Making What Everybody Wants - Part A

Nobody's been able to do it. No one has been able to bring peace. In fact, the Bible even predicts that there is someone who is coming in the future, the ultimate peacemaker, goes by an interesting title, the Antichrist.

Everybody says they want peace, but so far nobody has been able to make real peace. But today on Connect with Skip Heitig, Skip reveals the surprising character who will one day be seen as the ultimate peacemaker. God desires for us to know Him intimately through the study of His Word. That's why we share these messages, to help you and many others connect to God through His Word and grow in your walk through an intentional relationship with Him.

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That's connectwithskip.com slash donate. Thank you. Now, let's hear what Skip has for us today. We're starting off in Matthew 5. I'm calling this message, Making What Everybody Wants, which is peace. There's a great story about a little girl who was doing her homework one night and her father noticed how diligent she was of getting it done. She really didn't even look up and so Dad said, Sweetheart, what are you doing? She said, Daddy, I'm writing an essay for my class on how to achieve world peace. Well, he was impressed that his little girl was writing an essay on that and he just sort of remarked, Well, that's a pretty tall order for one little girl.

And she shot back and said, Oh, no, Daddy, there are three of us in class working on it. I love the optimism of a girl who thinks that three kids can change the world. The three kids can bring peace on earth.

But given the track record of people in the past, she's not going to do any worse of a job than what has been done by some in the past. The Bible opens with peace. It's a garden of peace.

It's the Garden of Eden. And the Bible also closes with peace. It's the eventual peace on earth that the Messiah is going to bring. So we deal with a book that opens with peace and closes with peace. But between those two points, the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Eternity, there has been anything but peace.

It's been a world. It's been a history that is filled with conflict, even though there have been pretty noble attempts to bring peace and to ensure peace. One of the most notable examples from the New Testament era was called the Pax Romana. The Pax Romana is a Latin term for the Roman peace. The Romans were pretty successful at bringing in a stability around the world by ridding the sea of pirates and ridding roads of thieves, and with the iron fist of the Roman army, ensuring a peaceful existence for most people that it ruled over.

That was the Pax Romana. In more recent times, there was something called the Pax Britannica, which is also a Latin term for the British peace. And that was during the 1800s and 1900s, the early 1800s to the early 1900s, about a century of peace, where through their efforts, they brought a stability to the more modern world, which enabled economic growth and development. But something happened after that, that shattered all of our hopes that any country was going to bring a lasting peace. It was called World War I. Yeah, when that happened, it's like, all bets are off. And then after World War I came, World War II. And as soon as World War II ended, in 1945, a group of people got together, October 24th, 1945, and decided that they would form, finally, an agency to bring world peace. It was called the United Nations. Oops, they didn't quite make it, did they? The United Nations mission statement is, we are about the maintenance of international peace and security.

That's a pipe dream. Because from that date, October 24th, 1945, until this day, there has not been a single day of peace in the world. Not one. I have a quote from an interesting source in Canada called the Canadian Army Journal, which notes that since 3600 BC, 3.64 billion people have been killed in conflict. And the value of the property destroyed is equal to a golden belt that would go all the way around the earth.

And the measurements of that belt would be 97.2 miles wide, almost 100 miles wide, and 33 feet thick. That's just the value of property that is lost in all of those conflicts. So what this tells us is that mankind has this endless capacity for conflict, for war, for not experiencing peace. So what can we do? Is there a role for us to play in this crazy world?

And the answer, of course, is yes, there is. It is the role of a peacemaker. It is the role that Jesus addresses in the Sermon on the Mount in the seventh beatitude. Beatitude is the blessings that Jesus gives to his followers. And in Matthew chapter five, verse nine, as part of that list, he says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. And we're going to consider that verse.

We're going to consider the concept of peacemaking. And then we're going to look at a really good example of that in Genesis 32 and 33 between two brothers, Jacob and Esau, who had been estranged but made peace. But there's a special word that this beatitude begins with, hence the name beatitude, and it's the word blessed. It is used in all of the beatitudes that Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount. And I suppose if ever there were a Christian word, it would be this one, blessed or blessed.

We use it in our conversations, don't we? We say, what a blessing. Or we say, have a blessed day. Or before a meal, we say, a blessing for the food. Or down south, they'll look at you and say, bless your heart, which I've discovered isn't always a compliment down south. That's sort of a phrase that covers the multitude of sins.

You know, they may be talking smack about you, but then they say, after they talk their gossip, they say, but bless his heart. But it's a common idea, bless or blessing. The word that Jesus uses in all of these beatitudes, including in verse nine, blessed are the peacemakers, is the Greek word makarios. And makarios is a word that means fortunate, blissful, or happy. Think of it that way, happy. Happy are the peacemakers. What's interesting about that is, if you read the beatitudes, they don't sound like it's the stuff happiness is made out of.

It sounds counterintuitive. For example, in verse three, blessed are the poor in spirit. Or how about verse four, blessed are those who mourn.

What's so happy about mourning? Or blessed are the meek in verse five. Or how about verse 10, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. That does not sound like happiness to most people.

That sounds like misery with another name. But when Jesus uses the term, he's not speaking about the outward bliss or an outward situation as much as an inward condition. I think a better way to translate blessed is satisfied. It's as if to say, no matter what's happening on the outside, you will be satisfied on the inside.

That's blessed. It's not a temporary feeling of bliss. It's a deep, supernatural contentedness. Now with that, I want to explore this concept of making peace.

And I want to give you a four-fold explanation of it. First, let's begin with the definition, peacemaking defined. There is a single word in verse nine, peacemaker, that is grabbing our attention for this message.

Blessed are the peacemakers. It's a beautiful word. I'm not going to say it in the Greek language because when you hear it, it doesn't sound like a beautiful word.

But it is a beautiful concept. It speaks about a person who either brings in a level of peace or restores peace that has been lost. So it's somebody who cultivates peace. It's someone who brings harmony where there was previous hostility. In classical Greek, a peacemaker was an agent usually of a government who would go out and plead for peace between warring parties or warring tribes.

Sometimes it was used to describe a strong ruler who would establish peace by force, like the Pax Romana. That was peace by force. Or the United Nations. Did you know that the United Nations has a group within it called the United Nations Peacekeeping Task Force? Now anytime you have to put peace and force in the same title, you know you've got problems. United Nations Peacekeeping Task Force is a task force. In other words, the only way to keep peace is to threaten war. We're going to enforce it. And I don't know if you knew this or not, but there was in our arsenal up until a few years ago, an ICBM in the American Nuclear Arsenal called the Peacemaker.

Yeah, that'll do it, right? Hey, we got one of these things. You better watch yourself. We got one of these babies, the Peacemaker. The LGM-18, intercontinental ballistic missile. Somebody once said Washington has lots of peace monuments. They build one after every war. We have seen diplomatic peacemakers go all over the world. They go in where there's conflict. They get parties to sign some document so that for three weeks nobody's killing somebody else. But that's not very lasting because after a while they pick up their arms again and they go at it again.

It never lasts. What they should do is send in the real peacemakers. And the real peacemakers are God's children who know what it is to be forgiven by a holy God and based upon that love and forgiveness have the wherewithal to make peace horizontally. They would do a far better job. They would share the gospel. They would do evangelism. They would share God's forgiveness for them and peace for them. We've had enough of worldly peacemakers and their continued failure.

Nobody's been able to do it. No one has been able to bring peace. In fact, the Bible even predicts that there is someone who is coming in the future, the ultimate peacemaker, goes by an interesting title, the Antichrist. He's going to bring peace to a world filled with conflict. And the Bible says when everybody goes peace, peace, then sudden destruction comes upon them like a woman in labor. So this man of peace is really just a harbinger of future conflict. So peacemaking is part of our calling because in the list of Beatitudes blessings that Jesus is describing his followers with, he gets to verse 9 and says, blessed, blissful, fortunate, satisfied, oh how happy are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God. Did you know that peacemaking is very important to God?

