Blessed are the Peacemakers [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. If you're a Hatfield, then it is part of your tribal responsibility to hate all the McCoys. And if you're a McCoy, then it's your responsibility to fall in with the party line of the McCoys and hate everything about every Hatfield.

And it means that every Hatfield's got to hate every McCoy, and every McCoy's got to hate every Hatfield. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in this series called Peacemakers, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. If you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It can be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries. As you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on that later in the program. But now, let's get started with today's teaching.

Here is Alan Wright. Are you ready for some good news? Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God. And this crazy, polarized, strife-filled, and so often hate-filled culture that we're in right now.

There's a temptation to get all caught up in it. But as a child of God, you have a different role. And it's a role like that of Jesus, who is the peacemaker. You are called to be those that help build bridges, calm strife while keeping the truth.

Today and in coming weeks, I take on the daunting task of talking to you about being peacemakers in this polarized world. And I can't think of any better place to start than in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew chapter five, where Jesus has this famous address that goes on for several chapters, but begins with a series of what are called the beatitudes. They are not called beatitudes because of the sound of the word, beatitudes. But that is a good way to think of them.

They are more about attitudes than they are laws. It's not a list of rules that are essentially saying, if you will do these things, then you'll be blessed. It is more a description of the blessedness of the life of those children of God who live this way. And I want to read all the beatitudes so that you'll see our text in its context.

It's at Matthew five, verse one, seeing the crowds. He went up on the mountain and when he sat down, his disciples came to him and he opened his mouth and taught them saying, 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 satisfied. Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God and blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. So all of these variety of statements of the blessing nature of the Christian's life, but notice that there is almost a growth in the beatitudes towards becoming peacemakers, which is then followed by an actually even stronger statement of when you're persecuted or reviled, that there's even a blessing inside of that. We want today to lay the foundation for the series. And so I want to just draw a few principles for you about being a peacemaker that's really more based on the comprehensive look at Jesus's life.

What does it mean to be a peacemaker? Well, I heard so many good stories since I've been back and my favorite might have been this, that our Union Cross campus decided on a great bridge event, an event that we call is showing the love of Jesus and building a bridge to the community that they did on the eve of the 4th of July. So it was a Independence Eve party that they decided to have at Weldon Village.

Now, Pastor Barrett, who's the campus pastor, he and his wife and family lived there in Weldon Village in the midst of Kernersville, a new and growing neighborhood that is one of those neighborhoods that is designed ultimately to promote community and have all kinds of walking paths and people be very connected there, people who move there and wanting to find community. And so they had this Wednesday night series going, talking about saturating the community with the love of God. And they said, well, why don't we on that Wednesday night just do so rather than studying about it, let's have a big event. And so they had this big event at Weldon Village and they had 200, 250 people come, bunches of the people in the neighborhood and church members brought their friends. And it was just a great big party on the eve of the 4th of July because everybody enjoys celebrating the 4th of July and not much going on the night before. And so they had this big crowd and they set up a stage and one of our own over there at Union Cross, T.L.

Limeberry, he had a legit cover band. They were out there playing songs from the 70s and 80s and such and had some great food. Brent Babb, who set up the grills and they were barbecuing chickens, they were giving away all the food, it was delicious. And the kids were having a ball. They had big wet water slide and the sprinklers going for the kids. And then they had a big parade for the kids with their bicycles. And so all the kids got on the parade and as they did, they played the Star-Spangled Banner from the platform and they said they got to the end of the parade, their kids didn't want to stop, they just kept on parading.

And it was just a big time. And Pastor Barrett said, you know, of course there were some that you could sense were a little skeptical of this big event. Someone who's wondering, what is this, some kind of pyramid selling scheme? You know, what are they going to make us do? What are they going to ask of us here? And all Barrett did in the whole evening, one time he got to the microphone and he said, Rinaldo Church is happy to sponsor this event and we are glad that you're here. Hope you have a great time.

If you happen to be looking for a church, we meet at Glenn High School and we'd love to have you come join us on a Sunday morning. That was it. And as the night went on, anybody that was skeptical lost their skepticism as their kids were having a great time and people started saying things like, I need to come hang around y'all a little bit more. And some have even come and visited church since then.

So it was a great event. But in the middle of it, a woman who did not live in the immediate neighborhood but further away across the street, across the highway, really, came over and started approaching the band while they were playing. And she was screaming and said, shut this blankety blank thing down.

And Barrett stepped up there, one of the many pastoral responsibilities and began to talk to her. He said that every other word was an expletive and that she just was, had the whole aura of alcohol. She was inebriated. And she said, I thought she was going to hit me.

I said, well, what were you going to do? She said, I was just going to let her hit me, I guess. And so he's trying to calm her down. She said, my whole house foundation shaking blank, blank, blank, blank, blank.

