Where is the person of peace?

I thought it might be encouraging to note times and places in Scripture when Jesus and the disciples did not quickly find a Person of Peace. We often picture Jesus with the women at the well or Peter visiting Cornelius, but is it normative that we will find a responsive person in an area right away? We sometimes have an overly simplistic or optimistic view of the task of finding a person of peace. And while I don’t want to risk being the ‘glass is half empty’ guy, I think it might provide encouragement in a roundabout way.

• Mark 6:1-6 - Jesus himself was not accepted in his hometown. Verse six says that he was surprised at their unbelief and left. (Also Matthew 13:53-58).

• Luke 9:5, 10:10-11 - Jesus prepares his disciples that some of the towns and villages they visit will not accept him. (Also Mark 6:11).

• Matthew 11:20-24 provides detail about cities that did not repent.

• Luke 9:51-56 - We all know the “person of peace story” in John 4 of Jesus finding the women at the well and opening the door to the whole Samaritan village. But this passage in Luke is the opposite of that, where Jesus and his disciples are rejected by a Samaritan village.

• Acts 18:5-8 - It seems that Paul doesn’t find some people of peace in Corinth until after he meets resistance so strong that he has to leave his regular time in the synagogue. (Perhaps you can make an argument that Priscilla and Aquila were people of peace, but it still stands that there was a tremendous amount of resistance to the Gospel in Corinth.)

• Acts 19:8-10 - The same pattern emerges in Ephesus. Tremendous fruit but also major resistance that causes Paul to leave the synagogue.

So… the call is to stay faithful to the task of engaging the lost, sharing the Gospel, and making disciples.

God can and will provide persons of peace that very quickly produce the “thirty, sixty, hundredfold fruit” that we desire to see. But that is in his timing, not ours.