Peace Is Not Passive
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Matthew 5:9
To have peace with God and to have the peace of God is not enough. This vertical relationship must have a horizontal outworking, or our faith is in vain. Jesus said that we were to love the Lord with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. This dual love for God and others is like the positive and negative poles of a battery—unless both connections are made, we have no power. A personal faith is normally useless unless it has a social application. (A notable exception would be the thief on the cross.)
I once saw a cartoon of a man rowing a boat toward a golden shore labeled “heaven.” All around him were men and women struggling in vain to reach the shore and safety, but he was heedless of their peril. He was singing, “I am bound for heaven, hallelujah!” That is not an adequate picture of the Christian life.
If we have peace with God and the peace of God, we will become peacemakers. We will not only be at peace with our neighbors, but we will be leading them to discover the source of true peace in Christ. Every person can experience the peace of God through Christ: “For he is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14).
Our lives take on new dimensions when we find peace with God. To explain this in simpler terms, let us visualize a right-angle triangle sitting on its horizontal base. At the apex or highest point in this triangle write the letter G, representing God. At the point where the perpendicular line meets the base write the letter Y, representing you. Then, at the opposite end of the horizontal line write the letter O, which represents others. There, in geometric form, you have a visual diagram of our relationship with God and man. Our lives (which before we found the peace of God were represented by a single dot of self-centeredness) now take in an area in vital contact with two worlds. Peace flows down from God and out to our fellow men. We become merely the conduit through which it flows. But there is peace in being just a “channel.”
Our Father and our God, make me a channel of Your blessings today. Help me to reach out with Your hands of mercy, see with Your eyes of empathy, hear with Your ears of compassion, speak with Your words of peace. Let me be a lifeline through which You rescue the lost. Use me, Lord, in Your service. Because of Christ. Amen.
Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).