Well, about that time, a neighbor of Barrett's, who's not connected at all with our church, don't know if she's connected with church at all. She came marching over. And of course, I'm thinking, I hear the story, oh no, she's going to get all over this case too. But instead she came to his defense and to the defense of the whole incident. And she began to calm the woman down. In fact, the woman said, why don't you just come over to my house, blank, blank, blank, you know, started screaming at her and see what it's like.

And she says, okay. And so she walked across the street with a woman so the party could go on. There's more to that story, but contrast that with, I don't know why this came back to me as I was thinking about how quickly strife when the, when a little gasoline is poured on it can just become engulfed in rage. On November 3rd, 1979, when my father, a TV newsman went to work, he had no idea that the supposedly routine story he was covering that day would be that evening's national news.

He didn't know when he woke up that morning that, but for the grace of God, he'd lost his life that day. A group called the Communist Workers' Party was going to have a rally starting in the Morningside development of Greensboro and march to the city hall, the seat of Guilford County. It was called the Death to the Clan March. They were rightly furious about the antics of the Ku Klux Klan and one of them out of the whole Greensboro area. But the marchers in the rally didn't carry that beautiful spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. who advocated peaceable protests. In fact, some of their flyers had suggested that the Klan needs to be beaten violently and chased out of town.

And it was already, the kindling was, was already there for a confrontation. So as dad arrived that morning and all the marchers and protesters were collecting there at the corner of Everett Street, very soon after at a caravan of 10 vehicles and a van started coming and riding back and forth in front of them, it was Ku Klux Klan. And some of the Communist Workers' Party in their anger took their picket sticks and stuck their cars and threw rocks. And then in an unimaginable quick sequence of events, Klan members went and opened the trunks of their cars and started pulling out guns and rifles. And within seconds, within seconds, a magna cum laude graduate of Duke was dead. A local, one of the nearby hospitals head of pediatrics was dead. A few moments later, the president of the student body at Bennett College was dead.

All told, five were shot to death, others wounded, and it became known as the Greensboro Massacre. I'm not saying that every time where there's strife, that unless there's a peacemaker, we can end up in such violence. But I am saying this, that everything that we do in our lives is either contributing to the peace or contributing to the strife. And I like to think of watersheds whenever I think of the great truths of the Scriptures and the great truths of God's life in this world, that at the top of a mountain, a drop of rain on one side or the other is not very distant.

But once it runs to its respective ocean, it's thousands of miles apart. And I think the thing for us as Christians in this world is to not get duped and tricked and sucked into the vitriol of a society that has lost its civility. We are, as the children of God, peacemakers. And I want to talk to you about what that means.

That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. It's shocking how quickly American values have changed. Suddenly, most people don't go to church or have a biblical worldview.

Everything has changed so much that maybe you feel like a foreigner in your own culture. How is a Christian supposed to live in a post-Christian world? Do we fight against it? Do we just shine our light in the midst of it?

Do we pull away from it? These are the same questions that faced a young exile named Daniel in Babylon 600 years before Christ. Though he was an alien, God showed the young man favor. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages on Daniel, a favored foreigner, in an attractive CD album, on a USB thumb drive, or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. You may feel like a stranger in this world, but as God showed favor to Daniel in his foreign land, God's grace is upon you today. Your gift today will not only help you walk in the grace of God during these troubling times, it will also help someone else. This ministry is only possible through prayerful support of listeners like you. When you give today, we'll send you today's special offer. Call 877-544-4860, 877-544-4860, or come visit PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues.

Here once again is Alan Wright. The beatitudes are called that because beatitude means blessing. But what's interesting about the beatitudes is that really this word for blessing is not the usual word for blessedness. It's actually a word that means more like, well, happy.

But it's deeper than that. It means it's the word the Greeks used to say congratulations to someone. It really means congratulations. You should be, you deserve to be congratulated for that. So if you're really to understand literally these beatitudes as Jesus starts much of his ministry with the Sermon on the Mount, he essentially is saying, if you're a peacemaker, then congratulations. You're going to be one of the most well-off, happiest people in the world. Congratulations to you.

It's almost like you'd say to someone who had a healthy newborn baby or just got the big promotion at work, well, you are to be congratulated because you're in a much better condition than most. So this is not a list of sort of laws to say, if you will be a peacemaker, then you shall be a son of God. No, instead, this is saying that when you are a child of God, you can increasingly become like Christ, your big brother. And as such, you will be a peacemaker. And that's a very blessed thing to be. Congratulations. You're a peacemaker. Ah, wonderful.

