Receiving the Prince of Peace – Ep. 141

Jesus is peace and God’s solution for the problems in this world. Wasn’t a process, wasn’t a plan, wasn’t rules. It was a person. And he is love. And his name is Jesus.

Tagline: Created on purpose and for purpose.

Hey, Merry Christmas season at least. And welcome back to the Daron Earlewine podcast. Daron Earlewine, your host. Stoked to be back with, huh? Check it out. We spruced up the joint, right? Can’t just have a screen, can’t just have the regular deal. It’s the Christmas season. Hello.

Okay, so want to thank producer Coop for giving us the nice little. It’s a butte Clark back here on the screen. I hope you love the Christmas season as much as the Earlewine family does. We have been watching Christmas movies now for a couple of weeks. I love it. I’d like to know that my day is going to end by watching some kind of Christmas movie. Has been great. Last night we just watched Santa Claus Three. Good.

Had kind of forgot about that one. That’s the Jack Frost episode. I’m not sure you know about that one or not. If you don’t check it out, you’ll enjoy it. Christmas music, Christmas decorations. Christmas. Christmas. Christmas. And that’s what we’ll be talking about here as we’re doing kind of a walk through advent, the advent season, and what the words around advent mean and how they connect to who Jesus is. And so today we’re going to have this conversation about that Jesus is peace.

He is peace. And I hope the next 20 minutes or so are encouraging to you, hope they bring peace to your life and help you understand what it means to have the arrival of Jesus into your life. Before we do, I want to just take a minute and I want to make sure we, once again, if we haven’t already, thank all of you that partnered with us this year on giving Tuesday. It was just a couple of weeks ago, and we had a big, audacious goal to try to raise $100,000, which you’d never done before.

And we were trying to trust the Lord and say, you know what, God, you say in the word to test you, and that if we want to give more than we receive, that we can’t outgive you. And so we thought, hey, let’s try this. Let’s give away 20% of what comes to us this year. Regardless of how much comes in, let’s commit to giving away 20% to other smaller nonprofits that may not have our reach, that may not have our level of support from folks like you.

And last year was great. We gave 10% away and it was awesome to be able to bless other causes. And as we were approaching this year, I was getting more excited about the people who are going to be able to help. And so was able to already send out a handful of support checks and stuff to other organizations, which was really cool. But going into it, I was excited about that, but really leery about, well, I don’t know.

In the past years we’ve had maybe somebody come forward and say, hey, if you guys can raise 25,000, I’ll give 25,000. And we call that like a matching grant. We didn’t have any of those coming in to giving Tuesday this year, and God was faithful. Many of you joined us and I just want to thank you for that. You may be saying, Daron, why are you talking about money like this? We don’t talk about a ton during the podcast, but everything we do with the podcast is connected and everything with Daron earlewine.com my book Spiritual DNA Pup Theology. Everything comes out of a ministry called black permission, which is the nonprofit that we started back in 2012. And we only exist because of the generosity of the lives of the people, of whose lives we get to impact through all of the ministry and resources and outreach stuff that we do. So if you’ve decided to partner with us monthly or on a one time basis, I just want to start this episode by saying thank you. And your generosity has brought us peace this year to know that we can keep doing this ministry and continue to awaken people to become who they are born to be.

If you want any more information about that, you can go to blackbirdmission.com/give if you’d like to become a monthly partner with us or maybe join us in a one time gift. Regardless, I want to thank you if that’s something that God nudges you to do. So let’s jump in. Let’s talk about peace and the fact that Jesus is peace. I remember when I heard the you two song peace on earth, and once again, I know you get it. Any chance I can work a YouTube song into a podcast episode? It’s happening.

And this one is hand in glove. No problem. Okay. This song, peace on earth by YouTube, for me, really brought to life some of the emotions that I’ve had often around Christmas time, or not even around Christmas time, just like thinking about Jesus and sometimes those things, and I’m sure there may be different things in your life. There are those things about your relationship with God and about Jesus where it’s like and I know this is true, or I believe this to be true. Excuse me, I believe this to be true, but right now I don’t see a ton of evidence that it is.

