Righteousness and Peace Kiss

There is a hopeful place, there is one hopeful place.  A meeting place.  A place where mercy, truth, righteousness, and peace come together.  They come together into One.

Mercy and truth meet together.  Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.  Psalm 85:10

Exactly where is this meeting place?  I believe, such a beautiful verse can only be applied to one place.  This place is Jesus Christ our Lord.

Mercy and truth meet together.  In so many ways.  The mercy of God meets the truth of who we are and covers this truth with His mercy.  Christ is mercy and truth, that is who He is.  God’s Mercy and His Truth come together a came down here for us.

Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.  Again Through His righteousness, Christ’s righteousness, peace is given us who are really never deserving of it.  We are worthy of it only because God has clearly demonstrated this, but we are never deserving of it.  His righteousness freely and graciously given can and should give us peace.  This is the best peace, this is the peace that last, this brings us through bad days, bad weeks, and so on.  This gives us hope that though times may be bad now, one day they will be so so much better.  We do not need to pursue so restlessly peace and happiness now, in things of this world, as if these eighty or so years is all we have.

The righteousness of God has kissed us when we were enemies of Him.  When we were in no state to have peace with Him, it was given to us.  This is His doing.

I ask you, I beg you, do not settle for a lesser peace.  Keep looking to this God of mercy and graciousness to lead you deeper and deeper into His peace.  Into His Place of where mercy, truth, righteousness, and come and meet together.  I am speaking as a fellow seeker, seeking more of His peace.

Our peace may be increased, strengthened, deepened by looking a such verses as this.  There are so many aspects of His truth in this verse.  I have only touched on a few, and not communicated it as well as I hoped.  Let the Lord Himself, His Spirit teach you truths from this verse. Allow Him to speak truth and life to you.  His word, Spirit and you is where you will gain peace, understanding and intimacy with Him.

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Lord, bless those are seeking for more of your peace, with me.  Open up your word to them, let them become more and more encouraged and comforted by your word.   Lord, help me be a better communicator of peace, forgive me for being self-pitying, prideful, and distrustful of your obvious working yesterday.  Give myself and these readers, more of your mercy, love and graciousness.  May your Spirit become more and more evident in us.  Help us to look to you with patient optimism in your working in us and others.  Help us to become peacemakers.

Peace Postcard 8/10/18

I will hear what God, Yahweh, will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, his saints;…

Be listening for the Lord’s words of peace. I know some of you have heard His words of peace.   Isn’t this the best thing in the world to hear His words of peace, comfort and encouragement to us weary souls?  We can stay in His love, looking for more of His peace, mercy and love to be poured on our thirsting hearts.

…but let them not turn again to folly.

We are trusting in You Lord to keep us in your love.  We love and desire You more than anything else, give us the grace to live this out.  Keep us from being lured away from You.  Protect us Lord Jesus our Good Shepherd.  We have come to know the evil one’s ways, how he cannot stand for us to be finding peace in You, and he will try to disrupt this.  We know he is very strong and resourceful, we know You are Stronger!

A Peaceful Truth

In my past I saw Jesus more as a standard or law to live up to.  I saw Him as being disappointed with and condemning of me.  I tried to be more righteous, to be good enough.  I knew I could not earn my salvation totally.  I knew Jesus had to make up the difference.  Yet, I put too much on my self to win Jesus’s help, to clean and reform myself partway, in the hopes that Jesus would see my efforts and come to help.  What a stressful and impossible form of Christianity.

God drew me truly to Jesus.  A true trust in Jesus, for God to do all from start to finish through mercy, love, and faith given me by Him.  Trusting His righteousness and mercy not my own.

I want to look at psalm 85.  Continuing the idea of thinking and meditating on God’s goodness, character, mercy, and love.  Filling our minds with these beautiful and peaceful thoughts of Him.

You have forgiven the iniquity of your people.  You have covered all their sin.  Selah.  Psalm 85:2 

One of the first things we must, and I mean “we must” learn well is: Through Jesus, His mercy, His love, His blood, His work, our sins are forgiven.  He covers all our sin.  Not just the sin we have seemed to attain victory over.  He covers all our sin.  This is the mercy of God, to me, this is the most important and most; love to God, and peace to us, producing thought there is.  Through His mercy and love, He covers our sin.  He covers our remaining sin, that sin we cannot attain complete freedom from.  He breaks the chains of sin by covering our sin and crediting us with righteousness, righteousness we are not even close to actually living out day to day.

This is where our faith in God can really become established and settled into Him, and out of ourselves.  If we do not come to a settled faith here, finding much greater peace in Him, we will always be in a performance type of Christianity.  Our faith and trust in God will only be as strong as our last performance. We will become those who begin to compare our performance with the performance of others.  Since most all of us will give ourselves much more slack than we give others, you can see where this will lead us.

God wants us to have an honest, desperate, and stubborn faith in Him.  He many times puts us in situations where peace can be found no where else, we must run to Him.  He desires us to cling tightly to Jesus, to His word, to His words of promise and peace to us.  To be finding peace and comfort in His psalms written for us, in verses like Psalm 85:2, to be finding beautiful, peace producing verses such as those scattered through out the book of Isaiah, to be searching for and finding comfort and peace in His word.

The seed sown in good ground:

That in the good ground, these are such as in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it tightly, and produce fruit with patience. Luke 8:15

 

 

Being Filled with Peace

I will be looking at Romans quite a bit as we are thinking about the fall of man from God and our returning to Him.

Even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things not fitting;  Romans 1:28

Adam and Eve flew from God to the world, to the god of this age.  Casting us all headlong with them into their same aftermath of sin, destruction, death, separation from God, and His peace.

We all being bound or dirtied with sin and distrustfulness in us, are naturally attracted to the lies and deceptions of the evil one.  Something within all of us, tells us we can find peace in the things of the world, in its comforts, its way or success, its way of esteem and fulfillment. Our natural way is to fill our minds with thoughts, schemes, and anxieties about finding and keeping the peace of this present world.  We have little room for thoughts and meditations on and about our true source of peace.

I was reading Luke chapter 7 today, in this chapter alone, we can see how God greatly desires us to be calm, at peace, not in anxiety and fear.

behold, one who was dead was carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.  Many people of the city were with her.  When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said to her, “Don’t cry.”

He then raised her son, back to life.  Jesus desires to cure our anxious and sad hearts.

the poor have good news preached to them.

Those not satisfied, not filled to the point of not needing Jesus, have the good news preached to them.  They are able to find sight, strength, cleansing, open ears, and life through Jesus and His good news.  They are able to find peace, as they haven’t found it in this world.

In speaking to the woman who loved Him much, washing His feet so lovingly.  She has found great peace and boldness with her God.  She was forgiven much, loved much, and found great peace.  Jesus gives His affirmation “Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.”

God would have us not be anxious about the thing of the world, our money, our shelters, our clothing.  He would have us trade in these anxiety-producing thoughts in for meditations and thoughts of Him and His peace available to us.  He would rather us be thinking about how He is so merciful with our faults and sins, He is gracious and tender-hearted toward us.  How many times He said,”fear not”.  He desires us to cast our fear on to Himself, and be growing, possibly very slowly, but growing none the less into the perfect love that cast out fear, finding more and more His peace.

Circling back to the first verse.  We would be turning our thoughts to and on God, His mercy, His love, His peace.  Filling our minds and hearts with knowledge of Him, trusting His Spirit.  I will continue with this line of thought for a while.