Matt Chandler - Advent of Peace

If you do have your Bible, I want you to turn to that passage. Here in a bit, I’m going to read it in English, which is the only language I’m quasi-proficient in—quasi being the operative word there. I wanted to start by saying I’ve been a little anxious for us. What I mean by anxious for us is that I’ve started to wonder what toll the last two or three years have taken on us. I’m a future-oriented soul; it’s how God built me, which means I don’t tend to process or feel a lot of anxiety. I just need something to do. If you give me something to do, then I won’t think about that at all. It’s why I desperately need silence and solitude to help me realize that, oh man, I’ve got some issues here I need to deal with. But there have been things, as I’ve tried to pastor in this season and love you well, where all of a sudden something will pop up and flare, and I realize that a great deal of us have really taken a beating over the last couple of years. We find ourselves—maybe we know we’re there, maybe we’re just kind of coming into the fact that, oh man, that really did some damage to me. I’m just wondering, I have concerns about what that looks like as we kind of continue to move into the future. In fact, one of the ways that happened this week—in fact, a couple of ways that happened this week—is through community in schools. They’re in our lobby; this is easily the heaviest load in our area they’ve ever had to bear, about 400 families and 800 kids that don’t really have Christmas coming for them. This is because of this season in which wave after wave of bad news just keeps befalling us. God knows what’s happening to our kids growing up in an environment where something’s always broken, where some kind of tragedy is always on its way. So, what I wanted to do today is spend my time talking about peace, and namely, that the coming of Christ has given us an opportunity—regardless of this season—to let peace be established in our hearts. Let me phrase that correctly: to let peace be established in our hearts. I’m not going to teach on peace as if it’s some kind of ethereal, «let me sing my way into an emotion,» or «let me position myself so I have all the stuff in my life controlled in order to feel peace.» I’m talking about a willing decision to submit to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who reigns and rules and can be trusted in that reigning and ruling, and to let our peace be rooted in that place. So that’s my goal. I have three things that I want to show you from this passage, but first, let me read this quote from a friend of mine, a pastor in Denver named Glenn Packiam. He’s brilliant. He says, «We stand between two proclamations: God has come, and come, Lord Jesus. The first grounds our confidence that the second will be answered. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus shape our hope and the return, reign, and renewal that is to come.» Right? That’s where you and I live. You and I live between these two pronouncements: that God has come—we believe that; we’re Christians—we believe that God has come, that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, put on flesh and dwelt among us. Now, because that happened and because of His death, resurrection, and ascension, we are looking to the future. With confidence, we believe that God will come again, but this time not as a baby—not as the six-pound, eight-ounce sweet baby Jesus—but kind of tattooed on the thigh, sword coming out of the mouth, reigning and ruling victorious Jesus, as He is. And that’s the space we find ourselves in. Where we believe it, there will be peace. Let me say this: where we choose to believe, there will be peace. Way too many of you are hoping for some emotive experience. Listen, I love emotions. I get excited when I’m caught up in the moment; it’s like bam, I’m crying. I want that. I’m after that. The mountaintop gives you perspective, but you always fight in the valley. A mountaintop might give you perspective, but you will always fight in the valley. If you want to skip around in your Christian walk, you fail to believe that we’re in a bit of a cosmic war here. So, to root ourselves in what I would just call our privileged position in history—the things that Isaiah is telling the nation of Israel are coming—we see clearly that they’re not just a hope for us; we see it, and gosh, we are evidence of it now. So, if you have found peace hard to come by—and that’s not all of us, but that is a lot of us—I mean, I keep running into members who still haven’t returned to me. It’s been two years, and it’s because they’ve got family members who, if they get the Rona, it’s going to be bad.