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The sermon grounds Christian peace first in Christ’s satisfaction of divine justice and the resulting reconciliation between God and the believer. This objective peace produces subjective peace in the conscience and can remain firm amid poverty, bereavement, temptation, and spiritual attack. Believers are instructed to rejoice, maintain a settled conscience, and stand armed with the peace of God. Sinners are invited to come to Christ’s meek and lowly heart for rest, forgiveness, and acceptance.
Theological center: Christ’s atonement establishes peace between God and sinners, and that peace becomes the believer’s conscience-resting, heart-guarding strength.
Applications: Rejoice continually · Maintain peace with God · Seek assurance before facing trials · Come to Christ in prayer
Primary texts: Philippians 4:7 · Matthew 11:28 · 1 Thessalonians 5:16
“The peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:7 IT is remarkable that when we find an exhortation given to God’s people in one part of Holy Scripture, we almost invariably find the very thing which they are exhorted to do guaranteed to them and provided for them in some other part of the same blessed volume. This morning my text was, “Keep the heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” Now, this evening we have the promise upon which we must rest if we desire to fulfill the precept—“The peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” This evening we shall use another figure distinct from the one used in the morning of the reservoir. We shall use the figure of a fortress which is to be kept. And the promise says that it shall be kept—kept by “the peace of God which passeth all understanding through Christ Jesus.” Inasmuch as the heart is the most important part of man—for out of it are the issues of life—it would be natural to expect that Satan, when he intended to do mischief to manhood, would be sure to make his strongest and most perpetual attacks upon the heart. What we might have guessed in wisdom is certainly true in experience. For although Satan will tempt and try us in every way, though every gate of the town of Mansoul may be battered, though against every part of the walls thereof he will be sure to bring out his great guns—yet the place against which he levels his deadliest malice and his most furious strength is the heart. Into the heart, already of itself evil enough, he thrusts the seeds of every evil thing and does his utmost to make it a den of unclean birds, a garden of poisonous trees, a river flowing with destructive water. Hence, again, arises the second necessity that we should be doubly cautious in keeping the heart with all diligence. For if, on the one hand, it be the most important, and on the other hand, Satan, knowing this, makes his most furious and determined attacks against it, then with double force the exhortation comes, “Keep thy heart with all diligence.” And the promise also becomes doubly sweet from the very fact of the double danger—the promise which says, “The peace of God shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus our Lord.” We shall notice, first of all, that which keeps the heart and mind. Secondly, we shall note how to obtain it—for we are to understand this promise as connected with certain precepts which come before it. And then, when we have noted this…