Reconciliation

We press into 2 Corinthians 5:18–19 to clarify the ministry of reconciliation and why God is not counting sins. We share four truths about God’s love, family nature, restorative judgment, and Christ in us that reshape how we speak and serve.

• reconciliation defined as restored relationship, not performance
• the word and ministry of reconciliation entrusted to believers
• God’s character as love, not anger or distance
• God’s nature as family and the prodigal lens
• judgment as restoration, not destruction
• Jesus as model for defending, lifting, correcting
• Christ in you as the source of ministry
• belief shaping message, tone and impact
• announcing what God has done rather than fixing people

Go back and read those four questions… Study those questions out. Ask yourself, do I really believe this is who God is?

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Message And Aim
• 2:55 Defining Reconciliation In Scripture
• 6:20 Word And Ministry Of Reconciliation
• 10:50 Called To Minister, Not Condemn
• 14:40 Four Core Truths Introduced
• 16:45 Truth One: God’s Character Is Love
• 26:20 God Is Not Counting Sins
• 30:20 Truth Two: God’s Nature Is Family
• 40:10 Welcoming Prodigals Without Barriers
• 46:40 Truth Three: Judgment As Restoration
• 58:50 Hebrew And Greek Lens On Judgment

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

It seems like every week that God seems to take my mind back to something that maybe we've already talked about previously. But it starts kind of giving me a little bit different perspective of it or a different revelation of to myself, but also how we can how we can teach it and how to make it make more sense. Um that happened this week, so uh we're gonna go back to something and look at something. And I hope you understand. I tell you this because I don't want you to think this dude ain't got nothing else to preach. You know, he's just preaching the same, I'm not preaching the same thing. I'm I'm coming at it from different angles because it makes more sense to people. Um this message today, I think, is gonna be a little bit challenging and and and thought-provoking. I hope it is. That's always my goal. It's designed, the way I set it up, is to push you into really a deeper revelation of the finished work and really awaken to what the what the word of reconciliation that we talk about so often. Uh what that word of reconciliation actually calls for. What does it mean when we say that? If we tell somebody that he's given us the word or he's given us the ministry of reconciliation, what does that really mean? Uh it's gonna be a little bit confrontational, probably to some of you. Uh again, I hope it is, because that's always a good sign. I don't mean that as anything negative. I want it to be a little bit confrontational. I want it to provoke you a little bit, but when I say confrontational, I mean in a good way. And what I'm saying by that is it's gonna be theological. Uh everything we say, I'm gonna come back straight to the scripture. We're gonna base it out of scripture, and it's gonna be a theological message, but I hope it's one that leaves you thinking this morning. I hope when you leave here that you are thinking about some things, you are uh contemplating how you can maybe look at this verse a little bit different, how you can explain this verse a little bit different if somebody was to ask you about it, or if you wanted to explain it to somebody. But I want to start off this morning with a statement. Um this statement is really the crux of the message, and it gets us going on where we're at this morning or where we're going this morning. I don't believe that we can teach what we don't understand. I don't believe we can teach what we don't understand, and I don't believe we can teach what we don't believe. If we don't understand it, and we don't, if we don't understand it, we're not gonna believe it. It's not gonna be a core belief in us because we have no understanding. It's not saying somebody's not smart. It's not saying that one denomination is teaching something right and somebody else is wrong. It's just saying that if I don't have it as a core belief in me, then when I'm talking to people or I'm witnessing to people, I will not teach it to them if I don't truly understand it myself. So that's what we're aiming to do. That's what when I say I repeat a lot of things, I know I do. But the purpose of doing that is because I want us to get some of these core understandings in us. Because as we go deeper into stuff, we've got to have some of these core teachings. So I want to make sure that we understand and that we that we can go back and we can look at the scripture when we talk about reconciliation and truly understand and know what it means. So we're gonna go back to the verse that is uh that we always come out of with this, uh 2 Corinthians 5, verse 18 and 19. You ought to know this verse by heart by now. We've talked about it so many times, but there's so much in here. Man, I can I could just do uh you know sermon after sermon on this verse. But it says in verse 18, now all things are of God. We can stop right there and I can teach a sermon on that. All things are of God, who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us, this is the key to it. He has given us, he didn't just reconcile us, he wasn't just with Christ on the cross reconciling the world to himself. We know that he was doing that because the word says it, but it was more than that. He was on there reconciling the world to himself, and then he turned around and he gave us the ministry of reconciliation. Now, my number one thing that I look at when I read this verse, because I could tell somebody, I could go out and I could say God has given you, based on uh 2 Corinthians 5 and 18, that God has given you the ministry of reconciliation. You need to step in that, you need to walk in that, you need to. If they don't know what reconciliation really means, then what good does this verse really do for them? Okay? Now I can look at this verse and say, man, God is good, God did this, and God did, but how does it really apply to my life? That's when we really start getting something out of it when I can take this and it becomes a part of who I am. So I've got to understand what this reconciliation is. We've talked about it so much, I hope you know now, and I'm I'm saying it in really simple terms. We could go and pull the Greek and Hebrew and all that and get really deep into it. But to really keep it simple, and you can go back and check behind me and make sure I'm not dumbing it down too much. I'm just trying to make it simple. It just means to bring back into relationship. When he reconciled us, when he was in Christ, reconciling the world, he was bringing the world back into relationship of what was broken, what was cut off, that separation that we say happened in the garden. Guess what he did on the cross? He removed the separation, he reconciled us, reconciled the world, all things, everything that was created in the world, everyone that was in the world, he reconciled, snatched everything that was causing separation out of the way, and said, Come back together with me. That's basically in a nutshell what reconciliation is. The ability that he gave us to bring everything back into order and back into where he headed at to begin with. Verse 19. That is that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. And right here, this is what messes with people. Not imputing their trespasses against them. Some translations say not imputing their sins against them. Okay. And has committed to us the word of reconciliation. This is a powerful scripture here. And really, I'm telling you, if you'll do a deep dive into this verse 18 and 19 and really study it out, it'll give you so much understanding of what we're talking about in the finished work. Because one thing that Paul is doing here, Paul is saying that God has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now, what does that mean? Why is that important? Because if he's committed to me, he's committed this to my life, he's given this to me, the word of reconciliation, then I have to automatically say, well, then he didn't give me the word of condemnation, he didn't give me the word of separation, he didn't give me the word of judgment, he gave me the word of reconciliation. That means something. But here's the catch. We can't proclaim a message that our heart does not believe. We can't proclaim something that we don't believe. We can't carry a revelation that we have not received. We can talk about it. I can say, you know, I can go out, you could go out and say, well, this is what my pastor taught on Sunday, and you can tell them a little bit and just uh, you know, kind of parrot, you know, what I said. But what if they start asking questions to you? What if they start saying, what does reconciliation really mean? Why did God give us that? If God gave us that, why do we teach on condemnation? Why do we teach on guilt? Why do we teach on sin? Why do we teach on separation? And now you've got something to come back with and say, He didn't give us those ministries. He gave us the ministry of reconciliation. Paul makes reconciliation our ministry in verse 18. Some people say, well, where'd that come from? I see right there in verse 19 that he gave us the uh uh the something different. But here, look at this. Through his Jesus Christ, he has given us the ministry, the ministry of reconciliation. If you go back to verse 19 just a minute, look at what it says. He's given us the word of reconciliation. I'm not gonna get into that today, the difference. There's really no difference. That's what I want you to see. But I can pull some things out and show you why these things come together and why when he says he's given you the word of reconciliation, he's given you the ministry of reconciliation. Those things are one and the same. You are called to be ministers. Every single one of you, you may not be called to be a pulpit minister. You may not be called to play an instrument and sing a song, but you are called to minister to the world, to the people in your spirit, whatever it is, your workplace, your school, your neighborhood, your family. We are all called to be ministers. What does that mean? Just give the word. That's all we're doing. We're ministering. But he has called us when we do that. I've told you before, this is the only time in Scripture that it tells us specifically what ministry he gave us. He says in the word, you're all called to be ministers, but this is the only time when he tells you specifically what ministry he gave you. The ministry of reconciliation. We are called to restore people back to what God has already finished. We're not called and set up to push people away. We're not called and set up as ministers to tell people how bad they are, how much they've fallen, and what they need to do to try to get back. We're called to tell them that God has done everything on the cross to bring, to dismantle that separation, to take care of the sin, to take care of everything that you ever thought in your mind separates you from him, Jesus took care of it on the cross. That's our ministry. And when you break it down like that, I love it because it makes it really simple. It really does simplify it. Now, I'm not a big person to teach on, you know, used to, we'd always say, you know, they're gonna come in and they're gonna preach a three-point sermon. A lot of people do that. I'm not much on preaching points, but I am today. Because I believe that there's there's three points that we have to have an understanding of. I'm not gonna call them points, I'm gonna call them truths. There's four truths. I said three, there's four. There's four truths that the word uh about the word of reconciliation. These four truths, I believe, are going to have to be persuaded. We're gonna have to be persuaded of these things. If we're gonna walk out the ministry of reconciliation, if we're gonna understand what he gave us in 2 Corinthians right here and what it means to our life, there are four things, four truths that we're gonna have to buy into. We're gonna have to understand them. They're gonna have to become a part of us. The root of uh, it's rooted number one in God's nature: reconciliation, bringing things back, removing everything that separates. It's rooted in God's nature, it's not rooted in our performance. It's not what I do or what you do or how good you do it. He already gave us the reconciliation on the cross, and that's what we've got to see. It's that he