What the World Needs Now

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well, once again, we have the opportunity as a part of the body of Christ to apply our hearts, our souls, our minds, and our strength to the task of worshiping God. And as we do so, we remember that our help is in the name of the Lord. May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sane for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Let the peoples praise you, O God, let all the peoples praise you.

The earth has yielded its increase. God, our God, shall bless us. God shall bless us. Let all the ends of the earth fear him. And Father, we do praise you this morning, for you are exalted on high. The heavens declare your glory. All of creation speaks of you. There is nowhere above or below the heavens we can escape your presence. The wicked rage in their stupidity and you laugh. The so-called wise use the breath you give them to explain away your existence. They ridicule us for placing our faith in you, but we are not dissuaded. We know whom we have believed in and are persuaded that you are ever present and actively involved in leading us to a greater faith, hope, and love.

May our worship this morning reflect this belief and be a pleasing fragrance as we offer it up to you. And we pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Sometimes in our zealousness for righteousness, we can get a little self-righteous. Two of Jesus’ disciples, James and John, also known as the Sons of Thunder, got a bit carried away as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus had sent some of his messengers ahead of him to a Samaritan village to make preparations for a brief stay. Apparently, he was going to travel on from this village to Jerusalem. But the locals there in this village didn’t take kindly to this and they refused to offer any help.

Well, James and John were indignant about this rejection, and they asked Jesus if he would like them to call down fire from heaven on the village. The story is almost humorous to read today, but Jesus wasn’t too thrilled with their suggestion and rebuked them pretty sternly. There’s a little bit of James and John in most of us when we run up against unrighteousness in others. Thoughts of retribution pop into our heads quicker than thoughts of reconciliation. There’s lots to get worked up about during these days of unrest, and it feels like a little bit of fire from heaven is just what the doctor ordered. In moments like that, we need to remember the other James warning that the anger of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God.

Our anger at the evil we see around us is never the righteous kind. We just end up fighting sin with sin. Our anger demonstrates a lack of faith that God is fully in control and is working out His purposes in ways that we don’t comprehend. The antidote to our self-righteous anger is to repent of our pride and trust the One who judges all men with pure righteousness. As hard as it is to believe, even the evildoer has a role to play in God’s plans. Verse 16, 4 tells us, the Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked, for the day of trouble. Are bad things happening? Yes. But that is the plan. God neither needs nor wants our indignation at the evil.

He simply wants us to preach the good news in season and out and have faith that he’ll deal with the evildoers in his good time. If you’ve been guilty of expressing self-righteous anger at evildoers, or if there’s any other sins that might come to mind, now is the time we take for you to confess those sins. And as we do so, you’re invited, if you’re able and you desire, to go ahead and kneel and confess those sins at this time. Let’s take that moment. Father, we must confess that we are easily provoked when we see sin in others and not enough when we see it in ourselves. We readily discern splinters in the eyes of others, not noticing the beam in our own.

May you increase our sensitivity to our own sin and replace our condemnation of others with compassion. May the evil we see around us motivate us to preach the gospel in all earnestness, as if men’s lives depend on it, for they do. Forgive us for being too lax with our own sin and too harsh with the sin of others. May your passion for this world be the same passion that beats in our hearts. May your cause be our cause and your ways our ways. We pray this in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. You can stand. The scripture reading that affirms our forgiveness of sin comes out of Romans 5, 8 through 10.

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son Much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life Our scripture reading for this morning comes from 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 verses 11 through 21 and I’ll be reading from the English Standard Version 2nd Corinthians 5 11 through 21. Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. But what we are is known to God, and I hope it is known also to your conscience.

We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you cause to boast about us so that you may be able to answer those who boast about outward appearance and not about what is in the heart. For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God. If we are in our right mind, it is for you. For the love of Christ controls us because we have concluded this, that one has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us. We implore you on Christ, on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, He made Him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Let’s pray together. Father, passages like this one are absolutely loaded with truth that is good for us to recall regularly, and it orients us, and it confounds us, and it gives us evidence once again that the Bible is not from man’s mind, nor is the gospel the construct of man’s creativity. We don’t think like this, you do. And to think that Christ, the sinless one, has become sin so that we might become. Righteousness is crazy and it is glorious and it evokes our praise and we do gather this morning with a strong desire that you have given us to worship you. It’s easy for us to take for granted as well. Many graces to us, even in these times, it’s so refreshing to lock arms and worship with people who assemble without fear.

