Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the sons of God. Matthew 5:9.
To be a peacemaker is to be almost like the old gun called the Peacemaker. It was called the Peacemaker because in the hands of a few men, the wild West was subdued. It was a rough one, a forty-five caliber, six-shot revolver with a kick that would almost throw it out of their hands.
What God calls a peacemaker is not a man or woman who uses diplomacy to prevent the eruption of a crisis and delays a crisis in lieu of a solution. Peacemakers are not diplomatic evaders of issues or problems. God does not do that. When we look to the Scriptures, we find that the Lord did not come to bring peace but a sword. And yet He is the Prince of Peace. When He said, Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God, He was talking about a ministry that must be clearly understood, because the whole Kingdom of God that is coming is based upon the work of these peacemakers.
The Lord speaks about the end-time army, but it will not be a people who will be vicious. Don’t confuse their violence of spirit with viciousness. It is not so. People in the great army of the Lord must start in with the battle taking place in their own spirits before they can participate with the Lord in the battle that will subdue the earth and bring forth the Kingdom. In a sense they are like those six-shooters, the Peacemakers—sent to subdue.
Jesus said, Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law: and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. Matthew 10:34–36. You say, “I thought the devil caused all that trouble in my home.” He did his share, but you must understand that God instituted many of the problems you have had. He created them.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that doth not take his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me. He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward: and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward. And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you he shall in no wise lose his reward. Matthew 10:37–42.
The Lord opens up trouble, but that is the only way of peace. Almost everything the Lord has brought of real peace, victory and release into your life has come forth because the problem lying dormant under the surface was agitated by God until it erupted. When you pray for patience, what does the Lord give you? What is it that works patience? …tribulation worketh patience. Romans 5:3. It causes everything to erupt. When you pray for God to deal with something in your spirit and He does it, it erupts. You pray, “O God, deal with it,” and He brings it out where He can deal with it.
God cannot bring peace to people who are self-deceived, who have buried their problems, evaded their needs, refused to face the things that He wanted. Peace comes from doing the will of God. It is an impartation from God that comes to those who are in His will. When God makes peace in your life it certainly is not by some compromise situation; it is because you have faced some real problems. He gives you a promise and it doesn’t seem as if it is working. You say, “Peace? I’ve had nothing but trouble.” No, He is taking the root of trouble out of your life. He is dealing with it, cutting it down, and you have a period of awareness over it.
Jesus said He had not come to bring peace but a sword, to upset entire households and turn them against each other. That is often not understood. The world builds foolish adjustments to wrong situations, but before there can be real peace in a person’s life that adjustment has to be changed. That is more upsetting, more disturbing, and more violent to his personality than the former situation. To our minds the cure seems far worse than the disease. But if there is to be a wholeness and soundness, the Lord has to start with drastic adjustments.
Suppose a man has one leg shorter than the other. Both still reach the ground, but everything else is thrown out of line. The way he walks may be twisted and out of balance. In time it affects everything in his body, yet it all started with a missing inch on one leg. If God heals that man and adds one inch to his leg, he will go through six months of misery. Suddenly, with that leg as long as it should be, but with muscles and organs functioning another way and affected by gravity, he will have stomach disorders and the pain of muscles pulling on everything that is out of line. He might say, “Thanks for the healing, but I would rather be one inch off.” But no, it has to be done right.
When God begins to bring His peace and His release, He starts dealing with the conflicts of the inner life. You would be surprised how many things you compensate for and adjust to. Those have to be corrected. A person may have a certain type of openness which could lead him to anything. Perhaps it would lead him to lust and seduction. It may be a type of openness through which he had been so disillusioned that his entire view of life and sex is distorted. Sometimes the problems of homosexuals must be understood in this light. They are not victims of something happening to them before they were born as much as people might think. Usually circumstances have come against them in a certain way, and because of the disappointments and pressures, they have adjusted and leaned the only way they can and still retain some balance in their lives.
In our walk with God in the Body of Christ, where things have been perverted, or lustful, or upset, we don’t begin to go down the line and preach on one thing after another to straighten them out, but we add another inch to the leg that is short and everything else begins straightening up. Let it happen that way to you. Don’t fight and struggle; it will straighten itself out. You will probably be the only one who will worry about it; everyone else will be filled with understanding, love, and prayer. We walk in the Spirit in the grace of God.
The same thing happens for people who have been violent in their reactions to things. When Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the sons of God, He was not talking about people who were trying to settle arguments and fights. He was talking about those who first solve the inner conflicts in themselves through the grace of God. God touches them. God heals them. God brings peace to them.
This truth can reach down into the depths of your being. There God will bring peace to you. Then it will radiate out contagiously, for everything of spirit is contagious. If you are bitter, the Bible says, “Beware lest any root of bitterness spring up and thereby many be defiled” (Hebrews 12:15).
It is a tragedy if you have been raised in a home where your parents were bitter. It leaves a bitterness in your own spirit, and you are marked. But God can heal that. When God has healed your spirit, the inner conflict and turmoil is gone, your spirit is beautiful, and you minister peace. Peace is not created by all the circumstances being just right, all falling in place the way they should. Peace is an attribute of God. It is a quality that is divinely imparted. It is the peace of God that passeth all understanding (Philippians 4:7).
Blessed are the peacemakers because they shall be called the sons of God. They are those who will minister God’s peace to the world. The greatest thing you can do is to preach the Word that lifts the veil of hypocrisy, self-deceit, evasion, and withdrawal from people. And when they face it do they think you are a peacemaker? No.
God sees all the trouble, the oppression, the confusion, the evil that is in the world, the tribulation that is here, but He sets about to solve whatever relationship it has to our lives and loose it from us. Then we can walk right down through the midst of all of those things with the greatest endowment He could ever give us—His peace.
Most of the troubles people have is because it is in their spirits to have trouble. They are oppressed because it is in their spirits to be oppressed. The peace that you seek will fill your life when the civil war within you ends. Only then peace comes.
Jesus said, These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. John 16:33.
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful. John 14:27.
In order for God to bring peace in your life, He has to trouble and stir it up. He stirs it up and deals with it. You cannot bring peace to the outward world or minister in an outward world until you have peace in your own inner world. God gives you peace. Peacemakers are those who have sought God to correct the confusion, conflict, oppression, and turmoil that is in their spirit. When God has corrected that and made them at peace with themselves and with Him, then it radiates out and they become peacemakers. When two individuals are in a situation where there is confusion and agitation, the one may add to it because of the confusion in his own life, but the other will quiet everything down if he has peace within. Peace begins and the peacemaker is born when the civil war within ends with the peace of God. You have to be a partaker of the fruit. You cannot be a peacemaker until you are a peace partaker.
The difficulties people often have in ministering in any level is that they do not have it in themselves. The world is quick to detect a believer who is not at peace himself. How is he going to reach anyone else? I was never drawn to a preacher, no matter how well he delivered a message, when I detected confusion in his own spirit. How could he set himself up as an authority to answer my problems when he did not have the answers for his own? I have consistently avoided giving answers, even when I thought I knew them, if I had not walked in them myself. We do not need people to criticize and tell us what to do, when we know they cannot walk in it themselves. That is what the Pharisees did. Jesus rebuked them, because they laid the load of the whole law upon the poor people, and would not lift a finger to help them, yet they did not walk in it themselves. Jesus was a peacemaker. Storms even had a hard time blowing when He was around. When He walked on water the waves had to lie down and lap quietly at His feet. He was the Peacemaker, the Prince of Peace.
You cannot have a civil war going on in you, so stirred up and battled, without real peace and still find that you can minister to anyone else and be a peacemaker. God’s peace comes when the Lord stirs up things. It will be the same way with you. When you minister to someone you do not seem to solve the problems on the surface, but God’s Word begins to bring the solution down at the root level. That is what God is concerned about. John the Baptist was a peacemaker because he came with a message, And now the ax is laid unto the root of the tree… Luke 3:9. It took awhile for the tree to appear dead, but when God severed the root, then the source of the trouble died. How can God make peace unless He starts whacking away at your life? Blessed are the peacemakers—how can you be a peacemaker unless you are ready to go to the root of the problem? A peacemaker is not one who dispenses aspirins; he is one who brings the divine cure for confusion and conflict.
