Jesus came in to the world to bring PEACE.
Confessing one of my guilty pleasures to you, I’ve started watching past seasons of “The Amazing Race” with my son—and I find myself strangely hooked by this show. Teams of two are given assignments in countries all over the world, racing to complete tasks and move on to the next leg of the race. The last place finisher in each round is eliminated. We recently watched the season finale from 2015, and at the end I could feel my heart pounding as the last teams sprinted to the finish line. When my son checked his Fitbit, it showed an increasingly elevating heartrate throughout the entire episode. I wasn’t even competing, and yet I, too, was stressed and frazzled just watching the teams compete!
I hate the feeling of being rushed. I’ll do almost anything to avoid it. Because I don’t do well in the intense pressure of an approaching deadline, I work far in advance to be ready. It’s just not restful—“peaceful”—when I feel pressured and pushed and hurried along.
We often think of peace as the opposite of war. So when we say that Jesus came into the world to bring peace, we immediately interpret that to mean wars will cease. While such a peace is definitely true, there is much more. In anything that causes us anxiety, worry, fear, concern, or grief, Jesus came to bring us His peace. He tells us that He is not giving us a worldly peace. Instead, Jesus ushers in a new Kingdom, one in which we are closely and intimately connected with God and where God’s plans, God’s values, and God’s priorities prevail.
In Matthew 11:28 Jesus invites all of us, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” It’s not the kind of rest that gives you more energy to run (or watch) “The Amazing Race.” It’s so much more! It’s the kind of rest that acknowledges the pain of our losses and remembers the brokenness of our spirits and yet still says, “In Jesus I have everything I need.” The craziness of the world (and it’s pretty crazy right now, that’s for sure!) melts away as we remember that in Jesus, the Prince of Peace, we have the rest and comfort and wholeness that we need to live each day.