Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, at this Christmas season, what is the nature of true peace? Ah, peace on earth, goodwill towards men, the angels declared right to the shepherds at the birth of Christ. If you could name for me anything that the human heart longs for above everything else, what would it be?

Well, I dare say it would be peace in some way, shape, or form. Externally, we are terrified of random violence and destruction coming upon us from hostile sources over which we have no control, and also wars and rumors of war, war in Ukraine, war in Palestine, or internally, turmoil and turbulence that churns within our own souls and then bubbles over into our personal relationships with our spouses and children. Despite our best intentions, we seem to mess up, right? Whether it be in international politics or our own personal relationships.

In other words, whether coming or going at home or abroad in our individual soul or our collective soul as a race, genuine peace seems to elude the human family. This is all the more poignantly brought home to us at Christmas season, when the words of the angels from heaven to the shepherds ring in our ears, right? Peace on earth and goodwill to men on whom God's favor rests. Oh, that there would be peace on earth. Why does genuine peace seem to elude the human family no matter what we do?

Is genuine peace even possible? Or will it always dangle one step ahead of our grasp? If it is possible, then how is peace achieved? Well, to answer these questions, let's look first at the three spheres in which the human heart longs for peace, and then examine how it is achieved. First of all, number one, the first sphere, the human heart longs for peace among nations.

This is what we think of first, many of us. President Woodrow Wilson, son of a Presbyterian minister, got us into World War I to make the world safe for democracy, he called it, which war only led the groundwork for the rise of Adolf Hitler in World War II. And Neville Chamberlain, prime minister in England in 1939, returned from Berlin with a worthless piece of paper after negotiating with Hitler, stepping down from the airplane, exclaiming he had achieved peace in our time.

What he really had done was sell out Czechoslovakia for a promise from Hitler that there would be no more war, and Neville Chamberlain's name has become synonymous with appeasement ever since. Well, my generation, the me generation of the 60s, who so self-righteously protested the Vietnam War, derisively referred to as peaceniks we were, we carried banners that exclaimed peace in Vietnam and proclaimed that peace had finally come to Vietnam when our troops pulled out in 1975. And as we turned our backs on Vietnam and the hundreds of thousands of those who helped us, anything but peace ensued.

Millions were butchered in reprisal in both Vietnam and Laos, which was renamed Kampuchea when the Communists took over there, too. In fact, the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea became known as the Killing Fields because so many millions of Laotians were slaughtered in the re-education camps under Pol Pot. Peace, indeed. Well, it becomes apparent that the peace movement of the 60s had a very selective agenda for peace, that Marxist-Communist forces might have their way in war and violence in Southeast Asia, and that the peace of the grave might settle over the killing fields of Laos.

In every generation, hope springs eternal, and naive and well-meaning people seem to get a glazed look in their eyes and lose all contact with reason and begin protesting for peace, and sometimes protesting, ironically, very violently, wishing and hoping with all their might that they will finally get it right, and all mankind will see the justice of their cause, lay down their arms, join their hands and sing kumbaya.

But in the end, we are far more like Charlie Brown, who, when promised by Lucy that she'll hold the football for him to place kick this time, well, we find that she pulls it away at the last minute again, and thwomp, down goes Charlie Brown. In reality, the Bible never promises or sanctions the kind of peace between the nations that characterizes this kind of mindset. It is a naive misreading of the Bible to assume that God either wants or allows unrelenting peace between the nations.

No, from the very beginning, when Adam and Eve fell in the garden, God cursed them and the whole earth, promising that there would be enmity, that is hatred, between you, that is the serpent, and her offspring, that is Eve's children. Us! In fact, so certain and irrevocable was this curse that brings hatred and alienation, that the two very first sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, were embroiled in hatred, such that Cain murdered Abel. Very few people today take seriously this and other texts. Even Jesus promised that wars and rumors of wars would characterize the period that we are living in even now.

Peace between the nations as an ideal to be striven after and achieved in our own day is a fool's errand. In fact, such a mindset can produce just the opposite of what it intends. Neville Chamberlain is a case in point. His craven peace at any price appeasement of Hitler, rather than bringing peace, only emboldened his aggression into Poland, plunging the world into war. And in more recent times, former President Jimmy Carter, many of you remember him.

He exemplifies the naivete and danger of this peace at any price mindset. Jimmy Carter is the man who will be known to history as the president who sacrificed Iran through the radical Muslim revolution in 1979, where the Ayatollah Khomeini returned triumphantly from exile, toppling the Shah of Iran and installing a radical Shiite Muslim theocracy in its place. Murder, blood, many lives, radical mullahs safely ensconced in power into Tehran. It is certain that thousands of men and women have done and will die in thousands of places because they have promised jihad until the end of time.

And Carter, like so many other naive and sentimental people, failed to realize the times and seasons to unsheathe the sword. Do you remember the 1960s hit song, Turn, Turn, Turn by the Birds? The lyrics are taken directly from the Bible, from the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, and it was considered a peace song since it concludes with the words, a time to love, a time to hate, a time for war, and a time for peace.

The emphasis was on peace, of course, although the song never gets into the fact that the whole point of balancing these opposites in the Bible, love and hate, peace and war, was to present the reader with a situation of using God-given wisdom to determine which time was the right time to mourn or dance, to keep or cast away, to make war or peace. There are times for war. There are times for peace. Biblical wisdom is the gift from God that helps the godly ruler, oh, in particular, right, helps the godly ruler decide which time this particular day is.

But Carter had only one button on his control panel, the peace button, and he pressed it and pressed it and pressed it, didn't he? I find it very ironic that the man who was responsible for the unchecked violence and spread of radical Islam in the world, Jimmy Carter, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. It goes to show that even the Nobel Prize Committee is taken by the naive, sentimental notion of peace that only traps a fallen world into an endless cycle of war, misery, despair, and suffering.

Oh, and as long as the world follows men like Jimmy Carter and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, men will continue to cry, peace, peace, but there will be no peace. The crucial thing to keep in mind in all of this is that the Bible nowhere guarantees or encourages the kind of naive, sentimental, peace-at-any-price mentality that has so overwhelmed the world and its thinking. The Miss USA contestant may stare blankly into the TV camera and exude, my wish for mankind is for world peace.

But the Christian should have his head squarely on his shoulders and know to his toenails that there is a season, a time for love, a time for hate, a time for war, and a time for peace. Well, secondly, the second place we long for peace, the human heart longs for peace with his neighbor and his friend and his relatives. Our Savior himself commanded us to love thy neighbor as thyself, and I am expected to obey this command and conform my life to its dictates, right? How easy this is in the pronouncement, but how difficult this is in the fulfillment.

Jesus never lived next door to a neighbor who played rap music at full volume at 11 p.m. at night. Jesus never had a neighbor who took the liberty of cutting down your whole apple tree because a branch grew over his property line and dropped apples into his yard. I have members in my congregation for whom these actual situations exist. In other words, hostility and alienation exist not only between neighboring peoples, but also between people who are your neighbors. This includes our workmates and relatives, too.

Personally, I remember working in my 20s with a subordinate who wanted my job and salary and would stop at nothing, including lying and cheating to get it. Several times I almost lost my Christian demeanor to beat the crap out of that person. Well, how do you respond to such a neighbor? Additionally, we find alienation and hostility in our most intimate of relationships, that is, our marriages and families. Untold, grief and suffering have been inflicted over the centuries as husbands brutalize and dominate their wives.

Wives harp and nag their husbands. Both spouses chipping away at one another's self-worth. Children are abused and neglected, ignored and shuttled from foster home to foster home, and they grow up never knowing what love is or what a secure mother or father-to-parent nuclear home might look like. Divorce rates soar, and the church in particular seems unable to do anything to alleviate the situation. How many men and women live and die in silent despair in anguish because they do not know how to overcome the alienation that exists in their personal relationships?

I'm reminded of the life of one of the foremost advocates of peace in my generation, John Lennon. Perhaps you remember his song, Give Peace a Chance. And of course, the refrain says, all we are saying is give peace a chance. Oh, how sentimental and genuine this sounds. On the surface, John Lennon, such a guru of peace and light, all he wanted was to see war end and peace reign among the nations.

Who among the Beatles was more troubled, though, when you look closely, whose life was filled with more alienation and turmoil than John Lennon's? His own heart was in a constant state of trouble and anxiety. He was divorced and alienated from his first wife, Cynthia, and from his only son, Julian. His relationship with Yoko Ono was single-handedly responsible for the breakup of the Beatles. In fact, observe how he died violently at the hand of an assassin who shot him to impress yet another celebrity.

John Lennon, of all men, should have given peace a chance to rule in his own heart and life. Instead, he was a hypocrite of the first order, prescribing peace in the world for all of us, chiding us all for our lack of peace, when his own heart was a cesspool of hatred and strife. The human heart longs for and aches for peace between brothers, but is unable to find it. If I had a magic wand, I would wave it over the personal lives of every American so that he or she might learn to love thy neighbor as thyself. But alas, this is not to be either.

The curse of God under our first father Adam guarantees that there will be enmity, that is hatred, between one seed and another, and that not only will Cain murder Abel, but even our hatred will be as murder, even as Jesus declared to us in the Sermon on the Mount, you have heard it said to those of old, you shall not murder, but I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to the judgment." Unquote. Right? Hatred is murder, though not carried to the logical extremity, but the root and seed of war lurks there, nevertheless. The third area where the human heart longs for peace is in his own soul.

The human heart longs for peace in his own soul. The place where all this starts is the individual human soul. If there's no peace here, there will be no peace there, that is on the outside, with neighbor or nation. Man is alienated from himself, from his own nature and being as it was created in fullness and beauty in the Garden of Eden. Well, if that's the case, what hope is there for any sense of peace in the world?

People commit suicide because life becomes impossible within their own souls. A man cannot live in his own skin. He's alienated from himself. Well, if I am so in conflict with myself, with my own soul, how can I be expected to be at peace with the outside world? Oh, one of the great weaknesses of the human condition is the tendency to project, that is, to attribute to others what is true of us.

Therefore, if I am suspicious of my own motives and intentions, I will project the same suspicion onto others around me. Oh, dear listener, we find this to be the case with even the most peaceful of men and their agendas. One of my favorite examples is the guru of peace, Mahatma Gandhi. Now, when you watch the movie Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal, when you watch the movie or listen to the biographies of Gandhi, you get the impression that he was this peaceful, meditative yogi that had reached nirvana.

But when you talk to his children and those who were close to him, you find that Mahatma Gandhi had an outward persona of peace and love. He was actually a surly, egotistical son of a gun who was mean, selfish, and cruel to all of those around him. His wife was a brow-beaten woman, someone who caused the modern feminist wood take up, and his children grew up to hate him. And they saw a side of him that the press and the outside world never did. Gandhi was a man who was devoid of peace in his soul, though he prescribed peace for every soul with whom he came in contact.

Hypocrisy is not a fault limited to Christianity alone, dear listener. What are we to make of all of this? If this is the case, that there never will be peace among the nations or with one another or in our own soul, well, barring a miracle, then what are we to do as those who desire true peace? Well, this brings us to our source of true peace. We're not left hopeless.

We're not left without remedy, dear listener. What is that remedy? Number one, the first order of peace in the affairs of mankind is peace with God. This cannot be overstressed. The first order of peace in the affairs of mankind is peace with God.

Here's the beginning, middle, and end of true peace. We are at one with God and one another in the Garden of Eden prior to man's rebellion. We were at peace with God. But Adam's sin plunged him and all of us into a state that the Bible calls alienation. That is where there's separation, hostility, and hatred between the parties alienated.

And Paul describes it in part as the natural condition of our hearts and minds, where, although you may not even be aware of it and may even resent my telling you that your default setting is one of hatred and hostility towards God. But that is what the Bible indicates, not me. For example, Paul says in Romans 8, the mind that is set on the flesh, that is your natural default setting of human nature, the mind that is set on the flesh, Paul says, is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law. Indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God, unquote.

And because this is the case, we are naturally alienated from God. Paul warns us again and again that we are, as he says, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in us due to our hardness of heart, unquote. Well, owing to this alienated state from our creator and sustainer, is it any wonder that all descends into chaos and anarchy? Because we are alienated from God and at war with him, we are alienated from our true integrated self, our immediate human family, and between nation, tribe, and people.

And until the alienation from God is taken away and our bond and fellowship with God restored, there will always be the fallout from the original alienation in hostility, suspicion, and conflict with one another. There is no escaping it and merely rising up against this notion and shaking a fist at the sky, determined that this time we'll get it right, will only confirm you in your present rebellion against God and your hatred of him. There's no escaping without deliverance from the outside. We are like the man trapped in quicksand who proudly determines to struggle out of his condition.

