As we unpack this episode, we explore the transformative power of obedience in cultivating peace, and turn the spotlight on John 14:27, a beautiful promise from Jesus about gifting His peace to us. Remember, trusting God may be a high-wire act, but it's a journey that's undoubtedly worth taking.
As we unpack this episode, we explore the transformative power of obedience in cultivating peace, and turn the spotlight on John 14:27, a beautiful promise from Jesus about gifting His peace to us. Remember, trusting God may be a high-wire act, but it's a journey that's undoubtedly worth taking.
Hello and welcome back to the final episode of the second week of the Advent season, the Real Friends podcast, where we are talking about the theme of peace. This is episode number seven of peace. How peaceful are we all feeling, gentlemen? Are you feeling shalom-y?
Speaker 2:Is that a verb or an adjective? I feel quite shalom-y.
Speaker 1:I don't think we need to get a t-shirt with shalom-y on it, we'll just stick with shalom-y-o. Exactly right. So just to recap really, really quickly, we talked about the facets of peace peace with God, peace with self, and that can lead to, hopefully, peace with others, and now we've been talking about ways to appropriate that peace, which? Is prayer, obedience, and now, finally, we are going to talk about trust.
Speaker 2:So Tyler is going to read to us our verse, John 14, 27. Peace.
Speaker 3:I leave with you my peace. I give to you, not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
Speaker 2:All right. So here Jesus is talking to his disciples and you've got to remember, Jesus is going to ascend to the Father and he has instructed his disciples, he has taught them, he has told them to go to the all the world and preach the gospel. And he's warned them he's been very candid that you're going to be persecuted, Life's not going to be easy. But now he says to them listen, I'm leaving you my peace. But he still has to tell them don't let your hearts be troubled. So they have to appropriate this peace, which means they've got to trust him.
Speaker 1:You know, trust what they've been taught and trust that they are being. You know that they are still going to have the Holy Spirit to help remind them as they go out, to appropriate their own peace and to teach others all about Christ.
Speaker 2:That's right. In our small group we've been again rehashing the book of revelation and you know, one of the main themes of the book of revelation is, you know, perseverance in the midst of trouble and turmoil and tribulation. And you know, john, just you know, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he just compels the people there of the first century to persevere and to trust God. And you know, he's essentially saying that there are going to be lots of bad things that happen to you.
Speaker 1:Nine marriage things are going to be happening to the world. That's right, yeah.
Speaker 2:There's going to be all kinds of trouble that comes your way. But he constantly gives them this behind the scenes look at the throne room of God to show that he's sovereign, he has a plan and that the promises that God will be with him and they will eventually be vindicated. And so you know, really you could say that John is calling the first century Christians and us to trust God in situations that we might not understand, to trust him in the worst of times. And you know one of the things. You know it's easy to talk about trust. I think we would all like to say, yeah, sure, we trust God. It's quite another to actually live and walk in that trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah, funny how actions can be a little bit more difficult than sometimes just speaking words or thinking words, and so, as we've often done throughout this podcast, we want to make things relatable. Although I'm very disappointed, I'm hoping that most of the listeners will know the movie Love Actually. It turns 20 years old this year. It is a Christmas movie, unlike Die Hard, and you two, when I mentioned it, just gave me absolutely blank looks which I could try to describe. But you know, this is not a video visual. There's a lot in that. Yeah, there's not a visual medium. So so, dear listener, I'm going to trust that you have either seen the movie or at least have some knowledge of the movie, that there's lots and lots of different pairs or groups of characters in this movie, matthew is really confident in his manhood.
Speaker 1:Let's just say hey it's got a lot of. It's got a. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a. I can't think of the word Movie bus, yeah, movie bus and a follow or whatever. And this has every great British actor from the late 90s, early 2000s that you can possibly imagine. But the one, the pair of characters I'm going to talk about here, and it's not even really one of the major sets in there is the actor Colin Firth, who plays a mystery writer and who discovers in the lead up to Christmas, early in the movie, that his wife is cheating on him with his brother not very Christ like at all and decides, understandably, that he is going to leave her needs to get away from her, get some space at the very least. And being a writer and this is something of a trope he actually has a cabin in the woods and with that cabin in the woods is he has, you know, previously signed up over the years with, like a cleaning service basically.
Speaker 2:I just want to pause and say now you've got Tyler's attention talking about a cabin in the woods.
Speaker 1:Yes, and out by a lake, no less. And uh, it's doing it there.
