Transcript

Shelby Abbott [00:00:00]: Welcome to the Connecting Podcast with Paul Tripp. My name is Shelby Abbott, and this podcast exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life. So here we are working our way through The Beatitudes. Why don't I just go ahead and start by reading the Beatitudes again?

Paul Tripp [00:00:18]: Well, let's talk about this for a minute. First of all, I just think we need to talk about the fact that it is just so much fun and such a blessing that we get to do this.

Shelby [00:00:26]: Oh, yes. It really is.

Paul [00:00:29]: That this is our employment. I mean, that's just craziness that we get to go through these riches. First, we get to be blessed by them and then, we get to bless others with them. And you know, really focusing in on these new podcasts on the fact that life in this broken, fallen world is hard.

[00:00:56]: The unexpected, unwanted things will enter your door. You will be misunderstood and mistreated because of your faith. Your faith isn't reinforced anywhere in the culture and so, how do you live a vibrant, hopeful, joyful, courageous Christian life in this world?

[00:01:21]: And we've decided to root that in The Sermon on the Mount and if you get anything in The Sermon on the Mount right away, it's that character counts because it just starts with character. So let's read The Beatitudes again.

Shelby [00:01:38]: Yes, this is all about the heart. So, this is Matthew 5. We'll start at verse one.

¹Seeing the crowds, He went up on the mountain, and when He sat down, His disciples came to Him.

²And He opened His mouth and taught them, saying:
³Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
⁵Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
⁶Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
⁷Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
⁸Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
⁹Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
¹⁰Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
¹¹Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on My account.¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

I'll stop there.

Paul [00:02:41]: So we're looking today at "blessed are the peacemakers" and I think it's really so important for us just to humbly confess, peace is hard for us. You can see this globally. In my lifetime, at least, there's never been not just a decade, but a year, where the world has completely been at peace.

[00:03:19]: We live in a world that seems always to be at war. If you take it back to our national situation, our political scene is just at this moment, it's just war. It's so discouraging. If you take it even into the church, the church is not free of battles and war, and it just seems like peace is impossible for us.

[00:03:48]: I think of Luella and me. I wish I could say that we are at a place in our marriage where it's just constant peace, but that's not true. And so, you’ve got to face The Beatitudes and you have to embrace the impossibility of what Jesus is saying is the blessed way of living. You can't approach The Beatitudes and say, "Okay, check that off. Yes, I got that."

Shelby [00:04:21]: Yes. It's not a checklist, yes.

Paul [00:04:22]: Because if you look into the mirror of "blessed are the peacemakers", you won't see a peacemaker. You'll see somebody that is given to some form of war-making that's more natural for us. Where does that come from?

[04:45] We see Genesis 3. I mean, after the sin of Adam and Eve, they're accusing one another and it always blows my mind how dark this gets quickly because the first generation then after them, you have sibling homicide. I mean, a brother killing a brother. It got pretty dark pretty quick, and that's been recorded and preserved for us as a massive warning to us. We're not okay.

[00:05:20]: I don't get along with people as well as I should. I'm irritated too easily. I want my way too often and so, the part of the blessing of The Beatitudes that drives us to our knees to say, "God, help me. I'm so far away from this." You say, "Well, I'm sure I am well." Are you a parent?

Shelby [00:05:47]: Yes, you don't have to train a kid to be a war-maker, to embrace confrontation. You have to train them to be peaceful.

Paul [00:05:55]: Well, you don't have to train yourself to be angry at all.

Shelby [00:05:57]: Yes, exactly.

Paul [00:05:58]: And you know, I always get tickled at couples who say, "We've never had a fight in our entire marriage," and I just think, "Come on, either you're comatose or you're just delusional because it's just not."

Shelby [00:06:18]: And this is coming from a counselor. You've seen it all.

Paul [00:06:21]: It's just not true and one of the things that did sober me, in my years of being everyday with people in my office is the degree of human anger. We're angry people. Some of us, that's more apparent. Others, it's more subtle. Some of us, it's all the time. Others of us, it's once in a while, but it's, it's there. There's a couple things I want to do, Shelby, is I want to look real specifically at things that are in the way of peace.

Shelby [00:07:03]: Like practical things that we put in the way of being peacemakers.

Paul [00:07:09]: Well, envy is in the way of peace because when I look at you with envy, I'm mad that you have something that I would like to have and I don't have it. That's not a loving way of looking at another human being.

Shelby [00:07:31]: It's vile, yes, when you break it down like that.

Paul [00:07:34]: And there's a lot of envy in us still, where we find it hard to celebrate God's blessing in somebody else's life. It's not just envy believers, you can envy anybody. Maybe you're a believer and you're struggling financially as a believer, and you're struggling with envying your neighbor who just seems to have...

Shelby [00:08:16]: Flourishing all the time.

Paul [00:08:17]: Yes, and just have it all. Well, that's Psalm 73, where David said him of the arrogant, he says, "I was like a brute beast," you know, just growling to yourself. Envy crushes peace. It just does.

Shelby [00:08:34]: It does. It wants for the badness of other people so that you could feel good about yourself.

Paul [00:08:39]: It turns humanity from a community of love to a competition. It's just a sad thing. Obviously, anger does when you view people as somehow, some way, being in your way. Well, that's the guy driving in front of you. We all know how tragic road rage is or it's somebody in the line in front of you that's taking too much time or somebody who doesn't respect you in the way you think you deserve respect or somebody took the cookie off the plate that you had your eyes on or a child who gives you lip.

[00:09:28]: You can't want peace with somebody you're angry at. You want that person out of your way. You want them out of your life. You want them punished, but the good things you would want for them are part of what wanting peace is about...

