Listen to this podcast by Mandy Seymour on living a life of peace in Christ.
What does it mean to be a person of peace? I think about that being peaceful is so important. What kind of person are you? What kind of person am I? What kind of person is Christ? Christ is the Lord of peace, yet He is also a warrior. But He is a paradoxical warrior, because the warrior in Him is fighting for peace.
He broke down the dividing wall of hostility by His death on the cross, the enmity between man and God, the hostility between mankind. And when we enter into the gospel and the gospel life, we enter into a place of learning to live and love and move and have our being from the place of the Gospel, the place of the cross, where we too have crossed over from death to life, death to sin, death hell and the grave, death to everything that is not life giving
And we learn to live in The resurrection power in a life giving life and pursue the path of peace by knowing and following Jesus, The Lord and Savior. He Himself is our Peace!
Sometimes I meet people who consider themselves to be peaceful but they’re combative. They tell you, “Oh, I I trust the Lord.” But then they fight and enjoy it.
Yet God fought so that we could be free of that strife in our hearts and our souls.
So what kind of fight are we supposed to fight? The good fight!
It’s different. It doesn’t come from a place of hostility, animosity, enmity, strife, jealousy, Discord, envy, anger, hatred. It doesn’t come from any of those fighting the good fight comes from a place of peace, love, joy, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control, and you know that you are finding the good fight by the fruit of it. These are called the fruit of the Spirit, peace, love, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self control. These are fruit, and they grow from a heart and a spirit and a mind that are rightly related to Christ
through the cross and the resurrection, life; They are the fruits of The Spirit.
Sp what we must learn how to do is to be rightly related. There’s a difference between having a right relationship and a wrong relationship, being rightly related and wrongly related, and it has a lot to do with our position and our disposition in Christ.
He alone is our rock and our salvation. He alone is our sanctification. It’s our salvation, our sanctification, our deliverer, our healer and our hope he is our happily ever after, and when we learn how to live a happily ever after life in him, everything else falls into place the way it should, and the very things that we thought we needed most, we realize are secondary to need, our need of Him. He is our greatest need. He is our greatest joy,
He is our greatest love,
He is our greatest strength.
And in Him, all things are yes and amen.
What does that mean when we learn to live in him and have a fruitful life and the gladness and fullness of this beautiful, amazing resurrection life that He gives us, everything else falls into place, and It causes us to say yes and amen like yes, let it be so be it,
because we can trust
that He is for our good and not our harm when we deal with the inside, in the situations of brokenness. In this world, there’s a lot of devastation that goes with that but in Christ, there is fullness of hope and peace and love.
And instead of devastation, there is restoration. He is our strength and our song.
Have you ever noticed when people are happy, eally happy, they will sometimes whistle or sing or hum?
When we find our joy in Christ, we have a song of gladness in our heart.
Have you ever had a song of gladness in your heart? Have you ever felt so happy that you just felt like singing? This is God’s vision for us, that we’d be filled with joy, not about the circumstances around us necessarily, or the challenges we face in relation to everyday life and the realities of of sin, but rather, as we pursue the path of righteousness, salvation and sanctification, there’s a gladness that comes with that, and a healing and a wholeness.
So people who once were at war can be peaceful people, they will still be proactive, but they can be proactive in their peace and their pursuit of it. They don’t have to be combative,constantly seeking strife or trying to live by it, because you can’t live by hostility. Only peace prevails, and it’s not just any peace. It is the hard won peace of Jesus Christ, because he died on the cross for your sin and mine. He paid the price for our wrongdoing against God and each other, he paid the price for the wrong that people have done against us.
And in Christ, we are made whole and new. And one day we will be with Him in paradise.
In the meantime, we must seek Him and seek to live in the fullness of the beauty of life in Him, and share Him with others, so that they too may know the hope, the living hope of the Gospel,
Love deeply. Live inspired.
And may the living peace in Christ be yours today and always!
– Mandy