Two thousand years ago the angels sang at Jesus’ birth, “and on earth, peace …”  But the world hasn’t got any better. Indeed, while peace is something we all long for, it is one thing the world does not have. So, where is the fulfilment of the angelic promise?

Before we charge the angels with false advertising, we need to read the full text of their song: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, among those whom he favors” (Luke 2:14). The angels were making a promise to a specific group – the people of God.

Over these last weeks we have been trekking through the Letter of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians. Today we come to his words in chapter 3:15: Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.

Broken relationships. Too often we ignore our deepest human problem – we are all self-focussed. Our relationships with God and with one another are broken. Jesus made it clear that the solution to the human condition, would require his death, for he would die the death we all deserve. It would be Jesus’ divine, costly work alone that could heal our relationship with God. What is more, once our relationship with God was restored, there would also be healing of the broken relationships across social and cultural, racial and national divides amongst his people. No wonder the angels sang: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, ‘shalom’, ‘peace’.

Indeed, in Colossians 3:11 we read: … there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all and in all. And in the following section, Paul goes on to write of the inner attitudes that we are to adopt as we relate to others. This includes ‘letting the peace of Christ rule our hearts’.

Referee. The context helps us to understand Paul’s meaning here when he speaks of peace. He is speaking about the inner peace that the Lord Jesus gives to his people, and also the attitude of peace that should now rule our minds and wills as we relate to others. In the flow of Paul’s writing about forgiving one another and loving one another, the peace of Christ is to be the referee. So when bitterness and love battle within us the peace of Christ is to win the day.

Now this doesn’t come easily, especially when we’ve been hurt by others. When we are dealing with injury and conflict, it’s hard to forgive and so make peace. Nevertheless, Paul is saying that God’s people are to be at the forefront of finding solutions to resolve tension and conflict. As Jesus himself said, we are to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9).

Bible. Furthermore, we need to know Christ, so that we will have his wisdom to bring into our conversations. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, Paul writes; Teach and admonish one another in all wisdom (Colossians 3:16).

Keeping the peace doesn’t mean simply sweeping our differences under the carpet, let alone putting on an artificial smile. In the 1992 Australian film, ‘Strictly Ballroom’, Scott, the central character refuses to dance the traditional ballroom steps. His mother is furious. ‘Put on a happy face’, she was told. But hiding our feelings isn’t the way to true peace. We need to find a way to express our feelings.

Furthermore, we are not at liberty to give one another a piece of our mind! Rather, we must bring our minds under the direction of the Lord’s mind, and the only way we can do this, is by coming to the Bible together.

And notice, we are to do this with all wisdom. Our coming to the Bible together is not to be an uninformed pooling of ignorance. We must work together at finding what the Bible means, rather than reading into it what we want it to mean. It’s a ministry all of us are to aim at. There is no place amongst God’s people for strong-willed, aggressive individuals insisting on their way. That creates division.

Song. And Paul continues: … with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. We often overlook Paul’s point here, that as we praise God, we are also instructing and exhorting one another. It’s one of the reasons our songs when we meet should be strong on Bible, and not insipid and repetitive. Even in our world of Covid restrictions, we can still reflect on the words. Singing Bible-based songs is an important way to build relationships.

And, there is something else. Gratitude to God. Whatever you do in word or deed, Paul writes, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him (Colossians 3:17).

Nothing brings about tension and division more than a discontented spirit. And a discontented spirit is an ungrateful spirit. To be thankful is to accept our situation in the loving providence of God. A thankful heart trusts God in every situation, and thankful people are always happy people.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts …, for it is to this that you were called… We begin to see that the promise of the angels’ song at Jesus’ birth was not fake news. Jesus has not only opened up the path to peace in our relationship with God, but also with one another as God’s people. Furthermore, we are now to let this peace of Christ within us become the referee or umpire in our relationships with others.

Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus says, “for they will be called the children of God”.

© John G. Mason

New – ‘An Anglican Understanding of the Bible’: https://anglicanconnection.com/gods-word-written-an-anglican-understanding-of-the-bible/

Coming January 2021 – Anglican Connection Online Conference
Details for the Anglican Connection January 2021 Online Conference will be released shortly.

