Daily Devotional
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."
Matthew 5:9
Jesus does not bless peacekeepers. He blesses peacemakers. The difference is not subtle. A peacekeeper wants the noise to stop. They say whatever is necessary to quiet the room and call it peace. But it is not peace – it is deferred conflict, held together with social duct tape until the pressure builds enough to break through again. A peacemaker does the harder thing: they enter the mess, address the root, absorb some of the cost, and move toward the conflict rather than away from it.
Daniel Doriani traces the connection between meekness and peacemaking with precision: the meek stop promoting themselves, stop grasping for privileges and recognition. When they stop demanding, peace tends to emerge – because most strife is driven by self-assertion. Someone is demanding to be right. Someone is insisting on recognition. Someone is requiring that the other person feel the full weight of what they did. Meekness dismantles the mechanism. When you stop insisting on your own vindication, you become available for reconciliation.
The sermon made a point worth sitting with: the supreme peacemaking is the proclamation of the gospel. The gospel is not merely a message about personal peace with God, though it is that. It is the only message in the world that addresses the root cause of all conflict – the broken relationship between human beings and God. Every other approach to peace is managing symptoms. Only the gospel addresses the disease. And so when you carry the gospel into a broken relationship, a divided community, a fractured family, you are participating in the very work of God.
The promise here is extraordinary: peacemakers will be called sons of God. In the Semitic idiom, sons of God means those who share God’s character – those who look like their Father. And God is the ultimate peacemaker. Colossians 1:20 says he made peace by the blood of his cross. When you do the hard work of reconciliation – in your family, in this church, in your neighborhood – you are bearing the family resemblance. You look like your Father.
Today's Challenge
Is there a conflict in your life right now where you have been keeping peace rather than making it? What would one step toward actual peacemaking look like this week?
Prayer
Father, you made peace at enormous cost -- through the blood of your Son's cross. Forgive me for the conflicts I have been managing rather than addressing, avoiding rather than entering. Give me the meekness that stops demanding and the courage that moves toward hard things. Make me a son or daughter who looks like you. In Jesus' name, Amen.
