Luke 2:14 — Peace On Earth
Main Idea: Surrender your life to the God who extends everlasting peace and life to you.
PEACE WITH GOD IS POSSIBLE BECAUSE HE GIVES GRACE
• You do not have to avoid enough, pay enough, or do enough.
• He extends His loving favor to you because that’s who He is.
PEACE WITH GOD IS PRESENTED BECAUSE HE GAVE
HIMSELF
• He created, we abandoned. He came to rescue, we’re invited back.
• Your sin & failure is not greater than Jesus’ sacrifice of Himself.
PEACE WITH GOD IS PROCLAIMED BECAUSE HE WILL GIVE
ETERNAL LIFE
• Every person is offered the opportunity to join His Kingdom through surrendering our way & self-rule (“repentance”) so that we can embrace His forgiveness & rule (“belief in Jesus as Lord”).
• This is not a call to “do better” or “turn over a new leaf”, it is an invitation to live in Jesus’ accomplishment the rest of your life.
Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)
Well, it's been a little bit since I had to record a service. It takes me back to 2020, when my son was actually just first born, and we had to record some services.
Certainly, the scenery here is a little bit prettier than it was, even then, thankful for the Christmas tree, and it's got ornaments from my kids.
There's an ornament that I grew up with seeing on my grandmother's tree, some ornaments from my wife, and I just love the Christmas time and the Christmas season.
I was telling the Women's Christmas Party yesterday, the Christmas season is the only time of year that I know whatever store that I walk into, whatever mall that I am in, even at a gas station that I was at yesterday, I heard the Gospel proclaimed.
And the Gospel, of course, is the good news that though mankind has wandered away from the path of God, that we have all sinned, we have thought and said and done things that violate God's law and go against His character and His nature, God did not
abandon us to the consequences of our own actions, which is ultimately a life lived without Him, without His presence, and then an eternity without His life and joy and peace and love, simply existence without God in a place that the Bible calls
hell. God did not abandon us to that set of circumstances. Instead, 2,000 years ago, He came in the person of Jesus Christ, and that's what we celebrate every December.
And what a joy that is that I can hear about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world through hearing the song, Mary, Did You Know?
Even recorded by secular artists like CeeLo Green or Pentatonix, I can hear beautiful renditions of Oh Holy Night done by a variety of singers. But I think in particular, Carrie Underwood's version is one that is very popular with people these days.
2:11
Christmas Peace Message
And as we think about the Christmas season, as we think about why Jesus came, about the fact that He came to take away our sin, there's one verse that my attention gets drawn to during this time of year, and that is Luke 2 and verse 14.
Luke 2 14 says, Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to people he favors. Or as many of you, like I did, grew up on the King James, Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men.
And I want to focus just on that one thought for a few minutes this morning, peace on earth.
Have you ever had an argument with someone, whether it was your sibling, whether it was your spouse, or whether it was like a Facebook argument, and it just could never end?
Neither side felt any need to abandon their position and adopt the other person's position. And so, it was just in a deadlock, and there was no reconciliation. It was just endless battle with that other person.
Many of us have been in situations like that. Many of you maybe are still in an argument with someone, and it's lasted for a couple of years. You refuse to apologize.
They refuse to apologize. And so, it's just been in a deadlock. There's an unending fight.
3:38
Humanityʼs War with God
Well, the Bible tells us that we were born in a fight with God, where He has the way that He created us to live, which is living life with His character and with His love, and that's God's way.
And then we have our way, living in selfishness, unkindness, disrespect, and hatred. And can I tell you that divide is why Jesus came? Because we were headed for eternity without God, without goodness, love, life, or joy.
Jesus came so that the war with God would end, and so that we would surrender to Him and to His way. I'm going to read that verse one more time, in Luke 2 14, glory to God, in the highest heaven, and peace on earth to people He favors.
Would you pray with me? And then we'll just take a quick look at peace with God and what that means for you this Christmas. Dear Jesus, thank you for today.
Thank you that we are able to utilize the gift of technology to share your message all around the world. We love you, God, and we pray that you would even enlighten those today that do not currently have peace with you.
They have never surrendered the fight and they have never surrendered to you. God, I pray that today they would make that decision. I love you, Lord, and I pray this in your name.
Amen.
5:07
Peace Through Grace
So, I just have three short points today. Number one, peace with God is possible because he gives grace. Number two, peace with God is presented because he gave himself and peace with God is proclaimed because he will give eternal life.
So, he gives grace, he gave himself, and he will give eternal life. Let's look at these three points together. First, peace with God is possible because he gives grace.
I noticed there at the very end of that verse, it says, peace on earth to people he favors. Hear that phrase, those he favors.
We are reconciled to God, not because we earn our way back to him, but because he has given us a bridge across the chasm of our failures, Jesus himself.
You see, it's not just that we are alienated from God, and if we do enough good stuff, we can make our way back to him. The truth is, we do not need to avoid enough stuff to get back to God.
We don't have to pay enough money to get back to God, and we don't need to even do enough to make our way back to God. You see, the problem is not that we need new decisions or new habits.