And so this is the foundation for what I want to talk to you about in coming weeks. That as you think about being a child of God, literally a son of God, and is not meant to be gender exclusive, it is to evoke the image of the status of the firstborn son and that ancient Palestinian culture who enjoyed a double portion of the inheritance and a very special status. You are like Jesus, a child of God. And it's very clear in the scripture how you become a child of God. John chapter one, those who believe on his name had the right to become children of God. John chapter three, 16, that when you believe and you trust in the fact that God came in the person of Jesus to save you and you put your trust in that, that's how you are saved.

And you can be born again. And in Romans, Paul talks about the image of being adopted. So this is not a text that says, if you'll become a peacemaker, then you'll be a child of God. It is instead saying that children of God are peacemakers. And you are a peacemaker because Christ himself is a peacemaker. And when you think about Christ's life, I just want to kind of lay a very general foundation and mention three aspects that I think are instructive from Jesus's life and are absolutely critical for us if we're going to be peacemakers in this polarized world.

And the first thing that is interesting to me about Jesus's life, and I think is in the whole call is that there's just a refusal of Jesus to get wrapped up in the feud between the quote religious leaders and the sinners. He somehow steps out of that. He has friends on all sides.

He is not put into a box. When you are a peacemaker, it doesn't mean that you are not going to disagree with people and maybe disagree very, very strongly. Be very clear about this. I have very strong feelings about some very important issues, but there is a way to disagree without becoming needlessly disagreeable. And I think that's the first mark of all peacemakers, being able to disagree without being needlessly disagreeable.

You don't have to be disagreeable. I was thinking about the most famous feud of all time, the Hatfields and the McCoys. I went back to look up about the actual origins of it. The McCoy family hailed from Ireland, and they were led by Randolph McCoy, a grandson of the great patriarch, William McCoy. And they lived mainly on the Kentucky side of Tug Fork, which was a tributary, a big sandy river. The Hatfield family lived on the West Virginia side of the river, led by William Anderson Hatfield, who would call Devil Ants Hatfield. Well, when Asa Harmon McCoy, who fought for the union, came home from the Civil War, he was murdered by a group of Confederate home guards called the Logan Wildcats. And though they accused Devil Ants Hatfield of committing the murder, it was later confirmed that Hatfield was at home sick at the time and couldn't have done it. So here's the funny thing.

Nobody knew who killed that boy. And that's what started the whole feud. They had assumed that it was the wrong person. And so it began. 13 years later in 1878, a dispute emerged about the ownership of a hog. Floyd Hatfield, cousin of Devil Ants, had the hog in his possession, but Randolph McCoy claimed it was his, said that the notches on the pig's ear were their kind of notches. And they got in a big dispute and appeared before the justice of the peace, who was a Hatfield, who of course ruled in favor of the Hatfields. And they used the testimony of a relative named Bill Stedman, a relative named Bill Staton. And so two of the McCoys killed Bill Staton, but they were later acquitted on grounds of self-defense. And thus the Hatfield and McCoy feud began and lasted for over 30 years. What's so ironic about this is that I learned that in 1979, the descendants of the Hatfield and the McCoys appeared on the famous TV game show Family Feud.

And they had a week-long competition for some cash and for a pig. Alan Wright, our Good News message. Blessed are the peacemakers from the series on peacemakers.

And I invite you to stay with us. Pastor Alan is back joining me in the studio, sharing his parting Good News thought for the day in just a moment. It's shocking how quickly American values have changed. Suddenly, most people don't go to church or have a biblical worldview.

Everything has changed so much that maybe you feel like a foreigner in your own culture. How is a Christian supposed to live in a post-Christian world? Do we fight against it? Do we just shine our light in the midst of it?

Do we pull away from it? These are the same questions that faced a young exile named Daniel in Babylon 600 years before Christ. Though he was an alien, God showed the young man favor. When you make your gift to Alan Wright Ministries today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages on Daniel, a favored foreigner, in an attractive CD album, on a USB thumb drive, or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. You may feel like a stranger in this world, but as God showed favor to Daniel in his foreign land, God's grace is upon you today. Your gift today will not only help you walk in the grace of God during these troubling times, it will also help someone else. This ministry is only possible through prayerful support of listeners like you. When you give today, we'll send you today's special offer.

Call 877-544-4860, 877-544-4860, or come visit PastorAlan.org. Back here in the studio to share Pastor Alan's parting good news thought for the day as we're starting this new series on peacemakers. And boy, this is timely, Alan. This is a good time to be talking about peace in such a crazy world. We have in our lifetimes, most of us say we've never seen society around us in America be so polarized.

And with pandemic, and racial unrest, and an election coming, we just feel like this series, Daniel, is so, so timely. When Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers, He's saying, in a sense, congratulations, you are be commended. You're in a good position if you're a peacemaker. That's to say that the ones who are actively interested in making peace rather than simply adding to the friction, those are really blessed people. And we've got a lot more to learn about this in coming days, but there is a blessing that comes into our lives through becoming vessels of God's peace in this world. And let's make it a commitment of our hearts. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.