Ministers of Reconciliation

Ministers of Reconciliation

Ephesians 2:16

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you take a Bible please and turn to Luke 10:29, “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’ Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed mercy on him.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do thou likewise.’” And of course, we know this parable by heart and we all of course, agree how dreadful the Levite was and how unchristian that whole attitude is.

But, what we’ve really been talking about in the studies in Ephesians is much the same kind of thing, because we’ve been sharing you remember, how the Gentiles and the Jews were so distant from each other. Probably especially because of the Jews’ attitude, the Jews regarded the Gentiles as knowing nothing about the God of the universe and they regarded them as really pagans compared with themselves. And you remember, we followed through how that came about because really, God had destroyed everybody in his Son Jesus before the foundation of the world and in effect he had done that for everybody Jew and Gentile, but it’s just from the early years of the worlds history he made the Jews aware that he had done that work. Not clearly, because it was a mystery to them, as far as they could get was the idea of a suffering servant that in some way was despised and rejected of men and in some way had borne their sins. But they really didn’t know that they and every man and woman on the earth had been committed into Christ, had been created in Christ, and crucified in him, and raised up in him, and was in the Father’s heart and arms at that very moment. But the Jews were given some signs that that was so.

You know how God did it, he revealed himself to people like Abraham and he made it clear to people like Isaiah, “Though your sins are scarlet they shall be as white as snow and I will bear your sins and in fact, I bear them at this very moment.” And even though it wasn’t clearly in black and white to them, still the Jews had a sense that the God who created the world loved them, and had mercy towards them, and had a steadfast love towards them that would go on and on however wretched, and disobedient, and poor, and faithless they were. And of course, the Jews knew that and they knew that these Gentiles didn’t know that and so you remember, how then there developed in them an attitude of superiority to the Gentiles. An attitude, which you remember, set up the middle wall of partition it was called in the temple, and the Gentiles couldn’t come into the court of the Jews, and they couldn’t get access to the holy place. And the Jews had an attitude of superiority and thought of the Gentiles as over there. And then you remember, how we shared together that it was very easy to condemn the Jews for that attitude but in a way to have some of that attitude ourselves, especially in regard to the people we visit, and the people we do business with day-by-day.

It’s very easy to have a subtle attitude, “Well, they’re not Christians, you know. They’re not Christians.” Or, “He swears like a trooper and he has no understanding of God.” We may say that they have no relation to God yet in our deep inner heart we feel, “They are different from us. I mean, there’s no question, of course they know nothing of our chapel service, of course they know nothing of Christian Corps., of course they know nothing about Jesus and about his being crucified for us and us being crucified with him. Of course, they don’t know those things and so in a sense, I’m limited as to how much I can feel I’m their brother,” and dare I change that word to, “How much I can feel I’m their neighbor.” And isn’t it true that it’s very easy to adopt an attitude in our lives of them and us.

We used to joke about it, you remember, I forget which house it was but you remember, one of the houses we had in Minneapolis on the University of Minnesota campus, had started off with eight people in it and I think three of them were Christians and five of them were not Christians and we used to joke of course, the lions are five and the Christians are three, and then the next week of course, the Christians are four and the lions are four, you know, gradually it changed of course and until everybody was Christian there were no lions left. But often that can be our own secret attitude, that it’s them and us. In a way they are in some sense the enemy. They’re certainly people that don’t understand the things that we understand and of course what these verses are bringing home to us in Ephesians is not so. Not so.

You are inside a dear person and have been created as part of him, and he has borne you, and borne your sin, and borne all that you could give, and he has allowed it to be destroyed in himself, and almost as in the song, that you sang going home just next door is the person who you’re selling jewelry too. Just an artery away in Jesus’ body is the person that you regard as them, as a Gentile and that’s what this verse is saying. I’d just ask you to look at it; it carries it a little further in today’s verse. It’s Ephesians 2, and the verse we studied last day you remember – well, to get the context you’d read from Verse 14, “For he,” Jesus, “Is our peace, who has made us both one,” that is the Jew and Gentile, “And has broken down the dividing wall of hostility.” And Verse 15 we studied last time, “By abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances,” all those laws that showed to the Jews what God was like, all the temple worship, all those things that enabled them to suspect that the God who had created them had mercy towards them and was loving towards them. “That he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace” and then today’s verse, “And might reconcile us both to God.” us both, the Jew and the Gentile. Me, the person in Christian Corps., and the person tomorrow in the store whom I’m going to sell jewelry to, “Might reconcile us both to God in one body,” inside himself, “Through the cross, thereby bringing the hospitality to an end.” And what comes home to you as you look more closely at this verse is that this is something that God has already done.

The word for reconcile is a word that looks in Greek, like this, “apokatallasso”. Like that. It means – that means other. The whole world means reconcile but it’s interesting to look at the entomology of it, because this is the word for “allos” “other” in Greek and this is the word back, and this has the meaning of make us other, make us other than we are. It’s interesting, make us other, make us different from what we are and what the verse is saying is God has in Christ, made us other than we are. He’s made us different from what we are and back has the sense of bringing us back to God, or restoring us to God. So it has the sense of making us different from what we are, and restoring us to God as we originally were.

In other words, that the Gentile and the Jew were both made in Christ from the very beginning as were the CCI person and the buyer. They were both originally made in Christ. They were both one in Christ, and then they used their free wills to stand up for themselves and not listen to what God wanted them to do and gradually they grew further, and further away from each other. And what happened in Christ, God saw that that was taking place and in Christ he restored them to himself, made them other than they had become down here, and reconciled them to each other. But the whole meaning of it is, the whole emphasis of it is, that God has done that. God has actually made us one and it is the deception of this world that persuades us that we are not one. And we can continue to live in that deception and live with that feeling of distance from them, or we can live in the reality that God has brought about.

To bring it even more clearly to you, if you look at the last part of the verse and you look at the Greek, “Might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross.” Here – I mean, this is terrible but this is the blessed Savior, and there’s the Jew, and there’s the Gentile, and here’s the CCI person, and here’s the buyer. In this one body, both of these people were made and as they determined to run their own life, and go their own way, they pulled that dear body apart, and they pulled, and they pulled, as they used to do on the racks. Put a person on the rack, and you remember they had great levers here by which they pulled the arms out and out to try to convince the people of course, to believe what they wanted them to believe. In that same way, these people tore this dear body apart, and that’s what the meaning of the cross is, that on the cross that body bore all the strains, and all the stresses, and all the hatred, and all the wrath as this one hated this one, this one hated this one, this one tried to make himself feel more secure than this one. So all that pulled in that dear body and that dear body held itself together on the cross and pulled them, pulled them back together and made them one bearing the pain in his own body, bearing their sin in his own body.

Every – every little frown on the face, every little stress in the body as this person confronts this person, every little feeling inside different, “They’re different from me, they’re not the same. They have not experienced Jesus as I have,” every little strain is born by this dear Savior in here and pulls apart what he has borne pain to draw together. So there’s a deep reality in the truth that we are one, and yet when we pull ourselves apart, we pull the Savior apart also.

Why I think it’s important, is of course, because of the very last phrase of the verse and also because of the real feeling that I think you recognize in your own heart, because as we talk about this you think to yourself, “Well yeah, I mean, I know what you say is right that I do have a tendency to think of them as them and us as us, and I do have a tendency to think well I’m a Christian and I do know the Bible and I do pray every day and they don’t, and I don’t swear and they do swear, and I do have a tendency to make those distinctions. But to tell you the truth, I can’t actually see how I can get out of those. Those are just feelings that are inside of me and they’re pretty natural and I’ve tried – I’ve tried to change them, I try to pretend otherwise, but I don’t see how to do it.” And there is no way you can do it unless, God has done something with it and that’s the last phrase of this verse.

Ephesians 2:16, “And might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end.” And actually that doesn’t, that doesn’t really translate the Greek very well because the Greek is a word called, “apokteino”, it’s the aorist, “apokteinos” and it means destroyed. And “tein achthron” wrath, hospitality, or maybe it brings it home more if we use the old jargon of our own society, hostile feelings, “Oh you have some hostile feelings towards him.” God destroyed the wrath. God in Christ destroyed that feeling that you and I have about these so called neighbors. God destroyed that, we do not need to feel that way. We do not need to feel, “Oh well, they swear and I don’t. They gamble and I don’t. Well, they don’t go to church. Well, they have no understanding of these things.” You don’t need to feel that. You feel that because you choose to feel it, because God in Christ destroyed that hostility, he actually destroyed that.

