Not as the World Gives | Dave Sloop

Our gospel this morning comes from John chapter 14 beginning at verse 25. This is the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint John.

These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, I'm going away and I will come to you. If you love me, you would have rejoiced because I'm going to the father for the father is greater than I. And now I've told you before it takes place so that when it does take place, you may believe. I will no longer talk much with you for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the father. Rise, let us go from here. — John 14:25-31

The gospel of the Lord.

Good morning, everybody. I heard it said once that people don't actually want money. They want what money can buy. In other words, if somebody tells you, "I want a million dollars," what they mean by that is not stacks of green paper. What they mean is I want a luxurious vacation. I want a bigger house, a better car. There's something underneath the thing that you say you want that is the real thing that you actually want.

And what's interesting is that if you get the house, you might look at the house and say, "Is this what I really wanted? Did I really want the house?" What you might find is that underneath that object was a different desire than the house itself. Rather, "I like the way this house makes me feel. I like the status that comes along with this house, and I like the way that it makes me feel when someone comes into my house and they think, 'Man, this is a nice place. I wish I was the kind of person that could have a house like this.'"

You and I, we are complex. And the point that I'm making is this: often, there are longings underneath the things that we think that we want. They're the thing we actually want, but we have not yet named or identified. And I want to make the case to you this morning that perhaps one of the primary, if not the primary longing in your life that sits quietly beneath many, if not most of the decisions that you make in a given week is a longing for peace.

Does that resonate with anybody here? We just want to know that everything is going to be okay with the people that I love, and we want to know that the people that we love are okay with us. And when our head hits the pillow at the end of the night, we just want to know: my world is at peace.

We also know that peace, inner peace, is incredibly fragile. You can be hitting on all cylinders in your life, but then in one tiny area of your life, your peace can be disturbed, and then suddenly, it spoils everything else. It's like an emotional toothache. You ever experienced this? We don't think about how our teeth feel until you have a toothache, and then it's the only thing that you can think about. That's what peace, a disruption of peace, can be like in your life. It is all consuming.

And if I'm right about this, then Jesus' words today in John chapter 14 are of particular importance to you and to me. Because listen again to what Jesus says:

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. — John 14:27

These are profound words with significant implications. And what I want to do this morning is start by making three observations, general observations about the words that we just read, and I want to ask two questions about them. And that's how we're going to spend our time.

Here's the first observation: Jesus says, "Let not your hearts be troubled." And if you remember, it's not the first time that he says this. In fact, the first time that he says this is in this chapter, in verse one. In verse one, he says, "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me." And then here, in verse 27, "Let not your hearts be troubled. Neither let them be afraid."

Jesus here seems deeply concerned with the condition of his disciples' hearts. Isn't that interesting? He's not only concerned with their performance and their behavior. He looks at them. He sees into their hearts. He understands that their peace is disturbed and disrupted, and it matters to him. He cares about your heart too.

That's the first observation. Jesus is concerned with hearts. He knows what's going on in there.

Here's the second observation. Notice the word choice, the way that Jesus phrases this twice. Let me say this too before I get to the next one. The fact that he says this twice in verse one and verse 27 means that these two exhortations exist as literary bookends for this chapter. One could make a good case that the driving force of much of what Jesus says in this chapter is in pursuit of their inner peace, that he is communicating them promises that they can cling to in order that they might experience peace.

Second thing. He says:

Let not your hearts be troubled.

In other words, don't let it happen, which implies, of course, that his disciples have some agency over their hearts, that he's suggesting to them, while you might not be able to control the external circumstances of your life, there's something internally that you can control. Is that what he means?

Let me give you an example of this. You would never come up to me and say, "Sloop, let not your pants be blue." Because they are blue. And I would respond to you, "There's nothing I can do about that. My pants are blue. You're just gonna have to live with it."

But you might come up to me and say something slightly different about my pants. You might say, "Sloop, let not your fly stay down." In which case, I would say, "Thank you. I did not know that it was," and I would immediately move to fix that problem, so that I was not embarrassed. Because I know that that second scenario is something that is very much within my control.

Is that what Jesus means for his disciples to see? That he's saying, "I see the anxiety. I see the fear. I see the trouble in your heart that has showed up there uninvited, like a guest that was not invited to the party, and I want you to know, you don't have to let it stay there."

Is that what's going on here?

Here's the third observation. Jesus is not speaking about peace in general. He says:

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, do I give.

What is His Peace?

So in light of those three observations, let me ask these two questions. Here's the first one. What is it? When he says my peace, what is he talking about? And how is it distinct from the world's peace that he seems to contrast it with? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What is the nature and character of it? What is it?

That's the first question. And here's the second question. It's pretty simple. How do I get it? How can it become my peace? If he says he left it and he gave it, how do I know that I've received it? And if I'm not experiencing it, which my suspicion is many of us here today are not, what do I need to do to begin experiencing and enjoying the benefits of something he claims to have given me?

What is his peace? And how does his peace become my peace? That's what we're gonna look at today.

So let's ask that question again. What is it? And one of the best ways to understand what something is is to clarify first what it isn't. And Jesus gives us a great place to start because right out of the chute, he says:

Not as the world gives do I give to you.

And so how does the world give peace? Or perhaps a better question to ask is, how do I ordinarily seek or try to find peace in the world? Just consider some of the ways that you are longing for peace in your life right now. There's a whole host of them. I'll just mention a few.

We want relational peace, don't we? We want to be good, reconciled with the people that we care about in life, those closest to us. We want relational harmony. We want to be at peace even with people that we're only mildly acquainted with. We want to be thought well of. We want relational peace.

And there's another relationship that you probably care most of all about, that you want peace in, and it's your relationship with you. You want to be able to look in the mirror and like what you see, and I'm not speaking in physical terms. I mean, you want to feel good about who you've become, the character that you exhibit, the habits that you've formed. You just want to generally like you. And if you don't, then there's probably not a whole lot of happiness in your life.

Where else do we need peace? You want vocational peace, not just to be satisfied by your job, to enjoy it, but you wanna feel secure in your job. And perhaps, in this generation, this has never been a greater concern, that someone younger, smarter, better would come and take your job, or that artificial intelligence would make you obsolete in the next six months. Maybe some of us here, that's a very real fear. We want vocational peace.

Or Dave Ramsey might suggest that the most important kind of peace you need is financial peace, which is just another way of saying, you want to stack up enough wealth so that you can weather any financial storm, economic storm that may or may not be headed your way. We want financial peace.

And without even realizing it, what may have occurred in your life is that the whole, the total sum of your life is just trying to maintain peace, and it's a balancing act, to be sure. And here's what it might look like for you. You are consistently and incessantly listening to this inner voice, the inner critic, who's constantly reminding you how you just don't measure up, and there's things that you need to change in order to feel happy and okay with you. Or it might be that you are killing yourself at work in order to get noticed, to get recognized, to get the promotion, to feel validated. And it might be that you discover that you've over indexed for vocational peace, and your relational peace at home is suddenly under threat. And perhaps you overcompensate in order to get that back in order, but now you don't get the promotion, and your financial peace is attacked. Do you see how we don't even realize it, but suddenly, we're just getting disrupted? Our peace is getting disturbed around every corner.

And here's the bad news. What I've just described to you is actually the easy part, because every single category of peace that I just named is something over which you are able to exert some measure of control. But what about life circumstances that show up uninvited, and over which you have zero control? The cancer diagnosis, the unfaithful spouse, the stock market crash, the wayward child, identity theft, getting rear ended at a stoplight. I mean, I could go on for the next thirty minutes because we all live in light of the fact that there are some things that happen in this life that we just simply cannot control, and they happen to us, and we have a different set of strategies for how to navigate those kinds of problems.

Two Worldly Strategies for Peace

See, because when we cannot hang on to peace by fixing our circumstances, what do we do? We set out to find peace by forgetting our circumstances. We just turn on Netflix, and several episodes or several seasons in, and six hours later, think, what am I doing? We pick up our phone and we scroll, or we pour a drink, or two, or three. I'm not saying any of these things is in and of itself bad, but what I am saying is that if we stop to ask ourselves the question, what am I doing? The answer that may come back to us is, I'm trying to forget my life so I can have peace because that's how the world gives it. The world will let you be at peace if you fix your circumstances or if you forget them.