[00:09:46]: Because think of what one of the original words for peace is the word "shalom" in the Old Testament. "Shalom" is a word for peace, but it means everything in its rightful place, doing what it was meant to do. It's a blessing. Well, am I angry? That's what I want. Bitterness. Wow, you can't be keeping score.

Shelby [00:10:12]: Yes, can you explain kind of maybe what the difference between envy and anger is in comparison to bitterness because it is different, but it can feel subtle.

Paul [00:10:21]: Bitterness is anger that's aged. It's like wine. It doesn't get better; it gets worse and so, I now carry this with me. Bitterness is confessing your sin to myself.

Shelby [00:10:42]:: Confessing your sin to myself. Okay, got it, yes.

Paul [00:10:44]: I'm called to confess my sin, but I'm not called to confess your sin. It's confessing your sin to myself and I keep this list; and it skews the way I think of you. I think of you at your worst instead of your best and so, I'm expecting the worst.

[00:11:07]: And so, guess what will happen? I will find more reasons to be bitter against you. What forgiveness does is it frees me, it allows me to look at you at your best, to remember how blessed I am by your life, to remember your gifts and your graces. Bitterness is a cancer that just destroys peace and it's always more damaging to the person who's being bitter than it is to the person you're bitter against.

Shelby [00:11:38]: Yes, that's a helpful reminder to make sure we put in front of our faces because a lot of times, people relish bitterness and it makes them feel like things are good inside. We get that buzz, kind of what you were talking about before, but it's rotting us out from the inside. It's not helping us at all.

Paul [00:11:56]: The fear control dynamic also crushes peace. When I live a fear-oriented life where I'm expecting life to be against me, so I'm not expecting good things. I'm expecting if I am vulnerable with you, you'll hurt me. If I go here, something bad will happen and so, what results from that is I want control.

[00:12:26]: I want to control you, so I can make sure you won't hurt me. I want to control situations to make sure I can't be hurt by them. One thing that's hit me again in counseling is most controlling men I met were the most fearful.

[00:12:47]: Well, if I am working to control you, I'm not thinking about peace with you. All I care is you are in the place that I want you to be, so that you don't hurt me and that way of living is just a God forgetful way of living. I can live without fear because the One who rules the universe is in me and for me and with me.

[00:13:20]: Impatience. I wish I could say I'm a patient person, but I'm not. I wake up every morning with an agenda. I'm project-oriented. I don't like things in my way. If I go to Reading Terminal Market, I know exactly how many minutes I need to be in there and that's a bad thing because it does put me in the center of my world and looks at people as being potentially in my way.

Shelby [00:13:54]: Yes, people are obstacles.

Paul [00:13:57]: I had a dear friend say to me who watched me at a conference, he says, "When people greet you, you don't look in their eyes and you don't stop moving because you're thinking of the next thing." That's pretty humiliating to hear, but I needed to hear it because it was true.

Shelby [00:14:15]: It's a good word for a friend.

Paul [00:14:19]: Selfishness. Selfishness is another thing that crushes peace. It's reducing the world down to my wants, my needs, my feelings, and I don't care if I have unity and peace with you. I just want what I want and if you can help me deliver it, I'll be nice to you. If you don't, I don't want you in my life.

[00:14:44]: Now, envy, anger, bitterness, fear of control, impatience, selfishness — I don't think any of us could say these are absolutely out of our lives. You may look at this, let's say some of these things are more of a struggle for you than others, but they're all there in some form and so, we have obstacles in our heart from the blessed life of peacemaking. So that's a diagnostic. Well, if you have a diagnostic, what you want to hear then is the cure.

Shelby [00:15:27]: Yes, how do we get on the solution side of this?

Paul [00:15:30]: And the cure is this: lasting horizontal peace requires vertical peace. It's peace with God that is the means by which I can have peace with you and there's a verse that just gets at that. Isaiah 26:3.

³You keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on You,
because he trusts in You.

[00:16:08]: So when my mind is stayed on the Lord, that means I'm aware of His presence, His promises, His grace, the fact that He rules over all things for the sake of His children, that He has power to do for me what I could not do for myself, that He has covenantly committed Himself to meet every one of my needs, I don't fear life. I don't need to envy. I need to put myself first.

Shelby [00:16:42]: You're not impatient with others.

Paul [00:16:44]: I don't have to be bitter. And he says, "I have peace because I trust this One." So I think this is one of the primary importance of a morning quiet time devotional because you remind yourself of who God is and you recommit to placing your life in His hands, entrusting yourself to the Lord.

Shelby [00:17:15]: It sets the trajectory for the rest of your day.

Paul [00:17:18]: And the fact that God will keep me in peace when my mind is stayed on Him and when I trust in Him is the platform where I can be at peace with you. I don't go into life full of self-oriented needs. I don't have to worry about how much God has blessed you because I know His blessings are infinite.

[00:17:42]: I don't have to worry about controlling things because He is in perfect control all the time in every way. I don't have to worry about the wrongs that are done to me because He's a God of justice. He says, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord."

[00:17:58]: I know that Jesus came so that I would not live for me. That's not liberating, that's bondage. Jesus came to free me from me. All that stuff is a beautiful platform of peace. All that is to say even though you have obstacles in your heart, you can be a peacemaker.

[00:18:23]: Let me read the verse again.

³You [God] keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed on You,
because he trusts in You.

[00:18:36]: You want to be a peacemaker? Start with entrusting yourself in the hands of God. Start by believing His promises. Start by remembering His presence. Start by saying if God is who He is and His promises are true, everything's going to be all right.

Shelby [00:19:00]: Yes, fresh reminder everyday. Yes. Needed that. That's great.

Paul [00:19:04]: Be at peace.