It's an important theme for God's children. It is not the job of politicians. It is not the job of presidents. It is not the job of diplomats. It is not the job of prime ministers. It is not the job of lawyers. It is not the job of kings.

It is not the task of Nobel Peace Prize winners. It is the calling for God's children. Psalm 34 verse 14 says, turn away from evil and do good.

Seek peace and pursue it. Romans 14 verse 19, let us pursue the things which make for peace and which edify one another. Hebrews 12 14, pursue peace with all people and holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Now I think there is a single word in the New Testament that best describes the idea of peacemaking, and that is the word reconcile, reconciliation.

It is used for what God has done for us, and it is used as the basis that God expects us to pull off with one another. In 2 Corinthians 5 18, let's put this up on the screen and read it together. You don't have to read it out loud.

I'll read it to you, but you can follow along. All this is from God who reconciled. Notice the word because he repeats the idea. Who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them, and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. You see that word is all over the place in a single verse. Reconcile.

What does it mean? It's the word which means to change or to alter completely, to change thoroughly. So the idea is in reconciling, you change the relationship. You bring peace where there was hostility in a relationship.

You alter it completely thoroughly. You turn hostility into friendship. If we were reading the New Living Translation or the Living Bible, the Old Living Bible, it translates the word reconcile in a very different way. It translates it to clear the path. To clear the path. It says God has cleared a path for everything to come to him. God has reconciled.

He's cleared the path. So we could illustrate that, right? Let's say we're walking someplace and let's get the path all messed up, shall we?

A little bit. These are obstacles in the path. Let's just make a couple more. I'm getting from there to there. So if I'm walking from here to there and I'm not looking where I'm going, there are obstacles in the path. I'm going to get hurt. I'm going to fall down.

I'm going to stumble. So if I want to reconcile, if I want to bring two parties together, I clear the path, right? I move these things out of the way, right? I clear it. And when I clear it, I have reconciled so that this party on this side and this party on this side can come together. That's what it is to make peace, to reconcile, to clear the path so that everything or everyone can come to him. So God has cleared the path for us. God cleared the path on the cross. He reconciled us to God. And because He's done that, He's given us a very clear calling. As we just read, He has given us the ministry of reconciliation and the message of reconciliation. So understand how this works. Vertical reconciliation, God doing it to us, is what produces horizontal reconciliation, us doing it to others, right?

It's like everything else. It's like forgiveness. We forgive because we've been forgiven. Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.

We love because God loved us. So when we experience that reconciliation, that path clearing experience, we are then equipped to do it and are called to do it for others. So we are God's diplomats. We're His messengers of peace. That's peacemaking defined.

Let's look at a second and that is peacemaking demonstrated. For that, I want you to go back to that passage I told you to pre-mark, Genesis chapter 32. Genesis chapter 32. In verse 1, it says, Jacob went on his way and the angels of God met him. When Jacob saw them, he said, this is God's camp.

It's always good to go camping with God. And he called the name of that place Mahanaim, which means double camp, two camps, God's camp and my camp. Then Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau, his brother in the land of Seir in the country of Edom. And he commanded them saying, speak thus to my Lord Esau. Thus your servant Jacob says, I have dwelt with Laban and stayed there until now. I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, male and female servants and I have sent to tell my Lord that I may find favor in your sight. Brother, I want to make peace with you. I want to clear the path.

I want to let bygones be bygones. Now I thought of a whole different array of examples that we could look at in scripture about people who made peace. There are some notable examples. One of them is Jonathan. Jonathan, the son of King Saul. King Saul and David were at odds with each other. Jonathan sought to step in between them and bring them together as a peacemaker.

That's a good example. Another good example is Abigail, the wife of Nabal in 1 Samuel 25. Her husband Nabal, Nabal means fool and he lived up to his name because one time when David protected his employees, Nabal's employees, and then later on asked for just a little bit of food to sustain David's own troops, Nabal refused.

