Sin made me God’s enemy, but Jesus, through his death, made me God’s friend
This is an age that longs for reconciliation. The Rock anthem of the 60’s was the Beatles hit, “Come Together.” In the 70’s, Coca-Cola picked up the beat and ran a hit commercial, “I’d Love to Teach the World To Sing…in perfect harmony.” Remember the view as the camera panned the human family assembled on that high hill, every color and creed represented? In the 80’s we had “We Are the World” expressing that same longing for unity and closeness. In the 90’s, Promise Keepers, the Christian men’s movement placed a high value on racial reconciliation.
But during this same time, a contradictory movement has been happening. The divorce boom happened. Families broke up at unprecedented rates. Heartache boomed. In labor, strikes and lockouts, in sports, multi-million dollar athletes hold out for more… While everyone is singing about coming together, many relationships are coming apart. People long for reconciliation and peace.
In marriage, they say that the sweetest part of a good fight with your husband or wife is when you get to kiss and make up. The most bitter part is if the making up never comes; if the other party never mends the fence. Broken hearts result if one party is unwilling to admit the offense and say those sweet words, “I’m sorry, please forgive me.” And even though you may have forgiven that person in your heart, the relationship remains distant until each person can figure out how to re-engage and allow trust and love to grow once again.
What is reconciliation?
Reconciliation happens when each person makes a thorough change, when each one is willing to become friends again after a state of hostility has existed. Reconciliation is all about making peace. Reconciliation is when a father and a son, or a mother and a daughter restore a once-strained and distant relationship. There comes a sense of pleasant calm where once there were ill feelings. The formal definition of this word is “to exchange, to make other a state of enmity, to exchange enmity for friendship. To effect a change back, to be reconciled.”
How does this happen in ordinary life? The sad answer is “not very well.”
We all have relationships that need attention from time to time. And there are times when a relationship will require a great deal of attention. But the most profound reconciliation we long for is a restoration of closeness and intimacy with the One who created us. Every day of our lives we may feel a strain between us and God. Even if you have walked with him for many years, there are days when you feel like, “Wow, I need to get back close to the Lord!” “I feel like I’ve strayed a bit.” Or maybe you are just now trying to figure out how to bridge that gap, how to decrease that feeling of distance between you and Almighty God.
There is awesome, good news for us. God wants to heal the rift. And in fact, he has already taken the essential action to turn even his enemies into the closest of friends.
Let me ask you a question: How does it feel to know that God wants a friendship with you?
God has taken some powerful steps to create the opportunity for reconciliation. Look with me at a section of scripture, God’s word on the matter:
Romans 5:8-11
8. But God demonstrates his own love toward us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! 10 For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! 11 Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. [1]
1. God Loves Us!
“The process of reconciliation originates with God, and that it is only by the outworking of His love that man can be brought into right relationships with his Maker.” (Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, page 192).
You see, every human being is loved by God. And God proved his radical, life-changing love by declaring the guilty sinner not guilty because of what Jesus did on the cross.
Let’s say you were arrested on a speeding charge and ended up before the judge, once again because you already had a number of tickets. You already had a large fine that you were unable to pay. And as the judge makes his declaration, suddenly, you are without a license, and an additional 5 is added to what you already owe. But then the judge takes off his robe. He steps down before his own bench, pulls out his checkbook and pays all your fines for you! He reinstates you license, and says, “Go, I declare that you are completely justified before this court. Go in peace, and good luck.” How would you feel? You would be shocked and surprised to know that you have a friend in that judge! And you may want to take the man out for coffee and thank him! Our friends would say, “Hey, you have friends in high places!”
And indeed we do. That is what God has done for us. Jesus Christ is his payment of our fine. It becomes the basis for an awesome friendship. How do you feel about the fact that God wants a friendship with you?
Biblical scholar C. E. B. Cranfield wrote:
“Where it is God’s justification that is concerned, justification and reconciliation, though distinguishable, are inseparable. Whereas between a human judge and the person who appears before him there may be no really personal meeting at all, no personal hostility if the accused be found guilty, no establishment of friendship if the accused is acquitted, between God and the sinner there is a personal relationship, and God’s justification involves a real self-engagement to the sinner on His part. He does not confer the status of righteousness on us without at the same time giving Himself to us in friendship and establishing peace between himself and us—a work which, on account of the awful reality both of His wrath against sin and of the fierce hostility of our egotism against the God who claims our allegiance, is only accomplished at unspeakable cost to Him.” Cranfield, Romans, page 258.
