Ministry of Reconciliation - part 2

Well, we only have 45 minutes to cover five hours of material, so... If you all stand, we'll just ask God's blessing on the seminar. Great Father and King, we come before you once again, thanking you for the Feast of Tabernacles and what it means, and just being here and sharing this with each other. And of course, we're sharing it with you and with our brother Jesus Christ. Father, we pray that you have mercy on us, that you teach us, that you make us your children, and that we can be there when this is actually accomplished, and meet Jesus Christ in the air, and help bring about this time. But we have to learn it now. We ask you to help us to learn it, and bless everything that we do here today. We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen.

In the first half of the material that we're covering, I talked about how there are five basic causes for dysfunctional conflict. There's always going to be conflict between people and how to make decisions, or what to do with, you know, like I said, where do you go to lunch? You get more than one person involved, and there's conflict. But dysfunctional conflict is a very serious matter, because it is the opposite of peace. And yet we are called to be peacemakers. So we have to learn and understand the ministry of reconciliation. I went through that last time, where Paul says we've been given the ministry of reconciliation, God's pleading through us, to the world, to be reconciled to him, and that we can never really deal with the deep conflicts in our lives until we first deal with the conflict we have with God.

That was the beginning place. Humanity can't deal with its conflicts, with wars and crime, with political parties. That can't be fixed until they deal with their conflict with God. You and I are being called to deal with our conflict with God.

And we started with scriptures like in Romans, where Paul said that we are just naturally the carnal mind is the enemy of God. Went through how he said in Ephesians that we are by nature the children of wrath, and that there's no way for us to fix that unless God does something.

So we talked about how we're standing before spiritual Grand Canyon and what kind of running start that you have to get to get across that canyon to where God is. There's no way to get there. God has to do something. And God sent Jesus Christ into our realm to become like us, to show us how to live, to die as that substitute, so that we can begin to be reconciled to God. Since we are all sinners, since we're all lawbreakers, we have no rights to God. We have no rights. He either does this for us or we have nothing. Now, once he does this, though, once Jesus Christ came across that gulf into our world, lived and died, was resurrected, went back to the Father, we still, that reconciliation isn't complete.

It's still not complete. There must be a response on our part. For any relationship to heal from conflict, there has to be something done on the part of both people. What I find interesting with God is that God as the offender gives us an example, and that is—and we won't have time to go through this—but when you go through the study of the New Testament, there is actually more responsibility given to us as the person offended than the person who committed the offense.

And he said, why? It's because it's the way God thinks. Remember, he's the offended party. He's the one that the wrong was done to. Now if God had the same problems we have—pride, the need to control—if God had the same problems that we have that he has to be healed by us, can you imagine if God had to be healed by us after everything we've done to him? We'd be doomed.

Since God's perfect love, and since God doesn't have to prove himself to anybody—one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible is when Moses said, who do I tell them you are? And he said, I am. Just tell them I exist. That's all they need to know. You know, he didn't give forty-seven titles. He just said, I exist. That's amazing for a being that's as powerful and as genius with what God has.

Just I am. That's all you have to tell. So fortunately, he doesn't have to be healed by us. He wants us, he doesn't need us. See, we need each other, and we need God. Those needs drive us. He wants us, but he doesn't need us. And so, because of that, just that incredible being of who he is, he's not driven by those kinds of desires.

He is driven by a love. He wants us. Now, God sends Christ across the Gulf to us, and we have to have a response. Romans 2, verse 4. This is the reconciliation, how God is reconciling us to Him, how God is healing the conflict between us and Him. And in doing so, we can learn how to deal with conflicts with others. Romans 2, verse 4.

Paul writes, "...or do you despise the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?" And so his argument here, and Paul can argue very logically, sometimes he gets off on a tangent and it's hard to work through Paul, usually because he's angry.

But boy, he's logical when he sets down and he just gets into where he's going. And his argument here is, how did you come to repentance? Was it your goodness that led you to repentance?

Or was it God's goodness that led you to repentance? It was God's goodness, it was God reaching His hand out and saying, I am willing to forgive you that led us to repentance. Which if we had time to talk about our responsibility as a Christian, well, we've offended each other, we have this enormous responsibility to go keep sticking our hand out and saying, I forgive you.

