Hosanna Restoration Church

No matter how things may be going crazy around us, God promises to keep our hearts in perfect peace if we just focus on Him. Don’t you just love it when you are in a stir and someone tells you to calm down? Have you ever heard anyone say, “I can’t calm down?” Well just imagine what was going on in the minds of the disciples at the time that Jesus came and kept saying “peace to you.”

I think they were feeling a lot of things, but peace was not one of them. And yet Jesus kept telling them to calm down, and to have peace. How in the world could He expect them to have peace? How could they possibly feel like everything was perfect and would just get better as time went on?

Finally Jesus must have felt they were calm enough to receive the key to the peace He was telling them about. They all had at least a partial understanding of how Jesus came into the world in the first place. They believed that the Father had sent Him, so Jesus told them that He was sending them the same way that the Father had sent Him.

While they were scratching their heads wondering what in the world He was talking about, He breathed on them! Did they immediately think about how God breathed life into Adam after He formed him with His hands? No one can answer that question, but we could guess based on how they were thinking during this period of time, that the answer would be no!

Jesus follows the breath of God with the command to receive the Holy Spirit. Did they begin to think about the fact that the Holy Spirit moved over the face of the waters at creation? Did they remember that the Holy Spirit conceived the child in Mary’s womb? Did they remember that John saw the Holy Spirit settle and remain upon Jesus? Once again, it is doubtful that all of this logged in right at that moment.

This key was planted in them like a seed, and when the Holy Spirit came upon them in the upper room, things started to make more sense. Just as it was hard for them to grasp what Jesus was talking about, it is sometimes hard for us to imagine that it could really be that simple; but it is!

Jesus lived empowered by the Holy Spirit. He was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. That same power of the Holy Spirit is ready to work in us as well. He worked around our lives while drawing us to God through Jesus Christ, and He has been given the authority to work in and through our lives if we will trust Him and yield to His guidance. This is why Jesus could promise peace to all who would receive Him.