God shows his love by not only paying our great traffic fine of all eternity through the death of his son, he actually wants to be friends with us after all is said and done.
Friends with God! That’s quite a change. Especially since the Bible says that without Christ, God regards human beings as his enemies!
2. God Calls Human Beings His Enemies:
Romans 5:10 “when we were God’s enemies”
Colossians 1:21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.
“Scripture regards man as constituting himself God’s enemy by the fact of his sin.” (Morris, 193)
Leon Morris wisely comments: “It is not always noted that sinful man is not hostile to God. He is quite content to get along amiably with his Maker, and does not, in point of fact, regard his sin as a just cause for enmity (a broken relationship which includes feelings of hurt and pain). He himself is not greatly concerned about the trifle of wrongdoing that is in him, and he cannot see why God should be. Now if Jones says that Smith is his enemy, but Smith says, ‘No, I am peaceable!’ then we must decide that there is enmity from the side of Jones, even though the term ‘enemy’ is fastened on Smith. So when sinful man is content to let bygones be bygones, but nevertheless God (through the mouth of his servants) speaks of an enmity, it is hard to see how it can be maintained that there is no enmity from the side of God. The point is that it is God’s demand for holiness which causes the enmity, and not a conscious hostility on the part of man toward God.”
“There is, on the scriptural view, a definite hostility on the part of God to everything that is evil…God is active in his opposition to all that is evil.” And sometimes, we human beings can be very, very evil. And so God opposes us.
James says it this way:
James 4:4
You adulterous people, don’t you know
that friendship with the world is hatred toward God?
Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world
becomes an enemy of God.[2]
But what is God’s response? Back to point # 1:
3. God loves his enemies:
43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.[3]
Romans 12:20--
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.”
21 Do not be overcome by evil,
but overcome evil with good. [4]
We will be like our Father God if we express love to those who have harmed us. That is what he has done…loved us when we least deserved it. When the relationship was damaged beyond hope, he acted as if we were his dearest, most treasured friend:
God’s heart is like the heart of the father whose son took his share of the estate, left home, and wasted it all in riotous living. But that father kept waiting for that son. And when that son came to his senses, and returned home with a sorrowful heart, that father gladly, warmly, received him back.
And that’s why God sent his Son— to reconcile us to himself:
Colossians 1:19-23
19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,
20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.
22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant. [5]
2 Corinthians 5:11-20
11 Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. ….
14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15 And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. [6]
This is what God has done! He has fed us with the life of his own Son! God loves people, even while we are sinners and enemies.
Karl Barth, famed theologian, was once asked, “What is the greatest thought you ever had? His answer:
“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
(Swindoll, Ox Cart, page 235.)
When we experience reconciliation with God, it means…
“the flooding of human hearts with the love of God, the disappearance of hostility, the joyful acceptance of forgiveness…. If a man truly repents, has his heart filled with the love of God, finds his hostility to God disappears and accepts forgiveness gladly, then he is certainly reconciled to God. (Morris page 202).
Reconciliation on God’s side means…
‘not reckoning unto them their trespasses.’ Because of Jesus.
“ ‘God’s feeling toward us never needed to be changed. But God’s treatment of us, God’s practical relation to us—that had to change.’ The distinction is important. God’s love never varied. But the atonement wrought by Christ means that men are no longer treated as enemies (as their sin deserves), but as friends. God has reconciled himself.
Reconciliation is Created by facing the Cause of our Separation: Sin.
God created reconciliation: How did he do it? Through the finished work of Christ on the cross. But human beings enter into it through repentance and faith
FORGIVING SOMEONE WHO HAS HURT YOU DEEPLY
When you forgive the person who hurt you deeply and unfairly, you perform a
miracle that has no equal.
--Lewis B. Smedes
(The Timothy Report, Swan Lake Communications,
SwanLake@webcombo.net, October 11, 1999)
And this is what God has done for us through Jesus.
He has made peace with us through the cross of his Son. But we must respond. We must own up to our part in this separation. He needs something from us for this to be put into effect: A Heart-felt Turn Around:
But first we must admit that our sin, our willfulness separates us from God, and in fact, is an offence to his very nature.
Rick Sturm, former District Executive Minister of the Columbia Baptist Conference spoke of the “astringent nature of truth.” What did he mean by that? It means the truth stings….but it also heals.
Ever have a scratch or wound on your hand or arm? You take a medical astringent, like rubbing alcohol, and when you apply it to clean out the bacteria, it stings! Ouch! Do this with a small child, and that child might think their parent didn’t love them! “Stop it, Mommy, that hurts!”
