[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason, and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 05:00 p.m. or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m. if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, you can find us
[email protected] dot. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our sermons. Podcast Madison Church of Christ sermons thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Good evening, everyone. Come on in and grab a seat. We'll get started here for our summer series.
I am excited tonight to have our guest speaker with us. His name is Billy Camp. And to give you a little bit of perspective on Billy count. He was here back in 2010 as our youth ministry intern. And so I called him and I said, hey, man, you want to send me a bio? And he said, I figured you'd probably just make up something anyway, to which I was about to. And then you know what happened? He sent me a bio because he didn't want me to start pontificating on my own. Right? And so Billy did a great job for us back in 2010. We loved him so much, and he had such preaching ability back in those days. I mean, we really and truly just felt he had such a gift. And it's not just a gift. It's his study habits. He's just a man who loves to get into God's word and to express it and share it. And I am so thankful that he's with us tonight. He's a minister at the Madison. Sorry. Well, he. He was. He's a minister at Dowrated Church of Christ, where he's been there since 2011.
He is here with his wife, Shelby, and their three kids, Kenley, Roman, and Lewis. And I got to hang out with them for dinner, and that was a lot of fun. I think Lewis fed me a few fries that I didn't mean to eat, but I got them a lot of energy. It was a lot of fun being with them. But Billy has served as the college minister at Dalrata for over a decade, but now, recently, he has moved over into family ministry. Education wise. He's earned his PhD in theology and apologetics from Liberty University in 2022. And now it's a full time lecturer at the biblical studies at Faulkner University.
So he's a great guy. Just brilliant, but even more so, just a great, great guy. And I'm just so thankful to have him with us tonight. Thank you for being here. I'm going to say a prayer real quickly, then Andrew knows is going to lead us in a song, and then we'll turn things over to Billy. Let's pray. Father, thank you so much for everything you've done for us, for the blessings we have all around us in our family and our church family, for the blessing of coming together tonight to open up your word and to study from it. And father, I pray that you be with Billy tonight. Help him to do a great job, help him to encourage us and inspire us and challenge us as well, Father. And we just pray that you'll be with him through all that. And lord, we ask that you be with all of us as we listen. Help us to be receptive in our hearts and minds and to just listen closely and to be moved and changed by it. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Good to see everyone.
I've been looking forward to this. It's good to be back. It has been a long time since I was here. And I did get to enjoy time here in 2010 working with a youth group. And then I've been back a couple of times to speak, but a lot has changed. I didn't realize how much time had passed until this fall at Dalreda. Faulkner had mentioned to the church at Dalrada. They said, hey, look, we want to take all the freshmen that come in, and we want to take them to people's houses. So would you be willing to host dinner? And my wife and I sure, send over whoever. It's one of those things, you know. Guess who's coming to dinner? Didn't have any clue at all. So we're sitting around our dinner table, got freshmen there. We brought in some upperclassmen just for them to fill in the conversations. And I was sitting next to a gentleman, and I was just getting to know him a little bit and ask him, where are you from? Just the general questions like that. He's like, I'm from Huntsville. Okay, well, what part of Huntsville? Let's narrow it down a little bit more. And as the conversation kept going, I found out, oh, he's from Madison. Oh, cool. He's like, well, yeah, you may know my dad, Brandon. And then I realized that was the kid I was throwing around on the couch many years ago when he was slamming wrestling and things like that. So it was cool to have gage in Montgomery and get to know him that way.
