The Peacemaker

Spurgeon opens by placing the beatitude "Blessed are the peacemakers" in its context — sandwiched between purity of heart and the willingness to be persecuted — and carefully describing the peacemaker in every role of life: as a citizen who resists the popular drumbeat for war (applying this directly to rising tensions between Britain and America), as a man who absorbs personal insults rather than avenge them, as a neighbor who steps between quarreling parties and takes blows from both sides, as a businessman who prefers to be wronged rather than drag a dispute through the courts, and as a church member who labors to quiet divisions among believers, knowing that Christians fighting each other is a spectacle that dishonors God and ruins souls. He traces three blessings the peacemaker inherits: God's own blessing poured from Heaven, the identity of a child of God that is proven not just by name but by bearing the very character of the Father who sends rain on the just and unjust alike, and the unavoidable public recognition of being "called" a child of God by observers who cannot explain any other way a soldier-turned-prizefighter smiles through scalding soup or a minister called "John Bunyan" by an attacker counts it the highest honor of his day. He closes by turning peacemaker himself, insisting the greatest peace to be made is between a rebel soul and God — painting in vivid strokes the triple war every unconverted person wages against their own conscience, against the Law's ten thundering accusations, and against God himself — and pleading with every hearer to lay down arms by trusting the wounds of Christ, who stands offering not terms but simply himself, and who has never yet turned away a single soul that came.Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on December 8, 1861.