We don't even need a new set of information to believe or to understand. We need a new nature. We need a new heart that who we are at our core is the problem.
It's not simply that if we had different habits, we would have peace with God. It's not that if we just knew more stuff about God, that we would have peace with God. Instead, what we need is a new heart given to us by God himself.
We need a new nature from the inside out. We need to be made new. And it is God's grace, His favor, His unearned favor, that gives us the ability to be able to have peace with God.
Scripture describes this difficulty like, can the leopard change his spots? To which the obvious answer is no. For a leopard, their patterns on their fur is just what they are, and they cannot change that.
And Scripture says that is the way that we were in our sin nature, that all of us were born at enmity with God, and we could not make that change of what our nature was.
But God can make that change of nature through what Jesus Christ has done, that our sins can be forgiven, that his Holy Spirit would come into our lives and make us new, not just new in habits or words or in the set of beliefs that we have, but he
can make us new in who we are, that we are transformed from the old nature to the new nature. And you might say, well, I don't know.
I've seen people that are Christians, and they seem to somewhat be the same type of person that they were before, or there's some similarities.
Well, I can tell you, even knowing our church family, there is a stark difference in someone that once had the old nature, as someone that did not know Christ as their Savior, and someone that does.
And I'm so thankful for the many testimonies that we have at our church. I can think of friends that talk about being cruel and biting and angry in how they dealt with others before.
But then after Christ, now they're able to show grace and have patience and forgiveness. People that used to have addictions, that once they accepted the Lord, they were freed from it.
And once they had turned, if you will, the keys of their life over to Jesus, he took the wheel and they were set free from addictions. People that used to be at odds with everyone, that now are friendly. They are reconciled to other people.
People that wanted nothing to do with others, that were changed to where they now genuinely care and love other people.
All of it is done, not just through turning over a new leaf, but instead, through being reconciled by God's changing of our nature.
Here, peace with God is possible because He gives grace, and He extends His loving favor to you, because that's who He is. You see, we can't change our nature. We can't change who we are on the inside, in our core.
But God can. But the flip side of that is that God extends His favor, He extends His grace, because that's His nature. That's who He is.
Peace with God is result of His love, not your perfection. He is good, and He is the rescuer. So He extends grace and offers rescue.
You don't have to earn who He is. He just is that. God wants to rescue.
He wants to love. He wants to forgive. You don't have to convince Him to do that.
It's His nature. Small illustration here. You could give me season tickets to the Denver Broncos.
You could get me a custom Self Broncos jersey. You could give me a football signed by John Elway. But none of those things would make me a Broncos fan.
That's just who I am. In the same way, you cannot possibly make God love or forgive or rescue you. That is simply who he is.
So we don't earn our way back to God. We need a new nature from God. It is his grace, his empowerment, his strength that changes us.
And you don't have to convince him to do that. It's what he wants to do.
11:17
Peace Through Sacrifice
Then secondly today, peace with God is presented because he gave himself. So we have peace with God because God made it possible through his grace. But then peace with God is presented because he gave himself.
You see, he created, and we abandoned him. He came to rescue, and now we are invited back. God does not begrudgingly save anyone.
He is eager to have a relationship with you. You don't have to convince him of your worth or wonder if he is willing to save you. He has already paid the price.
And that price was himself, his own life for yours. You see, your sin and failure is not greater than Jesus' sacrifice of himself. So many people think, I've done too much bad.
I've lived too much life apart from God. But the truth is, your greatest sins and failures, and all the reasons that you could give God of why it is too much to forgive you, the truth is that Jesus sacrificed his own life for you.
And all of your sin does not amount to being greater than Jesus' sacrifice. Peace with God came at an incredible cost. Our sin required legitimate payment.
But God's payment was far and away, over and above the largest debt that we could amass. I love Romans 834, which says, Who is the one that condemns? Christ Jesus is the one who died.
But even more, he has been raised. He is also at the right hand of God and intercedes for us. We sinned against a holy God, but that holy God came and paid the price of our sin and is now extending grace and forgiveness and transformation to you.
I love this quote from Richard Sips, who was a pastor in the 1500s. He said, there is more mercy in Christ than sin in us. Or there's a great song out by Matt Boswell and Matt Papa that says, our sins, they are men.
His mercy is more. God has more forgiveness than you have sin. His blood is of greater worth than all of the wickedness that you have ever participated in.
Jesus' forgiveness and sacrifice is greater. So don't believe the lie of Satan that you cannot be forgiven. Don't believe the lie that you are too far gone.
Whether you have never placed your faith in Christ or whether you have accepted Christ and you have fallen into sin, realize that there is always a Heavenly Father waiting for you to come back home, that as we confess our sins, he is faithful and
just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And so we can find grace in Jesus. So first today, peace with God is possible because he gives grace. We need a brand new nature, and God provides that because it's in his nature.
Peace with God is presented because he gave himself, and there is no one's sin that is greater than the sacrifice of Jesus.
14:35
Peace Through Eternal Life
And then lastly today, peace with God is proclaimed because he will give eternal life.