Now, the reconciliation takes place when the person takes your hand and says, I'm sorry. Or says, I accept we need to be reconciled or whatever. But if the person never says they're sorry, we're still supposed to be standing there with their hand out.

Why? Because that's the way God is. Think about it. His hand's always out until we reach the point that we just slap His hand away and then He takes it back. God's hand is still out to this world right now. There's going to reach a point where He takes His hand back. It's called the Day of the Lord. But until that point, there's always this hand out saying, I will forgive you. Take my hand. Now, He has to call us to take His hand. It's His goodness that leads us to repentance. Now we still have to repent.

We still have our response. Repentance is accepting all this, and it is changing. It's accepting His law. There's all these things that have to do with repentance. But understand, we can't repent on our own. We can't repent on our own. So in this reconciliation process, God sends Christ across the Gulf. We recognize His life. We recognize who He is. We recognize His death and resurrection.

And we say, I wish to be reconciled back to my Father. I wish to have the blood of Jesus Christ in my stead. And now I wish to be reconciled. But how do I do that? Because I'm still on this side of the Gulf. That's where we get into 1 Corinthians 2. First Corinthians 2.

I'm not going to read the whole chapter. Just a few verses. Because God now has to do something with us so that the corrupt human nature can be changed. Because after God forgives us, and after we repent, we still have corrupt human nature. You and I can start keeping the letter of the law, but we still have sin within us.

We forget that sometimes. It's part of the way we think. It's part of the way we feel. Our nature has to be changed. Christianity is more than just a set of doctrines. Christianity is more than just keeping the Ten Commandments. Yes, it's those things. But you know, that's like grade school. Those things lead us to a change of nature. We become different people.

First Corinthians 2, verse 11. First Corinthians 2. Pick it up in verse 11 here. As I said, this whole chapter deals with this. It says, For what man knows the things of a man, except the spirit of the man which is in him? And so no one knows the things of God except the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

The natural man. The human being that has not had their mind opened. The children of wrath. The carnal mind that hasn't been touched by God. The natural man does not receive the things of the spirit of God. You and I understand geometry and mathematics, and you and I understand art, and you and I understand music, and you and I communicate, and you and I have empathy. We have all these things that are like the image of God, because we were made in the image of God. But we are marred images of God.

It's just like someone took a hammer and just beat us up so bad that we don't look like we're supposed to look in our nature. And so you see violence and hatred and anger and disobedience, and you just see the state that we're in. To be reconciled back to God, God forgives us, but He doesn't accept us just the way that we are. Now, some of you have come from a Protestant background where you were told that. God accepts you just the way you are. No, He doesn't. God says, boy, do we have a lot of work to do. If you wish to be reconciled to me, you first have to accept the sacrifice for you because you're worthy of death. And secondly, you're going to have to repent and accept my spirit so that I can begin the work of shaping and molding you into what you were originally supposed to be, one of His children. And it takes God's spirit. That's the second step. See, that first step is Christ coming across the gulf, the great canyon between us and God. The second is He carries us back across to Him. How does He do that? Well, verse 14, But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that we may instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. So God takes His mind, His thoughts, His love, His ways, and it comes from Him into us. We are now reconciled to God on the first basic level. I mean, I don't know how more reconciled—well, I know how more reconciled we have to become, but the beginning stages, you think about it, God now lives—because He says, I abide in you—He now lives inside our minds. God's Spirit and our Spirit become intertwined together so that we now become receptive to His divine nature. You and I have an interesting problem. You and I have two natures. And one of them is corrupt, and the other nature is there to change the corrupt nature. And the corrupt nature rejects the other nature. Many, many years ago, I remember a woman I counseled with—and this was 30 years ago—a counseled woman who was seeing a professional counselor and then seeing me. She was seeing the professional counselor once a week, then the next week we were talking. And she said, well, he's telling me a lot of the same things, and we were working through some basic concepts, and we got into some of this. And after a while, she came and she said, I'm not going to see my counselor anymore. And I said, well, do you think that's a good idea? She said, no, I know it's a good idea, because he explained it to me. He said, I figured out your problem. He said, you want so much to be a Christian and do everything that's in the Bible, but part of you rejects it. Part of you doesn't want to do that. He said, so what I think you should do is give in to the part of you who doesn't want to do it, and you'll be okay. The conflict will be gone. And she said, I realized I'm not crazy. I'm a Christian. We now have two natures at war within us. Christianity is supposed to be uncomfortable. If it's not uncomfortable—I mean, not all the time. There's joy and love and peace. But if there's times it's not uncomfortable, it probably means we're still holding on to part of our Mard image.