What we're studying tonight, thinking about this topic of how unreconciled relationships impact resilience now. All right, so you've been studying already a few weeks now thinking about resilience, and it's such an important topic as christians, as we're working through this world and how resilient are we when it comes to what is coming our way. It's just one wave after the other of things that you have probably made the statement of. I just thought we would never see the day. Haven't you said something like that, man, I didn't think that, you know, my generation would experience x, y or z, and you start looking down the line and you think about generations coming later on. It's like, man, I feel sorry for them because of what they're going to have to go through because I see how things are happening right now. And man, they need more prayer, they need more help because they're going to have a lot more things coming their way that we didn't even deal with. And haven't you made that statement, too? Things that people, the younger generations and people in general are going through. You're thinking, man, I would have never imagined that would have been a topic of discussion. Discussion. We need to have resilience as christians with the wave of things that are coming our way. Now, I understand as you've been studying this already, you've got a little bit of an introduction, I would assume, defining the terms what is resilience? But I'm going to build off of that with my own spin of it as well as we think about unreconciled relationships, what is resilience? I don't know what comes to your mind when you think about resilience. Maybe you have to go and look up a very particular definition. If you do look at the definition, it's going to be the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties or going through something that is tough and being able to bounce back from it some substance or object that is able to spring back into shape. So when I started thinking about, all right, what comes up to my mind when I think about resilience, something that's able to pop back up, although you may try and knock it over. I thought about weeble wobbles first. That was the first thing that came to mind, is a weeble wobble that you can never knock them down. One of those that came to mind, but then I started looking through the window to my front yard and I saw the numerous amount of ant beds in my front yard. And I thought, those jokers are resilient. I cannot get rid of them. Does not matter what I do. So we're going to hang on to that just for a minute tonight as we think about being resilient and our resilience. I don't know if you've had to deal with ants in your front yard.
You know, here in Alabama, of course, we got those fire ants that we just can't get rid of. And although you may get rid of them in your yard, your neighbor doesn't care as much. So they want to come hang out in your yard as well. It doesn't matter how much you treat it. But I think about this on a regular basis because my kids run outside and they're outside playing, and then you hear the screams, right? Because the ants have come up on their feet attacking them because they left their popsicles out there, right. And so it just encourages them to come into my yard. But ants are resilient. It doesn't matter how much money I spend to be able to get rid of them out of my yard. They are resilient. And their numbers, I don't even know the numbers of them in my yard. I don't know how many of them are there, but they have bound together and they're fighting back against me. And so we have this mini war that's being waged in my yard, and they're pretty resilient.
And I think about ants and their resiliency.
And I think about our topic specifically tonight when we're dealing with things that hinder our resilience.
Now, you've already been introduced to this topic and you've already come across some things that may stop us from being the strong christians that we want to be, to be able to endure the waves of things that are coming our way, that's attacking the faith.
We need to be resilient.
And there's all these individual components. But one of the best things that we have going for us is what we have in this room, in this building tonight. And we're not the only unique ones. There are many churches that are meeting at the same time right now, although we meet at the time, 637 is a little off, so it's throwing me off a little bit. But we have churches meeting all across, not just Alabama, across the United States. We've had churches meeting all across the world in numbers, christians coming together, and what do we talk about here? In the middle of the week, we come to midweek Bible study, and we're going to study our bible. And that's a major component of this. But also the encouragement that you get from one another. Don't you look forward to the middle of your weekend where you're coming out of work, you're coming out of stressful situations, you're coming out of some big things that have been happening in your life, and you get to come here and you look forward to the hugs, you look forward to people looking you in the eyes and saying, how are things going? And it's not just a superficial question, it's a legitimate one. How are you doing spiritually? How are things going in your life? And we build because of that. And it actually creates resilience together that we're not going through this alone. But we've also seen the converse of that, haven't we?
Have you ever sat in these pews and maybe you're in the situation right now and there's some animosity across the aisle, some animosity between somebody that's in this building, and it made it a little harder to come in the doors this time, didn't it? If you're not going through it right now, haven't you had one of those situations where you were kind of dreading even walking in the building because you may see so and so, and maybe it was something you said, maybe something you did, maybe something you didn't say, something you didn't do, maybe something they said, maybe something that they did that hurt you.
And you might be sitting here tonight unreconciled.
You might be sitting here tonight thinking, I sat on this side of the building versus that one because they're over there. We haven't had a conversation in years.
Maybe you came here tonight because your christian family is much stronger than your earthly family.
Maybe you got some unresolved tension, some unreconciled relationships at home.
It could be within your own home, husbands, wives. You might be the only spouse that's sitting here tonight, and you have a spouse that's sitting at home, not here worshiping God and enjoying the blessings.
You might be sitting here and you're at odds with your son or your daughter that doesn't want to have anything to do with the faith.