And peace on earth, goodwill to men on whom his favor rests, which is what the angels said when Jesus arrived at Christmas. You don’t have to be awake very long on any given day to be like, well, this hasn’t worked out too well. At least it doesn’t seem like it. In the YouTube song, here’s a lyrics from one of the verses. It says this. Jesus, can you take the time to throw a drowning man a line? Peace on earth to tell the ones who hear no sound whose sons are living in the ground peace on earth, Jesus, in the song you wrote the words are sticking in my throat peace on earth hear it every Christmas time but hope in history won’t rhyme so what’s it worth, this peace on earth?

And I love that honesty from Bono. And I think that song, written truly in the spirit of the psalms, I think we need more songs like that. I think a lot of christian music today, we’ve lost the art of lament and to writing songs that leave us in the tension. Every song that I guess we sing at church or you hear on the radio, if you’re listening to christian radio, it’s like everything has to resolve. It all has to be buttoned up and figured out at peace, if you will, in our heart and our mind. And the truth about our relationship with Jesus is that’s not the case.

It’s usually some kind of up and down wrestling match that we’re trying to figure out. And I think that’s true with our connection to peace, Jesus, with the song you wrote, right? Peace on earth, goodwill to men. That was written about you. The song these angels sing, the words are sticking in my throat, right? Because my hope in history, they just don’t rhyme. So what am I to do with it? Because that is what Jesus was promised to bring in. Isaiah, chapter nine, says it like this. The people walking in darkness have seen a great light on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given and the government will be on his shoulders and he will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting father, prince of peace, right of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.

He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness. From that time on and forever the zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. It’s Isaiah nine, verse two and seven. And he’s the prince of peace, right? The almighty God, the prince of peace. His peace will never cease. And then we go, well, yeah, but there’s, like, wars and there’s struggles. And then even in my own life, I don’t necessarily feel like I have peace.

And it’s within that tension that we have to realize that God is always living in this situation. Where we’ve talked about this before, on past episodes, I believe, is the understanding of something being already, but not yet something that is in process. The reality is that for you, God declares you as righteous and says that you’re already seated in the heavenlies when you come into a relationship, him that you are made perfect, that you become the righteousness of Christ. And all these things that is said is true about who you are through the eyes of God are true, and they are true right now.

They are already true, but not yet completely fulfilled. And that’s the situation, as I understand it, about peace, is that God has established the reality through Jesus that he can bring peace to the human soul. He has established peace between us and God. Right. He has removed the barriers of sin, of God’s anger or wrath or whatever words you want to use that has been removed by the death and resurrection of Jesus. So now God and his creation have peace between us.

Now, has that solved every situation of unrest or lack of peace or hate or strife or everything else around the world? No, because not everyone has enjoyed that peace, but it is already available and not yet fulfilled. But that doesn’t mean that Jesus isn’t peace. And so I think that’s the piece that. The piece about peace that I want to talk about is that God’s solution to the problems in the world wasn’t a list of rules, wasn’t six, seven pillars of whatever is God’s solution was a person.

God’s solution for peace was a person. It was Jesus to arrive on earth to actually establish the opportunity and the reality, to change the actual way the universe is functioning so that there could be peace with God. And in that process, we actually have to get to the place where we actually receive that peace. I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do. I think about just specifically in the Christmas story, you have Adam and Eve. Goodness gracious, you have Mary and Joseph.

And they came to a point where they actually had to choose to receive the arrival of Jesus to receive that peace. Because if God’s answer to peace is a person. That person is Jesus. Then we have to have the same. We’re faced with the same opportunity that Mary and Joseph had to come to, right, where an angel comes to Mary and says, hey, listen, here’s the deal. You’re going to have a baby and your name Jesus, and he’s going to be the son of God. This hadn’t happened yet. She could have rejected this. I don’t want his arrival in my life.

But she received the presence of Jesus in her life and that brought her peace. But it didn’t bring her ease, it didn’t bring her lack of chaos. That’s one thing I think. It’s funny I’ve talked about all the time is obviously Mary is pregnant through the Holy spirit, which, can you imagine trying to explain that to everybody? That would not have been a peaceful conversation to your mom, your dad, your brothers, your cousins, the neighbor person, your fiance that you have yet to consummate your marriage with.

Then you have to take a trip to go to this census and there’s nowhere to stay. Then you’re having a baby in a barn. Then after you have the baby in a barn, all these strangers show up and start bringing you gifts to it. Then you hear about all this stuff going around town that all of a sudden, oh, no, the king wants to kill your baby. So then you have to leave over at night, right? Escape to a foreign country to preserve the life of your baby, because the king was trying to kill all the children, boys two years and younger.

Think of that line and tell me where you would be. This is. This has been peaceful. I’m glad that I’ve let Jesus arrive in my life because if I’m just being honest, he is the prince of peace. Everything in my life has just been solitude and silence. And I just feel like a Zen warrior right now. I don’t know what am I saying right now, Zen warrior, but here is actual Jesus arriving in the life of Mary and Joseph.

And it didn’t mean that everything was perfect, but it did mean that they received the presence of God himself into their lives. And his presence brought them peace, it brought them protection, it brought them provision into all of the challenges and chaos that life was bringing. And the same is true for you and me. Same is true for you and me. I don’t think being peace on earth means God’s going to fix everything immediately in your life. And when you follow God, you’ll never have a struggle. You’ll never have an ounce of anxiety, you’ll never have an ounce of worry. You’ll never face anything that takes great courage. In fact, I think all of that is just the opposite. You’ll face that. And I think if you join Jesus in actually the mission that he has to see heaven come to earth and push back against the kingdom of darkness, I think you’re going to have a ton of things that are going to take all of that and more. And here’s the good thing, is that you’re going to have a peace that surpasses understanding because your life is indwelt with the living presence of God, who is the prince of peace.

He is your peace. He is your provision. He is your protection. I love the word, the jewish word for peace, which is shalom. And the idea of shalom is not this idea of absence of struggle. The idea of Shalom is really a wholeness of life, a flourishing in a wholeness of life. You could almost say it is life as it was intended to be. I think that’s a great way to characterize what Jesus has done. Jesus has brought the opportunity so that our sins can be removed. This is the gospel message, right? We can have a relationship with Jesus and his arrival, his life, death and resurrection have allowed us to live life as it was intended to be lived, to have shalom, peace with God, right? Inner peace, so that we can go out and be people who actually make peace in this world.

And Frederick Buechner says this. I love this quote about peace. He says, peace is not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. And that kind of encapsulates what I was trying to say, is that Jesus is peace and God’s solution for the problems in this world. Wasn’t a process, wasn’t a plan, wasn’t rules. It was a person. And he is love, and his name is Jesus. And in your life, if you’re looking to increase the peace of your life, you don’t need to become controlling to where you’re trying to fix everything around you or get yourself somehow to disengage from all the relationships or maybe numb out to where you don’t feel the stress. What you need is to say, you know what, God? Here’s what I need. I need your presence. I need your love in my life so that I have Shalom. My life works as it should, where how it should work and how it was created to work is that as a human, I’m connected in the intimate relationship with the God who loves me and created me. And when that is right, I have inner shalom.

Life is as it should. Be as it was created to be. Therefore, I can step into whatever’s happening in my life with your presence, with your love, with your peace. Does that make sense? I wish at this point you were here with me. And then I could say that, and you could say, well, yeah, Daron, it makes sense. But sometimes when this happens, I struggle with this part. I wish we could have that conversation and in fact, pause for a drink of coffee.

In fact, I’d love to have that conversation. And so every episode I try to say, this is, I’d love to hear from you. You can text me 317-55-0507 would love to hear your thoughts. You can email me, Daron@blackbirdmission.com you can reach out through social media. Just dm me. There’s plenty of ways to get in contact with me, but if you have questions, things you’re wrestling through, I want to help you answer those questions or at least get you connected to someone that can. So please don’t hesitate to jump into the conversation.

And we will jump further into this conversation right after this short commercial break. We’ll be right back. Is it time for you to take your next step towards discovering your purpose, but you’re not sure what to do? Maybe jumping into the entire spiritual dna course seems just like a little too much for you right now. No problem at all. That’s why I want you to know about the five day jump start to purpose. It’s totally free, and it’s a five day audio course you’re going to listen to. Just, it’s really short, like five, six minutes a day. But it’s going to help you. Just, let’s call it an appetizer, right? To help you jumpstart this process towards purpose. It’s free. All you got to do is go to Daronearlewine.com/jumpstart. It looks like this right behind me on the screen. You’re going to go there and we’re going to send you the course for free. And I’ll help you take your next step because, hey, we say it every week. I don’t want you to forget about it, right? God’s created you on purpose and for purpose, let’s jumpstart that purpose. Now let’s get back to the podcast. All right. Welcome back to the podcast.