Nope, can't change that. Don't want that changed. But we're holding on to it. God puts His Spirit in us to take us to carry us across the Gulf so that we now are reconciled. We are in communion with Him. We are in relationship with Him, even though we still sin. Because that sin is being removed. We're being changed. You know, in 2 Peter 1—let's go ahead and turn there. What did you receive?

You said, well, I have two natures. Of course you do. When you receive God's Spirit, you received a different nature. What is that nature? 2 Peter 1, verse 2. Grace and peace—let's see if this is where I want to go. Yeah. Verse 2. Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who was called us by glory and virtue, by which, having been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

We have become partakers of the divine nature. The problem with Hinduism and Eastern religions, they say you have to find the God that's within you. That's the New Age movement. There's no God within us. We're a corrupted human being with no hope for eternity unless God reaches down and helps us. Because part of this healing and reconciliation process is He gives us His divine nature. Part of Himself comes into us. And now we must conform to that. You know what Christianity is? It's submitting to the guidance of God's Spirit. You say, well, how do I know it's God's Spirit? It has to be in this book.

You can't go, I can't go by my feelings all the time. I'll just be in more conflict. We have to go by what's in this book. This book tells us, this book tells us, the direction that the divine nature, God's Spirit, is going to guide us. This is what is in the divine nature. The Holy Spirit is not another person. It is the very mind of the Father and the Son that comes into us.

They're very powerful. They're very loved. They're thoughts. And the more sensitive we are to that, the less conflict we have with God. In Romans 8, he says, we are His children. All of Romans 8 read that sometime here during the Feast. Because Romans 8 says, you know, we are His children. Now children have the genetic makeup of their parents. You and I need the spiritual genetic makeup of our Father. For that to happen, He has to take part of Himself.

How do we create children? We take part of a mother and part of a father and it creates children. And what do we have? We have a human being like us. And that human being, very early in its development, becomes corrupted. Somewhere along there, Satan gets ahold of that child and corrupts their nature. And now they have corrupted nature. How are we going to become like our Father? He has to take some of his genetic makeup, if you will, and put it in us.

That's how he gets us back across the gulf over to Him, to His side. And this process we're going through right now is a training ground. Every day is a training ground. Now if this conflict between us and God is being healed, how does that affect the other four areas of conflict? So if our conflict with God is being healed, how does that affect those other four areas of conflict that we talked about two days ago?

Well, let's start with our desires. That we have desires, we have needs, we want to control. We have all these different things that we need to do. We need to protect our self-image. We need security. One of the driving forces of human beings is security. Well, let's look at James 4. This was read in one of the sermons already here at the feast, James 4. Verse 1, James is writing to the church. Okay? You're not writing to the world. The letter that James wrote was written specifically to the church at large, at the beginning of the letter, that's what he says.

It wasn't even written to a specific congregation, much of what Paul writes to either specific congregations or to individuals. James writes a letter to all the churches. This was to be spread out wherever they could find a church. And he says, where do wars and fights come from among you?

Why is it that we haven't solved all the conflict in our congregations and our families? Why? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? We have a number of great desires in life. One is to have no pain, physical or emotional pain. I don't want any physical pain. I don't want any emotional pain. We want pleasure. We want to eat good things. We want to feel good. We have these desires, these driving forces, which of themselves, they're not necessarily wrong. It's how we use them. As we have God's Spirit, we learn to control these desires. If we do not, we continue to have conflict all the time.

See, we think the answer to conflict is, get the other person to do what I want. The answer to conflict is for each of us to be doing what God wants. That doesn't mean you're not going to still have conflict. And there's times you're going to have unsolvable conflict. If the other person is going to be driven by a selfish desire and you're not, you still can't solve the problem.