And Jesus says, I'm not talking about that. What I'm offering is not that.

What Jesus's Peace Is Not

But there's something else that we need to make sure Jesus isn't saying here because he's also not saying that his peace is the absence of any sort of distress in our heart. He's not saying that if you have his peace, you'll never feel distressed. How do we know this? Because Jesus himself was well acquainted with it. Do you remember how Isaiah described the messiah that was going to come?

He says, rejected and despised, a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. — Isaiah 53:3

So know this, if you are plagued by distressing thoughts, Jesus is not suggesting that if you have his peace, that you become invincible to those things.

What he's saying—well, I won't tell you what he's saying yet because I wanna show you in the context of John's gospel how this is even more true about Jesus. In John 11, 12, and 13, we see examples of Jesus experiencing trouble internally, and the same exact Greek word for his disciples is used in each of those instances. In John chapter 11, he's standing outside of the tomb of Lazarus, and he's troubled. In John chapter 12, when he's in the temple and the Greeks show up and he realized, my hour has come. And he immediately realizes all of the implications that go along with his hour, which is his death, and he says, now is my soul troubled. And then in John 13, Judas betrays him, and he was deeply troubled.

So what is going on here? How is it that Jesus can be exhorting his disciples to not experience something that he consistently and frequently experiences himself? What is this? Is it a contradiction? No. It is not. And here's why.

What Jesus's Peace Is

Because Jesus is not saying you will be invincible from trouble. What he is saying is, if you have my peace, you don't have to be governed by it. It doesn't need to own you. It doesn't need to rule you. You're not gonna just pretend that you never feel it. What Jesus is doing here is he's teaching them that there is a way to confront trouble when it inevitably comes. And I think that begins to answer the question about what it is.

I've told you what it isn't, but here is what it is. When Jesus says, my peace I leave, my peace I give, I think at least in part, what he means is that what I'm offering you is what you see on full display right now in me. Not free of trouble. I mean, think about what's imminently coming for Jesus. Not free of trouble, but peace anyway. Peace in the midst of and in spite of trouble.

Jesus is at peace on the eve of his own death. He knows it's coming. He knows all that it will entail. He knows the suffering he will endure. He will be rejected, tortured, beaten, spat upon, crucified, murdered, unjustly. He will be made to look like a criminal. He knows it's coming. And he says, my peace I offer to you. He is so at peace in that moment that he's preoccupied with their distress. Can you imagine being so at peace with what's coming that you know is coming, the most horrific, unimaginable suffering you could ever think of? And he is at peace. It's not the absence of trouble, it is peace in the middle of it.

How is it that Jesus is able to stay or to remain or to abide in that sense of peace? Well, I want to take a look at one example of this peace in Jesus' life from John chapter 12 verse 27. If you turn your bible back one page, here's what it says.

Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour, but for this purpose, I've come to this hour. Father, glorify your name. — John 12:27

You see what Jesus is doing here? He's not forgetting his circumstances or trying to fix them, he is facing them. He's looking them right in the face. He's acknowledging the pain. He's acknowledging the fear that has showed up uninvited. Now is my soul troubled? But he immediately responds to it. Jesus does not just listen to his heart, he speaks to it because he has agency over it. He says, what shall I say? He says, it is for this very purpose that I've come to this hour. I don't need be afraid of it. Jesus begins telling himself the truth about the God that he knows and loves and trusts, that the circumstances of his life are not outside of God's purposes for him. And so he can rest, he can be at peace because he knows that he's right in the middle of what God has purposed and planned for his life, even though it's painful.

And this is exactly the same kind of thing that is happening in our passage today in verse thirty and thirty one. Let me read that to you.

I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me, but I do as the Father has commanded me so that the world may know that I love the Father. — John 14:30-31

Jesus is saying here, I know that Satan has influenced Judas, and he is at work in some other people too. And his influence will eventually lead to my arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion. But Jesus also knows something else. Satan has no claim on me. Jesus does not fall into the trap of conflating Satan's influence with his control. He remembers that his Father is sovereign over all things, and while he may permit some things that feel painful, they are part of his plan. And he can rest, he can be at peace, he can cling to the God that he knows and he loves in the middle of it.