These principles of the Kingdom are so deep that only the surface of what needs to be done in your spirit has been scratched. Are you aware of the conflict within you? Do you see the troubling in your thinking? If you are going to be a son of God, a peacemaker, God has to deal with the conflicts in your own life first. You cannot minister out of your own conflict. Peace takes over when the civil war within you ends.
Another important passage of Scripture about inner conflict is Galatians 5:16, 17: This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. Wouldn’t you like to have these cross-purposes in your life eliminated—the things that wipe you out? Why do we make New Year’s resolutions? Because we are aware of that which is warring within us. What happened to last year’s resolutions? Nothing much—they are just as new and as fresh for this year again—hardly used at all. We must go even deeper than the flesh and go on to the things within our own spirit which must be eliminated, which must be changed. That is what the Kingdom of God is all about; it is a realm of spirit.
Do you understand what this Scripture means? …the kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21. Phony expositors try to expound that Scripture: “Oh, it’s all the inner thought life.” But it is not; the kingdom of God is within you. Jesus was not talking about retreating into some sanctuary of your mind where peace reigns supreme; He was talking about the condition of your spirit. The Kingdom of God is not a building; the Kingdom of God is not a program; the Kingdom of God is not a denomination. As you come into the realm of Spirit, you are the Kingdom of God. It is within you. It is God reigning within your spirit. That doesn’t mean that it ends there; it means, that’s it. The force and the power of it reaches every realm, for God will leave nothing untouched. He will invade every realm there is through His Son. Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32. He gives you the Kingdom; it is a state of your spirit. God moves within you and within your spirit, and when that work is accomplished, it reaches on out to the other areas too.
One of the principles I have learned is that God does not seem to be doing as much sovereignly in this hour as He did in other generations. In the past many people would pray, and then God would move in sovereign acts: healings, miracles, signs, and wonders. Anything being done now is being done through the channel of His Body, Body ministry, as though God is taking a new, free expression of His power, His glory, and His victory through the Lord Jesus by moving through His many-membered Body. He is making them the extension of Himself, so that no longer can we say, “Here’s someone; He’s not much, but I think he has some ability. He has a good gift of gab and he can sing well, so let’s make a pastor out of him and send him someplace.” There would be less success with it now than ever before. Why? Because it is what a man is in his spirit that matters. That is why God will turn away from the professionals of religion in this day and begin to use the lame, the halt, and the blind.
When perfection is wrought within your spirit through God’s dealing down in your spirit—when He has stirred things up, made you aware of them, laid the axe to the root, brought peace within your life and peace within your spirit, and it is set right—then you will be among those people who will go anywhere, external abilities notwithstanding, and move the world.
This is not about elementary salvation but about the perfection of spirit. When people try to understand the Scriptures on the wrong plane they miss a great deal. For example see what you think of Romans 7. How far along was Paul before this happened to him? For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I know not: for not what I would, that do I practice; but what I hate, that I do. But what I would not, that I do, I consent unto the law that it is good. So it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. Romans 7:14–17.
“Well, that means he wasn’t a Christian.” It does not. If that were so, it would end when he became a Christian and never again happen to him. Do you practice what you hate but not consent to it? Do you say, “That which I do I know not”?
For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice. But if what I would not, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which dwelleth in me. I find then the law, that, to me who would do good, evil is present. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see a different law in my members (this word “law” is not some statute in the books; it is a “principle,” like these Beatitudes, by which everything works and is governed), warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I of myself with the mind, indeed, serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death. Romans 7:18–8:2. Paul was claiming a real release. To be very honest in the exposition of this Scripture, Paul was talking about the principle of sin that dwells within the flesh of an individual. We are going beyond that and talking about the principle of sin that often operates even in the spirit of a born-again believer.
II Corinthians 7:1 says, …let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. We are concerned about the filthiness of the flesh, but we are more concerned, during the study of these Beatitudes, about applying all the deliverance of the Lord to the realm of our spirit and having it cleansed from that filthiness of spirit which we sense. We may say, “Oh, this is terrible! I’m neither poor in spirit, nor mourning. I’m not meek. I’m not really hungry and thirsting.” Yet, as we open up to these Beatitudes, a change begins to take place immediately within us. It is much different than the cleansing of the flesh. The filthiness of the flesh is overcome in another manner. But the filthiness of the spirit, the imperfections of the spirit, seem to come in a different plane than those of the flesh. Jesus turned to His disciples and said, Now ye are clean (or “purged”) through the word which I have spoken unto you. John 15:3.
