P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

THE GIFT OF PEACE

You stand there, looking down in stunned disbelief.
Between your feet on the scales is a number larger than you’ve ever seen there before. As you step off, you vow to take immediate action. Before the day is out, you’ve been to the local sporting goods store and bought yourself a new treadmill.

You have it delivered fully assembled, and with satisfaction and determination, you push a few buttons and step on for the first time.

Starting out slowly, you set the speed for a comfortable two and a half miles per hour. Two minutes later, you’re getting into a steady rhythm and feeling pretty smug about taking this positive step toward getting rid of your spare tire. Another couple of minutes later, though, and two and a half miles an hour is starting to feel much faster than it did at first. It seems as if you’re working a lot harder.

When another minute passes and you find yourself breaking into a slow jog to keep up, you glance down at the display and are amazed to see that the speed now reads over 4 miles per hour. And the treadmill continues to accelerate. You push the Stop button, but nothing happens. Four and a half miles per hour . . . 5 . . . 6. You’re out of breath, drenched in sweat, and your heart is pounding. 7….8…9 miles per hour.

At this speed, you’re afraid to jump off—but you also don’t know if you can keep speeding up much longer. Clearly, your new treadmill has gone berserk—and instead of helping you toward better health, you now wonder if the thing is going to run you straight into a heart attack.
Even if you don’t have your own treadmill at home, my guess is that about this time in December, you may well feel like you’re on a treadmill gone mad—that the pace of your life has slipped into fast forward. You’re exhausted and out of breath. And the name on your treadmill?
Well…Christmas, of course!

You were moving through the year just fine until around Halloween, when you began to notice something in your local stores that not so many years back, you didn’t see till the day after Thanksgiving: Christmas decorations and displays.

You’ve stepped onto the holiday treadmill, and it begins to move faster and faster. Christmas cards. Christmas dinner plans. The search for the perfect Christmas tree. Hanging the lights. Dusting off the nativity scene.

On your calendar, programs and parties multiply like mushrooms in warm, damp soil. The company party. The church Christmas pageant. The school Christmas play.

Oh—and don’t forget the gifts! Once again, you’re caught shopping at the last minute. Circling the mall parking lot for 20 minutes so you can join the sea of shoppers surging through the aisles in search of perfect gifts for friends, family, and coworkers.

You stagger home with your carload of treasures and wearily wrap each gift to place under the tree.

Friend, I hope maybe I’m wrong about your Christmas this year. I hope you did all your shopping early to avoid the rush. And I hope that by now you’ve found not only the perfect gifts for your friends and family, but that just a few days from now, you’ll get just the gifts you’ve been hoping to receive for yourself.

Here in this final week before Christmas, I’d like to share with you the Five Best Gifts of Christmas. Four of them are gifts I happen to know Someone is already planning to give you. And then I have a suggestion for an awesome gift you can give.

Christmas, after all, is about giving. The very word Christmas contains the name of the greatest Giver ever—the One whose birth we celebrate each December 25—the One who is the “reason for the season.”

The Bible story of the birth of Christ refers to all five of the gifts we’ll be looking at this week. Today, let’s consider Gift Number One. The Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, says that on the night Christ was born, some shepherds were in fields guarding their sheep, when a brilliant angel appeared and told them that Jesus had just been born in nearby Bethlehem.

“And suddenly,” Luke 2 verses 13 and 14 tell us, “there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men!” (NKJV)

On earth….Peace—the first of the Five Best Gifts of Christmas.
Let me ask you: Does this earth seem to you like a peaceful place? According to the Carter Center founded by former President Jimmy Carter, at any given moment, there are at least 110 violent conflicts occurring around the globe, and at least 30 of these are major wars in which more than 1,000 soldiers are killed.

The Bible says that in the beginning, this earth was a place of uninterrupted peace. But when Satan, the original rebel, led human beings to join in rebellion against their Creator, sin and selfishness brought conflict, war, bloodshed, and death. One of the first two brothers murdered the other. And peace has struggled to survive ever since.

History is the record of human hostility—of savagery, battles, swords, artillery, and bombs. Recent history includes world wars, ethnic cleansings, genocide, the Holocaust, and terrorism.
On earth, peace?

If the collapsing Twin Towers of 9/11 shook our sense of peace and security, over the past year it’s been shaken even more as both Asia and America continue to reel in the aftermath of horrific natural catastrophes.

On earth, peace?

And it’s not just daily news reports that reveal the lack of peace on our planet. Consider human relationships. Everything from playground fistfights to bitterly contested divorces to domestic abuse—all of these underscore the reality that peace between people is an elusive goal.
On earth, peace?

But there’s another arena even closer to home where peace is hard to find. Perhaps a good share of the time, you don’t experience your own personal peace. Yes, we all have our times of happiness and relative calm—even of great joy. But if we’re honest, many would admit that much of the time, it’s as if storms are raging inside.

The enemies of inner peace are many. Guilt. Regret. Fear. Anger. Resentment. Anxiety. Addictions. Failures. Cynicism. Vengefulness. Stress—yes, even the stress of the Christmas treadmill.

On earth, peace?

Were the angels wrong that first Christmas night?

When Jesus had grown to adulthood, completed His ministry, and was about to leave this earth, He said to His followers—as recorded in John 16:33—“Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” (NKJV)

Was Jesus Himself wrong?

Sometimes it seems as if there is no peace to be found anywhere—not between nations, not between people, not even inside our own hearts.

Despite all this, friend, I want to assure you that Christ’s priceless Christmas gift of peace is for real.

The world around us, God’s Word tells us, will never be fully at peace—no matter how many peace talks or peace initiatives or ceasefires take place—until Jesus returns to put an end to sin and usher in peace that will last forever. But the gift of inner, personal peace is available right now to any one of us.

Have you ever seen those little Russian nesting dolls—called matryoshkas? You get one doll—and inside is another, and then another. That’s the way it is, my friend, when we accept the greatest Gift of all—Jesus Himself. For in Him, we find every other good gift—including the gift of peace.

Ephesians 2:14 says, “He Himself is our peace.” And Jesus says to all of His followers: “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace.” John 16:33, NKJV).

Friend, do you truly have peace inside? Do you want it, almost desperately? This Christmas, Someone has already given you the gift of true inner peace.

But what must I do, you might ask, to have that gift? It really isn’t complicated. If peace is found only in Jesus, then if we accept Jesus Himself into our lives, He brings with him the gift of peace—and a host of other gifts as well.

Jesus never plays games with us. If we invite Him into our heart—into our life—He responds immediately. “Behold,” He tells us in Revelation 3: 20, “I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him . . .” (NKJV).

Have you opened the door? Have you invited Him in?

The Bible says that Jesus once calmed a raging storm on the sea simply by commanding, “Peace, be still.” At this Christmas season, you may feel anything but peaceful. Inside, the winds of worry and stress and fear, of guilt and regret and anxiety, may be blowing furiously.

But in a single moment, friend, that can all change—the moment you answer the knock at the door of your heart and invite Jesus in.

You can go to Him right now and say, “Jesus, please come into my life and heart. Calm the storms inside me. Please give me your gift of peace.”

Jesus only waits to be invited.
Why wait a moment longer?

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