The Taste of Blessing:Finding Faith

 August 3 2025

Matthew 5:9, Acts 10:1-23,34-48

         It probably surprises some people when I say that I have come very close to losing my faith.If you knew a little of what I and my family experienced in my early years in ministry it might be a surprise that I’m still have any faith left at all. I had gone for so long without seeing much work of the Spirit that I began to wonder if he was still present within any churches.The one thing that changed my heart was being invited to go along to prison with a group called Kairos. The reason I said, ‘Yes”, to doing something far from my comfort zone was that I take seriously the charge Jesus gives in a parable recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. Most church going folks remember the story of Jesus, at the end of the age, separating the sheep from the goats by how people had taken care of those Jesus simply calls, “the least of these”. Jesus asks, “How have you done feeding the hungry and going a cool drink to the thirsty? How have you done with clothing those who need to keep warm, and visiting those who are sick? And how are you doing going to see those who are in prison? These questions are important because, as Jesus goes on to tell us, when we care for the least of these, we have done so to him. Now, throughout my years of ministry, I have had opportunities to give food and drink to those in need. I have given coats away to those who needed them, I have visited many who are sick but I never had ever been inside a prison. So when my friend Tom came and asked for people to join him how could I say no. It was this act of saying, “Yes”, not just to Kairos, but, more importantly to God, this is what saved my faith. You see, our Kairos team of twenty-five men from all over north-east Ohio who had gathered weekly for eight weeks to pray and draw together in unity, stepped into Belmont Correctional in faith that God had already been working before we ever arrived. The message we hand delivered was the good news that God’s love for these men had never stoped just because they had found themselves incarcerated. No, God’s love was greater than all of our sin, and as an act of that love, twenty-five of us men, part of the Kairos team, entered into Belmont just to demonstrate the truth of God’s love for these residents. This love was made real by our team bringing into Belmont, three thousand dozen cookies, so that every resident could at least have one dozen homemade cookies. Well, you have to wonder if a bunch of men armed only with a message of God’s love and and lot of cookies could have any effect against the hearts of those who believed they had long been forgotten by God. I myself do not wonder this anymore for I witnessed first hand, on one of our weekends, how God  transformed the self declared leader of the Satan worshippers. This man listened to talks on God’s amazing grace and he let what we had to say, go from his head to his heart. His tough exterior began to drop away. The Holy Spirit had begun to work in his life. Within six months this man who used to worship Satan became baptized as a son of God. And I found the faith I had thought I had lost.

         You see, Jesus was very aware that those who have been blessed by the Holy Spirit, will inevitably begin to have some real doubts about their faith just because of this evil age we live in. This is why the fruit of the Spirit we are looking at today, the fruit called faithfulness, is so important for us to understand. We are looking at the fruits of the Spirit in this series of messages called, “The Taste of Blessing”. We have learned how God has blessed us by his love so how could we not but respond by loving God in return. Now we know that God is our shield who keeps our life safe from death, so that we overflow with joy. As we discover that we are, indeed, the very children of God who has for us an eternal inheritance, we now have peace. Then we remember how, through the giving of the bread, our only free choice is to give ourselves over fully to the Spirit of freedom. This is the way we remain patient, refusing to go back to a life enslaved to this world. We also remember at the table, that we drink of the cup, tasting the very mercy of God. In that moment then, the mercy of God is to live in us. This mercy is seen by others as a kindness which causes them to come home to God. And when we come before the face of God in prayer, we become in synch with him, purified from one degree of glory to another. Our life is lit up with holiness, God’s uncommon goodness which has the power to brings others to glorify our Father. 