By these words, God is changing our spirit and perfecting and bringing us up. Oh, the transforming power of the Word! Are there things in your life that you want changed quickly? To hear and to believe is to find that the effect on your spirit is forthcoming immediately. You will become aware of real changes that you have looked for, an evidence within your spirit you can sense. You will be aware it is taking place within you and inner conflicts are being resolved. You will have Him to thank for it. And as you have peace, you begin to make peace. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the sons of God.
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Matthew 7:1–5.
If you do not have it in your spirit, you cannot give it to anyone else. And that is exactly what Jesus is teaching here. It isn’t literal. A little mote in your brother’s eye and a beam (a big plank) in your own eye—and some say that Jesus didn’t have a sense of humor? He had to have had a sense of humor, for our Lord Creator made giraffes, monkeys, and us. And once in awhile there comes forth some beautiful illustrations such as this. “A beam in my eye? Hmm…” Jesus is talking about a thing of spirit, so great that it colors everything that you are.
Do you realize that with a wrong spirit we could slow down God’s end-time purposes until it could take years for a church to rise above the imperfections in our spirits in the way that we approach God? Our animosities will do it. Our sympathies will do it. All of them are products of the things that are beams in the eye of our spirits until we are not able to do the will of the Lord.
Becoming a peacemaker and a son of God means that God wins the battle. And the antichrist that comes to reign in your spirit and sits upon the throne of your heart is dethroned and slain by the brightness of the Lord. To become an instrument of the Lord in this world begins by God bringing it in your life first. When God is dealing in your life and you are in constant inner conflict, it means that God is bringing peace to you. “Pow, pow, pow”; He is shooting down the bad things one by one to make peace. It will be as quiet as Boot Hill before the Lord finishes within your heart. He is crucifying the old flesh with its affections and lusts, and it is kind of noisy right now. “Pound, pound, pound”; the nails are going in as you are being crucified with Christ. You are wiggling and squirming because you are not really dead yet, but you are dying. Rest in peace.
Are you saying with all your heart, “O God, bring it to an end”? Do you say, “I thought we would be out winning the world, and I thought I would have at least a thousand converts all by myself by the time I’d served God this long”? Instead, He is dealing with the inner conflict. But as soon as the inner conflict is more and more resolved, then greater is the expansion out in the world. You have something to say, you have something to be, and what you are is more important than what you do. You can do a lot of things that can be effective up to a point, but it is what you really are in spirit that is important.
If you have any inner conflict and turmoil it will end, because God will begin, and day by day it will seem as if you are being glued together and becoming one person. You will know where you are going. Things will not upset you as they used to and you will not blow up over them. You will not be facing crises so unprepared. You will be walking in the grace of God because He is making you a peacemaker.
It is hard to understand the peace of God because everything around us is in turmoil, and yet it is going to be so even more. While the world is going mad, a people will come forth in this end time who will walk with peace in their hearts—without conflict. They will be God’s testimony walking around oblivious to the fact that everything in the world is collapsing around them, just missing them. Don’t worry about it; just walk in it.
To walk with God in this end-time move of His Spirit in the earth supersedes our understanding. Although it is so beautiful, so intricate, so basically a revelation of the wisdom of God, yet it is logical, rational, reasonable, and Scriptural beyond anything we could ever dream. It comes as a revelation to people’s hearts. And it seems as if they have such anguish and come into such turmoil, that they are like seething volcanoes walking around ready to blow. Then God brings to them His rest and His peace. When the sons of God come forth, we will see one of the great Beatitudes fulfilled: Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the sons of God.
When people are filled with the Holy Spirit, it looks as if the Lord has met them and their problems are all solved. But no, just one short leg is healed and they are trying to straighten up the rest of the body and get everything else to function. It requires an adjustment in every other area. On the surface you would think, “What has happened to my life? I started to walk with the Lord, and now everything’s getting messed up!” Yes, but you will soon be going in the right direction; relationships will be right; your inner thoughts will be right; you will be guided and directed by the Holy Spirit. However, that process is like having an adjustment by a chiropractor. It will probably hurt at the time. Psalm 51:8 says, Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Just remember that the Lord does some of these things to you for a purpose, and it hurts. This is the way God is making us to be at peace. He is straightening out all the things that are out of line. Everything will straighten out—just walk with God.
