Is Peace Possible in Bad Times? - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, February 27th. Did you know that peace is possible even when things don't go the way you planned? Through Christ, believers can be calm even in the most trying situations.

Is peace possible in bad times? I mean times like these. When your boss says to you, Sorry, we don't need you anymore.

We've had to have some layoffs and you're wanting to cut. When your daughter says to your mother, I know I'm only sixteen, but I'm pregnant. When you find out that you have had a tremendous financial failure and you do not know how you're going to work it out.

When you find cocaine in your son's bedroom. When all of a sudden you feel terrible about yourself. You don't think anybody loves you. No one likes you. You're unfit to be liked.

No one seems to care. You feel rejected, shut out, isolated, alone. Is it possible to have peace in these kind of times and bad times in our life? Or is that just a figment of our imagination?

Is that just something the Bible talks about without explaining how to have it? Is it possible to have peace in bad times? My friend, it is possible to have overwhelming, indescribable peace in bad times. That is the title of this message. Is peace possible in bad times?

And the answer is yes. And I want you to turn, if you will, to John chapter 16. In one of the most trying times of the life of our Lord and, of course, in the life of his disciples, he gives us the answer to that question and he tells us how to have peace in the most difficult of circumstances of life. You'll recall in this 13, 14, 15, 16 chapters, Jesus is telling his disciples some of the most important things that he has told them in all of his three years with them because he's about to leave them the next day. In fact, this very night he's going to be betrayed. The next day he's going to be tried and crucified. And all of a sudden their world is going to come tumbling in. And in spite of all the warnings he's given them and all the things he's explained to them, they're not going to be ready to handle this.

He knows how they're going to react. He said, you're going to follow me afar off. And listen to what he says beginning in verse twenty-eight. I came forth from the Father and have come into the world. I am leaving the world again and going to the Father. His disciples said, Lo, now you are speaking plainly.

And I'm not using a figure of speech, but they still didn't understand. Now we know that you know all things and have no need for anyone to question you. By this we believe that you came from God.

Jesus answered them, Do you now believe? Behold, an hour is coming and has already come for you to be scattered each to his own home and to leave me alone. And yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. Now look at verse thirty-three. These things I have spoken to you that in me you may have peace in the world you have tribulation. But take courage, I have overcome the world. Is it possible to have peace in times of great trouble and tribulation and trial and heartache and rejection and the kind of pressures and the tensions and the distresses that you and I experience in life? Well, let me say first of all, God has willed your peace and mine.

That is, God has willed it so. Listen to what he says in this thirty-third verse. When he said these things, what he's referring to is all the things he's been saying in thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

And what is that? Well, if you go back to chapter fourteen, verse one, he said, Let not your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in me. So he said, Now, don't let your heart be troubled and anxious about all of these things. Then if you recall, he said to them, Many things about answered prayer. He said in verse thirteen, Whatever you ask in my name, I'm going to do it. Then he said in verse sixteen, I will ask the Father. He will give you another help of one just like me, that he may be with you forever. That is, the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it does not behold him or know him.

But you know him because he abides with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.

So he's encouraging them about his absence and, of course, his coming again. Verse twenty seven, he said, Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. He says, Let not your heart be troubled.

Don't let it be afraid. Twice he said, Now, don't don't let your heart be troubled about these things. Then he talks about again the Holy Spirit coming. He talks about our relationship with him in chapter fifteen, keeping his commandments, how he loves us, how we love him, the world is going to hate us and how the Holy Spirit is coming and his work and ministry in our heart. Then he comes to verse thirty three and says, These things, what things?

All of those things. He says, All of these things I've spoken to you in order that in me you may have peace. That is, he says, In the world you have tribulation.

Present tense. In the world you have distresses, hardships, heartaches, burdens, hurts, things you cannot explain, things you absolutely know you don't deserve, all kinds of problems and all kinds of perplexities and confusions and all the rest. He says, In the world you have these things. But he says, In me you have peace, which was his way of saying that though I'm not going to take you out of this world and though your circumstances may never change and though the tribulations and the trials and the heartaches and the things I don't understand will always be there. He says, I'm telling you that you can have peace in the midst of all of that. He says in this passage, These things I've spoken to you that you may have peace. He said in the fourteenth chapter, the twenty seventh verse, look at that verse. He says, My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. So he contrasts the world's peace with his peace because the truth is the world's peace is an empty promise.

There is no such thing as having peace apart from God. And yet the world tells us, Yes, they can. You say, Well, I know some folks who look rather happy. That's the way they look. I know some people that seem to have peace and they're not Christians. That's the way they seem. My friend, if you knew what they had and you knew what was going on inside of them, you know what you'd say?

Whew, thank God I'm me and not them. Because oftentimes what's going on inside of them is a whole lot worse than what you're experiencing. And so what he's saying here is in this world of tribulation, he says, You will have peace. It's interesting what happened a little later on. If you'll turn over to the 20th chapter of John, because after Jesus' resurrection, you'll recall that he's up again in the upper room, slips into the room when the doors were closed, not any longer confined by space or by time. In the 19th verse, the 20th chapter of John says, When therefore it was evening on that day, the first day of the week on Sunday, when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them what? He said, Peace be with you. Verse 21, again he shows up and the Scripture says, Therefore Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you as the Father has sent me, also I send you. It's interesting also if you'll turn to the 15th chapter of Romans that the Apostle Paul describes God as a God of peace. The 15th chapter and the last verse of that chapter, verse 33, the Apostle Paul all through his epistles identifies God as the God of peace. He says in the 33rd verse, Now the God of peace be with you all.

Amen? Chapter 16 verse 20 he says, And the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. All through his epistles he's talking about God being a God of peace.

What I want us to see here is this. Listen, God has willed your peace. That is the desire of the heart of God that you and I live in peace, walk in peace, that we relate to others in peace, relate to him in peace and be at peace with ourselves. You're not going to meet many people in your lifetime who are at peace with God, peace with those about them and peace within themselves. And that is the kind of peace that God offers. Peace with himself, therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God. Peace with others, he says, we're to live peaceably with one another, seek peace and to pursue with each other. We're to have peace within ourselves. He says, My peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled. We are to be at peace with God, peace with those around us and peace within ourselves.

That is the will of the Father. But you do not know many people who really and truly are able to say, Yes, I do have peace with God. I am at peace with those about me. That does not mean necessarily that everybody just likes you and everybody loves you and everybody thinks you're the world's greatest.

No. My being at peace with them may not necessarily mean that they're at peace with me. But here's something good about that. My peace is not determined by other people's attitudes. My peace is not determined by their attitude toward me or the way they treat me. My peace is determined by my attitude toward them which says they cannot steal my peace from me.

That's the quality of the peace that God gives us. Likewise, you're not going to meet many people who are at peace with themselves. I don't mean by that that they're absolutely satisfied with themselves, don't want to grow, don't want to do any better, get any better, make any progress in life. But they're at peace with themselves. That means they understand where they are, who they are. They understand their relationship to Christ, have a sense of inner security, satisfaction, contentment on the inside. They don't have to have a lot of things, don't have to have a lot of approval. They are just content and they have accepted themselves the way they are while they know God is in the process of making something more out of them.

And the second thing I want you to notice here is this. Whatever God wills, God does indeed provide. Now when we talk about this peace, we're talking about an inner sense of rest and contentment. We're talking about the ability to walk in the midst of a raging storm and somehow on the inside have a sense of strength, contentment, quietness and inner resolve. There is no demand that I defend myself, justify myself.

There is no demand that I manipulate my way. There is nothing inside of me that is anxious and in turmoil simply because everything around me is in turmoil. And I know in my own life I have walked away from some very, very stormy, tumultuous, raging, bitter kind of experiences and walked away and had thought to myself, God, why am I not upset?

And I want to tell you why. You don't have to be upset. He has willed our peace. And if He wills it, He has indeed provided it. Now I want to explain this provision back to John 16.

I want to explain this provision here in just a moment. I want you to listen very carefully because here is the key that most people miss in their Christian life. They say, yes, I know that's what the Bible says, but. You know, it may apply to someone else, but.