And so David said, let's just attack this guy and wipe him out. Well, his wife found out about it, Abigail, and she went with a gift, bread, raisin cakes, grain, and presented them to David and humbled herself before David and brought peace. She was the peacemaker.

She's a good example of one. Paul's an example of a peacemaker in the New Testament when he took a vow of a Nazarite and paid for others to take that vow just to assuage the feelings of legalistic Jews who are having a hard time with Gentile believers. So all of those are good examples of peacemakers. I would even say an evangelist is a good example of a peacemaker. Anybody who shares the gospel is a peacemaker because he's bringing the gospel of peace, even though by bringing the gospel of peace there might be like a little bit of a war thing that happens because unbelievers don't want to hear it. The gospel can bring a sword, but he is bringing the message of peace, the message of reconciliation. You might say a peacemaker is somebody who's not content to go to heaven alone. That's evangelism.

But I want to consider this example, what we have just read. Two brothers who had been estranged, who had been apart for years, Jacob and Esau. Jacob stole his brother's blessing years before, dressed himself up like his brother, he made himself smell bad like his brother, went into his blind old dad and got dad's blessing, tricked him, and then ran away because Esau, when he found out, said, I'm going to kill Jacob. I'm going to kill my brother.

Well, years have passed since then. Jacob has been with Uncle Laban, now he's coming back, because God told him to go back. But as he's coming back, he hears that Esau is on the move and coming toward him.

Jacob immediately wants to make peace with his brother. And he says in verse five, here's this gift that I am giving you, these animals, I'll get to that in a minute. But he says, that I may find favor in your sight, that we can finally make peace, that the bad blood between us can be erased.

I want to be a peacemaker. Did you know it says in Romans chapter 12, listen to this verse, if it is possible, I'm glad Paul said that, if it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. Listen to that, that's a great verse that you and I should live by.

If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all men. I'm glad Paul wrote it that way, because sometimes it's not possible. He said, if it's possible, do it, but sometimes it's not possible.

You know why? Because some people are impossible. And what I mean by that is some people refuse to let it go. Some people will refuse to forgive. Some people will hold on to their pain and nourish it, water it, fertilize it, stroke it, pain, resentment, bitterness. I'm holding on to this. You can't have it.

I'm not letting it go. That concludes Skip Heitzig's message from the series, Give Peace a Chance. Find the full message as well as books, booklets, and full teaching series at connectwithskip.com. Now we want to tell you about a resource that will help your children know God's Word and understand and defend His truth. Attention moms, dads, and anyone who's looking to help children understand the message of the Bible. This month, we're offering the book Soaring Through the Bible for Kids.

God's Word can be a challenge to read and understand, even for adults. And this kid-friendly version of Pastor Skip Heitzig's popular book, The Bible from 30,000 Feet, gives young children and tweens a panoramic overview of all 66 books of the Bible, helping them see the context and significance of each. Soaring Through the Bible is a travel guide from Genesis through Revelation for Kids. Each chapter provides a flight plan for exploring a portion of the Bible, along with a brief synopsis that shows what the chapters are about and language kids can understand. Creatively designed with kids in mind, Soaring Through the Bible also features fun illustrations and fascinating facts to keep young minds and hearts engaged and interested. Soaring Through the Bible for Kids will prepare a child for takeoff on a lifelong journey of learning and loving God's Word. We will send you a copy of this unique book along with a booklet for you by Skip titled Why Truth Matters. Simply make a donation to support and expand this radio program with a gift of $50 or more.

Call 1-800-922-1888 or order online at connectwithskip.com. Come back tomorrow as Skip concludes his message, Making What Everybody Wants, and shows you what real peacemakers do. Peacemakers seek solutions, not arguments. Peacemakers calm the waters, they don't stir them up. Peacemakers work for reconciliation, not division. Make a connection at the foot of the crossing. Cast all burdens on His Word. Make a connection. Connect with Skip Hyten is a presentation of Connection Communications. Connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.