Bitterness and anger are the playbook of life around us today – from the bedroom to the corridors of power, from social media to the unrestrained looting in the streets. How should we respond?
Back in 1979 the historian and social critic, Christopher Lasch, published The Culture of Narcissism: There he wrote, ‘Our society has made lasting friendships, love affairs and marriages, increasingly difficult to achieve. Social life has become more and more warlike and personal relationships have taken on the character of combat…’
Even though Lasch was writing some 40 years ago, his thesis is still relevant. Driven by changing and conflicting world-views, society today has become more and more divided. For centuries, the Judaeo-Christian world-view formed the social bond in the Western world. But these days the popular view is to throw God out. And because we are now adrift on the ocean of life without an agreed moral compass, persuasive voices appeal to our basic, albeit unthinking instincts. Profounder, wiser voices of experience that speak to the depths of our souls are drowned out.
Indeed, in a recent book, Dr Greg Sheriden, a respected Australian commentator and author, writes: ‘The primary challenge today is not intellectual but cultural…’
For the last five hundred years or so, Christian theologians and church leaders have seen the need to address the intellectual questions people were asking – questions of the existence of God, authenticity, suffering, and science and Christianity. But if Sheridan is right and the challenge now is cultural, we need to ask, How do other people see us? Is there any difference in my life and my character from people around me?
In the flow of his Letter to the Colossians, Paul the Apostle indicates in chapter 3 the changes of character God expects of his people. Last week we touched on examples of inner transformation. Today we touch on transformed relationships.
In verse 12 Paul writes:  As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.
Changed attitudes. Paul tells us that if we are to experience and enjoy good relationships ourselves, we need to change our attitudes towards others. We need to put off the anti-social vices of indifference and thoughtlessness in our relationships with one another. Paul puts his finger on 3 attitudes that can cause conflict.
Instead of compassion and kindness, it is easy to distance ourselves from the pain and the suffering of others – especially in this world of Covid-19. Instead of humility and meekness, how easy it is for us to be so focussed on our own interests and achievements that we, even unconsciously, look down on others who are not as ‘together’. And how easy it is to be impatient with those around us because we’re not prepared to put up with their faults or failures. Indifference, pride and impatience can lie at the root of violence and hostility in any human society.
Forgiveness. Paul continues: Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord has forgiven you.
Let me ask, have you forgiven in your heart and before God that person who so badly hurt you? Have you let bitterness take root in your attitude towards them? If we know God’s forgiveness because we have turned to the Lord Jesus in repentance, how can we not forgive those who have offended us?
Clara Barton was the founder of the American Red Cross. The story is told that a friend once reminded her of a particularly cruel thing someone had done to her. Clara Barton didn’t seem to remember it. ‘But you must,’ her friend insisted. ‘No’, replied Clara Barton. ‘I distinctly remember forgetting it.’ Forgive as the Lord has forgiven you, Paul exhorts us.
Love. And put on love which binds you all together, he continues. Paul knew how easy it is for God’s people, indeed for everyone, to be divided. He understood the corrosive effect of wounded feelings. But he also knew of the one quality that can heal, and enable God’s people to grow into maturity: Love.
He is not speaking of a sentimental, insipid love, but of a love that is grounded in truth and is committed to serving the best interests of others.
This is where we who are God’s people are to be so different from the wider society. For the New Testament is insistent that God’s people be the one community where the ethics of love and mercy in serving the best interests of others, prevail. As God’s people, we are to pray for our enemies. God expects us to live out the grace of compassion and care for others – especially for one another as God’s people.
How are we to respond to the vindictiveness and division around us? The starting point is to pray that we might live out the life changes that the Lord has brought to bear on us as his people.
Tertullian, the 2nd century church leader commented of the way the wider society saw the communities of God’s people: ‘It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents’, he said. “Only look,” they say, “look how they love one another”.’
A prayer. Eternal God and Father, by whose power we are created and by whose love we are redeemed: guide and strengthen us by your Spirit, so that we may give ourselves to your service, and live this day in love for one another and to you; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.  Amen.