was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. So it's already occurred, and then he turned around and he gave the ministry back to us and said, Now you go out and and and give this to people. The point number one, or truth number one, God's character is love. I'm pausing here a minute. I want you to think about it. God's character is love. Some of you are probably thinking, well, we know that. How many times do we say we know that, but then we say things that contradict it? Not not maybe not intentional. We don't intentionally try to hurt people or try to lead people away from Christ. But some of the dumb stuff we say does, and we don't think about how we say it. If we don't believe that God's character is love, we will misinterpret everything that he is in the word. There will be misinterpretations in the Bible. Most Christians don't struggle with the power of God, they struggle with the personality of God. What does that mean? See, they know he's mighty. Most Christians, there is no doubt, they will tell you he is a mighty God. He is a sovereign God. But then there's times that they wonder, how good is he? Is he really good? I know he's holy, I know he's sovereign, but there's times he's not really good to me. Come on, you ain't gotta, you ain't gotta admit it. You've said it before, too. You've questioned how good God is because something didn't happen the way you thought it should, or something didn't happen as quickly as you thought it should. And there's times that we question how good God really is. How could, listen, every time we see a wreck where there's some a small child is killed in an automobile accident, come on, it crosses our mind how could God allow that to happen? How could God allow this small child here to live the eight or ten years he lived with cancer and then die? Come on, it that those things, you may, you don't have to say, and I'm gonna say it for you. Those things cross our minds. We're human. And it just amazes us sometimes the way our brains work and we we think things like that. That's not saying I don't believe in God. That's not that's not saying that I don't believe that he's a loving God, but that's things that come in there sometimes that say, is he really good? As he says he is. I do that. You ain't gotta say it. I do it because it it just it gets me sometimes, and I'm like, how can this happen? You know, they know he's holy. Most Christians know that he's a holy God. But I can say I I believe this. Most Christians know he's holy, but sometimes they don't know if he really likes them. Does God really like me? Does God really care for me? Is God really in this thing for me? He's blessing this one, and he's blessing that one. But what is he doing for me in my life? If we're not persuaded that God is love, we will always believe that he's something else. Now, what is that something else gonna be? What are we gonna replace it with? If we don't believe he's love, we're gonna say he's angry. Sometimes we're gonna say he's temperamental. Sometimes we're gonna say he's punitive. And we're gonna look at those things and we're gonna say, if he's love, he can't be those things if he is a God of love. A God who is love does not impute sins. He does not hold your sins over your head. I want to say that one more time. A God of love does not impute sins. Well, where do you get that from, Pastor? I just read it to you at the Bible. Okay. We just read it. He does not hold your sins, your trespasses against you. He doesn't hold the past as evidence that one day when you get there, he's just gonna say, boom, here's every bad thing that you've done. And there's people that literally, that's their theology. That I'm gonna stand before him one day. I don't want to get into that, but I'm gonna stand before him one day in the great judgment. And and in the book is written down every bad thing that I ever done. And it's just he's gonna go down the list and he's just gonna call out every bad thing I ever done in my life. That is crazy. I mean, really, that is crazy coming from a God who is love. He sent his son to the cross, he stayed there, he did this for the redemption of sins to do away with sin. And then he said, I've given you the ministry of reconciliation so that you don't look down on people anymore. You don't, you don't separate people, but you can bring them back together. But then you're gonna come up here and I'm gonna tell you every bad thing you ever done in your life. Just don't make sense to me. Maybe it does to you, and that's fine. That's not my theology. I don't believe that comes from a loving God. I don't believe that I'm gonna get up there and He's gonna just make me go through every bad thing I ever did. What good would come out of that? What positive thing would come from that? Because I've done some stuff that I'm not proud of that I'm not gonna stand in a pulpit and talk about. You've done some stuff. What possibly good, possible good would come out of doing that? It just boggles my mind. So a God who is love does not impute sins. We just read it right here as well. He doesn't hold the past as evidence over you, he's not waiting to punish you, he's longing to restore you. If we can transform our minds to see that he's wanting to restore and not separate, he's wanting to restore and not punish, it changes the way we see him. So here's a question. If God isn't counting sins, well, brother, that's your opinion. No, I just brought that out of 2 Corinthians 5 and 18 and 19. I just read it. He is not imputing sins against you. We struggle with that. That's so hard for Christians to wrap their minds around. Because I need, I need somebody to hold me accountable. So I need God to look and I need him to bring a lightning bolt down every time I screw up. No. That's immaturity if you need that. But as we mature, as we grow, we don't need somebody standing. Listen, you're an adult. You don't need a parent standing over you with a belt walking behind you every step. When you were a kid, yeah, they'd walk behind you and wait on you to mess up. That's a good time. We don't need that. We're mature. God is not walking behind us just waiting on us to have a misstep so he can get us. That's not who he is. If God is not counting your sins, why are we still preaching like he is? Why are we still delivering that message to people?

SPEAKER_01: 20:20

Truth too.

SPEAKER_00: 20:22

Remember the first one is God's character is love. Second one, God's nature is family. God's nature is family. We gotta see that. If we don't understand that God is father uh understand God as father, we will misdiagnose his motives. If you see him as angry, then you're gonna see his motives as doing something bad as punishment. See how this goes together? It's according to the way you see him. When you see him in a certain way, then now the motives, his motives is gonna come out in a certain way. If I see him as father, it changes everything. God's goal has never been about religion, it's always been about relationships. Not servants, not subjects, not making you subjects with slaves or servants, but sons and daughters. Always go back to the prodigal son on this because that's the best story to go back to. Listen, he was still a son. The whole time you read from the beginning to the end of that story, when he was walking away from the house to go wherever he was going, he was still a son. He was just a son that was walking away. When he was out there doing all the junk he was doing, he was still a son. He just didn't see it. When he was in the pig pen and he came up and realized and said, I come to myself, he was still a son who was coming back around to the truth. Even when he was headed back home and he started to doubt himself, and he said, You know, I can't go back as this. Maybe dad take me back as a servant. He was still a son with a messed up way of thinking. But the whole time from beginning until the end, he never changed being a son. He was always waiting for him. And the daddy was always waiting on him. He never made him come back and try to gain his sonship back. He never made him come back and work his way back to where he was. He invited him back in. You've never walked away from it. It's yours. So reconciliation is really, when we use that word, it's it's family language. It's it's God saying, I want my kids home. I want my family whole. I want all of those out there that's lost that don't know me to come back home. I want the prodigals to come back. You're welcome. I don't care when you left. I don't care what made you leave. I don't care what you did when you left. I just want you back home. That's the message that the finished work is talking about. That is the ministry of reconciliation. We're not saying get your act together, get cleaned up, get your life straightened up. We're saying just come back home. You've always been loved and you've always belonged. That's the ministry of reconciliation. If we picture God as running a courtroom, we're gonna keep bringing down verdicts on people. Always gonna bring down a verdict on them. If we see him as a judge, then we'll keep preaching judgment because that's the way we picture it. The way we see the Father has a huge impact on our theology and the way that we present ourselves and we we present ministry. If we believe God is restoring a family, we will tell people that He loves them. If we believe that God is truly restoring a family, we'll tell them God loves you, we'll tell them you belong no matter what you've been through, no matter what you've dealt with, no matter what you're going through right now, you belong here. That's the message we'll send. Why? Because no matter what they got into, no matter how far they went, how far they backslid, they're still family. I say it all the time. Condition don't change position. I don't care what your life looks like, it don't change the position that God put us in as children of God. It'll never change it. So how can how can we call people back home? How can we go out and teach on reconciliation and talk about the ministry of reconciliation and call on back home and then slam the door in their face because they may not have it all together yet. And church does that. We'll go out and we'll try to get everybody we can in the church because we want everybody that can to make it to heaven with us. And then as soon as they get here and they don't act just right, they don't look just right. They ain't quite got it back together yet the way you have. First thing we want to do is slam that door. We're calling them home and then slamming the door. Family don't do that. Family says, I don't like what you've been doing. I don't agree with what you've been doing. I'm not gonna condone what you're doing, but your family. And you belong. That's that's God's message. It's not pushing them away. It's not I'm gonna separate from you until you can get your act together. It's you belong. You're part of the family. I'm gonna bring you in, even though I don't agree with what you're doing, but I'm gonna help you get through it. I'm gonna bring light into all this mess. I'm gonna bring, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, we're gonna we're gonna teach you what God really thinks about you. That's the difference. That's how they get out of it. It's the goodness of God that brings man to repentance. It's not separation. It's not guilt and and shame. You're not gonna shame anybody into returning to God. You might temporarily, but is it gonna last? Is it did it really, really happen? And I know that's not for me or you or anybody to judge, but I want people to see how good he is. Not come to him just because they feel bad.

SPEAKER_01: 27:16

Point three.

SPEAKER_00: 27:18

Truth point three. God's judgment is restoration. I'm gonna spend a little bit of time here. Try to rush through the rest of it, but I wanted to get right here. Judgment. This has been on me lately. God's judgment is restoration. Judgment in Scripture is not God destroying sinners and just wiping sinners out. That is not judgment. You won't find that. It's God taking care of the things that destroy his children. What is it that's in there that's causing the separation? That's that's that's when we talk about judgment, that is what the judgment is. God going in there taking care and removing the things that's causing the separation between him and us. He's not destroying the person. And when we think about judgment, that's what we're thinking. Because we've been taught that you're gonna be judged, and if you don't meet the criteria, if your name's not written down in the Lamb's book of life with all these check marks beside it for good, then you're gonna burn in hell. He's gonna cast you out. He's gonna say, Depart from me, you worker of iniquity, for I never knew you. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You created me. See how out of place that verse is? See how we misinterpret that verse? We believe God's truly gonna look at the thing that he created and say, I never knew you. That verse is so out of context. But we use it to scare people into coming to an altar because you do not want to stand before him. And he'll say those words to you.

SPEAKER_01: 29:25

Judgment in scripture is different than what we are teaching in church.

