- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
LET US HAVE PEACE.
By J.H.Jowett.
“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5 v1) ,
This word “therefore" sends us back to the earlier part of the apostle’s letter. We cannot leap into the letter at any place we please and disregard every other part. We must accompany the apostle through the whole letter. It is of great importance that we not only arrive at the right places, but that we arrive there by the right way.
What is the way suggested by this word therefore? Let us look back over the way already travelled. It began in a depressing desert of sin, a desert from which there is no escape. Everybody has lost his righteousness, and everybody has lost his power to recapture it. Many devices are tried and many attempts are made to escape, but all struggles are in vain. In this horrible bondage every one is a prisoner for life.
No way out! No, not until God Himself made a way, a new and a living way. Infinite love met our deepest need, and across the desert a path appears which brightens more and more to the perfect day. In the atoning love and grace of Jesus Christ the prisoners of despair become the children of eternal hope. Through the mystery of the Cross we can recover our heavenly destiny. In a death whose mystery no one can explain we find the springs of a new life. And so completely does the divine grace meet our need that we may not only leave the imprisoning desert, we are also freed from our bonds and chains. The offered freedom is not only one of status. It is more than an amnesty, more than a decree of emancipation. It is an endowment and a bequest. It is the liberty of wholeness. It is the freedom of harmony.
This letter begins in clouds and darkness, but the black skies are rent at the end of the fourth chapter, and the blue heavens appear and the Kingdom of Heaven is opened to all believers.
And it is here that we find the word “therefore”. ‘‘Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”. It is not an assertion that we have peace. It is an appeal to take it. An amnesty is offered, receive it. Free pardon is proclaimed, receive it. But can anyone be so foolish as to see a wonderful deliverance of this kind and not accept it? Can we see the great possibility and not gladly accept and experience it? Peace is offered, a peace which passes all understanding, but so many won’t accept it. People will even trudge up to the very Cross with their crushing burdens upon their backs and then they turn away as though nothing had happened there, and they go away carrying their burdens with them. Here is the appointed place where the heavy-laden pilgrim can lay down his load and find rest and peace.
What shall we say to these things? Let us linger at the thirty-second verse of the first chapter, and at the fourth verse of the second chapter, and at the twentieth and twenty-third verses of the third chapter. Let us make a stop at every one of these places, changing all the plural words and pronouns into the singular personal pronoun, until we have read ourselves into a full understanding of the sacred word. And then more than anywhere else let us stay long at the twenty-fifth verse of the third chapter, “God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood”. Let us kneel at the Cross and stay there until life begins to stir in our numb hearts, and it is as though the winter is over and gone. Let us steadily look away from self to Christ. It is a selfish and dangerous thing for us to be always turning our eyes inward and letting our own faults or anything uncomfortable be uppermost in our thinking. It should not be so in those for whom Christ died. No, we should be so fascinated and enraptured by the grace of Christ that faults and fears and our sins will all be swallowed up in His glory. Let us believe and confidently accept His peace. Let us forget self and joyfully remember the things that are ours in Christ.