         Well, today, we want to figure out how our life can be, faith filled. In the last three blessings that Jesus teaches us in the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus speaks to the real test we face as those who are demonstrate the goodness of God yet are still living in an evil age. As we know all too well, it is difficult to keep on believing. So it is good news that the blessing we are looking at in  Matthew 5:9  will cause us to be faith filled. Jesus teaches us, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Now, this word, ‘peacemakers”, is an unusual word, and we are left wondering, just what does Jesus mean that the Spirit blesses those who make peace? To learn the ways of peacemaking we are going to look at Simon Peter. Now, he might be a surprising choice to be the poster boy for peacemaking. I mean, if you go to the eighteenth chapter of John, you will find that it is Peter who is drawing his sword, ready to fight to the death to protect Jesus who has just been betrayed by Judas. Hardly an act of peacemaking, right? Yet, even so, Jesus does not give up on Peter. We catch up with Peter far from where he had been when the book of Acts began. Instead of spending his days in Jerusalem, we now discover that Simon Peter is living in a little town called Joppa, close to the Mediterranean Sea. The early days of the church have been rough. Many apostles have either been imprisoned or killed. As the story goes along we find that Simon Peter is found further and further from Jerusalem. He has found that his own people, the people of Israel, have  overwhelmingly refused to accept Jesus as being the long awaited Messiah-King. Peter, too, I believe, has begun to feel his faith slipping away. What we also know about Peter is that he always struggled with his commission given to him by Jesus to take the gospel into all nations and make disciples. As a devout Jewish man who had heard from his childhood the dangers of even being in the same room with a person who was not Jewish, what Jesus called him to do, was nearly impossible for him.

 Yet, Peter had to remember the early teachings of Jesus concerning how the blessing of God could be experienced. Jesus is the one who said that there is indeed a blessing of the Holy Spirit to be found by those willing to make peace. This should remind us of something Paul speaks of in the second chapter of Ephesians. There, Paul tells us that through the cross, Christ created one people, thereby making peace. Jesus, through the cross, brought all people to God thereby destroying the hostility that used to exist. You see, Jesus came and preached peace to both those near to God, the people of Israel, and to those far off from God, all of the rest of the world, so that all might have access to the Father through one Spirit. So when Jesus calls us to be peacemakers, he is simply saying, “Follow me”.

         So, in order for us to become a peacemaker we must firmly believe that this peace of Christ forged on the cross is actually a peace that is a gift for all people, in all places. Yes, the people of Israel, had for thousands of years, kept their distance from the unclean people who lived in the rest of the world. Yet, what Simon Peter had to accept is that the cross changed everything. The cross was the moment in time when the old world had indeed died and with that death, so too the demands of the law had also died. Now, our faith demands we be absolutely certain we live in a new age where peace prevails because the promised Holy Spirit has indeed come and blessed us. This is the very promise of Jesus who, on the night that he was betrayed, told his disciples that the Spirit of truth will come to them. The Spirit guides us to live in the truth that the cross has indeed brought us peace. So peace is made when through the Holy Spirit we invite others to come and live with us in this truth, that peace is here for all of us, both those close to God and for those who are far from God

         We see how the Holy Spirit guides us into this truth in the story of Peter. He is called by God to go to the house of a Roman centurion, a leader of one hundred men. The story goes, that as Peter is praying one day, he becomes hungry. So, as his hand is on the refrigerator door, Peter has a vision. Peter sees the heavens open, and something like a large sheet is being let down by its four corners upon the earth. In this sheet are all kinds of animals, and reptiles and birds. Then Peter hears a voice, telling him, “Come on Peter, go ahead and eat.” Peter, ever the good Jewish man, replies, “By no means, Lord. Never in all my life have I ever eaten anything that is called common or unclean.” Then Peter hears a voice a second time, telling him, “What God has made clean, do not call common.” Now, people often make the mistake that Peter is here told to stop eating food called clean by God. That is absolutely not what the story is about. No, the story is about the very reason why Peter, and every other person of Israel, ate the food that they did. Now, people have for centuries sought the reason why the diet of God’s people was so peculiar. People have speculated that because pigs were believed to have diseases, this is perhaps why the people of Israel were not allowed to eat pork. I read once that the reason for their diet was that by not eating animals who had large litters, the whole land of Israel would eventually become a land overflowing with life. This sounds promising, but the real reason that the people of Israel did not eat certain foods is this: God told them to not eat those foods; end of story. If you go back to the fourteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, we find the rules that determined which foods God’s people were permitted to eat. This section begins with this phrase, “You are the sons of God”. God is addressing his children as those who stand to receive an inheritance. With this in mind then, God goes on to say that as his sons they were to restrict their diet to what their Father has decided they were to eat. This kind of just sounds like just good parenting, doesn’t it? 