SPEAKER_00: 29:34

I seen somebody put a I won't call his name. He put a message on Facebook the other day and really good. I mean he had a lot of a lot of people come on and post on it. He said, because the the most dangerous tool in the church has been the Bible. What he means by that is the misinterpretation of the Bible. That has hurt more Christians than anything. He wasn't putting down the Bible. He was just saying because we've misinterpreted, that's become the one tool, which should be everything to us, but it's become the one tool that has torn people apart. Yeah, he got a lot of uh comments on that. So if you look at it back in the Hebrew, the Hebrew word for judgment is mishpat. M-I-S-H-P-A-T, Mishpat. And what it actually means in the Greek, in the Hebrew, it doesn't mean condemnation. And I know that's probably what we think it means because that's the way we've been taught about judgment. It actually means putting things back in order. Putting things back in order. You look at it in the Greek, I can't think of the word right off the top of my head, but it actually means to bring correction. Same thing like a judge in a courtroom. A judge in a courtroom, he brings down a judgment on somebody in court to bring a correction to whatever they're doing. If he sends them to jail, he's not punishing them. He's sending them to a rehab or to jail or to probation or whatever to try to bring correction to whatever led them there in the first place. So he's judgment means bringing correction. And think about how quick that we put on bumper stickers and t-shirts and everything else says, you can't judge me. You're a Christian. You're supposed to judge. You're supposed to bring correction. You're supposed to get to a place to where you're bringing things back into order. I say it all the time. I love being the type of person that can walk in a room full of chaos. And as soon as we walk in, we don't even say nothing, but everything just starts to calm down. Why? Because you walk in with an anointing, and everything in that room has to just submit to the anointing that you walk in with. And pay attention to it. You may not even ever thought about it before. But when you carry your anointing into a place, there's some things that have to go. They can't stay there. So we don't go in causing chaos. We go in and chaos leaves because of who we are. So it's not about judging, it's not about putting people down. Judgment is not about looking at their bad and looking at everything they've done bad and wiggling that long finger at them. Judgment is bringing correction to it. And I know I'm not trying to tear nobody's theology up. I know most of the church is waiting on the great day of judgment. And what a lot of them don't realize is what did Christ do on the cross? He brought correction. He brought things back together. But that messes people's theology up. Because we've got to stand before a God who is going to bad, bad. Heaven. Hell. That's the picture we that we have. And we can't live without that picture because we think he's got to separate us. Why? Because you ain't been as good as I have. There's no way you could go to the same place I go to. We're selfish. But if I if I looked at it from the standpoint of what I'm talking about right here, that God is love and God is family and his character is love, then you know, then him and I can look at it in the same way and say, I don't care. Come on, you're my brother. You my sister. He says, you're my child. We just can't look at it that way. Because we got to separate. We got to cause division. We talk about God causing division. We're the ones causing division. We're the ones saying this one's here and this one's here. We're separating. God's not. God's fighting to try to bring everybody together, and the church is separating them. And then we're standing in the pulpits and saying this is the gospel. That ain't no more gospel than that's not gospel. Separating people is not gospel. Bringing people together in love, bringing people together in the characteristics of Christ. That's the gospel. That's what he told us to do. His judgment is restorative. It restores people. It's not punitive, it's not there to punish. Let me give you a few examples because I know you may not agree with this. So I'm just going to give you a few examples. God judges the oppressed. He judges the oppressed in the Bible by doing what? By defending them. He judged them not by putting them down. He judged the people that were oppressed by defending them every time. What did he do? He brought correction. He judges the fatherless and the widows by doing what? Lifting them up. When Israel is judged, God's goal was always return, restoration, healing. It was always positive, it was always restorative. It was never a punitive thing. And Jesus, how do we know what God wants about judgment? How do we know that what I'm saying is correct? Because I'm going back and I'm basing it on Jesus. Jesus is the model of God's judgment. Go back and read the stories. If you want to know what judgment, how can I stand behind a pulpit? I don't claim to be no great theologian. Okay. So how can I stand behind a pulpit and say certain things that I say and stand firm on them? Because the scripture says it. And if I believe the scripture, then I've got I can stand on the scripture. I had a I had me and somebody was commenting on Facebook the other day, and I made a comment and some lady that I don't even know it was somebody else's post, and she came back on it, and I made a comment. She came back on it and she says, Well, I guess I'll just take what you say since you're this great theologian. I won't even have to ask God about it. So I come back on and said, Read the scripture. You ain't got to go ask God. Just read the scripture. What does the Bible say about it? See, we get so mad and angry about things because somebody says something a little bit different than what we've always been told, and we call them a heretic and we call them a all kind of stuff. And my response has been really simple lately. Just read the scripture. You want to know what God's like? Look at Jesus. You want to know what judgment means? Look at Jesus. You want to know what restoration is? Look at Jesus. You want to know these things? Just look at Jesus. He says, I do nothing that I have not seen the Father do. I say nothing that I've not heard the Father say. We're one. We don't have to guess about God's nature. We look at Jesus. That was the point of him coming. He came down and actually showed this is what it's like in Daddy's house. This is what the Father is really like. And these things right here happened. When he seen oppressed people, he didn't push them down and say, Well, when you get your stuff cleaned up, you come see me. He lifted them up and he defended those people. When he met with the people who wasn't doing things like they were supposed to, and they was out, you know, sleeping with other people, and they was all these men up there fixing to stone the woman, and they expected Jesus to just jump in there and grab a rock. He