Peace from God Bringing Love for Your Enemy

A Chinese evangelist tells a story of how this peace from God worked out with a farmer in a poor area of China. He had a rice paddy on a plateau on a hill, and there were other plateaus beneath him. Every day, he had to go out and manually work the waterwheel to pump water from the brook up the hill into his fields and to irrigate his rice fields. He had a neighbor who was a very pesky and crafty individual and he had opened the gate between the fields lower below him. And so the Christian man would go down and he would pump the wheel for long periods of time, all the water would come into this field. And his neighbor would saunter out after having rested and relaxed, and he would open the gate and the water would flow downhill from the Christian`s field into his own, and he would mock him.

Well, that was very aggravating, and the Christian man was not happy. He was tired, too. But he went to the church; they were having a prayer meeting that night, and he asked, What should I do about it? And they all decided that this was in fact an opportunity to glorify God and also to manifest the peace of Christ with another. At their suggestion, the next morning the man went out a little earlier, and he pumped from the waterwheel not into his own field, but into his neighbor’s fields. And after he had pumped the water into his neighbor’s field, then he pumped the water into his own field. This went on for a couple of days, and you can imagine what happened. The man who had been taking advantage of him came out and said What are you doing, and why are you doing it? A conversation began, a relationship resulted and the man became a Christian. Ultimately, he asked his forgiveness, and they together became agents of gospel peace in that area. Well, this is what we have in Christ. We have peace with God. But then we have peace from God that we can manifest outwards to our fellow man. And that is what we are to do, especially in the household of faith—that is the church.¹

Dr. Richard D. Phillips