But, of course, the harder you struggle in quicksand, the farther and faster you sink into it until the very crown of your head bubbles and engulfed and all that is left of you are those few passing bubbles. So it is with all of those who presume to find peace for themselves and the world by their own efforts. Their very alienated condition guarantees that they will fail and sink further into the quicksand of hostility, alienation, and warfare. How then are we to be reconciled to God? That brings up point number two.

We are reconciled to God through his Son, Jesus Christ. One of the inestimable benefits of redemption in Christ is reconciliation with God the Father. Reconciliation, what a beautiful word. Reconciliation means that the hostility and alienation that used to separate two parties is now taken away, and love and peace now bind them together. Christ's death upon the cross satisfied the Father for the sin that separated you and me from God.

While believing in faith that this was done for you and that no effort or work of your own could have possibly reconciled you to God, this reconciliation is yours. Dear listener, there is no more blessed gift to give and receive at this Christmas time than the gift of true peace that begins with reconciled enemies, you and God. And it is my fondest wish for you this day that what Paul said that the Colossians might be true of you. He said, you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has not reconciled in his body of flesh by his death. Unquote.

If you have ever been reconciled with a friend or relative, oh, you know the blessedness of that reconciliation. Multiply this manifold times with God. Christ labors to make you just and right before God were successful. This, the Bible calls justification and it has brought you peace. As Paul says in Romans chapter five, therefore, since we have been justified, justified, excuse me, by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Peace with God. True peace works from the top down. If you have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, then your other relationships will reorder themselves according to it. Paul describes the consequences of this reconciliation for Christians when he tells the Thessalonians, you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another for that indeed is what you are doing. Oh, the third thing indeed that brings peace, true genuine peace.

Number three, God himself will bring true peace upon the earth at the end of time. Oh, when we pray in the Lord's prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are looking forward to the day when God himself will consummate his kingdom in its fullness. And this he will do when Christ returns to bring an end to time and the world as we know it. Only then will there be true, complete and utter thorough peace.

The kind of peace seen by the prophet Isaiah, where he says in Isaiah 11, the wolf shall lie down with the lamb and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra and the weaned child shall put his hand on the otter's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, unquote. The kind of peace of which the Bible speaks is shalom peace, which far transcends our Western notion of peace.

We conceive of peace as an absence of war, whereas the Bible conceives of peace as shalom, where the entire creation is reconciled to its creator, the God of the Bible. With shalom, we thrive in health and strength and prosperity. With shalom, our work is productive and death, disease, and war are banished from the realm. This is the sense of biblical shalom. This is the kind of peace that is in store for those with faith in Christ who has reconciled us to God.

And there's only those who have been thus reconciled to God who will experience this peace, right? Ah, we hear from the angels, peace on earth among those with whom he is pleased. The very context of this verse is that peace has come to earth in the baby Jesus who will reconcile men to God, and that that peace is existent among those with whom God is pleased, that is, those who receive that reconciliation of Christ by faith. All others remain alienated and enemies of God outside of Christ. No Christ, no peace, dear listener.

But if you know Christ, you know peace. Oh, Christians have known this peace from the birth of the church, and you too can know the peace of God that transcends understanding so that no hostility or war or alienation that the world can throw at you harms you. True peace on earth can be had for faith in Christ. A Christian, as he matures in his growth of discipleship, develops a spiritual poise that helps keep his head in the turbulent, strife-ridden world.

He is reconciled in the first place with a God who loves him and made him, and the promise of the Bible has come true for him, that is, God will dwell with him, and he will be God's own, and God himself will be with him as his God, unquote. Oh, dear listener, at Christmas, what greater joy can there be? And additionally, that believer is now equipped to bring peace to others around him, preaching reconciliation in Christ and living a life of love. He follows the Apostles' exhortation from Hebrews, which says, Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no man will see the Lord.

Therefore, if this is the case, oh listener, make this Christmas when you find true peace to your very soul. The world's peace is a fool's gold and an illusion. You will only find the peace of Cain, the peace of the grave in death, and even then you will one day face the hostility and alienation of the life beyond. Only in the one whose life and birth we celebrate at Christmas will you find true peace, Jesus Christ. And I exhort you to it in this day, and pray that you might be one of those who receive this reconciliation and peace in Jesus Christ.

And God will thus be pleased with you, and of you it may therefore be said, peace on earth among those, that is you, with whom he is pleased. This has been Pastor David Bassett, New Geneva, with a moment of truth. We meet for holy worship on Sundays at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Come and join us. Call us at area code 208-523-0196. 208-523-0196.