Maybe you're struggling just in general with parenting. It's not that somebody's walked away from the faith, but you just think, man, I feel like I'm letting my family down, my husband, wife, I'm letting my children down. Because I just haven't been the right kind of person. I need to. And there's been this divide between us, and I don't know how to reconcile it. I don't know how to make it better. And it seems like I'm just stuck in a spider web. Every time I turn, it's just like, things get more complicated. I get caught in another web, and I just don't know which way to go.
Those kind of relationships that go unresolved, that go unreconciled, really hinder our resilience, doesn't it?
The weak points in our life, if we know that a strong point in our life is where we get to be here together as a church, I dare say those weak points in our life are those where we are by ourselves.
And so if we're going to take this analogy just a step further and to utilize this in our mind, I don't know if you watched the bug's life, the real version that Disney produced. I enjoyed all of the CGI that was behind the scenes. You know, I had to go do my research. I wanted to know, okay, all these videos that I'm watching of these different animals that are going through, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, go watch it. It's quite enjoyable. But they. They actually are, you know, it's a documentary looking at all these animals and all these insects specifically and what they're doing. And they have a whole episode about ants.
And it's so fascinating to me, but they have this one scene on there where the ants have built up a home together in a water feature next to a pool, and they are going through and telling you this story about all the babies that the ants are having and how they need to bind together. And then, you know, they introduced the problem. The man's about to turn on the water of the water feature and ants, and I don't know if I've never seen this in real life. I've seen enough on tv to think that it's true. So that when water comes and the ants need to survive, they create a human life raft. This is actually a bunch of ants together floating in the water. Now, this might be your nightmare, and I'm sorry that you're not going to be able to sleep tonight thinking about these ants doing this, and you're going to be more resilient about fighting against them in your front yard. But you think about ants binding together so much where nothing can impact them, even a big wave that's coming their way, they're going to hold together and they're going to get through this. And like I said, they create the scene where the baby ants are being kind of like a life rafter on and all this kind of stuff. But this is real life.
But what happens in this or if the church is supposed to be our time, where we get to be together and we're to bind together and we're be united and we are to help one another, what happens when the unreconciled relationships come along in that same episode? They build the suspense and they have the slow music playing as one of the ants right there at the bottom starts sinking because he let go of the raft. He's not in there together.
I think this is exactly what happens to us when we allow ourselves to be separated from one another and we need to be reconciled.
If you have your bibles open up to Colossians three, we're going to be spending majority of our time looking at this passage in Colossians three because I believe that what we're going to see in this passage is a detail of the problem that we are experiencing.
We're going to see the solution for it, the blueprint for it, and then we're going to see the solution for it as well. In Colossians, think about this. Paul's writing to the church and he's trying to build them up. In Colossians chapter one, he says, all right, I want you to remember about when you came to Christ, when you became a Christian. You were transferred from the kingdom of darkness into his marvelous light.
You as a Christian, us as Christians together, we are united to Christ and we are united together individually. We are members of the body of Christ. And it continues on in Colossians one and gives us that beautiful description of who Jesus is, that he is the head of the church, his body, he is preeminent. All of these great descriptions of him we get to be a part of because we are part of Christ and he has unified us. There's no other reason why all of us should be in this room tonight. If it wasn't for Christianity, if it wasn't for Christ, if it wasn't for salvation or hope that we have an eternal life. Cause we've got a lot of differences here and it's really our differences where we start priding ourselves on those or focusing on those that starts causing the separation when we're supposed to be united. So as Paul continues on in Colossians, he's telling the church and he's trying to teach them how to get closer together, because there are things that can come in that start ripping people apart. And when you are separated from the body of Christ, that's when you begin to sink.
You were already sinking and drowning before you became a Christian, and you were carried over and you were brought in, right, you were saved.
But when we allow unreconciled relationships to come in, it causes us to divide from people.
But it also breaks our heart, and these are going to be the different components of it. It also breaks our heart when we see people sinking away from the church.
If you think about your time here this evening, is there somebody that's supposed to be sitting in these pews tonight that you haven't seen in a couple of weeks, a couple of months, a couple of years?
Does it hurt your heart when you see them at the grocery store, when you see them driving down the road and you wave and you think about, man, I remember when they were here.
A lot of times when people fall away from Christ, when they leave the church, sometimes cause of broken relationships, say many times people get burnt at church.