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Here’s the last two points I want to hit. I’m going to try to do it quick, is that we receive his peace and then we bring his peace is kind of the two part thing. Here he is peace, and we receive it. And one of the things I think is interesting, one of the other places where Jesus is talking about peace is he’s risen from the dead. He’s back, resurrected. And the disciples don’t know what’s going on. They’re meeting in the upper room. They’re freaked out. They don’t really understand exactly what’s happened. They haven’t really interacted with Jesus yet. He shows up in the room and it says that while they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said, peace be with you.

They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. And he said to them, why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see. I have. I think this is a comical situation. These guys, in the matter of three days, have been attacked, betrayed. They watched Jesus be beat, watched him be betrayed. Watch him be put through a false trial. Watch him hang on a cross and die.

They went through a day and a half of not really knowing what’s happening, thinking that this guy they believed to be God’s son was dead. Actually, he was dead. And they didn’t really know that he was coming back to life, because even though he told them all the time, they didn’t really understand it. Then all of a sudden, it happens. They’re not sure what’s going mean. Think about the turmoil that this would have caused. Now they’re in a room, and then Jesus shows up, just standing among them, which they immediately think he’s a ghost.

And he says, shalom. Be with you. Listen, the way life is supposed to be. May that be with you, because I’m with you. And there are moments, I think, where we’ve got to learn from this kind of thought, that if Jesus is with me, even if I’m frightened, even if I don’t know what’s going on, even if things don’t make sense, if he is there, I’m in his presence, and he’s in my presence, I can be at peace.

And I think a big part of this comes back to the understanding of the peace of the covenant of God that we have with him. We’re invited into the new covenant in the New Testament, and we’ve talked about this in the podcast before. But a covenant is this idea word. Covenant means becoming one. And so that’s God’s desire for us, is we be in a covenant relationship where we have become one with him, that his peace, the person of Christ, is now a part of our life, our soul is whole, it is as it’s supposed to be. We have inner Shalom, and within that, becoming one with God, the grounds of a covenant is the more powerful person in the covenant promises to protect and provide for the weaker party in the covenant. This is something we have to understand that. That’s the kind of relationship that we have, that’s the kind of shalom that we have, kind of peace we have with God.

And so within that we have his presence, we have his provision, we have his protection. And so whatever situation it is, whether it’s Mary and Joseph running for their lives, right, to Egypt and everything else that Mary and Joseph had to go through, raising Jesus from Christmas all the way through Easter, okay, all the ups and downs of that, they had the presence of God with them, they had the provision of God with them, they had the protection of God with them.

You look with the disciples, right? Jesus shows up, he’s like, hey, yeah, it’s me. I’m not a ghost. And here’s the deal. Peace be with you. I’m here, my presence is with you. Not only that, right after right, he says, listen, don’t go out and do the mission that I’ve called you to do until you receive power from on high, until you receive the power of the Holy Spirit, which is the indwelt presence and shalom of God. You can’t do this without my peace, which is my presence. Based on this covenant, which is going to give you protection and provision to go out.

That’s so important for you to understand that when you have this connection with God, when you have this connection with Jesus, when you’re in a covenant relationship, when this holy spirit infills you, that is the grounds for this relationship and you can trust it. In fact, coming back to that time and time again has been something that has allowed me to accomplish so much of what I feel like. I’ve been able to walk through the plan that God has for me because I’ve had to come back time and time again and stay in the peace, stay in the shalom that this covenant has brought me. I can trust God to be with me, right? I can trust God to be for me.

I can trust his provision. I can trust his protection. I can trust his presence because he has promised it. And when I have faith in that, he gives me peace. Right. Instead of striving for everything in your life, right? It’s about trusting instead of earning everything and thinking you’ve got to do it because you’re on your own and you have to protect yourself, you have to provide for yourself. And it’s a dog eat dog world. Everything’s got to be earned. Realize, no, here’s the deal. I’m going to trust and live in the peace of the covenant and I’m going to receive from God. Does it mean I don’t work hard? No.

