Isaiah 11:1-9
11A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. 3His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. 6The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. 7The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. 9They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
In the master
bathroom in our house, there is a clock that makes a rather audible
ticking noise. Now, I never noticed this until shortly after we put
it up and Rachel insisted that I close the door to the bathroom
before she could sleep. She said the sound drove her crazy and she
couldn't sleep with it. I hadn't noticed it at all. We're all wired
a little differently.
What's the one
sound that disturbs you the most? What's the one sound that, if you
had the power, you would rid the world of forever?
Ok—so let's
imagine a world without those sounds. Let's put you in a room where
there is quiet—there isn't a single annoying sound to get on your
nerves. Would you be happy with the way the world sounded? There
wouldn't be any noise.
What would you
miss?
At first, we might
revel in the silence. But then we'd probably notice that there were
no birds chirping, and there were no children laughing. We wouldn't
hear the choir sing their beautiful songs and the wind wouldn't
rustle the leaves in the trees. We wouldn't have any annoying
sounds—but that wouldn't be quite enough. We want the sounds that
make us glad, that make the world a more beautiful place.
We're going to
talk about peace today, and we're going to do it in the same
way—peace isn't just about the cessation of hostilities. When
Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant sat down to draw up a peace treaty
to end the Civil War, they didn't just agree to stop fighting—they
had to figure out what happened next, how to fill the void of
fighting with something good so that the country would have a chance
of sewing up the wounds that had been torn open. The kind of peace
we're going to talk about today is incomplete if we only talk about
avoiding evil—the kind of peace that we will discuss is a peace
that can only be complete if there is a sense of fullness to it.
Imagine a grocery bag that not only doesn't have unhealthy, terrible
things in it, but also is bursting at the seams with abundant
goodness, with a wealth of treats for the body and the taste buds.
This is shalom, God's peace. This is the kind of peace for which the
world is destined, and this is the kind of peace we are each seeking
today.
Getting away from
the idea of peace as the simple notion of people not fighting, I'm
going to read the beginning of the 11th chapter of Isaiah.
As we read, I want you to notice that it's more than a simple quiet.
Peace isn't indicated by the lack of violence, but by a community
that is working on all cylinders, a community that is in love with
one another. It's not enough that the wolf doesn't eat the
lamb—here, they actually lie down together, at peace, at rest.
<read 11th
chapter of Isaiah>
When we talk about
shalom, about God's peace, there is a sense of all of creation living
just as God had intended it to live. It's a fullness—defined not
simply by the absence of conflict, but by each created thing living
up to its fullest potential, to the height of how God created it to
be. What we had in the Garden of Eden was how it should be—but in
our sin, we turned from God's peace, believing in arrogance that we
could somehow manage to secure a better future for ourselves. We
shortened our vision to the here and the now, and we have been
suffering ever sense because of our shortsightedness, because of our
sin. We established our own gods and believed that we could buy
security, but in reality it has only purchased more anxiety, more
struggles. We could easily say that it is worse now than it has ever
been, but the reality is that, ever since the fall, we have been
captured in the net of sin and, in struggling to get free, have
wounded ourselves with the weapons we created in the hopes of
securing for ourselves a better life. We are indifferent to the
abundant life that God has offered us, the shalom, the peace of God
that passes all understanding, because we have tried to grasp it and
control it, rather than merely accept it as gift.
Perhaps, every now
and again, you have had a sense that things are not the way they
should be. We spoke on Monday about how some people grew up in
households where you never locked the doors, where you left the keys
in the car. You were comfortable and trusted your neighbors. You
might have even trusted strangers. Now, however, you don't do
that—now maybe you have an alarm system and a gate and a dog that
tells the world to keep out. But inside, there's a gnawing sense
that this isn't the way it should be. That it doesn't feel right.
That's a longing for shalom—that's the awareness that there is a
different way we were created to be, and it's the soul crying out for
the peace of God.
How do we get that
peace, you may wonder?
For starters, we
don't get it. We can't obtain it. We can't earn it. You can't save
enough box tops or brownie points to trade in for it. It's a gift,
and it comes from one man, one man who died on a cross because that
was the only way to secure peace for the world. It sounds funny to
say that a violent death on a cross was the only way to secure peace,
but I assure you that it was—Jesus Christ had to die for our sins
for us to have access to God's peace.