Somebody says something, somebody does something. Somebody doesn't say something, somebody doesn't do something, and they start drifting away. And they hold animosity against the church.
They think that they've reached a solution, but what they've reached is where they were previously, and they may not recognize that they're drowning, separated from the life raft.
And so Paul is telling us in Colossians, he says, you need to be focused, you individually need to be focused on Christ. In Colossians three, starting in verse one, he tells us this. He says, if then you have been raised with Christ, if you have been baptized into Christ, united with him in a death like his, and you have been raised up to walk in newness of life, if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, not on things that are below. The only thing that's going to change our perspective and even change our motive when we deal with ourselves and deal with other people is going to be focusing on the right kind of things. Because when we get caught up in things of this world, the earthly side of things, it starts causing division.
And division is the issue with unreconciled relationships.
Now let's step back a minute and let's think about this idea of reconciliation.
Now, it's a technical term. All right, we're gonna have a theological example of it here. In scriptures, we come to colossians chapter three. But we also have to have the context behind it, at least in our vernacular, that reconciles. To bring into balance. To bring into harmony. So if you have a budget, and you may not know this, but your budget is supposed to bring things into balance. The amount of money going out and going in, all those kind of things, you want to bring those into balance, right? You want to reconcile. Some of you know what this is? Reconcile the checkbooks. Some of us haven't written a check in eons. So I don't know about reconciling those together, but let's just take it for a budget, right? You want all your numbers to agree. You want everything to work out about what you got coming in and what you got going out to reconcile is to bring it into balance, to bring it into harmony.
So something that is unreconciled has disharmony. It's not in balance.
In fact, it's a cacophony, if you want to think about it, and harmony and music and those things. And that's going to be a part of what we're going to see here in colossians three.
To reconcile is going to bring it into balance. And we can't turn a blind eye to it. Have you ever turned a blind eye to your budget?
Maybe it's one of those things like, you know, I know we're supposed to have the weekly meeting where we sit down and we're going to find out how are we doing with all the Amazon purchases and things like that. But let's push that off till next week or next month.
If you let it go and sweep it under the rug and let's say, you know what? You decide to check in halfway through the year and you realize, where did all my money go? Right? We started spending it on this and didn't know how much we were spending on that. And you realize, okay, something's out of balance. We've got to rein it back in, because if you turn your back on it, your checking account's going to go down, your money's not going to be there. You're not going to be able to make the purchases and do what you need to do.
We can't let unreconciled relationships be swept under the rug.
We have an obligation as christians to reconcile, and this is going to be key, and I want you to hold this on your mind. We have an obligation as christians to reconcile.
A lot of that responsibility falls on us and there are going to be things we're going to have to do in reaction to it. But you may be thinking, all right, what about in a hopeless situation, we'll deal with that as well.
So to reconcile, to bring into balance, to bring into harmony.
First point that I want to draw out from colossians three, and we're going to work through three sections of it here and get some advice. Let's first talk about the messiness of unreconciled relationships.
Now, after Paul gives this encouragement in the first four verses, he's now going to get into here's your problem. If you feel unreconciled or you feel divided, you feel like there's some disharmony that's going on. He said, here's what's going to happen. Here's what you need to do, but it's also going to give us the problem and showing us the messiness here he says in verse five, colossians three, five, put to death. Therefore, what is earthly in you?
So think about that perspective. We want to be focused on things that are above, not on things that are below. Here's what's below. Sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness, which is idolatry on account of these. The wrath of God is coming in these. You too once walked when you were living in them, but now you must put them all away. Anger, wrath, malice, slander and obscene talk from your mouth. Don't lie to one another. Seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator, you see the messiness of sin, what it does, if you think about and bring up some of these unreconciled relationships in your life, because I know you have them, and I do too.
If it's in your own home, between you and your spouse, between you and your children, between you and your parents, maybe you have an unreconciled relationship with a member of the church here, a friend.
Maybe you have some unreconciled relationships with people that are in the world that don't agree with Christianity, but you work with them, you're friends with them, you're acquaintances with them, you go to a school with them, you have some relationships that are at odds.
And what is the cause if we start looking through some of these things? And why are people broken and why are they separated? What we find at the heart of it is sin. If you were to take each one of these individually named sins and label maybe some of those unreconciled relationships, that's where it broke, right there.
That's what I said. That's what happened?
It might be an action itself. Look at the impurity that is involved.
Maybe animosity, maybe brokenness comes in because of things like sexual immorality, impurity, passions, evil desires. When he talks about covetousness and idolatry, a lot of what comes from the Old Testament. Those that would commit idolatry were committing fornication against God. They were committing adultery against goddess. Don't we see sexual immorality breaking a lot of relationships, sex outside of marriage, the introduction of things like pornography. And these things can really tear people apart. It's what sin does, and it's messy. Maybe it's our attitude.
He says in verse eight, anger, wrath, malice, slander, obscene talk from your mouth. Have you ever said something that put you at odds with somebody else?
You spoke it out of anger, out of wrath, out of malice, belittling somebody.
We've said things that we regret. We know all the illustrations, right? The things that we say, we can't get them back after they're out. It's kind of like once you get the toothpaste out of the tube, you can't get it back in. We know all of those kind of things, and it's true.
Maybe you've said something, you've done something that has pushed someone further and further away, or maybe pushed yourself away. What Paul's advice is here. When we recognize the messiness of sin in these unreconciled relationships, if we can identify what the issue is, it's going to take us one step further to be able to repent, to bring it back into balance. That's what happens, to bring things into balance. We've got to get rid of the issue that's there. And this may be something on our part, but you might be at odds with somebody, and this is where some of these solutions start coming in. You might have gotten further and further away from somebody because they got further and further away from God.
We still don't get to sweep them under the rug and turn a blind eye to them. They need to be connected to the father.
They need to come back. They need to put to death if they had tasted the heavenly gift, as the hebrew writer talks about in Hebrews, chapter four, verses six through eight.
They know what it's like. Bring them in. If it's somebody that's not a Christian, and they have these kind of things in their life, show them a better way.
What Paul said here, and he said it before in his other books, such were some of you.
You came from a life of sin, and I did, too.
Any amount of time that we spent in the world with sin, we realize exactly what the writer of ecclesiastes was saying is that the things of this world are vanity. It's like striving after the wind. There is no fulfillment in sin.
There is only disharmony.
And so I want to think just for a second about how sin causes disharmony and a lack of trust. I don't trust plastic chairs.
I've broken too many. And you know when you're about to sit down in one of those plastic chairs, it's not going to work, right? You know that it starts wobbling. You start wobbling and you sit down, you hear the creaking, and you know this is not going to go well. You know, it's the same one that's been in your yard that you found on somebody else's on the side of the street that you think, okay, I need this in my backyard. It's one of these plastic chairs, right? You know that you can't trust it because there's some kind of brokenness to it. It causes disharmony. It causes a disunity. I don't want to use it. I don't even want to be part of it. It's to be thrown out of. That's what sin does, right? It makes us not trust people and it puts us further and further away and where things do get broken. But the idea behind unreconciled relationships is that it can be reconciled. But the only way to bring in reconciliation, the only way to bring in harmony, the only way to bring in balance is to have God involved.
Which tells me it's not all about Billy. It's not all about you. Have you tried with all of your strength, all of your might, try to shoulder up things by yourself to fix the situation? And over and over again you find how disappointed you are because you aren't able to do it.
I've done that.
I've tried to do a lot of stuff on my own. Instead of what Peter talks about, where we cast all of our anxieties on him, on God, because he cares for us. If we humble ourselves under the almighty hand of God at the right time, he will exalt us.
These relationships, we first have to recognize their messiness. We have to recognize that at the heart of any broken relationship is going to be sin. And the only solution to sin is Jesus Christ.
So can we expect a relationship to be reconciled if God is not involved and it makes it hard for those that are outside of Christ?
But there's still something that you can do as a Christian to fix these things. Takes me to my next idea from Colossians chapter three. And we go to this next section is the message of reconciliation.
Look at what Paul says here in Colossians three, starting in verse twelve. Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, bearing with one another. If anyone has a complaint against one another, forgive each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing songs, hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Here is the message of reconciliation. When he says, put to death the things that are of the world, you put all of that to the side. And what do you put on? Right. When we put on Christ in baptism, Paul used that language in Galatians that we put on Christ in baptism. We also have to put on the attributes of Christ, the qualities of God.