said, Whoever's without sin, cast the first stone. And he bent down and he done what he defended her. I always picture, he just bent down, you know. I don't know exactly, I'd have to go back and read it. But I this is the way I pictured it in my mind because it helps me understand it more. I picture Jesus just kind of getting down there and say, you know, defending her and saying, cast a stone if you want to. It's hitting me. He hit her. He protected her. Now I know in the story they already walked away and all that. I'm not trying to add to the story. I'm just saying that's the way my mind sees it. He's a protector. He didn't go down there to beat her up. He went down there to protect her, to defend her. Listen, this was apparently not a woman that should have been defended in that day and time for what she was doing. But Jesus, who is just like the Father, said, This is what I'm gonna do. This is judgment. I'm gonna bring judgment. I am gonna judge this woman today as she sets you on this street. And he did. He brought correction. And we don't probably don't know the whole story. I don't know what all he said to her. But she got up and she walked away and he said, Go, sin no more. What was he telling her? He was saying, Go and don't see yourself like this anymore. The way those men see in you, the names that they're calling you, that ain't you. Don't you you walk out of here and you don't see yourself like that anymore. Sin no more. He wasn't he wasn't necessarily saying, I'm sure he was saying, Don't hey, don't go lay down with all these men again. But the part of that was he wasn't focused on that. He was saying, don't see yourself like this. Change the way you see yourself. So Jesus is the model of God's judgment. If you want to know what God judges, look at Jesus. And I started asking that question when I when I wrote that and said, How did Jesus judge? He restored sight, he lifted the broken, he confronted lies and freed people from them. He exposed distorted thinking and brought knowledge and understanding. Again, what happened when he looks and says, get behind me, Satan. He wasn't saying my disciple is full of demons or is the devil. He was saying your thinking is off. And you need to back up because your thinking is not lining up with what I'm thinking. It's off. But he didn't cast him out. I mean, we'll be quick to say, you know, two things can't remain in the same house, and we got to get rid of one of them. We you know, we we use terminology all the time that but then Jesus just sat here and called one of his disciples the devil. And he kept him with him. Can we preach a can we can we preach a sermon on Jesus hung out with the devil? I mean Jesus liked the enemy. I mean, think about it. He he kept him. He didn't cast him out, he didn't separate him from him. He just said, change your thinking. Your thinking's not lining up. He brought correction to it. And there's all kind of, I mean, different ones is popping in my head right now. There's all kinds of different verses you can go to where Jesus shows as an example what judgment really is. He never destroyed a sinner, he never took down a person with judgment. You will not find that in the scripture, it's not there. He only took away and destroyed the thing that was messing up the person. Whatever was separating the person, he grabbed on to that. He never took out the person. The cross reveals judgment that restores, not ruins. The cross is where God judges sin. Not by punishing humanity, but by absorbing and removing the thing that separated us. He went to the cross. How many times do we teach it and we say that he went to the cross and he took on everything? I can remember as a kid learning that. He took on every bad thing in the world. He took it upon himself. And we teach that. And then we turn around the next Sunday and totally dispute it. Yes, he took on everything. If we see judgment as punishment, then we're gonna preach fear to people and into people. The problem there is that fear doesn't bring reconciliation, it terrorizes people. We're trying to reconcile them, not terrorize people. Reconciliation requires a God who heals, not a God who harms, a God who restores instead of one that retaliates. So here's a question before I get to the last point. If God's judgment is restorative, why do we still preach it as destructive? And we don't he's a god of restoration, he's not a god of destruction. Truthful, let me finish up on point four here. God's revelation in is Christ in you. Point four. God's revelation is Christ in you. You cannot reconcile the world if you believe Christ is somewhere else. He said it's Christ in you the hope of glory. Christ in you. If you don't believe he's in you, if you don't believe you have the ability to reconcile, you won't do it. You just won't. Because you don't believe that you have the ability to. Most Christians believe Christ is for them, but they struggle to believe Christ is actually in them. We believe what he did on the cross was for us. But can I actually get to the point of believing that it's not just for me, it's actually he did it with me, he did it together with me, and that now he's living on the inside of me. Again, in 1 uh Colossians 1 and 27, he says, Christ in you, the hope of glory. See, this means we're not ministering to earn reconciliation, we are ministering from the place of reconciliation. He's in me. I'm not ministering to try to get him to get closer to me, get him to love me more, get him to be closer. I'm ministering from a place of he's already in me. He already loves me. He's already as close as he can be to me. So I'm ministering, I'm ministering out of that place. I'm not trying to bring, here's one that people may not agree with, but I'm not trying to bring God into the world. I'm revealing a God that's already present in the world. How many times we come into a church and we start praise and worship, and we're we're doing our best with holy hands and everything to try to bring God into the service. God was in the service as soon as Monica or Ronnie gets here first in the mornings, whichever one walked in the door first. God walked in with them. He was here before you got here. And we try to we try to do things in the flesh to bring him closer. And we've always done that. It's just a mindset. What if I could actually get to a place of believing that I don't have to bring him in? He's already here. Can you imagine what every service could be like when I realized that? We're not trying to get God to move. We're awakening people to what Christ has already accomplished. He's already moved. He moved 2,000 years ago on the cross. He made a decision that day. And everything that we needed was done that day. That's again, that's finished work. That's a struggle for some people. I do, I understand that. Now that that does not mean that we just sit back and do nothing. And that's the mindset that most people have. As though he's teaching something where you don't even have to do nothing. You just sit back, sin, do whatever you want to do. And that's not what we're teaching at all. Which shows