How Jesus' Peace Works Through His Humanity

Now, some of us might have this thought. We might think, yeah, well, that's easy for him because he is God after all. A little bit tougher for me because I'm not. But I want to explain something to us because that is not how his humanity worked. He was not a fake human. Jesus never used his divinity as an opiate to soften the pain of the human experience. Not once did he do that. He never surrendered his divinity, but he never compromised the reality and the fact that he was fully human.

I want you just to consider for a moment the temptation in the wilderness for Jesus. This is precisely what Satan wanted him to do. Satan wanted him to be the king without the cross. He wanted him to be the savior without suffering, and Jesus said, I will not take shortcuts. He came to identify with the human experience, and he didn't cheat code it. He felt it all the way to the bottom.

And so, the peace that Jesus is experiencing in this moment right now is not a function primarily of his divinity. It is a function of his perfect humanity, fully and absolutely surrendered to the God that he knows, loves, and trusts. That is his peace. That is what he's offering. A peace not from freedom from pain is a peace in the middle of it.

Who doesn't want that? See, we think that what we actually want is a life free of problems, but it's not what we actually want. We want peace, and Jesus is saying, I can give you that in the middle of a life that is going to be full of problems, which he's going to promise in John 16. Anybody here not want that peace?

Getting Jesus' Peace

Well, let's figure out how we get it. How do I get it? That's the second question. And the first and obvious answer to that question is this: if we want what Jesus has, we at least have to do what Jesus does.

What does Jesus do? He does not try to fix his circumstances, nor does he try to forget them. He faces them. He looks at his circumstances, and he does not see the pain and interpret something about what must be true about God. He does the opposite of that. He knows what is true about God, and he allows that to inform his circumstances. Jesus clings to God. He clings to what he knows about God. He reminds himself.

He does not listen only to his heart. He speaks to his heart. Can we do this? We can. We can do what Jesus does. And in fact, this is precisely what this instruction is in verse 28 of chapter 14. Listen to what he says to them. This is really interesting.

You heard me say to you, I am going away, and I will come to you. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I am going to the father, for the father is greater than I. — John 14:28

We're going to unpack this because it's a tricky verse. Jesus said, "I told you, I am going away, and I will return to you." And if you're like me, what you expected him to say next was this: "And if you understood how rich that promise was for you, and all the benefits that will flow to you because I'm leaving and returning, you would rejoice." But that isn't what he says. He could have, and it would have been true, but that's not the point that he's making right here.

What is the point that he's making? Let's read it again: "I told you I'm going away, and I will return. If you loved me, you would have rejoiced because I go to the father." What? When Jesus goes to the father, he returns to the glory that he had before he came to earth. He says, "If you loved me, it would show itself in your preference for my glory over your comfort." That is what he's saying. Now, that might not feel terribly comforting, but can I show you that that's precisely what Jesus is doing in verses thirty and thirty-one?

When he says, "I see what's coming. Satan is at work in people's lives to kill me. And I go to the father. I go to the cross because I love the father, that the world may know that I love the father." In other words, Jesus is not just someone who is committed to a higher purpose. He's someone who is captivated by a greater love. And in the same way that he is willing to endure the pain of the cross for the sake of his father's glory, he's inviting them: "Whatever's happening in your life, you can endure it for my glory. And if you love me, that is the fruit that my love and your love that we share—that's what's going to bear fruit in your life. That's what it's going to look like."

The Mystery of Our Suffering

Now, here's another question you might be asking, and it's a fair one. I had to grapple with this one too. You might be saying, "Okay, now wait a minute. I understand how his leaving and their suffering, which is attached to his leaving—but he's going to be glorified, and I can see how their suffering leads to his glory. But what about the job I just lost? I don't see a straight line between my cancer diagnosis and his glory."

But I want to remind you of something. The disciples couldn't see that straight line either. God had a plan that they couldn't see yet, and it was for his glory. We may not know the reasons for our suffering, but the disciples are suffering in real time just like you are. And what I'm suggesting to you is this: there is a straight line between your pain and his glory. Always. He will not waste one drop of your suffering.