Not because they’re foolish, but because their hope is not in doctors or masks or politicians, but in the accomplished work of your son. Because of his work we have, eternal security, reasons to praise you and un-condemable status. It is in his name that we make our prayers. Known to you now, we rejoice with Colin and Alison Davis at the safe arrival of Luke Timothy last night. And from the pictures, it seems as though he is very alert and Alison seems to be doing very well. We pray for little Luke to thrive and for Alison to recover smoothly. We ask that you grant relief to Sean who’s dealing with this back pain that is excruciating at times, do help the doctors to know exactly how best to help him and help them to find a doctor who can do so.

May his recovery be speedy and full and without, and may have no further recurrences of his problems. As the Higgins await a date for Morgan’s upcoming surgery, we ask that the tissue would be benign and that you’d grant comfort to Morgan and the family as they continue to rest in your sovereign control. We pray that Dave would recover completely as well. We thank you that he seems to be recovering well from his recent knee replacement and his body seems to be responding well to the new knee. And we thank you for that. We continue to give you praise for the recent announcement by Debbie’s doctor that she is cautiously cancer-free.

We pray that her next scan at the end of January would only confirm this is, and that we thank you for the demonstration of your grace and glory. We pray too for my sister, Julie, her healing and her own battle with cancer, grow her dependence on you and her faith, we pray. We ask that you would grant steadfastness and joy to Ralph and Mary Kay, to Marjorie and Dawn, as they are basically shut in at this point. We know that they are prevented from contact with their families. They extended contact indoors anyway by the current restrictions. And we pray that you’d be their delightful companion in this time and allow the restrictions to lift soon as we continue to know more about the virus we’re dealing with and we continue to do a better job dealing with it.

We do pray for the president and first lady as they test a positive for COVID-19 this week. We pray that they would recover quickly and that you would use their sickness for a greater good. We do pray that you would raise up political leaders in this upcoming election who would rule us according to biblical principles. We pray that there would be a very quiet majority. It seems as though those who would upset what our ancestors have worked to establish here have the microphone at present. We ask you to grant wisdom to the American people that they may vote with wisdom and not just preserve what we have, but to take it still further for your kingdom’s sake.

We pray for the Good Shepherd Children’s Home asking that you would give wisdom and joy to Sajja and Yancy as they love and care for the young ladies of the home, we ask that their influence would be broad and lasting, measured not by days or weeks, but by generations there in Southern India.

We ask that you would raise up many families in Western Washington with whom Antioch adoptions may work to place foster children of our area in forever homes. We ask that you would grant us all a love for adoption that you evidently have. Having one begotten son and millions of adopted sons, We pray that that would be as glorious to us as it is to you. We thank you for the work of Ice Square Ministries for putting in the hearts of Josh, Lingal and his team this burning to win the billion Muslims of the world for Christ. We ask you to give them wisdom, creativity and all the resources they need to do so and may their full dependence be on you.

For Matthew Smith and Project 92 and the inroads for the gospel that have been afforded by the recent circumstances, we give you praise. We ask that you would continue to just pave the way there. and use, once again, a calamity and sadness and inconvenience for your own purposes and good. We do pray for the faithful parents of our congregation who are laboring hard to educate their children, to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. We ask that you would give them joy, success, grace, and wisdom. The need for Christian enculturation has never been more necessary and difficult than it is now. We pray that you have blessed their efforts.

We think of the other Marysville churches that are gathered and worshiped this morning. Please give us courage, humility, and wisdom, and give that courage, humility, and wisdom to our area pastors as well. Give to a voracious appetite for worship to Christians in our community, and may Marysville develop a gravity of the good sword due to the presence of the faithful and due to your favor.