© John G. Mason

New – ‘An Anglican Understanding of the Bible’: https://anglicanconnection.com/gods-word-written-an-anglican-understanding-of-the-bible/

Augustine of Hippo, one of the great minds of the late Roman Empire, wrestled with the notion of God and the question of evil, before coming to believe that Jesus Christ is truly the Son of God.

He goes on in his Confessions to say that as a young adult his prayer was, “God, give me chastity and self-control, but not yet”. One day he heard a young child’s voice singing, Tolle lege; tolle lege – ‘Take up, read; take up, read.’

He had been reading Paul the Apostle’s Letter to the Romans. Going back to the place where he had left the text, he let it fall open and his eyes lit on the words from chapter 13: Let us live honourably as in the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

As he read, he found the solution to his heart’s longing. “How sweet did it suddenly become to me to be free of the sweets of folly: things that I once feared to lose, it was now joy to put away. You (Lord) cast them forth from me, … and in their stead you entered in, sweeter than every pleasure…” (Confessions VIII)

Paul’s advice in Romans 13 is similar to that in Colossians chapter 3:1-11. In the opening verse there he says: Since you have been raised to a new life in Christ, set your hearts and minds on the things above… And in verse 5 he writes: Put to death therefore what belongs to your earthly nature…

He is saying that God’s people should let the light of our new relationship with the risen Lord Jesus fall on every aspect of life. Everything is to reflect our new identity. Let me touch on three examples that Paul gives us – sexuality, the tongue and relationships.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.

Passions. If you know the Lord Jesus, Paul is saying, then sex is for marriage only. ‘You used to do what you wanted to do,’ he says, ‘but now having linked yourself with the Lord, put to death such behaviour.’ People often insist that they are ‘making love’, but with Paul’s reference to greed in this context, he is saying that really it’s lust.

In recent years studies suggest that the internet is having a negative impact on marriages. People are so consumed by it, especially pornography, that they have less time and inclination for their for their marriage partner. What a strange paradox: ogling at pictures more than enjoying the precious gift of the personal, intimate relationship of marriage.

As Augustine came to realize, God is not interested in spoiling our fun. Rather, as our Maker, he’s providing the framework for our pursuit of the good things of this world as he prepares us for a new world, where we’ll have more true pleasure than anything we can begin to imagine.

Paul also speaks about the tongue: But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.

It seems strange that Paul writes about controlling the tongue in the same context as he writes about our sexuality. What we forget is that the New Testament sees the tongue as our most sin prone organ. In his Letter, James says that the tongue is a restless evil.

You may think that to get on in life you need to express yourself with vehemence and an edgy vocabulary. But malice, obscenity, and rage constantly damage and destroy relationships.

Sometimes people tell me that nobody likes a saint: they’re so self-righteous. But to say this is to forget what true humanity is. To be truly human is to be like Jesus. Let me ask, ‘Do you get the impression that he was a dull, anaemic personality?’ He was man as men and women are meant to be.

Which brings us to Paul’s further comment – Relationships:

In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

Here in Colossians 3:11 Paul is telling us that God’s people need to recognize the unity we have in Christ and, in turn, provide a picture to the world of God’s new society. One of the significant features of New Testament Christianity was the breakdown of racial and cultural barriers – especially between Jewish and non-Jewish Christians.

Paul’s words set the agenda of unity across the social and racial divisions for God’s people. Yes, we’ll disappoint one another, we won’t always be as tolerant as we should be, we won’t always love one another, or forgive one another as we should. But we must try. That should be our goal.

Put to death therefore what belongs to your earthly nature… Paul writes.

You may find it helpful to remember Augustine’s words as he read the Scriptures: “How sweet did it suddenly become to me to be free of the sweets of folly: things that I once feared to lose, it was now joy to put away. Lord, you cast them forth from me, you the true and highest sweetness, … and in their stead you entered in, sweeter than every pleasure…”

Augustine could sum up, “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

A prayer. Lord if we are honest, we find our consciences pricked by the lofty standards you have set, of sexual purity, in our speaking, and in our relationships. We know that this failure in us affects the whole world, creating injustice and protest, conflict and war. Please forgive us. Lord, we also want to thank you for the new world you have made, to which you have given us title. Help us to fix our gaze on you and your promises. Turn our hearts to love you and to honor you. Help us to live for your glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

At midnight in Sydney as the year 2000 and the new millennium began, the word Eternity lit up on the Harbour Bridge.