This actually took place. We have a tendency to look at that and say, “Oh, that’s a nice picture what you’ve done. Oh yeah, that’s a nice metaphor.” No, no that’s reality. If Christ died for all, all died. No, you have died and your life is hid with Christ in God. No, that is the spiritual fact, God has made the whole world right in his Son, and he has reconciled the world to himself. He has brought all this about. No, any feeling we have that – well, you know, “Well, I can’t possibly feel the same way as this person as I do towards Trish. You know, there’s no way. I mean, I can’t, I can’t feel the same way.” God says, “Yes you can.” What they feel is up to them and that is their freedom. What the society feels or expects you to feel about them, that’s up to them. But you yourself are free to love them as your very own self, to love your neighbor as yourself. You are free to treat them as part of yourself. And of course, you know, just as your mind begins to grasp that you see, “Oh yeah. Oh well, it fits in doesn’t it? It fits in with the whole thing of you treat a person the way you want them to be,” and that’s part of what faith is, seeing them as they really are except that now you see, that’s not just a trick, that’s not just a little strategy, that’s not just a little power of positive thinking, that’s not just a little way to exercise faith so that we can bring about the things that Wigglesworth or Hagen bring about. No, no, that is reality.

They are part of us. They are part of our Jesus, part of our Savior. Our attitude of distance to them was destroyed by God in Christ. It is destroyed. If we choose to continue to have that we can but we’re choosing a deception and a lie, and we’re putting ourselves under the power of the father of lies, and that’s actually where the other feelings come from. It’s quite interesting. That’s why you may say, “Oh well, there’s something that makes me feel this is right and that they are different from me.” Yes, yes, because once you put yourself under the father of lies he begets in you all kinds of attitudes from the principalities and powers that result in a real hostility and a really critical attitude to them. But if you abide in truth, then you will see, “This is my brother. He was crucified with Christ, he is part of me, and my father loves him as he loves me, and is ready to drench him with generosity, and kindliness, and prosperity.”

Only the Holy Spirit can show you how to talk in the light of these things, you can see that. Only the Holy Spirit can show you how to speak to that, or to our business associates in the light of that. But you can see plainly that it certainly means you can’t just use your own common sense which is so tinged with this lie. It certainly means that you have to go beyond what you’ve probably been doing up to now with your business associates. Only the Holy Spirit can tell you how that’s to be expressed. But certainly – I can certainly see that God does rain his rain on the just and the unjust, and I can certainly see that it’s very reasonable to expect that our dear Father would pour out his graciousness on a person’s business even if they weren’t acknowledging him as their God.

In other words, I can see that there are many things that they can experience from our dear Creator simply because he loves them, whatever their attitude is. And I can see how it’s our own narrow minded legalism that in a way, wants them to buy their ticket into the blessings of heaven. Well, when – if we hear of them receiving Christ as Savior, or if we hear that they believe in God, then we can come in and say, “Now, now God will prosper the work of your hand.” Well, doesn’t he prosper the work of many hands that don’t apparently know him? Doesn’t he pour out blessings on many people who aren’t Christians? In other words, isn’t there a great truth here that we can share with them in all openness, a great truth regarding the generosity, and the goodness, and the kindliness of the Father that has made us? And aren’t there ways even in which his Son’s tender heart can be expressed through our attitude to them? So I think it’s a wonderful – I think it’s a wonderful life that we have and a wonderful ministry, and we are called to be the ministers of reconciliation. Let us pray.

Dear Lord, we think of the men and women that we will see these coming days. We think Father, of how so many of them think of themselves, sometimes as very good and moral people, but often as people who have no religion in them at all, and who do not expect any particular blessing from the person who has made them. And we see Lord, that we either build them up in their most holy faith or we build them up in their most holy unfaith. Lord, we see that we either are used by you to confirm your love and tenderness towards them, and your bearing with them year, after year, or we are used to impress upon them that they are not right, they are not behaving properly, and they cannot expect your favor.

So Lord, we would ask you through your Holy Spirit, to give us light about these verses and above all, enable us to live in the reality of the cross and in the reality of what you have wrought in Christ. Enable us to treat no man from a purely human point of view, but to treat every man as one for whom you have died and therefore, one who has died with you. And if he is in you, he is a new creation and the old has passed away and the new has come. And enable us to speak to that new soul simply and so winsomely that they themselves will begin to grasp that they are new and will begin to live in the reality of the newness and the resurrection.

Now the grace of our Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with each of us now and ever more. Amen.