Had Christ not
died for our sins, we would be forever at odds with God. We could
not be united with God after death, because Christ would not have
defeated death, and because God couldn't be united with sin—it's
against his nature. But Christ wipes out death and sin, and makes a
path to peace for us. In Christ, we are cleansed from our sin, and
the part of us that is at war with God, that is opposed to true
peace, is forever altered. We stop looking to ourselves and look to
God. We stop trying to provide for ourselves and trust in God to
provide for us. We stop worshiping ourselves and this world and
worship only God.
Now, this peace of
God has two aspects to it. In much of the Protestant church in the
last hundred years, we have focused only on one aspect, the inner,
spiritual peace. This is the deep, heartfelt relationship with Jesus
Christ. Personal salvation is the focus of this kind of peace. And
there isn't anything wrong with this—but it's incomplete when we
stop after this. When we read Scripture, we notice that one's
relationship with God is always leading the individual out into the
community. One's relationship with God isn't lived in isolation.
So how do we
achieve peace? We begin by accepting that we'll only truly be at
peace when Christ returns and defeats sin with finality. Until then,
we work on our inner life, and that leads us out into the community.
One without the other is incomplete. Both are the work of a
lifetime, not a day or a week or a month or a year.
To work on the
inner life, it's about replacing our fears with trust. We have all
sorts of fear—we hear not having enough as we age, we fear not
being respected in the world, we fear scarcity and strangers and
uncertainty. We fear aging itself, and death and disease and
infirmity. We fear that we aren't good enough. For each of these
fears, we erect some sort of belief that we can control our fears, or
we construct a defense against the fears, rather than turn and trust
in God. There are a thousand companies trying to sell you a product
to prevent aging, and there are another thousand that will try and
sell you the lie that you can protect yourself from the outside
world. We tell ourselves lies that we can earn God's love and we
consume more products to make us feel superior over our neighbors.
None of these
products, none of our lies, leads us to the truth—that God alone
can provide for our future, and that all the world's products and
lies will fall away and fail us. For true inner peace, we have to
trust completely in God, to not worry about tomorrow, to not build up
idols that cannot protect us. It doesn't mean we live irresponsibly,
it means rather that we don't invest our time and energy into
worrying about the future. We make our plans, and we trust that God
will provide for us. We don't fear anything—we trust in God. We
trust in God in every moment of life and in the face of death,
because God has promised to provide for us, to watch over us, to
bring us through death into true life. Inner peace means we have to
die to ourselves daily, to recognize the places in our lives where we
rely on ourselves, and to slowly hand those over to God, that we
might be healed. It's about taking the locks off the doors to the
chambers of our lives that we have kept from God and handing those
over.
This should lead
us out into the world, for God's peace, a complete peace for all of
creation, cannot very well provide peace and joy for some and not for
others. A sense of peace means that we then begin to look out for
our neighbor, for we want them to have the same kind of peace we do.
We then work for them, regardless of their race or social class. Our
idea of our neighbor is radically expanded—shouldn't we want peace
for all of God's children? Shouldn't the abundant life that Christ
provides be offered to everyone? God's peace is bigger than just
us—and so our inner peace should lead us out into the world to see
justice and equality for everyone. If we have no fears or anxieties,
we are then freed to pass on God's reconciliation to all, to be
content with what we have and share it with the world. We can't just
have inner peace and relax—our relationship with God, the peace
that dwells within us, should compel us to share with others.
God's peace is two
sided—and it's not enough to have one without the other. It
changes us forever, and it gives us something to look forward to in
eternity.
Let us pray.
weighs about the same as a small cat, but it's as thorough an exploration of the Bible's witness as I've found. It was sent to me by a friend whose heart is immersed in discovering (and preaching) God's love for the world, and I'm grateful he shared this treasure with me. What Wright sets out to do, and achieves, in my opinion, is to explore the Biblical witness to God's primary purpose: reaching out to the whole world, so that all of creation might glorify him. It's a task of titanic proportions, but what a grand book. Wright sees the Israelites and the early church as part of God's singular task--reaching out to the world. God loves creation and loves each child in it, and the hope is that each of us will find our true voice and glorify God. Nothing short of that is the goal, and our role within it is to let God speak in us and through us, that our life may be joined in with what God is doing in the world.
David Platt's 
is meant to be a guide for parents of toddlers through teenagers to help children enter into worship.