where this message comes from is you can't even talk to me about this if you don't understand it. We can't debate and have conversation about something if you don't even understand where I'm coming from and why I'm saying the things I'm saying. I'm basing them out of the scripture. I'm going on that. And that's what I want to get to. I want to get to a place to where we can, me and people who don't even believe, like I believe, can have conversation. We may walk away and agree to disagree, and that's okay. But let's at least talk about it because I believe the more we hear it and the more people are able to understand it, they're going to be like, that makes a lot of sense. And secondly, the Bible says that. That's the main point. It's not that we're making sense, it's that the Bible says that. The last question is how can we minister reconciliation if we still believe we're spiritually empty? If we don't believe that he lives on the inside of us and that he's there with us and that he will never leave us, he will never forsake us, how can we minister reconciliation to people when we don't even believe Jesus is in us? So it's going back to understanding the basics of it first, understanding it on a personal level first, understanding he's with me. I don't care what I used to do. That ain't who I am anymore. I know who I am. He is living on the inside of me now. And I can go out and help people and bring light to people. I can restore situations because it's who I am now. But I have to see myself that way. And if I don't see myself that way, it's not gonna happen. You will never fulfill the one ministry he gave you to fulfill. Not because you don't have the ability to, but because you don't see yourself that way. So it's gotta start with each one of us individually, and then us as a group, and then us going out talking to other people. But it's gotta start here with us. So here's a connection. I'm gonna end with this right here, just show you a little connection that we I believe we have to see. Belief has to come before ministry. If I don't believe it, I can't minister it. I can I can even see where I struggled with a lot of this stuff when I first started learning it. When I really got, I mean, I I was years ago, I was into the finish, some of the finished work stuff, and I mean 20 years ago. But I didn't really understand it all. It was new to me. Last few years, I've really began to get a better understanding of it. I I can I don't just say, well, that sounds good now, it it makes me think a little bit. I really believe it. And because I really believe it, I can see my message is starting to change and shift a little bit. Because I'm not just saying it now because it sounds like a good sermon. I really believe it. And I really, truly believe that if more people can hear it and understand it and truly put down the wall long enough to see where we're coming from with it, that it would make more sense to a lot more people. And it would free more people. It would bring them out of guilt, out of shame, out of all that junk, and bring them into a freedom that they can live in. But we gotta believe it. There's gotta be a belief there before there's a ministry. Now let's go back to where we started at. Let's return to Paul's point in 2 Corinthians 5 and 19. That God was in Christ reconciling the world into himself, not imputing their trespasses or their sins against them. If you don't believe this, I'm just taking one verse. If you don't believe what it says in verse 19, if you're not persuaded that this is truth, if you still think God is mad, distant, and condemning, then it's going to be difficult for you to minister reconciliation. Because you will not imagine God doing it. Because what is God doing right here? He's showing you the ministry of reconciliation, he's telling you about it right here, and then he's turning around in verse 19 and giving it to you and saying, What you're seeing here, you now have. You have been given the ministry of reconciliation. If you don't believe that, it's gonna be hard to minister that to other people. These verses, we gotta take them personally. Your theology determines your ministry. What is theology? The way I understand these verses. My theology is gonna determine my ministry, other people. The God image that you have in your head determines your message. Is your message gonna be condemning? Hateful? I'm gonna use those words because my my message used to be that. And it I mean, I'm honored, I'm serious, it really did. It was it was very condemning, it was very straightforward, it was in your face. And I made a purpose. My purpose when I stood in the pulpit was to offend you. Now, my still my purpose, but it's in a different way now, is to offend you to bring light. It's to offend those things in you that is the lies that's in you that's that's separating you from truth. So it's changed. I see it differently now. What you what you're persuaded or or determined of is what you're gonna proclaim to people. I said this before, and and and I don't I hate to say this because I don't want to anybody take this the wrong way. But if you sit here every Sunday, and most of the people that hear is hear about it, you know, every Sunday, most of the Sundays anyway, if you sit here every Sunday and hear this, but you go out and you preach a different message, I don't think you're persuaded yet. And I don't mean that negative. Because once you're persuaded of it, what's on the inside is going to come to the outside. So again, let's look finish up looking at what Paul really said right here in verse 19. He's declaring something. I'm ending right here. He's declaring, God already reconciled the world. Gotta see that. And then he comes back and he says, now you go and do it. You go and tell him about it. He doesn't say for you to go reconcile the world. Think about that. He does not tell us as Christians for us to go and reconcile the world to God. Why would we do something that he'd already done through Jesus on the cross? He said, I was in Christ reconciling the world to myself. He's already accomplished that. So why does he need me to go do that? He doesn't. He just needs me to go out and tell what he did. It's not my job to. That's why we have the ministry of reconciliation. The ministry just means we go out and tell it. We're not doing anything. He's already done it on the cross. He says, announce the reconciliation that God has already accomplished. So this means you're not fixing people, and that's the church's problem. We've been taught we got to go out and fix those heathens out there. That's kind of the message that we've been given. We go out there and we fix them people. No, you're not fixing nobody. You're awakening people to the truth. You're not saving people, you're revealing the Savior. There's nothing you can say to save anybody. If you can do anything to save a man, Jesus didn't do anything on the cross. That's the savior. You're just the messenger. You're not bridging the gap. The cross already did that. This is making ministry really simple here. You're not counting sins.

