Sermon from Pixley UB

"The Prince of Peace"

Ephesians 2:14-18

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of the French forces in World War I, rarely gave interviews to the newspapers during the war, so reporters continually pressed those around him for any nugget of information about Marshal Foch's thinking about the war.

One man who was continually hounded by the press was Marshal Foch's driver, Pierre. The most frequently asked question: "When does Marshal Foch think the war will end?" The driver told reporters, "The Marshal never tells me anything--but if he ever says anything to me, I'll be happy to tell you."

Day by day the reporters continued to pressure Pierre for any information. Finally, the driver surprised the reporters by saying, "This morning, Marshal Foch spoke to me about the end of the war."

Pens poised above their notepads, the reporters eagerly demanded to know what the military leader said.

The driver continued, "Marshal Foch said, 'Pierre, what do you think? When is this war going to end?' "

Everywhere, for as far back as humanity remembers, the most urgent question of our race has been, "When will there be peace?" Do you remember a time in which there was truly peace in the world? When there was no major war, no brushfire war, no cold war, no war of liberation, no terrorist war, no war of guns, no war of words?

Conflict among nations is not the only place we see it. We experience conflict between individuals, conflict within families, conflict within businesses, conflict within churches, even conflicts on the freeway where angry drivers engage in everything from "Same to you, fella!" tirades to actual gunfire. As human beings, we scarcely know ourselves, we don't even begin to understand all the sources of our conflicts--so how can we know how to bring about peace?

In our study of Ephesians 2, we come to a passage in which the apostle Paul deals with Christ's role as the great peacemaker among men. Here we will see him in fulfillment of the great prophecy in Isaiah 9:6: "And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." This exalted title belongs strictly to Jesus.

In Ephesians 2: 14-18, the apostle gives us the way of peace. He uses as an illustration the fact that Jesus Christ bridged the widest chasm that ever existed between people--the gulf between Jew and Gentile. If you doubt that the Jew-Gentile division is so difficult to bridge, consider the Israeli-Arab problem in the Middle East. The greatest minds of our day have tried to work it out, and no one has gotten anywhere near a settlement. This is a classic confrontation between Jew and Gentile, and the differences are so profound, the hostilities so entrenched, that a solution appears impossible.

Paul describes in Ephesians 2:14-18 how Christ bridges the conflict and brings peace.

The word peace appears four times in three verses in that passage, and those occurrences of the word peace give us the apostle's outline of how Christ brings peace:

1.   "For he himself is our peace," verse 14. That is the origin of peace.

2.   "His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace," verse 15. This is the process of peace, how it is actually brought about: Jesus came and made peace.

3.   "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near," verse 17. He brought us to peace by preaching to us the means of peace.

I have said before, and will say again, that these truths are not mere doctrinal or theological concepts. If you are in conflict with another person in your home, on the job, in your neighborhood, in your church, or anyplace in the world, this is the way of peace, the key to peace, the secret of peace. Let's take a closer look at Paul's practical teaching on the issue of peace.

The origin of peace

Paul starts with a definition of what true peace really is. True peace is oneness. It is not merely the cessation of hostility, the absence of conflict. Peace means being one. This is a crucial truth. Until we understand it, our understanding of the meaning of peace will be superficial at best.

Is it peace when you get two armies to lay down their weapons and stop fighting each other? Certainly, not shooting at each other is better than shooting--but a cessation of armed warfare is often little more than a lull between rounds of conflict. That's not true peace by God’s definition.

Is it peace when two friends who have fallen out with each other, who have been engaged in a war of words, finally decide to simply avoid each other and remain civil but cool and distant toward each other? Not according to God's definition.

When a church outwardly maintains its rituals and programs, but inwardly festers with division, suspicion, and resentment, is that a peaceful church? No, not according to God's definition.

According to God, peace is oneness and harmony. It is sharing mutual enjoyment. It is being one. Anything else is superficial and temporary and not truly peace at all. Yet, in our personal relationships, our overwhelming tendency is to make peace only on superficial, external terms rather than in terms of real oneness. Weariness of warfare is not peace. Distance and coldness is not peace. An enforced truce is not peace. Only oneness is peace. That is the only form of peace God is interested in--the healing of conflict, the restoration of genuine unity and relationship.