But you will not be destroyed by the conflict. You understand? Sometimes we can't solve the conflict. We can just keep ourselves from being destroyed by it. Conflict can obsess us. If you're really having conflict, women have trouble with this, because just the way that women and men are wired a little differently in our brains, a man and woman can have an argument, he goes off to work, he comes home at night and he's forgotten about it. All day long, that's all she can think about. And then she's mad at him because he forgot. And now we have another conflict.

And he's walking around oblivious, so he's just hurting her more. We can't solve all conflict, but we can deal with ourselves. He goes on, he says, you lust and do not have, you murder and covet and cannot obtain, you fight and war, yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive because you ask and miss that you may do it selfishly, do it on your own pleasures. One of the core issues that we have to deal with is our selfishness. And it's the hardest thing that we have to deal with because we're absolutely sure that that selfishness is okay. We believe our selfishness is okay. He goes on, he says, adulterers and adulterers says, do you not know that friendship with the world is what? To be the enemy of God. We're too much part of this world. We still have our desires geared by advertisers and Walmart. We're still being driven by things that we should not be driven by. Is to be enemy with God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself the enemy of God. See, our desires have to be changed and that's what God does to his spirit. You want to do an interesting study, and this was mentioned during the already one of the sermons too, if you want to do an interesting study of how to deal with this issue. Do an in-depth study of the Beatitudes. Do an in-depth study of the Beatitudes. Take a piece of paper, put a line down the middle, take a Beatitude and write it out. And then look up every scripture you can find that's connected to that subject and write it down on the other side. And as you do, write, what is God saying to me? Because this is about attitude. The whole first part of the Sermon on the Mount is about attitudes. How we approach life. How we feel about things. Our thought processes. So God begins to satisfy our desires. We begin to say, God, not my will but yours. So we get into that other problem we have is the need to control. That need to control, remember I said, makes us our own dirt gods. We begin to worship ourselves. We actually worship ourselves. We must control everything around us because if we don't, we'll get hurt. If we don't, bad things will happen to me. When God gives us His Spirit, we have this unique opportunity He gives us that every day we can get up and get on our knees and say, God, today, today, you do your will in me. Today you show me what to do. You guide my steps. If you've read any of the Psalms, you see that David did this all the time. Today not my will be done but yours. Today God, fulfill in me. You control my life today because I really don't have control over much of anything. The more I try to control, the more I make things. And there's six and a half billion of us on this earth, and most of us are trying to control everything. Now, you've gotten real control freaks before. You know how miserable they are.

You know how miserable they make everybody else. But all of us, to one degree or another, are trying to control what's going on around us. And that's not wrong in itself. I mean, we have a need. We're so insecure. We have a need to try to control.

But the less insecurity we have, the less need we have to try to guide and control everything because we're just letting God guide and control us. It's amazing experience when you're around a person of real faith. Because they have a simple confidence the rest of us don't have. A simple confidence comes from, God will do what He will do in my life today. But see, you have to go give something up. Just like we have to give up certain desires, or we have to change and funnel those desires.

Right? We have to do the same thing here. We have to give up that need to control. The third point I talked about in terms of conflict was the need to be emotionally healed by the people who hurt us. This is a very difficult thing to work through, especially if you're close to somebody and they hurt you. The need to have them say, I'm sorry. The need to have them show that they were wrong.

What if it takes them a long time to do that? What if they never do it? Then you have to go to God and be healed. You have to go to God and be healed. Because if we no longer have to, and I don't know of any human being that's reached his stage yet. I've never talked to anybody who's reached his stage yet, but if we were like God, every time someone sinned against us, we might feel anger, disappointment, because he feels those things.

But there would be a point where we would be standing there with our hand out and saying, I will forgive you. I'm offering you forgiveness. We can't do that because we have to be healed. When Peter said, should I forgive seven times, realize the enormity of what Peter was saying. I don't know about you. I might forgive somebody once. Second time, no way. Peter says, I think it would be good to forgive somebody seven times.

All the other disciples are probably looking at him and saying, what are you talking about? I wouldn't think that could have abused him. And Jesus said, no, let's try seventy times seven. That's just overwhelming. Now remember, there's a difference between offering forgiveness and relationship. God offers us forgiveness, right? But you and I can't have a relationship with him until we repent. That's really important when people have been abused. You have someone who was abused as a child, they grow up into adulthood and they say, I'm just torn by and I'm obsessed with the hurt I went through.

