God-Centered Peace
What is Peace (and how is God central to it)?
Like many words, ‘peace’ is one understood in various ways. Sometimes it’s used to communicate quiet or calm. Other times, ‘peace’ is the word we summon when talking of conflict resolution or an end to violent clashing.
While these understandings get at good, desired results of peace, they are yet incomplete. They are less than the peace over which God governs – and short of the peace Jesus said He was leaving for His followers to occupy and extend to others.
Rather, God’s way of peace is much more than calm. It is greater than ending war or settling a dispute. It is beyond signed agreements and power-sharing arrangements. God’s peace is both a means and an end, a way of getting to a whole and reconciled life and an arriving at it to inhabit — and share — its fullness.
Peace was complete, with God the source and initiator of it. There was perfect union and unbrokenness with Him, within, with each other, and with the created world. It was life just as God intended, the way things ought to be.
So what changed? The Bible explains that sin (choosing and yielding to our way rather than God’s) entered the world through human choice. This broke peace with God. It fractured peace within the man and woman. From this, brokenness arced out further and the couple’s uninterrupted union became compromised. There was now disturbance between them — and within the created world. The unbroken harmony and togetherness between God, people, and His creation was disrupted. Now things were not the way they ought to be.
There is vast time and story between that first break and the advent of what could become a lasting peace and reconciliation with God. But long story short, that durable, continuous peace became possible and accessible when God offered to us the perfect life and sacrifice of His Son, Christ Jesus.
“For he is our peace, who made both groups one and tore down the dividing wall of hostility. In his flesh, he made of no effect the law consisting of commands and expressed in regulations, so that he might create in himself one new man from the two, resulting in peace. He did this so that he might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross by which he put the hostility to death. He came and proclaimed the good news of peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
Typically, sacrifice and peace could seem contradictory, at odds with each other. But moved by the breach between Creator and His creation, God saw fit to settle the weight and cost of sin with the sacrifice of His Son’s life. The sinless Christ Himself makes peace with God possible – and our sincere realization of this, and trust in Him, is the beginning of living in unbroken peace.
We might wonder how exactly this works; when we look around, the absence of peace often seems a very conspicuous presence. War, hunger, disease, oppression, division — even painful misunderstandings — without a doubt, there’s so much brokenness in the world.
The Peace of Christ Transforms
Yet there’s this: Embracing peace centered in God and made possible through placing our faith in Christ Jesus changes us. His peace transforms us in the midst of all that’s broken and incomplete.
This is good news. It’s good because as God forms us to be like Him in His character, we become people of peace – peacemakers who imperfectly extend the grace, love, and peace of God to others, and people who learn to steward well the created world we inhabit.
One by one, life by life, people of peace learn and practice “the things that make for peace and the building up of one another.” (Romans 14:19) As they do, they help advance the ways and means of a God-centered peace in their lives and communities.
And while this will not set right all the world’s brokenness, lives and acts of peace are far from insignificant. God can and does use them to help reach and transform people — people who may go on to change the course of communities and even nations.
OneTribe — People Building Peace
This holistic peace that begins and continues with God is the peace OneTribe and its local leaders bring into divided and war-impacted communities. Such peace is not contingent on top level agreements though we pray for political peace and stability of all nations. It is independent of mid-level institutions and organizations although these are often helpful in rebuilding fragile societies.
Instead, with conviction that it is ordinary-extraordinary people who make, break, and build upon peace, OneTribe explores practices of God-centered peace with local people. From this grassroots-up approach, comes a movement of people building peace that is changing lives and communities in some of the hardest places on Earth.
Will you join us on this journey?
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