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Why? Because God's not.

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Let me rephrase that one. You're not supposed to be counting sins because God's not. So why would you do anything if you're an example and you're supposed to be going out here doing what he done? Why would you count sins when he's not doing it? He says, I am not imputing sins. Not keeping up with them. I'm not keeping a little piece of paper and putting check marks every time you do it. Oh, cussed, oh, cussed again, cussed again. He's not keeping these sins. So why do we do that? The ministry of reconciliation is not convincing God to accept somebody. It's convincing them to accept that God has already accomplished something. We're not trying to go back and redo what God's already done. We're just simply going out as ministers, as people who serve him and saying this is what he's done. We're telling his story, not ours. I can tell you over the years, I've heard a lot of preaching on. I preached a lot on my story. I've heard preachers preach on their story. Our job is to give his testimony, his story, not ours. Again, the four questions right here, just to bring it home. Do you believe God is love or something less than love? Do you believe God wants a family? Or do you think he just wants followers? Do you believe God restores, or is he just in the game to punish us? Do you believe Christ is in you? Or is he far from you? You answer those four questions and you can you can say he is love, he wants a family, he's restored, he's hid it for restoration, and he is on the inside of me. And you can believe that and you can come to terms with that, then I'm telling you, you can go out and begin to minister this ministry of reconciliation in a way that it will change lives. It will bring light into people. You don't have to do anything special, but just tell what he's. Already done. That's it. Your answer to these four questions will determine your ministry, your message, your theology, your tone, your posture, but most of all your impact. Because you cannot walk in the world of reconciliation until you are persuaded of the God who reconciled the world. We've got to recognize this. I know you may say he got all that out of one verse. Yes, because it's all in one verse. It really is. My notes was five pages. On one verse. That's how important the ministry of reconciliation is. Why? Because it works, it's what Jesus taught, it's what we're supposed to do. And it's really simple.

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It's really simple.

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How do I bring people to a place of repentance? It's the goodness of God, but it's the goodness of us as we show the goodness of God. As we go out and just give the testimony, and we just tell about Him. We tell Him, hey, He loves you. You belong. You're family. You're not separated. You're not too far gone. You're not already got one toe dipped into the flames of hell. I've heard these things. Brother, we can pull you back out, but you already got one toe down in hell. Like, dude. It's like he's either going to push me on in or he's going to pull me back out.

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It's crazy.

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Go back and listen to this. Better than that, go back and read it when Ronnie gets it online. You can read the transcript of it. Go back and read those four questions. And really, really ask yourself those questions. Study those questions out. Ask yourself, do I really believe this is who God is? And if I do, then I can step into this ministry that He's called me to. And if I'm not in that ministry, if I'm not ministering reconciliation, then it may be that I'm struggling with one of these. And that's okay. We need to know before we can change it. But maybe I'm struggling with one of these. Maybe I know he loves me. I know he's loved, but I'm struggling to see that he's really with me. Because I got so much going on in my life, and it's hard to believe that a God who is there would never leave me nor forsake me is really with me with all this hell going on in my life. That's a real thought.

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And it's okay to have that. I know people who are struggling physically in their bodies.

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And I'm telling you, when you wake up in the morning and can't hardly get out of bed, God is love and God is a savior may not be the first thing that comes to your mind in the mornings.

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We want it to be. But when you wake up and you move and something hurts, you know, it's it's hard sometimes.

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And that's not a bad thing. That's just saying, okay, let's recognize that. Let's let's let's realize it. Let's come to terms with it so that we can begin to say no. That don't mean you ain't gonna feel the pain. But he is the Savior, He is the healer, He is this, He is that. We've got to see Him for who He is, and then we can step into this ministry of reconciliation that He gave us.