Well, we have to give up that hurt in order to function and have good relationships with other people. Which means that we have to offer forgiveness to that person so that we're no longer motivated by that anger, by that disdain. We have to give it up.

But you're not required to have a relationship with the person unless they repent. But if we don't do that, what happens when the person does repent and they walk up to us and say, I am so sorry, and we say, don't tell me you're sorry, you're nothing to me? You want to think about something? Think about this. There's probably no person in the Bible more misused than Uriah the Hittite. David stole his wife, committed adultery with his wife, lied to the man, and had him murdered.

I don't know how you can abuse anybody more than him. Had he murdered? He repented and God forgave him. David was punished. Understand also that repentance doesn't always erase punishment. David was punished terribly. He was punished the rest of his life. Not only was he punished the rest of his life, every human being that ever repents will read about his sins. Now, you talk about a penalty. Can you imagine that?

Every human being that ever repents will pick up this book and read about David's sins. And David is okay with that. David's okay with that. And when he comes up in the resurrection, he will be okay with that. When Uriah the Hittite comes up in the second resurrection, if Uriah the Hittite isn't willing to forgive David, he will go to the lake of fire. Think about that. He has to forgive him. Because if he doesn't forgive him, he will become a bitter, angry person.

And he will never be able to live without conflict. See, Satan can't live without conflict. So you begin to understand something when you realize how important this forgiveness is. But relationship is something different. I think David will be standing there when he comes up, and David is going to be a spirit being, and David is going to beg him, please forgive me for what I did to you. But David will have already received salvation. Uriah the Hittite is going to have to face his trial. He's going to have to face his trial.

He's going to have to give up those desires. And he's going to have to be emotionally healed. Fortunately, David is going to be there to help emotionally heal him. And God is going to be there, too. This is what's so amazing about God. We seek reconciliation with each other so that we can be emotionally healed. God is seeking reconciliation with you so that you can be emotionally healed. God does need to be emotionally healed. All the abuse we've done on God. He needs no emotional healing. So God, the offender, is seeking you and me, the people who have offended him, the abominations, and saying, I would like to heal you of your abomination. That's the love of God. That's where we have to go. We have to repent. We have to respond. Or we will not have a relationship with God. Understand what he is offering. And so we give up the need to control. Our desires have to be changed so that we're not driven so much by our emotions. And this is very difficult. We have to not be driven by our emotions. Our emotions must be guided by our thoughts. And our thoughts must be guided by the Bible. Everybody has told people a very false concept. Change the way you feel. Now would anyone like to explain to me how to change the way you feel? Because I haven't figured it out except one way. Because the Bible, I've looked all through this book trying to find explanations on how to feel. And all it keeps telling me is don't trust the way you feel. Okay?

How do I change that? Do you know what this book is full of? How to think. You know how you change the way you feel? You change the way you think. And that's what's so hard. Because it takes a conscious effort to change the way you think. So how do we change the way we think? We find out how to think through this book, and God's Spirit molds our thoughts. And as it molds our thoughts, we change the way we feel. That's how it's done. This is the reconciliation process. This is the healing. So as we are healed, we can give up anger. Not all anger is wrong. Unfortunately, most anger for us is wrong. We misuse anger. God's angry. He never misuses it. But we have to give up greed. We have to give up the need and desire to hurt others. We have to give up our selfishness. We have to give up the need to control. We have to give up these things. How do we do that? We change the way we think. We wrestle with our own thoughts. We let the thoughts of God come into this book, and we pray constantly. Don't let me think this way. Please, change the way I feel. Don't let me feel this way. How am I supposed to feel? We're supposed to be asking God that all the time. Because this isn't just actions, it's nature that's changed. The beginning stages of Christianity is just changing of actions. Of course it is. How do you teach a child multiplication? You teach some tables, right? There comes a point where they have to use the tables, which is a process of the mind. You and I have to submit to God's Spirit. We have to use the commandments. And in using the commandments, in using the laws, it changes who we are internally.

The last point of human conflict is our pride, which is that exaggerated viewpoint of ourselves. How do we deal with that one? How do we deal with that one? One of the stories I like to tell—it's a very long story, I won't go into all of it— but it's fascinating to me. In the American Revolution, there was a man named Ben. Ben was remarkable.