Here the apostle tells us the secret of peace. The secret of oneness is a Person: "He himself is our peace." When Jesus makes peace--between individuals or between nations--that peace will be a satisfying, permanent, and genuine peace. It is a peace that will endure. In order for you to live at peace with other people, you must be at peace with the Person of Christ. If you have His peace, you can start solving the conflict around you. But you never can do it on any other basis. The place to start, the origin of peace, is the settling of any problems between you and Jesus Christ.

When we have problems with another person it’s our tendency to focus on that person and all the bad things they’ve done to us. But, in reality, our problem isn’t primarily with that person. Actually, we have two problems: our lack of peace with them and our lack of peace within. And the second is the most important and, often, the one we overlook. We are not at peace. We are upset, angry, and emotionally distraught. Everything we do and think is colored by that emotional state. It is impossible to solve the problem with the other person until we ourselves acquire peace.

This is the promise of God to Christians: He is our peace. Once our hearts are settled and we have placed the matter in the hands of the Lord, we can begin to understand the problem more clearly and apply intelligent, caring, practical remedies to the situation that will result in true peace, true oneness. There is profound insight in the fact that Christ is our peace.

The process of peace

Next comes the process of peace. How does peace happen? It comes in three stages, Paul says. Three stages must take place before we experience oneness.

The hostility ended

“He . . . has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations” (v. 14b-15a).

Paul is talking about the ending of the great conflict between the Jews and the Gentiles of his day. He says the first thing Jesus did was to tear down the wall of hostility and separation between them. He uses a turn of phrase that refers to a feature of the temple in Jerusalem. He was a Jew, and had been brought up in that temple, and he remembered the wall, about 3 or 4 feet high, that ran through the temple court, dividing it into two sections. One section was the court of the Gentiles, an outer court, while the inner court was accessible only to Jews. There was a warning sign threatening death to any non-Jews who entered that inner court.

In the year 1871, archaeologists digging around the temple site uncovered the very stone marked with this warning. These were the actual words, translated from both the Hebrew and the Greek: "No man of another race is to proceed within the partition and enclosing wall about the sanctuary. Anyone arrested there will have himself to blame for the penalty of death which will be imposed as a consequence."

The temple partition wall is a symbol. It was destroyed when the temple was leveled by the Romans in A.D. 70, several years after this letter was written. But Paul says the hostility between Jews and Gentiles was demolished in Jesus Christ. At best, the Jews treated the Gentiles with aloofness; at worst, they despised and hated them. There was enormous hostility between these two peoples.

The Berlin Wall once divided that great German city into a communist sector and a free sector. But today that partition is gone. East and West Germany have been brought together, made whole, made one. The hostility has been erased. If you want to see that wall today, you can't go to Germany but you can find a section of it in America, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. It is decorated with a flower and a butterfly--symbols of peace and freedom--and it stands as a reminder of old divisions and a symbol of the peace that comes from unity and oneness.

The fallen Berlin Wall is a symbol of the kind of peace God wants to bring to our lives--the tearing down of partitions and barriers, the creation of genuine unity and oneness. How does Jesus Christ tear down those walls between Jews and Gentiles, between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and others? These barriers seem impenetrable--but the apostle says that Jesus Christ knows how to remove these walls. How? "By abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations." It is the law that creates the hostility. So if you remove the law, you end the hostility.

The strength of hostility is demand. The Jews despised the Gentiles because they considered themselves better than Gentiles. "We have the Law of Moses," they said. "The Law is right and true; it reflects the character of God. You Gentiles don't have the Law." And in their self-righteous arrogance, they thought they were keeping this Law because they didn't do some of the outward, external acts the Law prohibited. And so they hated and despised the Gentiles because they thought they were superior. The Gentiles, on the other hand, hated the Jews, for their smugness and hypocrisy. So there was intense hostility between them.

Jesus' solution is to fulfill the Law in his own flesh and substitute what both Jews and Gentiles really needed: grace and forgiveness. By giving Jews and Gentiles a common ground of grace and forgiveness, he removed all reason for hostility.

So this is the way to end hostility and generate peace: Remove self-righteousness with its arrogance and demands. Put grace and forgiveness in its place. Peace comes to families, for instance, when parents stop insisting they never make mistakes, when parents begin to apologize when they err. When parents free themselves from the obsessive need to be seen as flawless and infallible, when they finally allow themselves to be human in front of their kids, peace becomes possible in the family. The same principle works between friends, among church leaders, and in business settings. Hostility results from self-righteous demands. Remove the demands, and hostility gives way to unity and peace.

A new man created

“His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace” (v. 15b).

But God doesn't stop with merely abolishing the Law and its demands. If He stopped there, He would simply be indulging and tolerating sin. God goes further than that, and His next step is an act of creation: "His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace" -- notice the word create. That is something only God can do. Man cannot create. Only God is the Creator. Only God creates out of nothing. He makes a new person, a new unity which never existed before.

The "new man" Paul refers to is the church itself. The church is a picture of what Jesus Christ does. In the church, there is neither Jew nor Gentile. The Jew does not have to become a Gentile; the Gentile does not have to become a Jew. There is a new and fully integrated entity created. In the church today, we don't see a great deal of division between Jews and Gentiles, but we have other divisions: divisions between races; between rich and poor; divisions between the powerful and the powerless; divisions between different leaders in the church; divisions between different philosophies of ministry and worship styles; divisions between different cultural and historical heritages within the church.

Peace comes to a church when the walls of division are broken down and the church discovers what it means to be a fellowship of Christlike men and women who demonstrate the same grace, love, and forgiveness that was taught to them by their Lord and Savior.

Reconciled to God

Paul reminds us that the ultimate barrier--that between sinful humanity and God--has been broken down by the cross: "and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility." Ultimate peace must be with God. When we recognize that we are all on the same level before God, that the ground is level at the foot of the cross, that we all stand in need of the same grace and forgiveness, then hostility is brought to an end. This is what the apostle says: "by which he put to death their hostility."

Paul tells us that we are to see each other as no different before God. The only ground we have to stand on before God is the ground of His grace and forgiveness, and "not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:9). When that is our attitude, all division is brought to an end. Hearts are healed. Peace is created.

The means of peace

In the final section of this passage, we find the means of possessing peace. How do we lay hold of peace? Well, the apostle says, verses 17 and 18, "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." Here we see that two steps are necessary to lay hold of this kind of peace:

Believing the message God has given you.

"He came and preached peace," says Paul to these Ephesians. That is, "Jesus preached to you." How did he do that? He didn't come in person. He came in the person of Paul, an apostle sent by the Lord. Paul's preaching was Jesus' preaching of peace. Christ seized the initiative and sent the apostle to proclaim His peace. All that remained was for the Ephesians to accept it and believe it.

Preaching is never an argument or a dialogue. Preaching is an announcement. You can either accept it or reject it, but you can't quarrel with it. It is what God says is true. And God says that the barrier has been removed and a new relationship is available, which will be far richer than anything you've known before.

And the next step to laying hold of God's peace?

Communication with the Father

"For through him [Jesus] we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." This is probably the greatest statement in the book of Ephesians. I don't know a higher plateau of truth than this. Here we see the Trinity of God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--all working together to bring us into the closest possible relationship with God. He invites us to communicate with him, to unload before him all the burdens and pressures of our life. And we begin to live in this new relationship with the Father.

There is nothing higher than this. When the full glory of this relationship breaks upon us, we will discover the greatest joy of the Christian life. "Now this is eternal life," Jesus said, "that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent" (John 17:3). At this point, life begins to be what God intended it to be.

It’s as if we've been climbing with Paul, step by step, up a great mountain. And now we have come to the very summit: direct access and communication with the Father. We can go no higher than that. Life with the Father is the most delightful of all experiences, for all that we need is provided by a Father's heart, and a Father's love.

Here, at the summit of the Christian experience, we find the peace and joy that humanity has always longed for. Hostility has ended. The partitions have been torn down. Communion and fellowship with God and one another are ours at last. We have been elevated to all God intended us to have and to be by His Son, Jesus--the One who is the Prince of Peace.



	"The Prince of Peace"
	Ephesians 2:14-18
	Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of the French forces in World War I, rarely gave interviews to the newspapers during the war, so reporters continually pressed those around him for any nugget of information about Marshal Foch's thinking about the war. One man who was continually hounded by the press was Marshal Foch's driver, Pierre. The most frequently asked question: "When does Marshal Foch think the war will end?" The driver told reporters, "The Marshal never tells me anything--but if he ever says anything to me, I'll be happy to tell you." Day by day the reporters continued to pressure Pierre for any information. Finally, the driver surprised the reporters by saying, "This morning, Marshal Foch spoke to me about the end of the war." Pens poised above their notepads, the reporters eagerly demanded to know what the military leader said. The driver continued, "Marshal Foch said, 'Pierre, what do you think? When is this war going to end?' " Everywhere, for as far back as humanity remembers, the most urgent question of our race has been, "When will there be peace?" Do you remember a time in which there was truly peace in the world? When there was no major war, no brushfire war, no cold war, no war of liberation, no terrorist war, no war of guns, no war of words? Conflict among nations is not the only place we see it. We experience conflict between individuals, conflict within families, conflict within businesses, conflict within churches, even conflicts on the freeway where angry drivers engage in everything from "Same to you, fella!" tirades to actual gunfire. As human beings, we scarcely know ourselves, we don't even begin to understand all the sources of our conflicts--so how can we know how to bring about peace? In our study of Ephesians 2, we come to a passage in which the apostle Paul deals with Christ's role as the great peacemaker among men. Here we will see him in fulfillment of the great prophecy in Isaiah 9:6: "And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." This exalted title belongs strictly to Jesus. In Ephesians 2: 14-18, the apostle gives us the way of peace. He uses as an illustration the fact that Jesus Christ bridged the widest chasm that ever existed between people--the gulf between Jew and Gentile. If you doubt that the Jew-Gentile division is so difficult to bridge, consider the Israeli-Arab problem in the Middle East. The greatest minds of our day have tried to work it out, and no one has gotten anywhere near a settlement. This is a classic confrontation between Jew and Gentile, and the differences are so profound, the hostilities so entrenched, that a solution appears impossible. Paul describes in Ephesians 2:14-18 how Christ bridges the conflict and brings peace. The word peace appears four times in three verses in that passage, and those occurrences of the word peace give us the apostle's outline of how Christ brings peace: 1. "For he himself is our peace," verse 14. That is the origin of peace. 2. "His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace," verse 15. This is the process of peace, how it is actually brought about: Jesus came and made peace. 3. "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near," verse 17. He brought us to peace by preaching to us the means of peace. I have said before, and will say again, that these truths are not mere doctrinal or theological concepts. If you are in conflict with another person in your home, on the job, in your neighborhood, in your church, or anyplace in the world, this is the way of peace, the key to peace, the secret of peace. Let's take a closer look at Paul's practical teaching on the issue of peace. The origin of peace Paul starts with a definition of what true peace really is. True peace is oneness. It is not merely the cessation of hostility, the absence of conflict. Peace means being one. This is a crucial truth. Until we understand it, our understanding of the meaning of peace will be superficial at best. Is it peace when you get two armies to lay down their weapons and stop fighting each other? Certainly, not shooting at each other is better than shooting--but a cessation of armed warfare is often little more than a lull between rounds of conflict. That's not true peace by God’s definition. Is it peace when two friends who have fallen out with each other, who have been engaged in a war of words, finally decide to simply avoid each other and remain civil but cool and distant toward each other? Not according to God's definition. When a church outwardly maintains its rituals and programs, but inwardly festers with division, suspicion, and resentment, is that a peaceful church? No, not according to God's definition. According to God, peace is oneness and harmony. It is sharing mutual enjoyment. It is being one. Anything else is superficial and temporary and not truly peace at all. Yet, in our personal relationships, our overwhelming tendency is to make peace only on superficial, external terms rather than in terms of real oneness. Weariness of warfare is not peace. Distance and coldness is not peace. An enforced truce is not peace. Only oneness is peace. That is the only form of peace God is interested in--the healing of conflict, the restoration of genuine unity and relationship. Here the apostle tells us the secret of peace. The secret of oneness is a Person: "He himself is our peace." When Jesus