Would you like to be a peacemaker? Would you like to be able to sow in peace? James 3:17 and 18 says, But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without variance, without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for them that make peace.
Some preachers are as diplomatic as possible, and yet they offend everyone. Another man can be cold, almost bordering on rudeness he’s so blunt, but he talks to people straight, saying things that could offend them easily, and he gets away with it, week after week, year after year. If anything, the people love him. Many a preacher who was doing his very best said something at which people took offense, and they dropped out. If people didn’t like what was being preached to them, they would close the purse strings.
If someone really loves you and their spirit is perfect towards you, they could walk up and slap you in the face and you would never take offense. A great deal of animosity is in the human spirit. “What knoweth a man save the spirit of a man which is in him?” (I Corinthians 2:11). You are drawn to some people, and you are against others, because some people have hostility within them. When you come near them you feel like bristling up, and you don’t know why. Your fists are clenched while you’re around them. You can go up to other people with clenched fists, but when you look at them you relax because there is no fight in them, just peace.
Blessed are the peacemakers because they surely know how they came to be that. When God has sons who will come through Armageddon and subdue the nations, it will be because those sons first had an Armageddon within. What God does in your spirit is what will be effective. The world has had all the right words, the right phrases, and all the right doctrines for a long time. The trouble is there has been a lot of hot air but no power behind the words because it has not been wrought in the spirits of the men. The world has become conditioned to professional religion and is still impressed with people’s academic achievements. It will be surprising to see what God will do through people whose spirits are made right.
So often you see that inner ambition and conflict: “Oh, I have to run down the road and witness for Jesus. I have to do this, and I have to do that!” People are driven and motivated, and when it all comes out there is only frustration.
The work of God can be done to a great extent by people who are not really peacemakers; they can do a lot. But it is when you really have it down in your spirit that other people sense it and hostility doesn’t come up in them. Bungle along and if you have love, no one takes offense. Has someone ever come to your door to argue religion? Before they talked five minutes, they were angry and had you angry. Why? Because they were oppressed by an argumentative spirit. They were trained to argue with you. Under the name of witnessing they did everything they could to draw you into contention and debate. And when they left, you were standing there, feeling fierce. And if you were upset about it, it is because your spirit was bad too. They won’t tell you anything that you want to really follow, but they will stir up anything in your spirit that you need to know about. And that will be one of the sweetest exercises that could ever happen to you. Do you want to be a peacemaker? Are you on your way to being a peacemaker because God is dealing with the things in you now?
The greatest Peacemaker of all time is described in Ephesians 2:13–19. He is our model and we are going to be peacemakers like Him. Study this passage carefully because the word peace is used a number of times. You will see how the Lord brings peace—how He made peace in people’s lives. It is very important that you understand this, for it can live with you all the days of your life:
But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in his flesh the enmity (He was talking about the wall of partition, an enmity that was in the people’s flesh), even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; that he might create in himself of the two one new man, so making peace; (watch these words) and might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and he came and preached peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father. So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God. Ephesians 2:13–19.
How did Jesus make peace—between Jews and Gentiles, those who were close and those who were far off—how did He do it? Jesus took the walls down. Walls make conflicts. “Walls?” The walls that you built or that are built against you are the source of all the conflict and confusion that exist in your life and in your relationships. What is it that keeps a husband and wife from communicating with each other? Walls! They may be talking the same language, but they might as well be talking two foreign languages. Nothing is coming through. They are not communicating at all. Why not? They have a wall up. They don’t even hear each other, really; their spirits are walled off and are not open to each other. If a counselor were to mark on a blackboard “he” and “she,” as they gave their arguments and grievances—one for him, one for her, one for him, one for her—when he was through he would see only who had the most credits. Who knows where it started? But if he could break down the wall between their spirits, he would not have to solve a single problem. They would go out hand in hand; everything would be fine. They would be flowing together as one spirit.
The source of problems is the walls that come up. When we talk about being a peacemaker, we are talking about the ministry within the Body of Christ that makes it one. How do we do that? We open up our spirits to God and take the walls down toward each other. Let the Spirit of God flow. That is the way of making peace and receiving blessing. Then we can go into conflict with the devil, claim things, and win great victories. How did Jesus bring peace to us? He took down the walls and destroyed the enmity that was between people and between them and the Lord, and so making of the two, one new Man, and so making peace. All by His precious blood He took the walls down.
How does the Body of Christ ministry work today? By someone who goes along as a peacemaker. And if you say, “He is a wall dynamiter,” you would be saying the same thing. He gets rid of the walls between people where they have little imagined offenses and put up walls against each other. You do that, don’t you? Sometimes when you withdraw it is the same thing; you are putting up a wall. You walk up and say, “Hello, Brother So-and-So! Hello, Sister So-and-So!” They say, “Hello,” but they know and you know, and they know that you know, and you know that they know that you know there is a wall. And that wall should not be there. You feel it, and it exasperates you. One of the most difficult things is when two people have a close relationship but are addicted to walls coming up against one another. What should they do? Go back to the source of it.
You put up a wall because of inner conflict, because of something of trouble in your spirit. Oppression, confusion, and things that are in the world reach your spirit, and so you put up a wall. You can’t take it. There are people who have gone through difficult experiences, so they put up a wall. A classic illustration is the woman who dies an old maid, because when she was young and beautiful she had a sweetheart but he jilted her. So what did she do? She wore black the rest of her life and withdrew. She was not honoring the memory of him. But something got to her spirit so she put up a wall.
These are the same things that happen to you in your spirit. That’s why you withdraw. That is why there is enmity between you and others. You say, “This shouldn’t exist in the house of God.” No, it should not. Know this one thing—that the Body of Jesus Christ will flourish when we have peacemakers: peacemakers who know how to take down walls so that people love each other, and so make peace. In the ministry of the Body there should be that flow of love. You should be a peacemaker. Being a peacemaker doesn’t mean just being diplomatic for everyone to get along. A peacemaker is one who can come to the walls and the root of the problem and get rid of it. Then the peace begins to flow through the Body.
And the best place to start is down in your own heart, in your own spirit. If there is something wrong in your spirit you will put up a wall. You won’t reach your bother and you won’t reach your sister. Down with the walls!
Some people built beautiful walls and never realized that when those walls come down, there would be nothing left but an anthill. They had built all those walls around an anthill, and they had really nothing to protect. It is so shattering to them to realize they are not anything, they do not have anything, they are not going anywhere, and they have not been anywhere. All they have done is build walls. When God takes down the walls where are they?
Building the Body of Christ is nothing more than people receiving ministry so the walls are taken down and they flow into one. The Body of Christ is going to be that great instrument of God in the end time because it has received its ministry to become strong. All the middle walls of partition were taken down, and God made them one, so bringing peace. The peace of a church increases as the walls come down. Conflict and difficulties exist in a church when those walls are up. A peacemaker is a man who has his walls down. Conflict and troubles come because of walls and when the partitions are broken down, as Christ broke them down for us, we can reach into every area of our lives and bring the walls and partitions down.
When people come with walls it is delightful to start bombing those walls and when they are exposed, they are embarrassed because they have been hiding behind their walls for so long. Then the Lord brings us that perfect love of a peacemaker: “We know even as we are known.” Some of those walls we put up even within our own perception, until we become self-deceived by them—walls that we put up against other people and walls that we put up against God. The peacemaker knows that a man is full of conflict within his walls until someone brings them down. With every wall that comes down there is a greater peace and less conflict. Soon you are ready to shoot them down yourself, and if you see a wall going up, down comes that wall!
Is there a way in God that you can be a peacemaker? Find it in yourself first. Pray, “Jesus, bring me Your peace, Your comfort.”
“Oh,” you say, “I got that when I first became a Christian.”
Oh, did you now—are you sure? I have a feeling that it comes by another route. Philippians 4:6–7 says, In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving (not worrying about anything—everything with prayer and supplication) let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus. Would you like that?
Down with the walls. Rise, you peacemakers. Down with the walls. The ministry of a peacemaker who builds the Body of Christ is a destroyer of walls that have walled in men. He will be called a son of God, because that is what Christ did.