"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" was -- and still is -- a revolutionary statement in two ways.

First, as part of the Beatitudes, this meant bringing people to peace with God. For centuries only priests had been entrusted with the role of being intermediaries between individuals and God. To entrust ordinary people with the call to help bring people into relationship with God was revolutionary. It's still Christ's call to us today.

Secondly, for anyone to be known as a "son of God" (which applied to both men and women), was radical. To be God's priest, king, prophet, or servant wasn't new. But his child? That signaled a transformative relationship of tremendous intimacy.

We are still able to have this close of a relationship with God and invite others to do the same!

Empower yourself and your family to engage fully in God’s grand story. Subscribe to Hi(Impact) at Stephanie Presents for insights, encouragement, and practical resources!

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The eleven verses in the Gospel of Matthew, commonly known as the beatitudes, can seem like some nice little sayings that we would calligraphy for a wall art. But in truth, they were revolutionary statements.

Some of these statements were shocking, and perhaps not any of those more than the one that we're going to talk about today as we continue our look in this famous passage that begins this sermon on the map called the Be attitudes. Stay tuned.

If your desire is to become spiritually stronger, emotionally healthier, and relationally smarter, you're at the right place. Speaker and writer Stephanie Smith inspires and equips you to achieve these three key aims.

If you are a parent, you also learn how to raise empowered kids ready for adulthood. Let's get started.

Hello there, my friend, and welcome to the lives K three podcast. It is my mission to help individuals and families and the upcoming generations to be spiritually strong, emotionally healthy, and relationally smart.

We need all three of these things if we are going to first become in relationship with God and become our best and truest selves.

And we are going to live wisely on this earth because we can have a kind of correct theology in terms of our core set of beliefs or doctrines, and we can still be pretty messed up emotionally, and we can still make some really dumb decisions with regards to our relationships. Anybody here raising their hand? Okay. Because if you are know you are in good company, because I am right there with you.

One of the reasons that is my mission is because I know, not just by success, but I know a whole lot by failure, the importance of these three things.

But as I've gone through life and I've done the work and I continue to do the work, and I've learned and I've grown, I want to be able to turn around and share with other people, both from my success and thankfully also from failure, that God redeems so that they, and that includes you, can, can become the best self and not have to spend so much of life carrying around a lot of baggage and then someday get into the kind of the middle or end of life and going, oh gosh, I sure wish I would have known that years or decades before that just, I don't think has to be the default that we often see. And one specific area that I do know something about, both by God's grace alone, some success, and also plenty of mistakes made along the way.

And that is about raising boys.

You know, I have a lot of research, and if a person dives into the statistics and the research that is available, the state of men and boys in western culture is not good, and specifically here in the United States. And this is not sustainable.

We, because there aren't a lot of voices speaking about this right now and providing solutions, then we haven't really experienced the full impact of this culturally. It's still kind of taboo to admit that boys and men are struggling, and not just because they're boys and men.

It's not like, oh, you know, it's just because they're men and that's why they struggle. You know, we have this phrase that's floating around our culture about toxic masculinity.

And I'm just curious, when was the last time that you heard anything about toxic femininity? Because the last I checked, both genders can be toxic as individuals.

And I don't like the fact that we are categorizing an entire gender with such a negative label. This is having an impact. Why am I bringing all this up when we have been talking about the beatitudes?

It is because it's one of the most powerful messages of hope and information that I give.

So if you are a part of a church, if you're a christian school, if you're part of an organization that just cares about the state of men and boys and wants to know how do we raise good men? Because it is possible, then go to my website, stephanieprisons.com dot.

You can click on the speaking page, you can see my speaking topics, and you can read about the one that I have there. Boy, oh, boy.

On raising good men, I will travel, all of the United States travel internationally because this is a message that desperately needs to be heard. Okay, so we are going to transition and move back into.

We've been walking through the gospel of Matthew, chapter five, the first few verses there in this series on the beatitudes. And again, be attitudes as basically when Jesus says to blessed are those, he's saying, happy are those.

