January 29, 2001
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Phillipians 1:2
Grace to you and peace from the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Mauston.
It is our hope that we at First Baptist can make these ancient greetings real factors in the everyday relationships of people especially when we dig into and uncover some of the depth of meaning in each word. For "charis is the normal Greek greeting: it is the greeting with which Greek letters always begin. Eirene is the Greek for the normal Hebrew greeting, and was the greeting with which Jews met each other." In Hebrew it would be shalom.
"Charis is a lovely word; the basic ideas in it are joy and pleasure, brightness and beauty; it is in fact connected with the English word charm... Eirene is a great comprehensive word. We translate it peace but it never means a negative peace; it never means simply the absence of trouble. It means total well-being, everything that makes for mankind’s highest good…In addition this peace has always got to do with personal relationships, a persons relationship to himself, to his fellow-man and to God. It is a peace that is born of reconciliation."
Infuse these common words with Jesus and see them rise to new heights of meaning. Man becomes "no longer victim of the law of God; he has become the child of the love of God."
So when Paul, and our congregation pray for grace and peace on us all, we are praying that we all will know the joy of knowing God as Father and the peace of being reconciled to God, men and to ourselves and this is the grace and peace that comes through Jesus.
Quotations from writings by William Barclay.
Past Weeks Thoughts: