Way back when there was a lilting tune by pop singer Neil Sedaka called “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” I remember silly words it contained: “dum-do-bee-do-dahm-dahm. Comma-comma-dum….” But as the title suggests, the song was about breaking up. Like many in the early ‘60s, it expressed the teenaged angst of love won and lost.
The flip side of this also is true: Reconciling can be very hard to do as well. Whether in a marriage, family, close friendships or long-standing business relationships, when those ties become damaged, it can be extremely hard to achieve true reconciliation. It requires humility and forgiveness – which can be difficult to muster when one or both parties have been deeply hurt or betrayed.
This is one reason the Gospel of Jesus Christ is so poignant and compelling. After defining a true follower of Jesus – “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) – the apostle Paul explains this is the perfect example of what reconciliation means:
“All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them…” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).
When we think about a broken relationship we’ve had and how difficult it was (or would be) to become reconciled, imagine the magnitude of what these words express – God earnestly wanting to reconcile us to Himself, despite our rebellion, refusal to obey the commands He gave us for our good, and defiance in worshipping just about anyone or anything but Him. In a word, our sin.
Philippians 2:7-8 tells us that God “…made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and become obedient to death – even death on a cross.” These words sum up most profoundly what true humility, sacrifice and forgiveness look like.
It’s impossible to capture this in strictly human terms. Imagine one of us taking on the form of a caterpillar, or even a beetle. That certainly would be humbling, but even that image in no way conveys what it was like for the God of the entire universe to take on human form in the person of Jesus Christ. And yet, that’s the extent to which He desperately desired to become reconciled with wayward, willfully disobedient people.
And going to the cross, dying in our place to atone for our sins as our Redeemer, was the only way He could accomplish that. “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Perhaps we should keep this in mind when we struggle to become reconciled with another person who has hurt us deeply.
There’s one other thing I find in this passage that strikes me as amazing: God not only has provided the means for becoming reconciled with Him but also asks us as His children to become agents for this reconciliation. It states, “And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 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” (2 Corinthians 5:19-20).
There’s so much that could be written about this, but through the centuries this is exactly the apostles, patriarchs of Christianity like Martin Luther, John and Charles Wesley, Charles H. Spurgeon, Billy Sunday, D.L. Moody, C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, and even Charlie Kirk have been doing: Imploring men, women and children to be reconciled to God.
Best of all, since we also as children of God are given the title of “Christ’s ambassadors,” this is our privilege too. Who do you know that needs to be reconciled to the Lord, to learn that He loved them so much that He sent His one and only Son to die for them, as we’re told in John 3:16? After all He has done for us, isn’t that the least we can do for Him?
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