And this isn't some fake, oh, I'm just always walking around, never having any kind of negative emotion, happiness. You know, the reality is that happiness can coexist at the same time with grief or sadness or loss.

So this is more than just a temporary emotion that we feel when everything goes our way. This is about a state of presence.

It's about how we show up in life and if we want to have a life where regardless of what's going on around us, even while we are experiencing sadness and grief, and.

And yes, we can even experience fear and anxiety and these other things at the same time, we can be experiencing a subtleness, a peace in our life, even a happiness in our life. And it can seem like, what? Those things don't quiz this, but trust me, they can. Now, it's a process.

It's not like you just make this decision and then poof, all of a sudden, one day it just descends on you. This is a process. And one of the things that impacts that process are the thoughts that we think and the actions that we take.

And so when Jesus is talking about these beatitudes, he's giving us some specific ways in which we can enter into that type of life that has a settled happiness to it, regardless of what we are experiencing. And as we have tracked through the previous beatitudes, we see where those began with people who are poor in spirit.

In other words, people who recognize, I don't. I'm not going to do this life well apart from God. People who have a humility, who have a. A poverty of spirit.

And this isn't about, oh, poor me, I'm just so terrible, and I'm just so awful. Now, that is not what being poor in spirit is. It is recognizing that I don't have enough without God.

If I go to the grocery store, I know that I either better have enough cash or I need to have enough money in my account that when I swipe that debit card, the transaction is going to go through. I have to have enough. And if I am too poor, well, then I probably better not show up at the register with things that I can't afford.

And a poverty of spirit is when we show up in life saying, I'm not going to be able to do this on my own, and, God, I have to have you. And as we walk through these, we see that these beatitudes are twofold. One is they talk to us about our relationship with God.

And then two, how do we then live that overflow out in our relationships with one another?

And that is absolutely true for the one that we're going to talk about today, which is blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Now, here in the United States, at first glance, that can seem like, oh, what God's talking about here, what Jesus is talking about are people who keep the peace.

These are the people who smooth everything over, who are in a relationship, and they don't have any conflict, or these are people who walk into a room and they just make sure everybody's taken care of and let's just keep the pew. That is not what this scripture is talking about.

So if that's kind of what maybe you've had in your mind is, oh, these are like a special group of people that have that ability. That is not what this is talking about. First of all, what these verses are primarily talking about begin with our relationship with God.

And when Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers, what he is saying is, after we have, we have walked through these other things where we have this humility in our hearts, where we hunger and we thirst after doing and what's right and after living, living aligned with how God has designed us to live, then eventually, as we walk through these different things, we're going to have the desire to bring other people into a relationship of peace with God. We're going to have the interest in bringing other people into relationship with God and making, helping them to make peace with God.

This is basically a call to make disciples. It is a call for, yeah, that old fashioned word that has kind of become tambo evangelism.

And I don't just mean by that that we look at necessarily methods from 50 years ago. Maybe we need to bring some of those back. Maybe we don't. This isn't about methodology. This is about the heart.

Again, all of these beatitudes are about the heart. Not one of these is something that you can just measure externally because they all go to the heart.

And this is about having a heart that says, hey, I want other people to make peace with God. But we don't just have a desire for that, that we actually do something to make that happen.

In the United States today, it has become kind of socially taboo to really share your faith unless somebody just comes right out and says, hey, would you please tell me about your faith? But that, but we are not supposed to live in alignment with cultural norms. We're supposed to live aligned with what God has told us.

And that begins with the Bible.

And so when we look at this, we're not talking about beating people over the head with our faith because you're never going to make peace with anybody or help them make peace with somebody else by beating them over the head. So that's not what this is about, but rather it is about showing up in a way, and that's going to look very different.

It might be sitting down with a colleague at work at lunch that you notice is just really struggling and just asking them, hey, you know, I just kind of noticed seem like you're really down, or it seems like that you, you know, you've just had a lot of anxiety or something's going on. Can I just be here with you. Would it be okay if I prayed for you? I don't even have to do that here. I can just.

Is there something specific that I can go home and pray for? Because there are things I might not be able to help you with.

But I have a God that I know and that I love, who delights in being able to help people, who reach out to him. That is part of that journey, even of helping people to make peace with God. It might be inviting neighbors over for a backyard barbecue.

It might be sitting with someone on an airplane and just talking to them. Not in an annoying way.

I mean, it's like, okay, if they sit down, if they close their eyes, if they pull their neck pillow tightly around them, if they put in two earbuds, okay, they don't want to be bothered. Okay. And so that is not the time to, like, jerk their earbuds out. Go, hey, let me tell you about God. Have you made your peace with God?

Okay, that is going to turn them off. That is not going to want to bring them to God. So we want to use wisdom with this, but sometimes we have to be careful that we don't use.

Oh, well, I'm just being considerate as a way to excuse ourselves from what can actually be uncomfortable now, in Jesus day, the people hearing this, this was a revolutionary statement on both the front end and the back end. You see, at this time, the people who stood in place to be the peacemakers, if you will, between people and God were the priests.

These were the priests that people brought their sacrifices to, who were entrusted with the ceremonial laws.

And they were the ones who would oversee the offering of sacrifices, and they would stand in place of the people as individuals and as a nation in order to bring their offerings to God and the different kinds of offerings, and to be able to make peace with God for them as individuals and as a nation. And that structure had been in place for hundreds of years, way back since the very beginning when.

When God established these ceremonial laws with Moses. So not back to the beginning with Adam and Eve, but back to when these ceremonial laws were first instituted, and that was it from then on.

And all of a sudden, for Jesus to say to the crowd, just these ordinary, average individuals, people that came from all walks of life that.

That had all kinds of jobs or socioeconomic positions, all these kind of things, that you can be a peacemaker, you can be someone who helps to bring people to peace with God. That was a radical statement.

And even early in this ministry, this statements like this would have begun sowing the seeds for why I, the religious leaders became so angry with Jesus and eventually to the point that they wanted to put him to death. Because this was saying, wait a minute, it's not just all about the priest here. This was a radical, turning upside down way of doing life.

Even up until this time, people could be seen as.

As prophets or as kings or as servants, but definitely not in the position of being an emissary, an intermediary on God's behalf to and between people. And the end of this statement, when he says, for what? For they shall be the sons of God. Again, this is a radical statement.

This level of intimacy, this level of close relationship with Goddess was like, okay, wait, whoa, no, uh uh, uh, uh uh.

You can be one of God's priests, you can be one of his prophets, you can be one of his kings, you can even be one of his servants if you don't fall in any of those categories. But to be his son, this was almost a blasphemous and for some people would have been considered a blasphemous statement.

For other people, it was a statement and a proclamation that was filled with hope. What, we can be that close to God?

So the first part of this statement that, hey, you ordinary, average people, you can also go out and you can help to other people to come to peace with God, that was a radical statement. And the ending of that statement for you shall be called sons of God. And that applied to both men and women. That wasn't just for men.

That is an inclusive term for, that includes both men and women.

And to be able to say, you're going to be called the sons of God, you're going to be able to enter into that intimate of a relationship with him was radical.

And, you know, the thing about radical, revolutionary countercultural statements is they will deeply offend some people and they will delight and thrill others. I mean, that's just typically the way it goes. And that's not just true for faith based statements, that's just true in general.

And so we have to really look at these statements and say, why would people have been hopeful? And why would people have been so angry about this?

And for the people that were going to be angered by this is because their position, their status, their control, their power was at risk. But for other people, all of a sudden, this was going to begin allowing them to step into a freedom that they didn't know.

These people had been so beat down for so many centuries, not just by, not, not by the laws that God had originally established, but by all the added layers of rules and regulations that people had come along and had added to them. And it was too much of a weight for people to bear.

And so when Jesus is coming along and he's saying, hey, there's, there's a whole different way of life here than people who were so hungry to walk in freedom. This, these were statements of hope to them. And that is where we can also be like God.