I don't have time to go to all the places in scripture that confirm this for us. Romans 8:28 is the most obvious:

All things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28

Paul says:

These light and momentary afflictions are preparing for us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all. — 2 Corinthians 4:17

Whatever we're suffering with right now pales in comparison to the glory that this suffering is producing.

Get this too: in the same way that Jesus says, "I obey my father by going to the cross so that the world knows that I love him," you know what that means? The cross he has allowed in your life becomes an occasion for you to show the world that you love him.

I'm not saying that pain is irrelevant, and I'm definitely not saying that he doesn't care about it. He does. He cares about your heart just like he cares about his disciples' heart. What I'm saying is that every ounce of pain can be an opportunity for you to show a watching world that you love him more than your comfort, that you love him more than even your own life. And you know what happens when you live that way? He is glorified in you.

The Source of Our Peace

Now, we're going to go a little long. There's one more aspect of his peace that you and I need to understand. Because when Jesus says, "My peace I give to you," on the one hand, he's saying, "I am the model for peace." But if all we ever were to do is to copy him, we're in trouble. Because you and I aren't very good at copying Jesus on our own. I don't think like him on my own. I don't act like him on my own.

And therefore, let me make this point quickly: He is not only the model of our peace, he is the means of our peace. Which is why he says throughout this chapter, and specifically in our text in verses twenty-five and twenty-six:

I send the helper. — John 14:25-26

I send the helper to bring to mind what I've said to you, so that you will understand it, so that you will have a greater sense of who I am, and it will enable you to endure this suffering that otherwise would be unbearable. I'm giving you my helper, my holy spirit, not only so you'll remember, but to cultivate a sense of affection and love that makes my glory more preferable than your comfort.

He does not expect you to figure this out on your own. He does not expect you only to imitate him. Because notice this, he gives first a promise and then an exhortation. And I think the reason it happens in that order is this. What he asks of us in the exhortation is made possible by what he gives to us in a promise. He is giving us his presence, and it is the only reason he can say, don't let your hearts be troubled, because he's given us his spirit. He is our peace.

But here's the final thing that we need to understand. There's another layer to Jesus' peace that we haven't discussed, and it's this. He is at peace with his father perfectly. Every day of his earthly life, he only ever did what his father asked of him, and he was the only one who ever was able to do that. He was perfect. He was at peace with God, and he was surrounded by a humanity among which you are part that is at war with God.

That's the language the Bible uses about you and your heart apart from Christ. You are hostile to him. You do not love him because your heart has been so tainted and corrupted by sin. You cannot obey him because you do not have any affection for him. You don't understand his truth apart from him, and he's at peace.

The wages of sin is death.

And so in a sense, you and I are on a death march, and we don't even know it. We are marching towards our death because of a heart that is hostile to God. It is at war with God, not at peace, like Jesus' heart was.

Here's the point. Jesus is not only our model for peace. He is the means of our peace by his holy spirit. But Jesus, before we have any hope of modeling him, we need the means of his spirit, but the only ones to whom he gives his spirit are the ones whom he has made peace with God for.

Making peace by the blood of his cross, he reconciled all things to himself. — Colossians 1:20

He himself is our peace. He has made peace with God for us. And my question for you is, do you know his peace? Because that is the peace that is most important for you to discover. And until you know that peace, you will not have the means of his peace, and you cannot begin to imitate his peace.

Maybe some of us here today, for the first time, would realize we've been at war with a god we didn't know. And he is today asking, would you be willing to lay down your weapons? And for some of us, who have not been enjoying what is ours by right, we need to remember what is true about the God who is sovereign, who is in control. We need to look at our circumstances through the lens of love. Because when love becomes our lens, rejoicing in the midst of our pain becomes possible.

I pray that today, you would know his peace.

Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We thank you. We need you. And we know that apart from you, we are without hope, and we can expect to stay in a place of unrest and disturbed peace. But I pray that you would set people free even as I pray, Lord Jesus, wherever they are on that spectrum. It is in your name that we pray. Amen.