Second Sunday in Advent, December 10th (Candle of Peace)
In accordance with God’s promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth,
where righteousness is at home. Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting
for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.
– 2 Peter 3:13-14
I challenge you to know the peace of God that surpasses all understanding due to the presence, promise and power of God. It covers our past, promises our future and walks in our present!
New in Christ
What is perhaps most striking about the visions of the world’s future is that they have taken form completely independent of Christian thinking which is preeminently future-oriented. Those enormous powers which are gaining control in the hardened world, which cry out for a new age, a new world, and a new order can find no solid roots in Christianity, it seems. While Christians were so busy with their interior household problems and were so preoccupied with themselves that they lost sight of the rest of the world, a growing need outside of Christianity became more and more evident. This suggestion Christians often regarded as merely naive, anarchical and immature.
And yet you are Christian only so long as you look forward to a new world, so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are a Christian only when you believe that you have a role to play in the realization of this new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with a holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life.
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