When we walk into this world and we say, you don't have to live beat down and carrying all of the stuff that's been added, maybe it's been added to your family through generations of addictions or abuse or of ways of living and doing things that have just caused you to live in such bondage. You don't have to live that way anymore.

It's coming along and setting people free from all these regulations that they have put on themselves that don't at all come from God. I have to be perfect.

I have to make sure that I measure up here and I can't ever have this kind of negative emotion or, man, I've got to get it all together in all these different areas of my life. And if I don't, then what? We don't have to live that way. We can live as God's children.

We can have that close of a relationship with him, and this is where we can be most like him, you know? Jesus, the eternal, only begotten, forever existent son of God, came for what purpose?

He came to bring us into relationship with God, for us to have a way to make lasting peace with God. And this is a call for us to be like him and to bring the good news into this world, to bring that gospel, that good news.

And it goes back to what the angels saying at Jesus birth and what they announced for the goodness of God has come here, peace on earth, goodwill towards men. That's the coming of Christ. That's the message of the gospel, and that's the message that we need to carry out with us.

Not anger, not outrage, not animosity, not, you better do everything my way or else you are not part of God's kingdom or whatever.

And that doesn't mean that we don't have discernment, and that doesn't mean that there's not right and wrong, and that doesn't mean that there's not categories of this is wise and, hey, guess what? This is dumb. But when, when others see us not as peacemakers of saying, hey, you can also walk in peace with goddess.

But if they see us as angry, outraged, vengeful people.

Nobody is going to want to come to make peace with God if that's what his kids look like, because that's just going to look like, well, I guess that's what your God looks like, and that is not who God is for those that have come to him through Christ. And maybe you feel like you don't qualify to be someone who can be a disciple maker. That's nonsense.

And this statement right here, Jesus wasn't speaking only to his twelve disciples. He wasn't speaking just to the religious leaders.

He was speaking here to the crowds of people and saying, hey, if, if this is who you are, if you have this poorness of spirit and then you mourn because of your sin, and then you have a meekness about you that says, hey, I've, I'm dependent on God and you hunger and you thirst for righteousness.

If you seek for God's mercy and then not just receive it, but to return it and extend it for others, if you have a purity of your heart, not just all the right outward actions, if you do those things, you can be a peacemaker to help others come to know God. All right, my friend. Well, we are very close to wrapping up this series. If you haven't already.

Just make sure you go back to Matthew, chapter five, the beatitudes. Just take a few verses and just read over those. I mean, you can just read those very, very quickly every day.

Let those really soak into your heart and your mind. And then as you are going through life, just ask yourself, okay, how am I showing up in this situation?

Am I showing up with a poorness of spirit where I'm like, goddess, I need you here, or am I showing up like I've got all the answers? Am I showing up with mercy? Am I showing up with meekness? Am I showing up with a hunger and a thirst for righteousness and doing what's right?

Or am I showing up here, you know, with a hunger and a thirst for other things? And am I showing up here with a pureness of heart, or am I substituting an external checklist because I don't really want to have to do hard work?

These are great filters that we can use to assess how are we really growing as an individual and as a Christian, and then with what we've looked at today, how are we showing up to invite other people to make their peace with God as well and to accept that God has called us to be his children, not just his servants? Okay, so that's going to wrap us up. I will see you on Thursday's episode.

If you're new around here, Thursday episodes focus on helping parents raise kids that are ready for adulthood, kids who are prepared to engage fully in the grand story that God has for them. So make sure that you tune in for the next episode on Thursday for that, and then we'll be back next week as we look at the last of the Beatitudes.

All right, my friend, remember, if you haven't already, visit the website Stephanie presents.com. sign up for my weekly newsletter, high impact.

While you are there, that's going to give you some great resources and encouragement and insights that you're not going to get here on this podcast or any other way. And remember this, you have an impact that is immeasurable, eternal, and irreplaceable. I'll see you next time.

Thank you for listening.

Visit the website stephaniepresents.com and sign up for high impact to join the mission of building spiritually strong, emotionally healthy, and relationally smart women and families. You can also book Stephanie to speak at your event and check out additional resources.

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