We do ask that this morning you enable us to offer praise that is fitting for who you are, that we may worship in spirit and in truth as Christ has commanded, and as we consciously behold Him, conform us a bit more into His image. And we pray these things in His name, amen. And Father, indeed, you are holy, holy, holy. This hymn gives us just a glimpse of what it might be like to be in your presence with all the heavenly hosts and all of the saints singing those words. And we thank you, Father, that you sent your son down here to be with us, Emmanuel dwelling with us here on earth, to give us a glimpse in the flesh of what you are like.

And thank you for your word, which instructs us, which tells us how we can be holy like you are holy. And as we look into it now, I pray for myself that I would be able to serve it up without messing it up. And as it goes out into this group, that it’ll find good soil and take deep roots. Father, we just thank you and bless you for all of your many, many gifts. In Jesus’ name, amen. You may be aware that there was a big fight the other night that made national news. I’m referring to the so-called presidential debate.

As embarrassing as that fiasco was, it was largely par for the course these days when comes to civic discourse. America is increasingly a polarized nation with an ever-shrinking middle ground. According to one national survey, up to 70% of those polled said that America is going in the wrong direction. Of course, that does not mean that there’s any kind of consensus on what direction we should be going. Half of those people want us to go left. Half of those people want us to go right. The bottom line is that we are a deeply divided nation at this point in history. I personally am a bit of a news junkie, not as bad as Dave Light, but I’m a news junkie. I also keep my eye on various social media outlets and I’ve noticed a trend among those who believe in the sovereignty of God sounding more and more alarmist in their posts. The The tone of those posts is often fighty, not unlike what we see amongst the politicians today.

Now, because I’m interested in politics and I have a lot of opinions, Gail periodically asks if I think I should run for office. When I think about it, I always conclude that it’s not for me. I would probably end up in jail for poking somebody in the nose. However, I do admire those who enter the fray in an attempt to bring a voice of reason to the debate. Ultimately, the only real hope for the cultural mess we are in is the gospel. It’s the gospel that brings hope and lasting change. Now that should be a duh point to anyone listening today. But I want you to consider if too many Bible believers have in some way conflated their politics with the gospel, and that has led to rhetoric that sounds more Trumpian and less like gospel.

I ask these questions because it seems that for all of the right values and ideas our team is digitally blasting, it only provokes more angry volleys from the other side. Now of course, much of this is because light and dark will never have fellowship, but is some of it because we are unintentionally presenting another gospel, one that is offensive, not because of what God has said, but because of what we are saying or how we’re saying it.

As we seek to speak the gospel into our culture, it is critical that we remember what the ministry of the gospel is all about. Bring you back to the passage Jonathan read this morning, 2 Corinthians 5, just a few verses there, verses 17 through 20. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ God, was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them and entrusting us the message of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. God making his appeal through us, we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. If you were to exegete that passage, you could not ignore the fact that the word reconcile shows up five times. It’s certainly a key word in that section. Clearly, reconciliation is at the heart of the gospel. Man’s reconciliation to God, and by extension, man’s reconciliation with other men. Notice from the passage that we have been given the ministry of reconciliation and we are entrusted with it. It’s a sacred duty to pursue reconciliation. Other verses help affirm this call to reconciliation.

Romans 12-8, if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Matthew 5-9, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Now, as I’ve already stated, I’m not suggesting that we try and find a way to be at total peace with a non-elect. That is not possible. What I am arguing for is that we reflect on what it practically means to be entrusted with the Ministry of Reconciliation and then let that understanding begin to permeate how we interact with those we engage with. So with the time remaining, I want to take a look at the topic of reconciliation and see how we can do a better job at being peacemakers inside and outside the family of God.

This is not a call to compromise the hard truth of the gospel. It’s a call to make sure that if someone is going to be offended, it is the gospel that offends and not our insufferableness. The Puritan Richard Baxter said, he that is not a son of peace is not a son of God. other sins destroy the church consequentially, but division and separation demolish it directly. Baxter’s right. Allowing a conflict to fester without seeking reconciliation can quickly grow into a cancer that strangles the life out of relationships and dishonors the God in whose image we’ve been created. Not only that, it totally messes up our witness to the world. Jesus said, the world will know that we are as disciples by the kind of love that we show each other.

That kind of love necessitates true reconciliation. So let’s start with some definitions. Reconciliation at its root means exchange. In accounting terms, we talk about reconciling our checkbook with the bank statement until the two are in agreement, or we hopefully make them reconciled. Some of you cheat and just go ahead and write the number in. We match debits and credits until the two documents are balanced with each other. We use statements like, I’m trying to reconcile what I believe to be true with what I am hearing or seeing. This idea of trying to get the two things to come together. In relationships, reconciliation refers to the exchange of hostility, anger, or war for love, friendship, or peace.

that reconciliation is not simply the cessation of hostility. Just because someone has stopped shooting at you does not mean they are reconciled to you. Some have suggested that person to person reconciliation is not always possible or even required by God. I have had believers tell me that, well, we don’t really have to be brought totally back together. But is that really true? Reconciliation occurs when there’s been, and this is the process that typically goes on for reconciliation. It starts off, reconciliation occurs when there has been a disrupted or broken relationship which is followed by the assigning of responsibility and or guilt for the breach leading to overt actions taken to remove the source of hostility resulting in the complete restoration of original friendly relations.

Any process that stops short of this is not true reconciliation. A lot of broken relationships come back to a point of cessation of hostilities. There’s an uneasy truce, but they don’t go the full distance for a restoration of normal friendly relations, and that’s what reconciliation brings about. There isn’t such a thing as partial reconciliation. That is, reconciliation does not bring about half restoration. It brings about complete restoration of a relationship to where it was before the offense occurred. Now, you’ve got to be careful here. I’m not saying that there might not be some lasting consequences resulting from an offense.

For example, if a Christian employee steals from a Christian employer, The result may very well be the loss of employment, and they won’t get their job back. Relationally, however, the employee and employer can and should be fully reconciled once forgiveness and restitution have occurred. If the two remain relationally estranged after forgiveness has occurred, they are not biblically reconciled. One of the powerful aspects of the gospel is that it turns enemies into friends. Consider Romans 5, 8 through 11. But God demonstrates his own love towards us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Consider that.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more than having been justified by his blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only this, we who also exulting God God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we’ve been received, who we have now received at reconciliation. The whole reconciliation process takes us from enemies to friends. And again, I just wanna emphasize in that passage the idea that while we were yet sinners is when God stepped in.

In this well-known passage, we see the results of true reconciliation from enemy to friend. God could have chosen to forgive us our sins and remain relationally aloof from us. He could have decided that all he wanted was our worship while revealing as little as possible about himself. Instead, he forgave us our sins and invites us into relationship with him. He takes us from enemy combatants to children who exult in him. Now God would have been completely righteous to destroy his enemies. Instead, he converted those enemies into friends by bestowing grace and mercy upon them. Abraham Lincoln was once criticized for his kindly attitude towards his enemies.

They said, why do you try to make friends with your enemies? Somebody asked, you should try to destroy them instead. Lincoln responded and said, am I not destroying my enemies when I make them my friends? In conflict resolution, Christians should not settle for a pseudo-peace. I’ve seen that occur too many times within the context of churches, where they call it peace, but it’s not really peace. It’s really just a truce. It’s a pseudo-peace that only calls for hostility to cease, but rather not a real peace where friendly relations are restored. That is the Father’s expectation. We can’t always guarantee that outcome, but it should be what we pray and strive for as much as possible.

We’ve already seen that reconciliation is a core element of the gospel. Without it, you don’t have the gospel. So consider now that not only have we been the recipients of God’s reconciliation ministry through Christ, but we are now called to join that ministry of reconciliation. And again, just direct you back to 2 Corinthians 5, particularly verses 18 and 19. Now all things are from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. Sounds like a job description. Namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.

And he has committed to us, or some translations, he has entrusted to us the word of reconciliation. I mean, we can gloss past some of those emphases there. I mean, God has entrusted to us. He has given us the ministry, the job of reconciliation. And think through the relationships you’ve had in the past that have gone south. And did true reconciliation occur, or as so is often common, did we just allow those relationships to drift apart and just say, maybe in heaven we’ll get it straight? It’s a pretty amazing few verses. We who once were the enemies of God have now just been made friends to God. and we have been made his ambassadors to the world.

That is real reconciliation. If we are called to join his ministry of reconciling men to God, how important do you think it is that we practice the reconciliation in all of our relationships? Obviously, the context of the passage we were just looking at is reconciling a man to God, the unbelievers, but it get by extension, it makes sense that reconciliation is something we ought to be practicing. It’d make no sense for God to say, Go out there and reconcile them, but you guys can keep fighting inside your house. You can see how hypocritical it would be for us to run around calling enemies of God to be reconciled to him, and at the same time we are refusing to be reconciled with others.

Where is the power in that message? Who would view our message as good news? One of the most powerful ways we can lend credence to the gospel is for others to see how it has revolutionized our relationships with others. If it’s possible for man to be reconciled to God, how much more should it be possible for man to be reconciled to man? The chasm between us as God is infinite. The chasms between us and people we have issues with doesn’t even become close to approaching that. The failure of Christians to be reconciled one to another makes all public proclamations of God’s love putrid, pathetic, and powerless to those whom we preach.

among the brethren, rooted in reconciliation, proves the veracity of our message to the world. And conversely, when we refuse to be reconciled, it shows that we are deceived and the truth is not in us. Very well-known passage, 1 John 2, 9 through 11. The one who says he’s in the light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the light and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But the one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes. Now some will argue, they say, I don’t hate my brother, but I just don’t see a need to try to pursue that relationship and bring it back to a state of friendliness.

They don’t wish evil upon the other person, but they just don’t care to restore the relationship. Is it possible that that’s just a nice Christianese way of whitewashing the real truth in the matter? Do we somehow think that it doesn’t matter to God? Do we really think that it doesn’t bother God to send his son to die so that we might be reconciled to him if his children then choose to live in a state of on-reconciliation with each other? What do you think’s gonna happen someday when we all get to heaven? Is God going to allow us to continue in that on-reconciled state? Is he going to wall off parts of his kingdom so we don’t have to bump into each other?

Okay, you stay in that end of the house and you go to your room over there and don’t come out till dinner. What’s going to happen in heaven? It seems like it would behoove us to make every effort to be reconciled here and now rather than wait until then. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to have that kind of a median in heaven where God says, OK, before you start to get to enjoy the pearly gates or the streets of gold, you guys never got your act together on earth. So come here. We’re going to have a little powwow. I’m not sure that’s actually what happens, but if it does, I don’t want to have that kind of a meeting be the first thing in heaven that has to occur.

A reconciliation that does not restore relationships, like a car that has an engine and a transmission, but no clutch. You can rev the engine and you can shift the gears, but you’re not going anywhere. So now let’s talk a little bit about attitudes and actions that promote or prevent reconciliation. By now it should be evident that the gospel is intended to bring about reconciliation, vertically with God and horizontally with man. The one exception in horizontal relationships is when it is the gospel itself that separates. Jesus told us that the gospel will at times separate intimate relationships. Luke 12, 51 through 53.

Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you no, but rather division. For from now on, five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. But other than the opposition to the gospel, there should be nothing that prevents reconciliation from occurring. When it comes to trying to resolve a conflict, a conflict resolution expert by the name of Ron Crable, by way of tongue and cheek, listed eight ways that you can turn a disagreement into a feud.

So number one, be sure to develop and maintain a healthy fear of conflict, letting your own feelings build up so you are in an explosive frame of mind. Two, if you must state your concerns, be as vague and general as possible, Then the other person cannot do anything practical to change the situation. Three, assume you know all the facts and you are totally right.

The use of a clenching Bible verse is helpful. Speak prophetically for truth and justice. Do most of the talking. Four, with a touch of defiance, announce your willingness to talk with anyone who wishes to discuss the problem with you, but do not take steps to initiate the conversation. Five, latch tenaciously onto whatever evidence you can find that shows the other person is merely jealous of you. Six, judge the motivation of the other party on any previous experience that showed failure or unkindness. Keep track of any angry words. Two more. Seven, if the discussion should, alas, become serious, View the issue as a win-lose struggle.

Avoid possible solutions and go for total victory in unconditional surrender. Don’t get too many options on the table. And then eight, pass the buck. If you are about to get cornered into a solution, indicate you are without power to settle. You need your partner, your spouse, your bank, you know, whatever, make an excuse. Now, Crayville’s list would be humorous if it wasn’t so spot on with how conflict resolution meetings usually go. And I’ve been in plenty of those. With this list as examples of how not to resolve conflict, let’s then consider now some biblical principles to keep in mind that will help us either not get into an unreconciled state or will help us become reconciled if a breach has already occurred.

And so I think I have six things here that you can list. ways to, again, not get into trouble, or if you are in trouble relationally, how to get out of it. Number one, the priority of God’s glory. First and foremost is in anything we do should be the glory of God, 1 Corinthians 10.31. If we make the conflict about us and our rights, we’re already off to our wrong start. Typically, an offense leaves us hurt or angry. We begin to replay the offense over and over in our mind, and it keeps our emotions stirred up. Realize the primary offense is first and foremost against God and secondly against us. See the offender first and foremost as a sinner in need of God’s forgiveness and reconciliation.

See yourself as the agent God is trying to use to demonstrate his love for that sinner. Remember, you are his ambassadors, And as such, it’s not your job to unload your wad on the offending party. Before you respond to the offenders, spend time in prayer asking God for clear thinking and a calm heart. Approach the offender graciously and think the best. Perhaps they do not even know they’ve offended you. If they do respond poorly, look to Christ as your example. Remember how when he was personally attacked, he did not defend himself. It was only when he was defending the Father’s glory that he became more aggressive.

If you are the one being confronted, do not become defensive. Whether you intended to offend or not is not the issue. It’s possible that the offended party may even have unrealistic or unfair expectations that have led them to be offended, but don’t make that the issue. Do not minimize the fact that the other person is offended. Show concern for their offense and take steps to either clear up any misunderstandings or seek forgiveness if in fact you were wrong. Do not be hasty to excuse yourself. Carefully consider if you in fact have sinned in any way by an act of omission or commission. The flesh does not like being exposed and it’s easy for us to initially deny or minimize our failures.

So keep the glory of God in mind. Second, a proper perspective on our own sin. A huge point to keep in mind when we are responding to an offense is our own sin. If we see an offense as too great to get over, if somebody else has offended me and I’m saying, I’m sorry, I just can’t, I can’t be reconciled, that was too big of a deal, we then have a poor understanding of our own sin in the eyes of a holy God. John Piper wrote in his book, The Momentary Marriage, a profound understanding and fear of God’s wrath is exactly what many people need, because without it, the gospel is diluted down to mere human relations and loses its biblical glory.

Without a biblical view of God’s wrath, you will be tempted to think that your wrath, your anger against your enemy, is simply too big to overcome because you have never really tasted what it is like to see an infinitely greater wrath overcome by grace, namely God’s wrath against you. You think that person offended you? Ponder for a little while how offensive our sin was to God and the price Christ had to pay. No matter how great an offense seems towards us, it can never begin to compare to our offense before God. Holding onto the runs others have committed towards us shows wanton disregard for how much the Father has forgiven us.

To the offender, again, I say, do not be too quick to slough off responsibility for your actions. If you honestly can’t see your sin in the situation, thank the other person for bringing the concern to you, and then ask them for time to perfectly consider what they’ve brought to you. Once you’ve taken the time to consider, then follow up with the other person and make sure the issue is resolved. Thirdly, lead with love. Sometimes we can avoid conflict in the first place by letting love cover a sin. At first Peter 4.8 tells us, above all, keep fervent in your love for one another because love covers a multitude of sins.

Many quarrels among Christians would never start in the first place if they would just apply this verse. Now clearly there are times when something must be said when serious offenses occur. Nevertheless, sloshing a little grace on others when their clay pot bumps into yours, will go a long way towards minimizing offenses. We need to develop thicker skins and much more tolerance and grace extended to one another for those minor offenses that inevitably occur. When we must confront someone, approach it as an act of love and not as an opportunity to vent your frustration with them. The goal is to bring them back to a point where their testimony glorifies God.

Recall that God loved us while we were yet sinners. How much more should we love a brother or sister who has offended us? Keep going back to that comparison. We have no excuse not to seek reconciliation. If you are the offender, do not react with hurt, anger, or annoyance when confronted. Love is not arrogant. It does not act on becomingly. It does not seek its own. It is not provoked. You recognize those all from 1 Corinthians 13. Remind yourself that no one is perfect. If you find yourself never agreeing that you have offended anyone, then there’s a good chance that you don’t have an accurate view of yourself.

We all have a little bit of that tendency like, well, I never offend anybody. But the reality is as we do more often than we know. I lost track. Fourth, are we on four? Four or five, some are on there. Have a heart of humility. Sometimes we are offended because we expect to be treated better. Our own self-importance can cause us to feel slighted or unappreciated by others and leads to feelings of resentment. Again, consider Christ’s example and how He humbled Himself in order to reconcile us to God. In light of His example, I think we can afford to be not too hung up on the issues of fairness or being justified.

Jesus never made the issue about Himself personally. The battle was always over issues of truth and righteousness and the glory of God. There may be times when you are pursuing reconciliation that you won’t get the other person to agree or come to terms with every aspect of the offense. Without glossing over real issues, don’t nitpick every little detail in order to show how justified you were to be offended. There’s something in us that just wants to, you know, what’s the saying, you know, show everybody how dark your teabag is. You just want to keep going over every little minor point just until they really understand just how much they hurt you.

There’s really no need to do that. Allow room for God to work on the other person’s heart. We are not called to be the Holy Spirit in anyone’s life. It may take time for the offender to fully recognize their sin. If you are the offender, humility goes a long way to taking the heat and emotion out of a conflict. Seek to understand why what you did offended the other person. invalidating their feelings or making excuses will only serve to provoke them more. In cases where you honestly believe you did nothing wrong, simply acknowledge the other person’s issue and ask that you can, what you could do differently to avoid the offense the next time.

And in the next principle of five, I think, answer with gentleness, Proverbs 51, 15, one, a gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. We must get control of our tongue and our emotions when we are working out conflict. Gentleness and self-control are two aspects of the fruit of the spirit. It is hard to argue if only one person is actually fighting. If a discussion starts to get heated, there’s nothing wrong with halting the discussion for a time for the purpose of prayer and calming down. A lot of couples need to learn that when it’s getting hot, Just somebody be smart enough to say, you know what, we do need to stop.

We will talk some more, but let’s take a time out. Calm down. Remember, in these conflicts, you’re looking for, you’re not looking for a winner and a loser. You are looking for a God honoring resolution to the conflict. James 1, 19 through 20, tells us to be quick to hear and slow to speak, and it also tells us that the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God. Take that as a warning. When anger enters the conversation, hope of a righteous outcome goes out the window. So you must learn to recognize when that’s beginning to happen and take that time out. And then sixth, forgive and forget. Once a person acknowledges their offense and asks forgiveness, we must be quick to grant it.

At all times, we must have the willingness to forgive. Holding onto a grudge is sin on our part and reflects again on our lack of understanding of God’s forgiveness of us. Part of forgiveness is forgetting, but I do not mean the act of erasing the occurrence from your memory. We can’t do that. You know, some people say, well, if you really forgive me, you forget it. We can’t do that. We’re human. But this forgetting is the process that every time it does come back to your mind, and it probably will, you don’t sit there and camp on it. You don’t relive it. don’t just let all the emotions come back. You recognize that you’re thinking about it, and then you say, OK, that’s been dealt with.

We’ve been reconciled. If it’s an attack of the devil to try to stir up anger again, rebuke and pray, whatever you got to do, but don’t dwell on it. Satan will want us to relive past offenses in order to prevent true reconciliation from occurring. We are responsible to actively bring such thoughts captive and choose to not dwell on them. Remembering, again, how much sin we’ve been forgiven is a good way of helping to make other sins towards us less grievous and less likely to keep coming to mind. I keep going back to that point over and over again because I found that to be extremely powerful, to meditate on my sin before my God and what Jesus had to do to forgive me of my sin.

Any other issue I’ve bumped into a long my life can’t even come close to comparing that. And so that’s the pattern of what we’re trying to follow when it comes to reconciliation. If we are the offender and are being confronted, we need to humbly acknowledge that the other party has been offended. Whether we meant to offend is not the issue and offense has occurred. Be sincere in your apology. You know, we all know what those half-hearted apologies sound like. You know, and CK Chesterton says a stiff apology is really just a second insult. When somebody’s apologized to you and you know it’s not sincere, it just tends to make you even angrier.

Often a minor offense becomes a major one simply because the offender made light of the offense and is insincere in offering an apology. So in summary, for most of us here today, this has been a very remedial review of reconciliation. I bring it to our attention not as something new, but rather something for us to remind ourselves as we relate to one another and to those we are called to be a witness to. As basic and simple as the topic is to understand, it seems to be one of the harder Christian principles to practice. It’s a sad reality that many relationships between Christians remain strained or awkward because they can’t achieve true reconciliation.

Have we come to a place where we just accept that this is a reality in the fallen world, that we’re gonna have strained relationships, and so be it. If we have been entrusted with a ministry of reconciliation, shouldn’t we do everything in our power to make sure we are reconciled in those relationships? And then, extending beyond our Christian relationships, how should our understanding that we have been given a ministry of reconciliation affect the way we engage those who do not know Christ? Are we known by our devotion to Christ, or our commitment to other causes? Do our words, digital or otherwise, carry a sweet fragrance of Christ to those who are being saved?

If you find yourself taking a lot of heat from those who are opposed to you, is it because they are hostile to the gospel, or are they hostile to you personally because of the way you’re communicating your ideas? It appears the darkness is getting darker by the day. The enemies of God are getting bolder. Our job is to be faithful ambassadors of Christ and to appeal to those enemies to be reconciled to God. That is job one, not winning the political debate, not winning any other argument. Those are fine, done rightly. But job one is bringing men reconciliation. May that be the duty in the forefront of our thinking each time we decide to engage our family, friends, and others.

And Father, we do ask that as we have been forgiven much by you that we would remember that when we find ourselves in conflict with others, that we would not be like the man in the parable who was forgiven much and then went back and strangled his friend for much less debt, but that we would have a heart of humility and all these affairs that we would strive for reconciliation in all of our relationships, that we would not let our embarrassment, our awkwardness, our pride, anything interfere with that. But to understand that this is what you called us to. And Father, I know in this room there are people who are already thinking of those who they are not reconciled with and are wondering what they can do.

I just pray that you might give them wisdom, that perhaps you’ll cause them to bump into these individuals and allow a conversation startup, but that all of these unresolved relational matters that are still floating around would begin to get cleaned up, and that that would really speak loudly to the community around who are watching and observing how we Christians function and how we love one another. And so we thank you again for the reconciliation that we’ve received in Christ. And again, may we be faithful to model that likewise in following your example. We just pray now in your Son, Jesus’ name, amen. One of the greatest declarations that we find in the entire Bible is, there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus.

I mean, them shouting words, right? Thanks a lot, amen. We must never let that truth of the, a truth of that statement failed to overwhelm us with its enormity. All of us at birth were handed a ledger. On the one side was original sin to which we spend a lifetime adding more sins. And remember that just one sin is enough to earn eternal damnation. On the other side of the ledger before Christ is all of our righteous deeds that we’ve ever done. The problem is that all of our righteousness is as filthy rags according to the prophet Isaiah. Jesus took that ledger that we could never hope to reconcile and gave us one we can never on reconcile. It’s in a permanent state reconciliation even though we still sin, where sin increases grace abounds all the more. He did it by becoming sin for us even though he personally knew no sin.

In so doing he reconciled us to God, never again to be alienated because of sins past, present, or future. You don’t ever have to balance the checkbook again. Amen. Of course this does not mean that we have license to go on sinning. Our reconciliation comes with a renewed mind and heart that finds sin repulsive. Colossians 1 21 through 22 tells us, And you who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, In order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. Unless you are planning on hiding under a rock this coming week, this may have been the most peaceful few hours you’re going to get to experience. The charge for you this week then is to take the peace of Christ and seek to spread it far and wide. Our charge comes out of Romans 14.9. So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for the mutual building of each other.