Speaker 1:So the girl who is taking care of this cabin for him, both while he's not there and while he is there here in the storyline of the movie, is Portuguese and speaks just about no English whatsoever, which is a tiny bit more than he knows of Portuguese. And yet, despite this, throughout the movie they make a connection. Uh, it's clear that he has a romantic attraction to her, even though he doesn't know why. And, as we come to learn, she also has one for him, even though he has no idea about that. So, to jump fast forward towards the end of the movie, he decides to take a blind leap of faith. He's got some information. She's like I know how I feel, I think that she could feel this way, but I have no idea why, cause we don't have words. I am going to start teaching myself Portuguese, and you see in various scenes where, instead of going out and doing things with friends, he's sitting with a pair of headphones on, like we have right now, and he yet at like night language school, and he is repeating strange conversational phrases in very, very bad Portuguese. He has no idea how or why this is going to work, but he has faith in you know something he can't see, only what he feels that if he does this somehow things will turn his way and he will be able to win over this girl.
Speaker 1:Fast forward to the very last scene of theirs, pretty much in the movie, where he has gone to Portugal going to get the girl and is speaking very bad Portuguese to the entire family who is he is meeting before the love of his life comes out and she comes out and he's saying just nonsense in Portuguese and she starts speaking a little bit of broken English and he suddenly realizes he is.
Speaker 1:His feelings are reciprocated. She had no reason to try to start learning English unless it probably had something to do with him. Not now. He's like you. You learn English. Well, just just in case, just in cases. So it may not be a perfect analogy of of of trust in God, but sometimes we don't understand everything that has happened. We don't know God's plan he's running the entire universe but we can trust in what we're, you know, being told and what we feel when we know that it is according to his plan and that, even though we don't see how it is going to turn out wonderfully in the end, we can have that trust and in fact it does turn out to our benefit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. You know. I mentioned a couple of episodes ago my good friend who you know has been diagnosed with with cancer, stage four cancer, and it's just unbelievable. He, you know, though, he doesn't understand why this has happened and he doesn't know what the outcome is going to be. He believes that God can heal, but he has said to me, I mean astonishingly, no matter what happens, I just want God to be glorified and I trust his way is the best way. I really trust him and he's continuing to walk with God. That's unbelievable.
Speaker 1:And it's hard for us certainly, as as it's probably hard for you, as somebody knows him to see him going through this going. You may have trust, but how you don't. You know you've got a daughter, you've got a family. How can this be part of God's plan? How can this be? You know for everybody's, you know good in his, you know in God's glory and all our benefit. But he trusts and we trust and we know that it will work out.
Speaker 2:And you know, and that's right, and this has resulted in unbelievable peace. I mean, you know, we, we, we mention the verse all the time. You know, we, we quoted often. You know that he'll give us peace that surpasses all understanding. I don't know how many times we've rehearsed that throughout this this week, you know, with the theme of peace, but truly that's what. That's what this friend of mine has. He has it. It makes no sense how he could have a peace like this, but he does.
Speaker 1:Certainly not without trust, just unwavering trust. So I think we can all agree that it is very easy to talk about trust and think about trust, but it can be another really hard thing to enact that, to live that out fully. Pastor, I know that you have another story about you know sort of a step by step literal and figurative process of of of trust or other people not trusting. Why don't you take us into that?
Speaker 2:So in 1859, charles Bloedin, perhaps the greatest tightrope walker of the 19th century, became the first to tightrope above the raging waters of the Niagara Gores with no safety harness, no safety net, and you can't.
Speaker 1:If you haven't been there, you can't imagine how scary that is. Have you been to Niagara, Tyler? No, I've seen pictures. Yeah, I haven't seen it from the Canadian side, but let's just say I wouldn't. I would want to walk across only an incredibly wide bridge, one that was nearly as wide as Niagara Falls, if I was going to walk over it.
Speaker 2:So after his first successful attempt, he returned to perform the the daring stunt several times, each time drawing larger crowds and discontent with merely crossing the Niagara. He kind of had to up the ante each time. So you know, one time he made the journey backwards, he wore a blindfold. One time, one time he walked on stilts and even pushed a wheelbarrow across, and Ripley's website said that one time, with a wheelbarrow, he actually, he actually pushed a lion across the tightrope successfully. So there you go. This is a daredevil to say the least.
Speaker 2:Or if it was a tranquilized lion, perhaps, or stuffed animal.
Speaker 1:I think somebody was lying.
Speaker 2:So my favorite account is the time when he stopped midway and he actually cooked and ate an omelet at the halfway point.
Speaker 1:Does that mean a chef came from the other side and met him and, like a shorter?
Speaker 2:cook. They had this. I saw a picture like a drawing of it and they had this I don't know the scaffolding that went over the rope and there was like a stove in the middle and, yeah, he actually fired it up and cooked a noblet and ate it, so right there on the type rope. So on one of his final attempts, he decided he wanted to up the ante even more. So here's what he did. He asked the crowd if they thought he could carry a man across the tight rope on his back, with a crowd, as you can imagine, roared with applause, declaring their belief in his success. You can do it. Then he followed up with another question who would like to volunteer Silence? See, it's one thing to declare trust in someone and it's quite another to relinquish complete control. So, not wanting to disappoint the crowd, that was reportedly about 100,000 people, oh wow. He turned to his manager, harry Calcord, and he asked he said do you believe I can succeed at this feat? And Harry nodded his head. And then he did something profound he climbed on his back. So Bloat, dean.
Speaker 2:Before crossing with Harry on his back, he turned to his manager and he said this he said listen, this is actually very dangerous. It would be very easy One misstep we could both plunge to our death. But he said if we want to survive, here's what you have to do. He said you've got to truly trust me. He said your tendency is going to be to want to counterbalance. But he said that will not work, will fall, he said. If you want to survive, he said you have got to move with me. It's not going to feel natural, but you've just got to flow with me, move where I move. You know, I started thinking about that and I thought you know, there is this tendency that that we have when we're following Jesus, that that when we don't understand, sometimes we want to go our own way.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, fall back on a road. You know our well. Our old ways are old tendencies.
Speaker 2:That's right. If we, if we do that, we're sure to the plunge right to the fall. But if we'll just trust Jesus, step by step, and go with him, then you know, it is difficult as that may be, we will make it to the other side. So let me take this analogy one step further. With Charles and his manager Harry, there was a chance they could actually no, no matter what that they could one misstep and they would fall to their death.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm not so with Christ. No, not so with Christ. When we let's say, get on Christ's back and we, we move where he moves, there is absolutely no chance of us falling into the raging waters. And here's why those waters, those tumultuous waters, they, you know, in the analogy that you could say they represent death judgment. In the reason that if we are with Jesus, that that we know we will not fall into those waters to our death, is because Jesus actually took the plunge himself. He jumped off the tightrope, so to speak, to bear the weight in the wrath of those waters, so that we didn't have to be appeased to those waters.
Speaker 2:That's right. And because he is raised never to die again, when we Connect to Jesus by faith and we we just go with him across the tightrope of life, we are safe and we can have perfect peace. Perfect peace across the worst of situations that life might bring and that came at great price to Jesus to give us that peace and To show us that scripturally.
Speaker 3:Tyler's gonna close this out with a beautiful verse in Colossians Colossians 1, 19 through 20, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile To himself all things, whether on the earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Speaker 2:So we've talked about peace all week and how wonderful it is that we can have peace with God, how wonderful it is that we can have inner peace, and how wonderful it is that we can have peace with others, and All that is made possible Because of the blood of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:And so, if you can go and remember that About your daily Grind, hustle and bustle here through this holiday season, wanting to keep Jesus at the forefront, keep that sacrifice first and foremost in mind and that that allows you to trust Everything that he wants you to do and to be obedient in him, praying to him, being thankful to him, and it should all tie together and enable Christ to stay at the forefront of your mind.
Speaker 2:That's right. And to close this out, I just you know, I'm quite aware that there are many people listening that are going through tragedies, going through dark circumstances, horrible times, and I just would like to pray, if I might, for those people. So, god, right now we lift up all of those listening who may be going through these tumultuous waters. They may be going through very difficult times, tragedies, but I pray, lord, that they would see beauty in each day, that they would see that the many things that you have given to us, that they would pray, that they would obey your word, even when they don't understand, and I pray that they would Not try and attempt to carry these burdens themselves.
Speaker 2:Thank you that we have a savior who has, who walks with us in in the darkest seasons of life. Thank you that, even in the midst of the most troubled times, that we can have perfect peace through Jesus. So I just pray that they would trust you, that they would not be anxious for tomorrow. Lord, we do not know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future, and so help all of us, including the three of us around this table, to Be anxious for nothing, but in all things, by prayer, in supplication, let our requests be known to you with Thanksgiving, and may the peace of God guard our hearts and minds in the Lord Jesus Christ, and we pray these things in his good name, amen.
Speaker 1:Hey Walt, how did that happen?
Speaker 2:Hey, hey, hey.
Speaker 1:Hello my Walt, hey everyone Huh.
Speaker 3:You can do it.
Speaker 1:You, you, you, you, you, you you you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you you.