Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God poured into us…these are powerful statements of our reality as it pertains to our relationship to God, indeed our experience of God. Peace, grace, and love dominate our relationship with God not judgement, condemnation, and fear of offending him. Peace, grace, and love…this is God’s disposition towards us. Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God poured into us…this is the foundation of our reality and of our experience of God. Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God pour into us is the root of our personal existence, the foundation of what we should know about ourselves, the foundation of who we should be as persons. I know I’ve just made some big, lofty statements and I want to help you understand this foundation of reality, grab a sense of it because chances are we let it get drowned out.
Peace with God, standing in grace, the love of God poured into each of us…this is who we are. Last week I spoke about abiding in and appreciating the beauty of Creation and experiencing the joy and love that flows through it and how at some point we come to discover the presence of God and how we are beloved by God. Today I want to ponder upon life in the wake of discovering our Belovedness; which is life made full, made abundant in peace, grace, and love.
So, let’s look first at peace with God. When I think of peace with God a couple of biblical images come to mind. I think of the story in Mark of Jesus and his disciples out on the Sea of Galilee and a powerful windstorm began to threaten to swamp the boat and kill them. The image of the storm and the way Mark words the story gives the sense that Creation itself or something very sinister possessing it is trying to kill God’s very vulnerable fledgling nest of those who are the beginning of God’s healing for his Creation. Jesus, at first sleeping, arose and spoke sternly to the storm and at his word it ceased. Something only God could do. Immediately, the lake became calm, placid, not a ripple. I have memories of being on a lake in a rowboat with my dad at the first break of sunlight fishing and there wasn’t a ripple. It was very good. Peace with God is like that. Storms calmed, placid, not a ripple, very good.
Another story I think of when I think of peace towards God is Jesus’ healing of the man who was possessed by a legion or 1,000 unclean spirits. The townspeople tried to contain the man by chaining him up in a graveyard. But he always managed to break the chains and then run around naked and shrieking incoherently. When Jesus showed up the unclean spirits recognized him and begged him not to destroy them. At a word, Jesus cast the legion out of the man into a heard of pigs who went and drowned themselves in the Sea. Again, something only God could do. The whole town came out to investigate the commotion and found the man sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind. That’s a powerful image. This very tortured man now psychologically, emotionally, spiritually and even physically reposing with God, clothed with personal dignity, and thinking clearly about himself. To glimpse oneself with the love that God sees you with, to know yourself as God knows you - this is peace towards God. Those thoughts that torture us about our own lovability, those horrible ways we beat ourselves up and try to mercilessly destroy ourselves with shame and guilt, all the self-destructive “unclean” thinking ended – that is peace with God.
Moving on to standing in grace. Grace is a term that has to do with the royal court as opposed to the judicial court. Unfortunately, too much of Christian thinking for the last 1,000 or more years (and that’s a very long time) has located it in the judicial court where it’s meaning is reduced to the leniency of the court where we don’t get the deserved penalty for sin because Jesus stood in our place and took the penalty of death for us. But, grace isn’t a judicial courtroom matter. Rarely does it show up in the Bible in that sense, but it has been mistakenly made predominant. Grace has rather to do with a monarch’s disposition towards her subjects. Grace is receiving the favour of your monarch. Imagine yourself being invited to come into the presence of the Queen. She invites you to come and stand before her. What and honour! You are invited to stand, rather than to kneel. This a gesture of empowerment. Then, the queen gently extends her hand towards you for you to touch to acknowledge your worth. She speaks to you to indicate you have her ear and that she is favourably disposed towards your requests and will act for you. This “for you” experience with your monarch is what grace is.
The grace in which we stand is that we stand in the presence of God with God’s favour. He touches us and speaks to us personally giving us dignity. And, God promises to act for us. God is for us. By for us, I mean come Hell or highwater God in his loving kindness will make happen what is best for us. God will in time work all things for our healing, all things. Stay standing in the presence of God praying and listening. God is “for you.”
Finally, looking at the love of God poured into us as the Holy Spirit, God’s very self, coming to dwell in us. This is an odd one for us to talk about as it involves talking about personal experience of God when we’ve all been well schooled in a misdirected version of the Christian faith simply being centered on moral duty rather than personal devotion or, if you got Billy Graham-ed at some point, you had an experience of forgiveness and called yourself “born-again” in addition to that sense of moral duty. I suspect you’ve heard very little about the presence in us and the work of the Holy Spirit in us and find the topic scary. So, I’ll try to talk about this in a familiar way.
One thing I like about this time of year is driving around and seeing the fields newly planted. They look so vast and wide-open and I know that the power of new life is there working away yet unseen. I sense a bit of the glory of God in that vastness. I feel like this when I see fields mowed and the big, round bails of hay lay waiting to be put away. The vastness in the fields of agriculture is spiritual to me. It touches my spirit. In those moments of seeing the vastness and the beauty and the glory, I myself feel open towards life as opposed to feeling closed in on myself in my small, little world. I feel open to the mystery of God’s working new life in me. I feel open to other people. The Holy Spirit works like that. The Spirit encounters us at some point or over a period of time and we come to sense that we are beloved by God and this sense of being beloved opens us up to life and to others, opens our eyes to see ourselves and life anew, to feel newly alive, to feel hope, to feel worth, to feel favoured.
From this sense of our belovedness flows love for others, and it is a particular kind of love. It is like grace. As God is for us and his “for us” culminates with our knowing ourselves to be beloved, so we open our lives to others and help them to discover they are beloved. When Jesus spoke of denying oneself, of laying down one’s life for others, and of even dying to oneself, this is what he meant. He meant that we don’t go about life seeking to make “me” great or get my wants and needs met by imposing myself on others to their detriment. Being that way is how we wrongfully take life as opposed to receiving life for the gift that it is. To deny or die to self is to help others discover their own belovedness, worth, and beauty. It is to be present for others to support them in what they go through. It is to help them stand in grace empowered. It so often means tough love and that we will suffer rejection in its many forms because inexplicably so many people find the Good News of their belovedness to be threatening. Love helps others find the peace with God, the calm, the good that they so desperately need. Love helps people be free of their ”unclean” spirits and to discover rest in the presence of God where they are clothed in dignity and thinking clearly about themselves. Love is to be “present to” and to “for” others so that they find peace with God and can rest in a sense of belovedness.
Peace, grace, and living in the love of God; these are at the core of our relationship with God. Enjoy the peace God has freely given you. Be “for” others and seek their good just as God is for you and seeks your good. Devote your life to helping others discover their own sense of belovedness. Amen.