One of the most well-known verses in the world is, God loved the world in this way, that he gave his one and only son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life.
The promise from God's word is this, if you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, sorry, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, Scripture says you will be saved.
It says for whoever will call on the name of the Lord will be saved. And what a wonderful promise that that is. Scripture says here's how you can confess with your mouth.
Here's how you proclaim Jesus. In Acts 2.38, the Apostle Peter told the people gathered there at Jerusalem, at Pentecost, he told them, repent, that is, to turn your back on your way of life.
Turn your back on being in charge of your own life and turn to Jesus' Lordship. And then as a result of that, he says, be baptized. That's the way that we confess publicly to others what we believe in our heart.
And I want to encourage you, if you have never placed your faith in Jesus, you can do so today. You can confess Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead. Repenting from sin and turning to Jesus.
And then not today because we're meeting online, but we would love to have you follow the Lord in believers baptism that you would tell everyone else what you believe in your heart through being baptized.
Want to close with these couple of statements here.
Every person is offered the opportunity to join Jesus' kingdom through surrendering our way and our self rule, that's repentance, turning from our way, so that we can embrace his forgiveness and his rule. That's belief in Jesus as Lord.
That we say, I'm no longer in charge of my life. Jesus is the one that is in charge of my life.
And as you ask the Lord to save you, that you are aligning with Jesus' kingdom, that God who lives in the highest heaven and who gives grace, who was born that day in the city of David, a savior, Christ the Lord.
As you say, I believe in him and in his way, and I'm going to follow him. There is peace with God that is given to you. You don't have to earn your way back to him.
He has already extended all of the grace, all of the new life comes through him alone. The call to eternal life is not a call to do better or to turn over a new leaf. It is an invitation to live in Jesus' accomplishment the rest of your life.
You don't have to earn your way back. Jesus earned the way for you.
17:30
Choose Peace Today
I want to close with one illustration. You can see kind of behind me, sun's finally peeking through the clouds. And so even as that happens, I want you to think about light shining into your life, that maybe you have been at enmity with God.
You have been not walking his way. You haven't been obeying him. He hasn't been the ruler of your life.
But you can turn your life over to Jesus. If you have questions about that, I would love to have a conversation with you. My number is 509-771-7716.
You can call me even today. I would love to have a conversation with you about what it looks like to turn your life over to Jesus. I have one closing illustration, and then we'll be done for today.
When France and England were at war once, a French vessel had gone off on a long whaling voyage. When they came back, the crew was short on water, drinkable water, in their boat.
But they were near an English port, and they wanted to get water from that English port, but they were afraid that they would be taking prisoners for that war if they went to that port.
Some people in the port saw their signal of distress and sent word that they didn't need to be afraid, that the war was over and peace had been declared.
But they couldn't make the sailors on that whaling ship believe it, that the war was genuinely over and that they would be safe. So the sailors didn't dare to go into port, although they were out of water.
At last, they made up their minds that they better go in and surrender the cargo and their lives be surrendered to their enemies rather than perish at sea without drinkable water.
But when the whaling sailors got into the port, they found out that what they had been told was true, that peace had been declared.
There are great many people today who don't believe the glad tidings that peace has been made by Jesus Christ between God and man. But it is true. You can experience peace with God even today.
If you have never placed your faith in Christ, when I was 8 years old, it was December 1st, actually 2006, I'm going to celebrate 20 years of being a Christian, of being a professed believer in Jesus next year.
When I was 8 years old, I'd grown up in church, I knew the verses, I was 9 years old. I hadn't done any big sins or anything yet, but I had never personally placed my faith in Jesus.
And on that day, I realized that I, though knowing lots of religious stuff, though going through lots of religious motions, I had never turned my life over to Jesus.
I had never surrendered my life to the God who was putting forth forgiveness and peace to me. And that day, December 1st, I asked the Lord to forgive me, that He would be the one in charge of my life. That's a decision you can make even today.
If you have placed your faith in Christ, then I want to encourage you, today, walk in relationship with God. Act as though Jesus is still the one in charge of your life. Don't allow your own flesh or desires.
Don't allow others to supersede what the will of God is for your life. I want to encourage you today. You can have peace with God.
It doesn't come through your efforts or your nature. It comes through the nature and grace of God. It was bought because Jesus himself paid for it.
So there is no sin or failure that you have that is greater than Jesus. And then Jesus offers eternal life. That when we die, it is not the end.
Instead, we have a home forever with him. All of this is offered. Peace on earth to those that God favors.
You want to know if God favors you? Do you believe in Jesus? Have you turned your life over to him?
You can know absolutely that the favor of God rests on you. Today, will you choose peace with God that he is extending to you. Thanks for tuning in today.
I encourage you, sing through O Come All You Faithful. You can pull up a recording. It's on our YouTube, youtube.com/attbcessex.
And there's a version of O Come All You Faithful. One of my favorite versions personally, is hearing Bing Crosby sing that song. We had a CD grown up that had that on there.
And so I encourage you to listen to O Come All You Faithful. But thank you for tuning in today.
