131 Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Reconciled to God

One of the most daunting aspects of being a peacemaker is the challenge of peace-making in our own relational worlds. Our natural reaction to conflict is either fight or flight – punish or withdraw.

The only way to get beyond this natural inclination is through a supernatural infusion.

Our capacity to reconcile with others is rooted in our reconciliation with God.  Without vertical reconciliation, there can never be horizontal reconciliation.  

Jesus came to this broken planet that it might be healed.  He sought to bridge the gap between a sinful humanity and a holy God.  The cost of this extraordinary act of reconciliation?  His very life.

Friends, the immensity of that truth needs to powerfully grip us so that each of us might personally appropriate Jesus’ offer of reconciliation.  And that we might be motivated to become agents of reconciliation.  

When you embrace Christ as your savior, you become “new” in multiple ways.

1.     Externally New: Justification

When we come to Christ by faith, God, the Judge, accepts Jesus’ payment for sin’s penalty and declares us “not guilty.” 

2.     Internally New: Regeneration

When you embrace Christ by faith, you are given a new nature and out of that new nature, you can begin to live a different life. 

3.     Outwardly New: Reconciliation

Once a person gets “put back together,” he/she is given the greatest assignment of all – to help put a broken world back together. 

Text: 2 Cor. 5:17-18; Col. 1:15-23

Originally recorded on August 11, 2013, at Fellowship Missionary Church, Fort Wayne, IN.