If God is love, we take on his love. And think about what a little bit of patience would do in your home, in your workplace, in your school.
Think about what a little bit of compassion would do to the conversation that you have with your mom or your dad, your brother or your sister, your husband or your wife, your classmate, your friend.
Can't you take each one of these and think, man, how much more work do I need to do? And what is available?
This is. It does seem a little exhausting, doesn't it? And if we're maybe doing a personal checkup on ourselves, we think, I feel like I've been doing a pretty good job of that man. There's so much more work to be done. Even at our best, we're still not perfect. Only Jesus was.
And we see Jesus day after day with the scribes and the Pharisees and those that are at odds with him. And he shows compassion, he shows kindness, and they give him death.
You know, we're not told that we're going to have an easy life here. Christianity is not easy.
Being reconciled to God and reconciling others is not an easy task, but is a fruitful task. It's a beneficial task. It's an eternally blessed task if we will take on the right attitudes and put them into action. It's not just the attitude itself.
It also has to come out, and it starts from the inside out. Look at advice that he gives here. If you were to go through this passage again and look at what he tells us to do, he says, let it clothe you.
Let it rule in your hearts, let it dwell within you, and let it be done.
Something that you are clothed in, something that rules you, something that dwells within you, something that is being done. It's in every fiber of your being. It's not something you just get to do on a one off conversation. It's not just something you get to do in one conversation with somebody randomly. It's something that is strategic, but it's also something that's lived out, that is recognized, that there's something different about you because your eyes are on Christ.
And for those that want a solution for their disharmony in their life, if they are away from God, when things start breaking around them and they start grasping, whose hand are they going to reach out to?
Yours should be the first one.
Yours should be the first one that they think about coming to, because you're compassionate, you're kind, you're loving, you've been there all along, and they realized they've been away.
See, what I find in this passage, what we're reading is that God brings in harmony. In fact, it is spelled out here in verse 14, talking about love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Harmony.
But I also want to build up this passage just a little bit by going outside of our key passage here. And I want to look at something Paul says in two corinthians, chapter five. And it goes back to a comment that I made earlier about that we are obligated as christians to reconcile.
The language that Paul says here in Colossians three is identical to what Paul is going to say in two Corinthians five. He's just going to expand it a little bit further, this idea that such were some of you, as he says in Corinthians, he also said here you live this way at one point, and you forgive one another as you have been forgiven in Christ. Keep this in your mind as we look at two corinthians, chapter five, verse 16. In fact, you may have above verse eleven. I'm reading out the English Standard version. You may have an indication what this section's gonna be about. It's the ministry of Reconciliation. But this is gonna help us understand this message. Or the ministry of Reconciliation. Look at verse 16, 2nd corinthians 516. From now on, now that you have been raised up, our context is going to say the same thing here. Paul. If he says it once, he's going to say it again. No thought is by itself if you've been raised up. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ did what reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. You forgive because you've been forgiven.
That is, in Christ. God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. I, for our sake. He made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
See, God creates harmony and he lets us be a part of it.
The message of reconciliation is one that we took hold of, and we get to know that we're at peace with God. Sin has been done away with. We died to that old way of living. We have been buried with Christ. We rise up to walk in newness of life. And that's who we used to be. We might have used to been in sexual immorality, evil desires, covetousness, idolatry. We might have been in our lives where we had obscene talk from our mouth, we had anger, we had malice, we were at odds with one another. That was the old self. We have to put those things to the side so that we can be united to Christ, that unites us to one another.
It might be time, if you're already a Christian, to be reminded of these things and to go back into those unreconciled relationships that need to be fixed now. Understand, once again, there's many different working components in this, and that's why it becomes a case by case. And to be able to sit here this evening, we would need more time to flesh out each one of these individual relationships about how do I work with my specific classmate? How do I work with my specific friend, how do I work with my specific relative? How do I work with this and this. We could spend all evening, we spend the rest of our time, and we need to. That's why we're here tonight. If you got a specific question, find someone tonight, because you know what? There's someone in this room that's already gone through it. They'd be glad to give you advice and encouragement and prayer and lift it up to God. Utilize that in the body of Christ tonight.
