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Peace in the Holy Spirit

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Christmas Sermon (#1)

The Kingdom of God and Eternal Life (#4)

Luke 2:14

Sermon by Pastor Sylvia Chan

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Introduction

Today is December 24th , Christmas Eve; December 25th is the date the western churches celebrate the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ; but the eastern Orthodox churches celebrate on a different date. Actually no one knows when the Lord Jesus was born, and I am not going to debate about the exact birth date of the Lord, but I will look into the meaning of his birth. 

NAS Luke 2:14 “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”

This is the praise from the heavenly angels to Yahweh God on the night the Lord Jesus was born. It says “peace among men”, but through two thousand years history we see that wars and more wars have been happening all the time, pandemics and natural disasters happened everywhere and all the time. Where is the peace? Why is it like that? Let’s look at the Bible to find the answer.

Different aspects of peace

We look at the peace in the Bible. The Bible talks about different kinds of peace:

  1. Peace from physical harm;
  2. Peace in our hearts;
  3. Peace in our relationship with God and with other people.

But the Lord Jesus said specifically that his disciples will have trouble in this world, he did not promise there will be no physical harm to his disciples.

NIV John 16:33 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

Here the Lord Jesus specifically says that in this world his disciples will have trouble; This statement of the Lord has been fulfilled. In the two thousand year history of the church, many many faithful Christians have been persecuted and killed for the sake of the Lord Jesus and the gospel; even today there is still severe persecution against Christians in different places in the world. Christians being persecuted is inevitable, we cannot avoid it. The Lord never promised that we will not be persecuted, but he said that as long as we stay in him we would have peace of heart, not physical peace.

We can ask Yahweh God to protect us from harm, but there is no promise of physical peace for us in the Bible. Therefore we don’t study peace in terms of physical harm, we will only study peace in our hearts and peace in our relationship with other people.

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