The gospel is an astringent. It stings! But it also heals. And when the healing is done, you appreciate so much more the Father who has caused you that pain for a moment so that you may be healed for a lifetime.
God heals our sin problem through the cross. And as a result, he clears the way for a healthy recovery for us, and an attitude of friendship and appreciation for the One who has healed our broken lives.
So God in Jesus Christ announces the bad news…so that we can experience the healing that comes from the good news!
It’s the same in our human relationships. You know how it goes. Someone offends you big time. Maybe a friend at school who pulls a stunt with you, and then gets himself off the hook and leaves you to take all the punishment. Or a business partner who deserts you and leaves you with a pile of debt. A husband who betrays you, or a father who leaves you.
But the next time this person sees you, he or she acts as though nothing were the matter! Then they say, “Hey, why can’t we be friends?” There’s just one answer: the offense hasn’t been accounted for. The other party has not taken responsibility for their sin.
Let’s say you are willing for the relationship to be restored. You are willing to take that person back as a friend, or partner, or spouse. What do you need from them?
An admission of wrongdoing. Sorrow over the pain they have caused you and others. Integrity to make it as right as they are able.
And if they do not? Well, then there is no reconciliation. They didn’t own up to their part of the problem. As a result, you won’t be able to trust them. The prior relationship hasn’t been restored.
Rather than true, relaxed, joyous friendship emerging, there will be a certain wariness about the relationship. The cowboy will sleep with one eye open, watching his “pardner,” waiting for the other boot to hit the dusty trail on the path of betrayal.
“No true reconciliation can take place unless the cause of the estrangement is truly faced and dealt with. If it is ignored or glossed over, then a species of uneasy truce may result, but there can be no real restoration of fellowship, no true reconciliation.” (Morris, page 222)
Hughes: “There can be no reconciliation between persons by ignoring the deep-seated ground of offence. This must be eradicated and destroyed if the reconciliation is to be complete and lasting. If God and man are to be reconciled, it cannot be by the simple expedient of ignoring sin, but only by overcoming it.” (Quoted in Morris, page 222)
That’s what God is looking for: an admission of guilt on our part. A realization of our need for Jesus. And a willingness to change.
Through the cross, “man turns to God in repentance and trust, and God looks on man with favor and not in wrath.” (ibid, 222)
St. Augustine said, “We count on God’s mercy for our past mistakes, on God’s love for our present needs, on God’s sovereignty for our future.” (Swindoll, Ox Cart, page 238)
JI Packer wrote, “What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of his hands. I am never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment, therefore, when his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when his care falters. This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort…in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.” Knowing God, quoted in Swindoll.
I do not know who wrote this story, but it eloquently shows us the power of reconciliation.
“A Living Bible”
His name is Bill. He has wild hair, wears a T-shirt with holes in it, jeans and no shoes. This was literally his wardrobe for his entire four years of college. He is brilliant. Kind of esoteric and very, very bright. He became a Christian while attending college.
Across the street from the campus is a well-dressed, very conservative church. They want to develop a ministry to the students, but are not sure how to go about it. One day Bill decides to go there. He walks in with no shoes, jeans, his T-shirt, and wild hair.
The service has already started and so Bill starts down the aisle looking for a seat.
The church is completely packed and he can't find a seat. By now people are really looking a bit uncomfortable, but no one says anything. Bill gets closer and closer and closer to the pulpit, and when he realizes there are no seats, he just squats down right on the carpet. (Although perfectly acceptable behavior at a college fellowship, trust me, this had never happened in this church before!)
By now the people are really uptight, and the tension in the air is thick. About this time, the minister realizes that from way at the back of the church, a deacon is slowly making his way toward Bill. Now the deacon is in his eighties, has silver-gray hair, and a three-piece suit. A godly man, very elegant, very dignified, very courtly. He walks with a cane and, as he starts walking toward this boy, everyone is saying to themselves that you can't blame him for what he's going to do. How can you expect a man of his age and of his background to understand some college kid on the floor? It takes a long time for the man to reach the boy. The church is utterly silent except for the clicking of the man's cane. All eyes are focused on him. You can't even hear anyone breathing. The minister can't even preach the sermon until the deacon does what he has to do.
And now they see this elderly man drop his cane on the floor. With great difficulty he lowers himself and sits down next to Bill and worships with him so he won't be alone. Everyone chokes up with emotion. When the minister gains control, he says, "What I'm about to preach, you will never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget. Reach out a welcoming hand. Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible, some people will ever read".