makes peace--between individuals or between nations--that peace will be a satisfying, permanent, and genuine peace. It is a peace that will endure. In order for you to live at peace with other people, you must be at peace with the Person of Christ. If you have His peace, you can start solving the conflict around you. But you never can do it on any other basis. The place to start, the origin of peace, is the settling of any problems between you and Jesus Christ. When we have problems with another person it’s our tendency to focus on that person and all the bad things they’ve done to us. But, in reality, our problem isn’t primarily with that person. Actually, we have two problems: our lack of peace with them and our lack of peace within. And the second is the most important and, often, the one we overlook. We are not at peace. We are upset, angry, and emotionally distraught. Everything we do and think is colored by that emotional state. It is impossible to solve the problem with the other person until we ourselves acquire peace. This is the promise of God to Christians: He is our peace. Once our hearts are settled and we have placed the matter in the hands of the Lord, we can begin to understand the problem more clearly and apply intelligent, caring, practical remedies to the situation that will result in true peace, true oneness. There is profound insight in the fact that Christ is our peace. The process of peace Next comes the process of peace. How does peace happen? It comes in three stages, Paul says. Three stages must take place before we experience oneness. The hostility ended “He . . . has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations” (v. 14b-15a). Paul is talking about the ending of the great conflict between the Jews and the Gentiles of his day. He says the first thing Jesus did was to tear down the wall of hostility and separation between them. He uses a turn of phrase that refers to a feature of the temple in Jerusalem. He was a Jew, and had been brought up in that temple, and he remembered the wall, about 3 or 4 feet high, that ran through the temple court, dividing it into two sections. One section was the court of the Gentiles, an outer court, while the inner court was accessible only to Jews. There was a warning sign threatening death to any non-Jews who entered that inner court. In the year 1871, archaeologists digging around the temple site uncovered the very stone marked with this warning. These were the actual words, translated from both the Hebrew and the Greek: "No man of another race is to proceed within the partition and enclosing wall about the sanctuary. Anyone arrested there will have himself to blame for the penalty of death which will be imposed as a consequence." The temple partition wall is a symbol. It was destroyed when the temple was leveled by the Romans in A.D. 70, several years after this letter was written. But Paul says the hostility between Jews and Gentiles was demolished in Jesus Christ. At best, the Jews treated the Gentiles with aloofness; at worst, they despised and hated them. There was enormous hostility between these two peoples. The Berlin Wall once divided that great German city into a communist sector and a free sector. But today that partition is gone. East and West Germany have been brought together, made whole, made one. The hostility has been erased. If you want to see that wall today, you can't go to Germany but you can find a section of it in America, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. It is decorated with a flower and a butterfly--symbols of peace and freedom--and it stands as a reminder of old divisions and a symbol of the peace that comes from unity and oneness. The fallen Berlin Wall is a symbol of the kind of peace God wants to bring to our lives--the tearing down of partitions and barriers, the creation of genuine unity and oneness. How does Jesus Christ tear down those walls between Jews and Gentiles, between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and others? These barriers seem impenetrable--but the apostle says that Jesus Christ knows how to remove these walls. How? "By abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations." It is the law that creates the hostility. So if you remove the law, you end the hostility. The strength of hostility is demand. The Jews despised the Gentiles because they considered themselves better than Gentiles. "We have the Law of Moses," they said. "The Law is right and true; it reflects the character of God. You Gentiles don't have the Law." And in their self-righteous arrogance, they thought they were keeping this Law because they didn't do some of the outward, external acts the Law prohibited. And so they hated and despised the Gentiles because they thought they were superior. The Gentiles, on the other hand, hated the Jews, for their smugness and hypocrisy. So there was intense hostility between them. Jesus' solution is to fulfill the Law in his own flesh and substitute what both Jews and Gentiles really needed: grace and forgiveness. By giving Jews and Gentiles a common ground of grace and forgiveness, he removed all reason for hostility. So this is the way to end hostility and generate peace: Remove self-righteousness with its arrogance and demands. Put grace and forgiveness in its place. Peace comes to families, for instance, when parents stop insisting they never make mistakes, when parents begin to apologize when