The back story is the personal story of Arthur Stace. Born in poverty to alcoholic parents, he had little education and became a petty criminal, an alcoholic and homeless. In the aftermath of World War II, he joined the lines outside St Barnabas’ Broadway, an Anglican Church in Sydney that provided food and shelter for the homeless. However, to get a meal involved first hearing a sermon! Stace turned to Jesus Christ.

One night, at another church, he heard a sermon on Isaiah 57:15: For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits Eternity, whose name is Holy;… “I wish that I could sound or shout Eternity to everyone in the streets of Sydney,” the preacher said. “We’ve all got to meet it. Where will you spend Eternity?” Taking up the challenge, the almost illiterate Arthur Stace, started chalking Eternity, in a distinctive copperplate script, on the streets of Downtown Sydney. Over 35 years he chalked it 500,000 times. Eternity became the mystery and the fascination of Sydney.

And how important this word is for our world today – a world challenged by a pandemic with its drastic health, social and economic consequences. Eternity opens up a new way of looking at life.

New life. In his Letter to the Colossians, chapter 3:1 Paul the Apostle writes: So if you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. In Colossians 1 and 2 Paul tells us that with the coming of Jesus Christ the new age of God’s kingdom has dawned. This new age co-exists with the old which the New Testament refers to as the world. For the present a door is open, allowing people to pass from the old age to the new. In Colossians 1:13 he puts it this way: God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves…

When we come to our senses and turn to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, our whole relationship with God changes. In Colossians 2:20 Paul speaks of everyone who turns to Christ as dying with him. Now in Colossians 3, he says: So if you have been raised with Christ…

New perspective. While physically we are still in the old world, God’s people now move in the sphere of resurrection life. And Paul wants the light of this sphere of eternity, to fall on everything we say and do. ‘Live,’ he says, ‘as though you belong, not on the earth, but in heaven.’

Now, it’s natural to let the concerns of this world dominate our hearts. But Paul urges everyone who has this new life in the Lord Jesus, to see the challenges and troubles of life through the lens of their new resurrected and eternal life.

Because Jesus Christ is at the right hand of God, he sits on the throne of holiness and great power. No longer should we feel that we are helpless victims of a troubled world with all its faults and failures, disease and death. And when we truly see that life now is fleeting, we will experience a greater joy and peace as we center our lives more and more on the Lord Jesus.

Paul develops this: For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God, he says in verse 3. From God’s perspective, everyone who lives without him is dead. We may be healthy and enjoying life, but as far as God is concerned, we are dead. However, when we truly turn to Jesus Christ, God raises us up to a new life with Christ.

For the present others only see our physical bodies. The reality of our new and eternal life is hidden. Indeed, because those around us cannot see, let alone understand the life we now have, there will be misunderstanding, mockery and even anger at the lifestyle changes they observe. But, because our faith is grounded in the God who keeps his promises, what is now hidden will one day be disclosed. Everyone will see it. Paul puts it this way in verse 4: When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

In today’s world of scientific progressivism, the idea of Christ bursting through the skies in a blazing display of power and glory, seems pure science fiction. But the Bible leaves us in no doubt. From cover to cover it tells us that the world is going somewhere and that the final outcome will be the return of God’s king.

Do you realize that it is only some twenty-eight life spans ago – a life span being 70 years – since the events of the death and resurrection of God’s Son? During the course of his public life Jesus had predicted these events. He also spoke of his return. In the same way that his death and resurrection were fulfilled, is it not conceivable that his third prediction will also take place?

And when he returns, what a day that will be! This present age will be seen for what it is – passing. And the pure joy and glory of God’s people will be manifest for what it is, an experience of life in all its fullness, for all eternity.

Eternity awakens our minds to see life now through the longer lens of a time without end – of God’s country.

It is nothing short of a miracle that Arthur Stace’s one-word sermon on New Year’s Eve of the new millennium was seen by an estimated four billion people around the world. In this troubled world, let’s live in the light of eternity and the return of God’s King.

A Prayer: O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: do not leave us desolate, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to where our Savior Christ has gone before, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for evermore.  Amen.