My circumstances, my situations, my hurt, my feelings, my loss, my rejection, my home, my husband, my wife, my children, my job, my finances, my this, my that, my health, on and on and on. You know what we do? We read the Bible and we say, well, but. If He has willed peace, listen to what He said to those men. He says, you live in a world of tribulation, but in Me. He says, in Me, you will have peace. Now the question is, if He has provided it, how has He provided it? First of all, the peace that He's provided is peace between us and Himself. Romans chapter 5, verse 1. So peace with God is the first step toward this peace. He says, Romans chapter 5.

You might want to look at that one. Some of you know it, some of you do not. He says, therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God. And justification by faith is what God did at Calvary.

When He speaks of justification, He means the fact that you and I have been declared no longer guilty, the penalty of all of our sin, past, present, and future, has been placed and was placed upon Jesus Christ, so that when He died at the cross, He took all of our sin debt. Listen, all of our sin debt, all of our guilt, all of our penalty upon Himself, and now we are no longer the enemies of God. We've become the children of God, and therefore the war is over. That is the war that has to do with my enmity between God and myself.

I am His enemy. He is God, is no longer there, because we've become the sons and daughters of God. So the first step toward that faith we're talking about is the step of being declared righteous, Romans chapter 5 verse 1, through the death of the Lord Jesus Christ at Calvary. Step number two is the fact that Jesus Christ is now living on the inside of us. That is, the kind of peace we're talking about with Him, with others, and with ourselves requires more than just the fact that Jesus died at Calvary for us.

It requires that Jesus Christ live on the inside of us. Now if you go back to John chapter 15 for a moment and look if you will in verse 1, because I want to show you something. Verse 1, Jesus is explaining His relationship and He says, I am the true vine and My Father is the vine dresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away, and every branch that bears fruit He prunes it that it may bear more fruit.

You're already clean because of the word which I've spoken to you. Abide in Me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.

I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in him, He says, He bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. And listen to what Jesus is saying then. Remember He said, these things I've said to you in order that you may have peace in Me.

Now listen. Jesus said, painting this picture in John 15, He said, I am the vine, like a grapevine. You are the branches. He says, you are abiding in Me and I am abiding in you. So He's speaking of a relationship.

He's speaking of a union that takes place. When you and I were saved, He says, we were like branches that were grafted into the vine. That is, we were placed into Christ Jesus so that we became a part of His life and His life became a part of our life. Now look, in a grapevine, the sap that runs in the vine, once that graft is taken, the sap that runs in the vine now runs in the branch, in the stem producing beautiful, luscious grapes. So what you have is vine and branch, but you have one life now.

The life running in the vine, running in the branch. Jesus said, apart from Me, you can do nothing. He says, these things that I have said to you, I have said to you that in order that in Me you may have peace, though in this world you're going to have tribulation. When you received Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, you became a child of God.

But here's the key now. He says that He placed us in vital union with Him so that now you and I are living in union with Christ. The very life of Jesus is now your life.

That's what Paul meant when he said, he says when you have Christ, you have everything. Then in the third chapter he says, and when Christ, who is our life? How is it He's our life? Because He's dwelling within us. We say it, we say I received Christ Jesus as my Savior.

He came to live on the inside of us. Jesus said, I am abiding in you, living in you. You are abiding in me, living in me. You are already living in union with Christ. The very life of Jesus is coursing through your life. You see, this has nothing to do with my outward circumstances. It doesn't make any difference what's going on outside of my life and around me and being done to me.

Nothing can tamper with that relationship. I have been placed into vital, inseparable union with a person of Jesus Christ, never to be separated. Because the source of peace is on the inside of me, that means I don't have to go anywhere, see anybody, have anybody, have anything, do anything, experience anything in order to have peace because it has nothing to do with my surroundings. It has nothing to do with what I own, who I love or who I don't love, how I'm treated, mistreated or accepted, has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with a vital union that I have with a person of Jesus Christ. God the Father put me in him, and he says he sealed that with the Holy Spirit of promise on the day of redemption, and no one can pluck me out of him.

That is the work of God. Thank you for listening to Is Peace Possible in Bad Times? If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.