Daily Devotional

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

“Blessed are the peacemakers,

  for they shall be called sons God.

The promise of sonship in the second half of the Matthew 5:9 points us to Matthew 5:43-45,“You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

Here, we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us if we would be sons of God. So probably Jesus thinks of peacemaking as all the acts of love by which we try to overcome the enmity between us and other people. And if we ask for specifics, he gives two examples.

In Matthew 5:47 Jesus gives the other specific example of peacemaking-love in this text: "If you salute (or greet) only your brethren, what more are you doing than others?" If there is a problem in one of your relationships, or if there is someone who opposes you, don't feed that grudge. Don't feed the animosity by ignoring and avoiding that person. That is the natural thing to do—just cross the street so that you don't have to greet them. But that is not the impulse of the Spirit of a peacemaking God, who sacrificed his Son to reconcile us to himself and to each other.

Peacemaking tries to build bridges to people. It does not want the animosity to remain. It wants forgiveness. It wants harmony. And so it tries to show what may be the only courtesy the enemy will tolerate, namely, a greeting. The peacemaker looks the enemy right in the eye and says, "Good morning, John." And he says it with a longing for peace in his heart, not with a phony gloss of politeness to cover his anger.

Prayer:

Lord, I pray that you would give me the strength to forgive others. I pray that you would give me the heart of a peacemaker, that I would not only forgive, but I actually pursue to rekindle those broken relationships.  Give me the strength to not just walk away from problems, but to face them, and do so in a way that is honoring to you. Lord, don’t ever let me be okay with broken relationships, may they always burden my heart.