It means I know that I’m not ultimately responsible for the outcomes because I’m in a relationship with the prince of peace. I hope that makes sense for you. And I would say that a couple of things too with this is that you have to fight for this peace because I think everything in our life screams the opposite of this. And that’s a part of spending time daily with some disciplines in the presence of God so that you can be brought back to what is true.

I have peace with God. I have the presence of God, right? My soul is as it should be. There is shalom within me. And if I can start from a place of inner peace, I might actually have a shot to bring about outer peace, peace in the world around me. If you find somebody that has a lot of strife and a lot of struggle and a lot of chaos in their earthly relationships, I promise you, you spend enough time with that person, you’re going to find a person who does not experience very much inner peace.

Right. They’re creating out of the conditions of their soul. When we can experience the depth of the presence of Jesus in our soul, in our heart and our mind and our strength, what happens is that inner peace begins to spill out into the people around us and we begin to be people who now are peacemakers on earth. That’s the last thought I want to give you, is now that we receive his peace, we bring his peace and story from my personal life with my kids and we’ll wrap it up. Is one of my sons had a friend was spending some time at our house for a couple of months and they were driving back to this friend’s house and the person said, man, I really love being in your house. It just feels so peaceful in your guys’house. And she’s like, I don’t know what it is, but it’s just something there.

It just feels right. And I was so proud of my son. He’s only 17 years old, and he was able to say to a friend, well, yeah, that’s the Holy Spirit. As you know, we follow Jesus. I think what you’re experiencing in our home is the peace of the Holy Spirit. And I was so proud of him that he had the courage to say that, but also so proud of him that he knew that that was true, to be able to say, yeah, that’s what we bring to the world because we have the peace of God’s spirit, and so we are bringers of that spirit.

And I want to encourage you if you’ve been a follower for Christ for a while, and maybe I’m always wanting to push you out into the frontiers of the kingdom of God, if maybe you have forgotten that. Because if you look at your life right now, I want you to take stock on it. You’re coming to the end of the year. It’s almost Christmas time. Look at your life. If you’re a follower of Jesus and you have been for a while, how many influential relationships do you have with people that have no idea about Jesus?

I want you to really think about that, because if the answer is none, you are doing this world a disservice because you are indwelt with the person, the prince of peace. And people’s lives are chaos living in darkness, right? People living in darkness have seen a great light because Jesus has come. Well, here’s the deal. He came once and now he sends you. But if you have insulated your life in light and you have no influential relationships with anyone who lives in darkness, what may be happening to you is you become used to what it’s like to be in just a peaceful environment. It’s me, it’s my christian friends in my christian school, with my christian church, with my christian movies and my christian tv, and I’ve just bubbled myself.

I’m in a snow globe of Christianity. And in here it’s always the same degrees and it’s always nice and it works for me. And so what you’ve gotten, you’ve gotten used to like, yeah, I have peace. Doesn’t everybody? This is what it’s like in my little bubble I’ve created. If that’s your life, I want to strongly encourage you to take that snow globe of christian bubble and smash it on the ground and allow it to break all over the place and then enjoy the chaos of living on the frontier of the kingdom of God.

Because I want to tell you this, the thrill of hope, right? The thrill of hope, the power of peace. When you start realizing that, oh my gosh, there is a world of darkness around me and people are living in a chaotic, frantic lives with complete lack of peace. And I actually am filled with the presence of the prince of peace. And it’s my honor and my opportunity to bring it into the lives of others.

When you start sensing that you’re joining Jesus to become a peacemaker on earth, let me tell you, you will be so glad you smashed that little safe snow globe on the ground. Because now you’re going to start experiencing the flow of God’s presence and peace through your life. And there’s nothing, nothing like it. Begin to bring the peace of God to the chaos around you. Peace on earth. We need it now, receive it, and then bring it to the world.

Hey, thanks for tuning into this episode. I appreciate it. Can’t wait to talk to you guys next time. We’re going to continue this conversation about talking about who Jesus is and at Christmas. And until we do so, please reach out to me, put all that already in the podcast, you and how to find me. I’d love to be in a deeper conversation about these topics with you and maybe helping you take your next step to become who God’s created you to be. Until we talk again, remember these three things. God’s for you, not against you, near you, not far away. And he’s created you on purpose and for a purpose. 

Talk to you next time right here on the Daron Earlewine podcast.