Bible Verse: God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God. Matthew 5:9, NLT
Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:1-12
We’ve come to the end of another Advent season. We’ve reflected on God’s gifts of hope, faith, joy, and peace. But what gift could we give the world as we embark on a new year?
Matthew records the famous teaching and inaugural address of Jesus we know as the Sermon on the Mount. History has had many defining moments shaped through game-changing writings and speeches, including Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” sermon, and Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches.”
The Beatitudes were that kind of moment. Jesus declared an upside-down Kingdom for a messed-up world and invited His followers into a life of radical faith. Inside that sermon was a call to be a people of peace.
The theme of peace or “shalom” flows through the Bible. Michael Wilkins says peace “…indicates completeness and wholeness in every area of life, including one’s relationship with God, neighbours, and nations.” He continues, “Making peace, therefore, has messianic overtones (cf. “Prince of Peace” in Isa 9:6–7), and the true peacemakers are those who wait and work for God, who makes whole the division created by humans.”¹
So, what gift can we bring to the world this next year? What would it look like if Jesus-followers everywhere took up the Matthew 5:9 challenge and became peace-filled peacemakers in 2024?
Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) was a Dutch Jewish writer and diarist. During World War II, she documented her spiritual and emotional journey in her diaries, offering profound reflections on love, faith, and human suffering. Tragically, she perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp, but her writings continue to inspire people around the world.
In her diary, she wrote: “Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”²
Let the Advent season end with the beginning of the dawning of a new breed of peacemakers ready to take Jesus’ words personally and seriously. The world might never be the same.
Prayer: Let’s pray and reflect on “The Prayer of Saint Francis”:
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.
O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.
Amen.
Reflection: How can I be a peaceful peacemaker in the new year? Make a resolution now to bring His healing, hope, and peace into your world.
¹ Michael J. Wilkins, Matthew, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2004), 209–210.
² An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943, trans. Arno Pomerans (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 185.
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