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The sermon teaches that Christian peace is not psychological optimism but an objective reconciliation with God grounded in Christ’s blood, justification, and completed atonement. The Father gives this peace, Christ purchases it, and the Holy Spirit works it in believers. It produces joy, resignation, and confidence that God governs even painful providences for good. Doubt or temptation may interrupt the believer’s experience of peace without undoing the believer’s standing before God. Those who lack this peace are urgently called to believe in Christ and seek Him as the only Peacemaker.
Theological center: Peace with God is secured by justification through faith in Christ’s once-for-all substitutionary atonement and is applied by the Triune God.
Applications: Believe in Christ for salvation · Seek Christ, the Peacemaker · Peace rests on justification · Distinguish reality from experience
Primary texts: John 14:27 · Romans 5:1 · Ephesians 6:15
“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” John 14:27 OUR Lord was now about to die, to depart from this world, and to ascend to His Father, He therefore makes His will, and this is the blessed legacy which He leaves to the faithful—“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” We may rest well assured that this testament of our Lord Jesus Christ is valid. You have here His own signature, it is signed, sealed, and delivered in the presence of the eleven apostles, who are faithful and true witnesses. ’Tis true a testament is not in force while the testator lives, but Jesus Christ has died once for all, and now none can dispute His legacy. The will is in force, because the testator has died. It may however, sometimes happen that a testator’s wishes in a will may be disregarded, and he, powerless beneath the sod, is quite unable to rise and demand that his last will should be carried out. But our Lord Jesus Christ who died, and therefore made His will valid, rose again, and now He lives to see every stipulation of it carried out, and this blessed codicil, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,” is sure to all the blood bought seed. Peace is theirs, and must be theirs, because He died and put the will in force, and lives to see the will fulfilled. The donation, the blessed legacy which our Lord has here left, is His peace. This might be considered as being peace with all the creatures. God has made a league of peace between His people and the whole universe. “For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.” “All things work together for good to them that love God.” Providence that was once estranged and seemed to work counter to our welfare, has now become at peace with us. The wheels revolve in happy order, and bear us blessings as often as they turn. The words of our Lord may also refer to the peace which exists among the people of God toward one another. There is a peace of God which reigns in our hearts through Jesus Christ, by which we are bound in closest ties of unity and concord to every other child of God whom we may meet within our pilgrimage here below. Leaving, however, these two sorts of peace, which I believe to be comprehended in the legacy, let us proceed to consider two kinds of peace, which in our experience resolve themselves into one, and which are surely the richest part of this benediction. Our Savior here means peace with God, and peace with our own conscience. There is first, peace with God, for He “hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Chr…