         Now, with this in mind, We return to Simon Peter and the vision he has as he prepares for lunch. The vision was a reminder as to why Simon Peter restricted his diet, and that reason was simply that he considered himself to be a son of God. As an obedient child he only ate what his Heavenly Father told him to eat. In this same way of thinking then, when God tells Simon Peter to be a peacemaker, he was to be obedient to this order of God. The reason why he was to do what he was told is the very same reason he never eaten a pulled pork sandwich, because his Heavenly Father expected Simon Peter to obey him. As obedient children we are to be peacemakers simply because we know who we are, sons who will one day receive an inheritance. I believe that this is what Simon Peter took away from his startling vision, because from then on his life began to become faith filled, having a real certainty as to what his Heavenly Father had called him to do.

         The story of Simon Peter and his strange vision thus helps us understand the importance of being peacemakers. We are to be like Jesus because we know ourselves as being the very sons of our heavenly Father, children who go and tear down the walls of hostility for only one reason: our Father told us to get busy with bridge building. If we consider ourselves to be those who stand to inherit eternal life, those known as the very sons of God, then peacemaking is what we will do. Now, people may speculate just why would we, in such a divided world, be those who tear down the walls and the fences and instead build bridges? The only reason we can offer for busying ourselves with the creation of peace is simply that our  Heavenly Father told us to. No other reason is necessary. 

         All that remains for us then is to figure out just how does one go about creating peace in an evil age where peace is always received with skepticism. Well, again, Simon Peter demonstrates to us the art of peacemaking. As it turns out, Peter simply follows the teachings of Jesus concerning how others are blessed by the Holy Spirit. Peter first speaks to Cornelius and his family about the good news of Jesus, the story of Jesus who was full of the power of the Holy Spirit, the one who was the living goodness of God, bringing wholeness to the lives that were broken, a life that demonstrated an uncommon peace. This Jesus was sentenced to die upon the tree called the cross, yet he was raised from the dead three days later and he is now the one who lives to judge the living and the dead. This is Jesus is the one the prophets spoke of, the one all might believe in to receive forgiveness of their sins. This Jesus has judged us all worthy of life, a life lived with him, our king. You see, this is where the blessing begins, the poor of spirit receiving from God this most amazing free gift of life in his kingdom. So yes, the Spirit came and blessed Cornelius and his family, a Roman centurion and his family, those who longed to belong to God and be known as his family. The sorrow he felt as being so unworthy of a life with God was suddenly erased as the Holy Spirit, the Comforter came rushing in, surrounding him with love. Cornelius and all in his household knew they had crossed over from death into life. They now possessed a new life as children of God. This is why they now had peace because they understood that they too stood to inherit eternal life. So, here stood Simon Peter and Cornelius, as equals, standing on the level ground at the base of the cross. Here stood Simon Peter and Cornelius at peace with each other, one who had felt near to God and one who had been considered far off from God, now both brought together through the power of God. This is the very beauty of this act called peacemaking. 

         What do others see when we do what our Father has called us to do, this act of making peace? They see that our life is marked by our faithfulness to God. So, when our faith begins to waver, we must get back to peacemaking. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to lead us to bring the truth of God’s peace to those who long to be restored to the family of God. The Spirit will guide us to those who feel unworthy to be called a fellow brother or sister in the family of God, to give to them the good news of this peace God has for all of us. This is how our Heavenly Father fills the hearts of his children with faith. So the Holy Spirit is standing bye, ready to lead us to one who longs to know that they too can be part of this great big family of God. The question is: Are you ready to follow him? Let us always be ready to say, “Here I am Lord, send me! May our prayer be, may just one more person might be blessed by the Spirit and  know at last the peace that Jesus has won for them at the cross!. To God be the glory! Amen!