How Can the World Find Peace?
January 1, 2002 - Two thousand years ago, at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium, in the city of Jerusalem under Roman occupation, Jesus Christ answered a question of one of the leading religious figures of His day. And the answer that Jesus gave him is the solution today to three of the major problems facing us in this new millennium: poverty, pollution and conflict.
by Anne Graham Lotz
As Jesus gave the solution to these problems, He directed the attention of the religious leader, and thus our own attention, not to the problems in the world but to the source of those problems, which is in the human heart. The solution is spiritual rebirth.
Jesus said, "You must be born again,"(1) because we need a new mind to know God and to understand others. We need a new heart to love God and to love others. We need a new spirit of reconciliation with God and forgiveness toward others.
The Bible says that all of us have sinned, and we fall short of the glory of God.(2) God created us in His own image with a capacity to know the Creator in a personal and eternal relationship, but we rebelled against God and disobeyed Him. With that act of disobedience sin entered the human race, and as a result, we were separated from God.
The Bible says that "the wages of sin is death"(3)—not only physical death but spiritual death. Sin has resulted in wars and conflicts that are an outward reflection of the wars in our hearts because we do not have peace with God. And because we don't have that peace with God, we live in poverty of the human spirit—we don't have the blessing of God. And because we live in spiritual poverty, we pollute our world with sin—greed, pride, hatred, prejudice.
The Bible says that Jesus Christ is God's Son whom God gave as His own sacrifice on the cross to atone for our sin.(4) Through His death and resurrection we have forgiveness of sin, reconciliation with God and eternal life when we place our faith in Him.
The solution to poverty is God's only Son, Jesus Christ, who eliminates the poverty of the human spirit by giving us the blessings of God—love, joy, peace, happiness, hope and eternal life.
The solution to pollution is God's only Son, Jesus Christ, who, through His sacrificial death on the cross, cleanses us of the pollution of sin—greed, selfishness, hatred, anger, envy, pride, prejudice and unforgiveness.
The solution to conflict and war is God's only Son, Jesus Christ, who establishes us in a right relationship with God and a right relationship with our fellow man, and who brings us peace.
My prayer is a prayer of praise to God for giving us His Son, Jesus Christ. And my prayer is a prayer of petition that the world might be reconciled to Him, and then reconciled to each other, through faith in His Son, Jesus Christ.
PRIVACY
