One way to define peace is responding to God’s reconciling acts in our lives.This includes God at work in all aspects of creation.

Four Spiritual Truths

• 1. God is love. Pretty profound when you wrap your head around it. God equals love. If we experience love, we know a bit of God, even if we don’t even recognize it. We were made like God—in God’s image. So we’re made to love, like God. God wants us to live at peace with our Maker, our world, and with each other.
• 2. Sin gets between us and God. When we try to run our own lives apart from God, suffering, greed, violence, abuse and broken relationships happen. Sin can be individual, or part of a larger system.When we follow Jesus we’re free from the power of sin.
• 3. Jesus came to the world to defeat sin and the powers of evil and died on the cross for all our sins. God stood up to the forces of idolatry, materialism and violence. He confronted those powers with truth and love and ultimate victory over death through the resurrection of Jesus. He taught us to love our enemies and overcome evil with good.That same power that raised Jesus from the dead helps us overcome our tendency to sin.That power also helps us to confront the powers of sin and death in this world.
• 4. Following Jesus every day in our lives means all of the stuff you usually think of–doing good and being good, but also loving our enemies, sharing possessions, caring for the environment and giving loyalty to Jesus above nation, class or ethnic group.
• Prayer: God, I have sinned by turning away from you and trying to run my own life. Separated from your love, I am shaped by the powers of greed, lust, and violence that bring chaos to the world. Forgive my sin and let me start anew. Thank-you for your Son Jesus , who defeated Satan and brought the kingdom of God to reality. Give me power to live like Jesus--loving the enemy, sharing possessions, serving others, caring for creation and speaking Good News of your salvation. I commit myself to the church as the body of Christ. I give allegiance to Jesus and his way of forgiveness above every other loyalty. Amen.

You can do this:

Read Matthew 5-7 -- The Sermon on the Mount.
You can read this online at www.lifeofchrist.com/teachings/sermons/mount/default.asp

In a perfect, peaceful world, everyone would live according to these verses. Sometimes we think that this sermon is only describing God’s kingdom to come.But it can be a sign of God’s kingdom on earth, if we begin to really live these verses.

• 1. How does Jesus turn around our normal ways of relating to others?
• 2. How would everything be “the best it can be” if we seriously considered the Sermon on the Mount as a blueprint for our lives?

Choose one section or one verse from these chapters and evaluate every interaction you have this week in light of that section.

Links:

• Jesus Online - a poem