than I.
Co-equal with the Father and with the
Son.
He will come and he will be the
other paraclete.
Not only to walk with you and talk
with you but to live in you and
that forever.
And peace is the fruit of the Spirit.
Jesus bought it.
He paid for it.
It was made.
Hours on Calvary's cross by his blood.
And he says I've made full provision not
only for that but to bring it from
heaven into your heart.
So he says it's very wrong for you
to worry.
Set your troubled hearts at rest.
Stop worrying.
Because I have made provision.
And if you believe in me then you
should have this expectation of faith and move
out into life however restless or full of
commotion it may be.
Trust me.
Have you received the Christ who is the
author of peace?
Is he your Savior?
If so, thank God this morning.
Bless God this morning.
In your heart let music ascend.
Let the melody of worship ascend to the
throne of God who loved me and gave
himself for me.
Let that happen now.
But what if you haven't?
My friend, this is still the day of
salvation.
I'm so glad of that.
And it is my great privilege today to
be able to say that Jesus has not
withdrawn yet those words which say him that
cometh to me I will in no wise
cast out come to him.
And make the seat on which you're sitting
the altar on which you place yourself body,
soul and spirit to be his and all
the redemption his blood purchased and all that
is involved in it is yours as a
gift and peace is part of it.
It's a wonderful privilege to meet like this,
isn't it?
To proclaim and to hear a gospel such
as this.
May it be ours as we go our
several ways and may we become peaceful to
spread it for the world is languishing in
need of it and if we do we
shall find that gradually it will percolate and
penetrate into the segments of society and perhaps
some of us will have the opportunity of
influencing governments, local, national, international bodies in the
way of peace.
God grant it to his glory.
Our Heavenly Father we thank you for your
word and we ask that it might please
you to lead us in the way of
its truth.
If you find rebellion in any of our
hearts please be merciful to us and yet
we'd rather have your hand be ruthless with
us in exterminating sin now than that we
should be left in our natural state to
die.
Spirit of God breathe upon us therefore and
lead us in the way of life and
light and peace through Jesus Christ your Son
our Lord.
Amen.