Alive - by Dave Smith

parallel account in Luke’s Gospel, the disciples were frightened,
thinking Jesus was a ghost, to which Jesus replied: ‘Look at my
hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does
not have flesh and bones, as you see I have’ (Luke 24:39). As I
commented in 40 Days with Jesus, he was saying, in effect: ‘“It’s me.
See the nail prints here. This was the price I paid for you to be free.
But it’s really me. You’re not looking at a ghost. You’re not looking at
a vision. You’re not dreaming. Touch me. It’s really me. I’m back.”’
When they still struggled to believe, Jesus asked for something to eat
and they gave him ‘“a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in
their presence” (Luke 24:42–43). How wonderfully real and tangible:
“You think I’m a ghost! Give me a piece of fish to eat!”’ 8 So, this
resurrected Jesus was clearly the same ‘physical’ Jesus; yet at the
same time he was somehow different, able to just ‘appear’ in a room
where the doors were locked.
The risen Prince of Peace offered the peace of God to the disciples
back then, and he does the same to all of us now! As I shared in
Chapter One, the very moment that I opened my life to the risen
Jesus, he came in and brought me a peace that I had never imagined
was possible. As I look back now, I realise that this was because for
the first time in my life, because of my acceptance of what Jesus had
done for me through the cross and resurrection, I was finally ‘at
peace’ with God. This in turn resulted in an inner peace, a peace with
myself that I had never experienced before and, in turn, overflowed
into a much greater sense of peace and harmony in my relationships
with others. I also experienced an immediate sense of joy.
FILLED WITH A PEACEFUL JOY
There’s a clear link between peace and joy. Romans 14:17 highlights
that ‘the kingdom of God is…righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy