Jonathan Edwards’ “The Peace Which Christ Gives His True Followers”

 Edwards preaches on John 14:27; “Peace I leave with you, my peace give unto you: not as  the world gives, give I unto you.”  From the phrase “My peace I give unto you.” Edwards  deducts two significant points:
 1) Christ had this one things and this was of His possession
 2) This peace is the peace He Himself enjoyed and which true believers in Christ  experience (John 15:11; 17:13)
 
As his usual emphasis is the futility of the temporal, Edwards compares worldly peace to “the ease and pleasure that a drunkard may have in a house on fire over his head, or the joy of a distracted man in thinking that he is a king, though a miserable wretch confined in bedlam.”  Meanwhile, heavenly peace, which God gives to his true followers, “is the light of life, something of the tranquility of heaven, the peace of the celestial paradise, that has the glory of God to lighten it.”
Click HERE to read it! 

God Glorified in Man’s Dependence, by Jonathan Edwards

Jonathan Edwards preached this sermon on the Public Lecture in Boston, July 8, 1731 and was published after several ministers requested it. This was the first sermon published by Jonathan Edwards. The issue that Edwards addresses is in what way are we are dependent on God and how the work of redemption strips us of all reasons to glorify ourselves. Edwards gives more examples than I listed, and so I would recommend reading his sermon for a full exposition of these Biblical truths.

“So that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:29-31).

Corinth was not far from Athens, the seat of Greek philosophy. Paul explains how the gospel has made the wisdom of the Greeks foolishness for they cannot know God through all their philosophizing. And when God reveals the gospel to these “wise men,” they label it as foolishness. So why did God choose “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”? Paul explains it here-so that no man may boast.