they err. When parents free themselves from the obsessive need to be seen as flawless and infallible, when they finally allow themselves to be human in front of their kids, peace becomes possible in the family. The same principle works between friends, among church leaders, and in business settings. Hostility results from self-righteous demands. Remove the demands, and hostility gives way to unity and peace. A new man created “His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace” (v. 15b). But God doesn't stop with merely abolishing the Law and its demands. If He stopped there, He would simply be indulging and tolerating sin. God goes further than that, and His next step is an act of creation: "His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace" -- notice the word create. That is something only God can do. Man cannot create. Only God is the Creator. Only God creates out of nothing. He makes a new person, a new unity which never existed before. The "new man" Paul refers to is the church itself. The church is a picture of what Jesus Christ does. In the church, there is neither Jew nor Gentile. The Jew does not have to become a Gentile; the Gentile does not have to become a Jew. There is a new and fully integrated entity created. In the church today, we don't see a great deal of division between Jews and Gentiles, but we have other divisions: divisions between races; between rich and poor; divisions between the powerful and the powerless; divisions between different leaders in the church; divisions between different philosophies of ministry and worship styles; divisions between different cultural and historical heritages within the church. Peace comes to a church when the walls of division are broken down and the church discovers what it means to be a fellowship of Christlike men and women who demonstrate the same grace, love, and forgiveness that was taught to them by their Lord and Savior. Reconciled to God Paul reminds us that the ultimate barrier--that between sinful humanity and God--has been broken down by the cross: "and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility." Ultimate peace must be with God. When we recognize that we are all on the same level before God, that the ground is level at the foot of the cross, that we all stand in need of the same grace and forgiveness, then hostility is brought to an end. This is what the apostle says: "by which he put to death their hostility." Paul tells us that we are to see each other as no different before God. The only ground we have to stand on before God is the ground of His grace and forgiveness, and "not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:9). When that is our attitude, all division is brought to an end. Hearts are healed. Peace is created. The means of peace In the final section of this passage, we find the means of possessing peace. How do we lay hold of peace? Well, the apostle says, verses 17 and 18, "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." Here we see that two steps are necessary to lay hold of this kind of peace: Believing the message God has given you. "He came and preached peace," says Paul to these Ephesians. That is, "Jesus preached to you." How did he do that? He didn't come in person. He came in the person of Paul, an apostle sent by the Lord. Paul's preaching was Jesus' preaching of peace. Christ seized the initiative and sent the apostle to proclaim His peace. All that remained was for the Ephesians to accept it and believe it. Preaching is never an argument or a dialogue. Preaching is an announcement. You can either accept it or reject it, but you can't quarrel with it. It is what God says is true. And God says that the barrier has been removed and a new relationship is available, which will be far richer than anything you've known before. And the next step to laying hold of God's peace? Communication with the Father "For through him [Jesus] we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." This is probably the greatest statement in the book of Ephesians. I don't know a higher plateau of truth than this. Here we see the Trinity of God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--all working together to bring us into the closest possible relationship with God. He invites us to communicate with him, to unload before him all the burdens and pressures of our life. And we begin to live in this new relationship with the Father. There is nothing higher than this. When the full glory of this relationship breaks upon us, we will discover the greatest joy of the Christian life. "Now this is eternal life," Jesus said, "that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent" (John 17:3). At this point, life begins to be what God intended it to be. It’s as if we've been climbing with Paul, step by step, up a great mountain. And now we have come to the very summit: direct access and communication with the Father. We can go no higher than that. Life with the Father is the most delightful of all experiences, for all that we need is provided by a Father's heart, and a Father's love. Here, at the summit of the Christian experience, we find the peace and joy that humanity has always longed for. Hostility has ended. The partitions have been torn down. Communion and fellowship with God and one another are ours at last. We have been elevated to all God intended us to have and to be by His Son, Jesus--the One who is the Prince of Peace.