He was one of the earliest leaders of the Revolution. He financed part of the Revolution out of his own pocket until he almost bankrupted himself. He was politically stabbed in the back. He was actually probably only one of maybe two or three good officers in the entire Continental Army. You realize the first few years of the Continental of the American Revolution, we lost every battle, basically, except for Bunker Hill that we fought. And even after we'd won, we just lose the next one. I mean, we couldn't win. We couldn't beat the best army in the world in what we were doing. We had the officers to do it, and he was one of them and did it. He won battles. He also—we invaded Canada at one time, decided to make it one of the colonies during the war. Didn't work. Canadians drove us out. We came back. He actually held the army together as it came back. He built a fleet on Lake Champlain in New York and fought the British on that lake. He was wounded a couple of times. He wasn't promoted. He came from New England. And to keep the balance—there was already sectional problems within the United States to keep the political balance— they wouldn't bring him up to a major general because there were already too many from the north, and they had to promote people from the south. And they were arguing. And from the west—when you say the west, remember that's western Pennsylvania at this point. This part of Tennessee wasn't even considered part of the states yet. They were part of the colonies. And so the man just—I mean, he was accused of things. Terrible things happened to him. Terrible things. The Canadian government sued him because as the army was retreating, he took food from farms, and he was reprimanded. And this went on for year after year after year. Ben tried so hard. He did so well. And then he got tired of it. And he was always a man of pride. He had a great pride about himself. And Ben, finally, his pride was so hurt. He said, I won't take this anymore. You and I know him as Benedict Arnold. Benedict Arnold, if he would not have betrayed his country, would be right up there with George Washington and Samuel Adams and others as one of the greatest leaders of the American Revolution. And he was for years. His pride got the best of him. Pride hurts us so much because pride gets us looking at how others treat us instead of how we treat others.

How do we deal with pride? In one of the beatitudes, is blessed are the pouring spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Being poor in spirit doesn't mean that you and I walk around all the time in some kind of depressed state. It doesn't mean there aren't times to be strong. Moses was poor in spirit, and Moses stood up at times in front of millions of people and was strong. Paul was poor in spirit. Paul had no problem standing up when it was time to stand up and do what was right.

Being poor in spirit means to be acutely aware of your poverty without God.

It means to be acutely aware, at the core of who you are, of your absolute spiritual poverty without God. And we have to go there. We have to go there to be reconciled to God. And we have to be reminded of that. The more we're around the church, the easier for us to forget that.

Look what God's given us. Knowledge, power, healings, the holy days. Look what He's given us. And we can get to the place because of the knowledge we have.

Because we have overcome certain sins, because we are moving forward. That we give up our poverty before God. And pride in our own Christianity motivates us.

And when that happens, we have conflict.

You can't hide from our pride. It's part of all of us. We all have corrupt human nature. All the things I've talked about, it just touched on. Because that's all we could do between two days ago here, is touch on these things. All of us wrestle with one degree or another. Some of you have overcome others more than others. Some of you have no need to control as much as others. Some of you don't have as much pride as others. But we all have part of it. We all have some elements of these things in us. We all need to be emotionally healed.

We all are driven by our desires sometimes, just for pleasure, for self-image, for these different things. And so it affects the way we treat others.

Only when we experience the utter poverty of life without God, that we appreciate what we have to have with God. So, we've just briefly touched on how God is reconciling us to Him. He sent Jesus Christ across that great canyon, and now He's taken us back across to the other side. We are now His children in relationship. That was read, right? That was read at one of the sermons. We are now His children. We don't know what we will be. We can only get a glimpse of that. But we are already in relationship, children. We are already now, have God abiding in us. We're already reconciled. Now, you and I can leave this process of reconciliation. There is an unpardonable sin, and that should scare us. To leave that reconciliation, to leave what God is doing, is to go back out and be totally in poverty without God. And that's a frightening thing. But God didn't call us for that. If we fail, it's only because we choose to fail. God doesn't choose that any of us should fail. God has reconciled you to Him. Live like a person who is reconciled to God. Obey like a person who is reconciled to God. Pray like a person who is reconciled to God. And as you do, God will use you in the ministry of reconciliation, not only to reconcile with each other, but to help others come to Him.