But what we find the commonality between all of these things that we find unreconciled relationships. There are times, of course, maybe we have dusted the dirt off our feet and these things, but if we have an open door to be able to bring somebody back into balance, we need to fix it.
Start with, if there's someone in this room right now that you're at odds with, fix it tonight before the sun goes down, while we still have breath in our lungs, while today is still called today, don't let that go any further.
You build on top of it and you think, one after the other, how can I take the message of reconciliation where it goes, where it needs to go?
So as we come back to colossians three, close out our point here, we've considered the messiness of unreconciled relationships. We've looked at the message of reconciliation. And just for a moment, I want to think about the method of reconciliation.
Now, the passage I'm going to use here, continuing on in our study, is very specific to the church, but I think there's some benefit in looking at this and being able to use these principles to fit every other relationship. Here's what I mean. Let's read back in colossians 318. Wives, submit to your husbands as fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, don't be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, don't provoke your children lest they become discouraged. Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye service as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men. Knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward, you are serving the Lord Jesus Christ, for the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Now, you look at this, and these are three very specific relationships. You've got the husband and wife, you've got parents and children, you got bondservants and masters. But do you find in here the messiness and the message?
If you were to take out and flip things around a little bit. When he says, husbands, love your wives. What's the number one priority? Or what's the number one need that women a desire in their marriage is love.
Wives, respect your husbands. What's the number one need and feeling that husbands need in their marriage? See, if you go through this and you remove out some of these components and create the messiness here and then supply the solution, then can you put in the attributes of God along with them? I think you certainly can. He even gives us the evidence here and what's unique about these three situations. It's also the three ways that we relate to goddess. He is our we are the church, the bride of Christ.
We are the children of God. We are the bondservants of Christ.
See, we already know these relationships intuitively, and if we know how to work through them in difficult ways, then we can also work with God as needed and work with others.
But I understand this is not an easy task. I haven't put something in front of you and given you all the solutions. I've introduced the necessity of what we need to do when you think about the method, and this is what I want to show you as we wrap things up here, is the necessity of implementing the method. If you can think tonight of someone that you need to be reconciled to, there's a lot of complexity in this. It's not just a one size fits all. If you've got me and you and we're at odds with one another, what all is involved in that?
What Paul has illustrated here in Colossians three is more of a chart like this, isn't it?
There's some forgiveness that I have to have you think about internally. What all do I need to go through as well if I need to be reconciled to God? When I'm putting things to death, I'm recognizing the sin in my own life and I need to be reconciled to God. And so my relationship to God is important, but also God's relationship to me is important. That's before I even get to reconciling with my friend or the person I'm at odds with. But also, think about them. Don't they need to get in balance with God? They've got some internal things they got to work through. There's some relationship with God and God's relationship with them as well. And all of these things need to come into balance. You think about how to reconcile one another. These things are complicated, but it's not complicated in the message.
It's complicated because of sin.
And my advice and what God's solution is for us is to be dedicated and devoted to him.
And if we place him as our priority, we're gonna be willing to work with other people.
And I believe that harmony can happen. I believe reconciliation can happen. But the only way is what Paul said back in two corinthians, chapter five. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God as you have the energy.
Maybe if you don't have the energy, as you have the desire, maybe your desire is waning. As you have the intent, maybe your intent is off, and you need a proper motive.
All of these things.
Let it start tonight. Dedicate yourself to goddess and say, I want to fix, but it's not going to be by my strength, it's going to be by your help. God, I submit myself to you in this relationship, and I want to do everything I can to show you in it, because you are the reconciler.
I'm just the message bearer. Let's pray together. Lord, our God, we come before you this evening. Thank you very much for allowing us to be here together as a family, to study your word, to be challenged. Father, I realize that there are a lot of people, we realize there are a lot of people in this room that need to reconcile relationships in their lives.
A lot of it is because of sin. If we have sinned in some way, help us to recognize that and to repent from it and confess that to one another.
If there are those that have fallen away from you, have walked away, help us to plant and water and please give the increase, because you are the only solution in our lives. You're the only way that we can find harmony with one another in this world. And we do look forward to being with you for all of eternity. But until we're there, help us to be resilient. We love you, Father, and we pray this to you in the name of Jesus. Amen.
