Tag: Reconciliation

Reconciled – Colossians 1:15-23

That word, reconciliation, keeps showing up. It’s the same word Paul uses in 2 Corinthians when he talks about being committed to the ministry of reconciliation.

“But now He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him.” — Colossians 1:22 (HCSB)

Paul opens this passage with one of the most theologically loaded descriptions of Jesus in the entire New Testament. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The firstborn over all creation. The one through whom everything was created visible and invisible, thrones and powers, things in heaven and things on earth. Everything was created through him and for him. And then this line that stops me cold every time…”in him all things hold together.” He didn’t say just spiritual things, or even just religious things. Everything. The whole created order coheres in Christ.

It’s worth sitting and ruminating on that for a minute rather than rushing past it. He’s pointing directly at who Jesus is in the grand sweep of all reality. He is fully God. He is before all things. He is the head of the Church and the firstborn from the dead. This is the kind of passage that probably should be memorized by anyone who takes their faith seriously, because it pretty well encapsulates everything about who Jesus is and what that means for the rest of existence. But, even that all things hold together, not just fly apart into space, because of Jesus.

Then Paul makes it personal. Starting in verse 21, he turns toward us. We were alienated. Enemies of God in our minds. Our behavior reflected that alienation. And then…because of who Jesus is, because of what he did through his physical death on the cross, we have been reconciled. Not improved. Not partially forgiven. Reconciled. Presented before God holy, faultless, and blameless. That’s the thesis of the whole passage sitting right there in verse 22. The gap that existed between us and God has been closed, completely, by Jesus.

That word, reconciliation, keeps showing up. It’s the same word Paul uses in 2 Corinthians when he talks about being committed to the ministry of reconciliation. We have been reconciled to God, and then immediately commissioned to carry that same reconciliation outward in helping bring people back into right relationship with God and with each other. That’s not a secondary calling or an optional add-on to the Christian life. It’s central to everything.

So I need to keep my eyes and ears open to where that is happening around me and join it. People are alienated from God and from each other everywhere we look. The same Jesus through whom all things hold together is also the one who tears down the walls that divide. That’s the work I’m called to participate in. When I actually stop and think about what Christ has done, holding the entire created order together, that God chose to reconcile me to himself through his own death, the only honest response I know is to say “Wow.”

Enemies – Romans 5:6-11

“For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” — Romans 5:10 (NIV)

Paul makes a point early in this passage that is easy to gloss over. For someone to die on behalf of another is unusual and contrary to nature, really. Even for a genuinely good person, that would be a rare thing. But Jesus didn’t die for good people. He didn’t die for people who were already on his side or already working toward the right things. He died for people who were actively working against him. That’s not a small detail. That’s the whole point.

None of us came to God with anything to offer him that he needed. Whether you grew up in church or walked in the door last week, there was a stretch of your life where you were on the wrong side of this equation. If you are not actively working toward the Kingdom of God, you are working against it. There is no neutral ground. No coasting or lying flat. Which means every single one of us needed exactly what Jesus provided, not because we deserved it, but precisely because we didn’t.

That’s the heart of the gospel right there. He didn’t look down at humanity and see something worth saving in the usual sense. He looked down and decided to save us anyway. That kind of love doesn’t really have a human comparison. The closest Paul can get is to say it would be unusual even to die for a good person, let alone enemies. Try to wrap your head around that for a minute.

That should change everything about how I live. The way I approach work, relationships, the stuff that frustrates me on a random Tuesday. I’ll be honest, I don’t always live like that. It is easy to get pulled down by the small things in the course of a normal day and lose sight of what actually matters. That’s a constant battle.

But the remedy isn’t trying harder. It’s fixing my gaze back on what Jesus actually did. Not in a way that feels like a religious obligation, but in a way that genuinely recalibrates everything else. He did more than any of us could imagine or ever live up to. That changes everything…even on the days when its much easier said than done.