Genuine Worship

woRship

R        Reconciliation                                              2 Cor 5: 18-21

“And God has given us this task of reconciling people to Him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And He gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making His appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.”

If you have a checking account, you receive a statement from the bank each month, which you should reconcile to your records.  Now usually, the reconciling items go both ways.  You may have checks that haven’t cleared the bank yet, so you must subtract those from the bank balance.   And the bank may have charged you some fees that you need to recognize.  In most cases, neither you or the bank has the correct balance, but the process of reconciliation brings the balances into agreement by considering all of the items.

But did you notice in this passage it says that, “For God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.”  We need to understand that God is holy and perfect – He is the correct balance.  As fallen sinful human beings we need to be reconciled to God and only He is able to accomplish this through faith in Jesus.  In another New Testament book, Paul expresses it this way, “Yet now He has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, He has brought you into His own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before Him without a single fault.” (Col 1:22)  The only way we can be made suitable to stand before a holy, perfect God is for Him to change us to be like Him.  And in the meantime, He wants us to be telling others about the change that only He can make possible.