Becoming Instruments Of God’s Peace

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father … encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.
2 Thessalonians 2:16-17

Stories abound of people who, during their final hours on earth, became the givers rather than the recipients of consolation. Even the apostle Paul, imprisoned and on trial for his life, could offer words of encouragement in his letters to the churches. His secret? The “living love of God.” Charles Spurgeon explains.

WALK WITH CHARLES SPURGEON
“Union with the risen Lord is a consolation of the most abiding order: it is, in fact, everlasting. Let sickness prostrate us; have we not seen hundreds of believers as happy in the weakness of disease as they would have been in the strength of hale and blooming health? Let death’s arrows pierce us to the heart; our comfort dies not, for have not our ears often heard the songs of saints as they have rejoiced because the living love of God was shed abroad in their hearts in dying moments?

“Yes, a sense of acceptance in the Beloved is an everlasting consolation. Moreover, the Christian has a conviction of this security.

“Whatever may occur in providence, whatever onslaughts there may be of inward corruption or outward temptation, he is safely bound up with the person and work of Jesus. Is not this a source of consolation, overflowing and delightful?”

WALK CLOSER TO GOD
Francis of Assisi, thirteenth-century saint, perhaps said it best:

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy 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, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”