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Stand up and be reconciled By Joseph Garlington, Destiny Image Publishing Jesus has called us to be light and to be salt. Light illuminates and rules the darkness, and salt affects everything it touches. Salt also provokes thirst. If you take the living Christ with you and begin to live among unsaved people, then sooner or later they will get really thirsty. God has given you and me the same ministry that Jesus had, and that is the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-20). Unfortunately, we don't act like it. All my life, the church taught me that friendship with the world is enmity with God, so I thought I couldn't have any friends who weren't Christians. We spent all our lives witnessing to Christians, and Sunday after Sunday, we thought we all needed to get saved again. (It's called "being born again, again.") We had countless altar calls for people who "weren't saved enough" this week so they could come and get saved all over again. Since none of us knew any sinners, we couldn't invite them to church and none of them got saved. When Jesus came to earth, he had the reputation of being a friend of sinners (see Matt. 11:19). What would happen if someone heard that you were a friend of sinners? The first thing your Chris tian critics might say is, "Birds of a feather flock together, you know." Nevertheless, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. That's what Paul tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians. Pay special attention to the final verse. Tell me, you who want to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise. This is allegori cally speaking for these women are two covenants, one proceeding from Mount Sinai bearing children who are to be slaves; she is Hagar. Now this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free; she is our mother (Galatians 4:21-26, NASB). According to this Scripture, we have the same mother. I don't care whether you are German, Italian, Brazilian, French, Zulu, Hottentot, Norwegian, Spanish, Irish, or Martianwe have the same mother in Christ. Male or female, once you receive Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior, we have the same mother. Isn't that amazing? We have the same mother, and we are all free, whether or not we realize it. Everything changes when God comes to you and says, "You have a new mother. Your mother is my heavenly Jerusalem, my kingdom, and it is above. That means you are free, and you can no longer make decisions after the flesh." Your decisions about life and death, and love and hate, must be made in the Spirit from this point on. Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm talking about politics or some social program or agenda. This is a message on what we must do with the ministry of reconciliation. What has God given us? What has he called us to be, and how can we fulfill our calling in the world without fumbling for answers?
We are living in a day with increased tension between men and women. Ethnic and racial strife is inflamed all over the globe. The church of Jesus Christ continues to be unnecessarily divided because of denominationalism and sectarianism. I can live with the pain of racial rejection, gender rejection, or religious rejection, but the only way to truly overcome is to become a minister of reconciliation. The only truly authorized medium of this message is the church of Jesus. If we don't do it, we will live with the consequences of our disobedience. The church must rise above her identity in ethnicity and gender, above denominationalism and sectarianism, and get on with the business of making disciples of all the nations. It's going to take the whole church to reach the whole world, and that world is cross-racial and cross-cultural. If we don't do it, the consequences are even more frightening than one would want to contemplate. When I was born again, whether I liked it or not, you became my brother or sister. Chances are that if I had met you in those early days, I wouldn't have liked you at all, but there wasn't anything that I could do about it. The truth is that when I first surrendered to Jesus, I hated white people. I was born and raised in the public housing projects of Buffalo, New York, to a family that was essentially poor (although we didn't know that we were poor). My life experience made me think that it was okay to feel such hatred toward white people. One day the Lord confronted me with it, and I said, "Lord, I really don't want to feel this way." At the time, I was preaching as a guest evangelist for a church in Los Angeles. This large black congregation had a total of three white members. When I finished my sermon, a little white lady with gray hair and a beautiful smile came up to me. I was cradling my Bible in one hand and I had my other arm down at my side, and this little lady just put her arms around me and pinned my arms to my sides. Then she began to say, "I just love you, Brother Garlington." I said, "Praise God," but at the same time I was doing my best to break free. That woman had a steel grip on me, though, and she wasn't about to let go. She said, "You remind me of my son." I thought to myself, You are lying. I know I don't remind you of your son She kept right on holding me. I was still wearing the clerical robe I'd worn for the service, and the perspiration I'd generated during the ministry time was making me feel cold. Then that woman started crying and telling me that she wanted me to be her son, and my kindly response was a silent but urgent prayer, God, get me out of here! The woman just kept hanging on to me and telling me how the message had ministered to her. All of a sudden I felt something begin to seep out of me. When the lady finally let go of me, I realized that I felt differently about her than before she had come up to me. In fact, I felt differently about other white people too. I began to understand that this woman really was my mother in this New Jerusalem. I remembered the Scripture passage where Jesus promised us, "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake, shall receive many times as much, and shall inherit eternal life" (Matt. 19:29). I have mothers all over the world, and they come in all colors. When I see them today, I don't view them according to the flesh because I don't know them that way anymore. Neither Jew nor Greek "For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free man, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:26-29). Paul tells us that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek" (there are no racial distinctions), "there is neither slave nor free man" (there are no socioeconomic class distinctions), and "there is neither male nor female" (there are no gender distinctions). Jesus came and essentially said, "I'm here to make some changes, but most of all I'm here to show you that the Father has a different attitude toward the world than that of the Pharisees." Many of us have been stuck with Pharisees all our lives (and some of us have even been Pharisees). You can spot a Pharisee by the telltale signs of hypocrisy. Pharisees don't like anybody and they don't appreciate anybody. No matter what or how often you do something good, that kind of Pharisee will find something wrong with it. Pharisees pray like this: "God, I thank you that I'm not like other people. Thank you for making me better than that poor street person, that alcoholic, and that rotten lost person." The honest truth is that we arelike them! Countless numbers of Christian men act like misogynists, or women haters, while saying they don't hate them. Millions of Christians hate millions of other Christians because they have different skin colors, eat different foods, or say different words over their communion wafers. We need to take personal responsibility for what we have done to one another. First we need to repent and get right with God so we can be reconciled to one another. Then we can reconcile the world to God as well. We need to turn to one another and say aloud from our hearts, "I need you." We need to see each other as significant parts of the body of Christ, and without each part fulfilling his or her God-given call and destiny, we will all be impoverished. We don't seem to understand that the Holy Spirit doesn't have a black church or a white church any more than he has a Korean church or an accountant church. We all belong to Christ's church, and we are called to model on earth what already exists in heaven. What exists in heaven? John has to describe the scene in technicolor: "After this I looked, and before me was a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes" (Rev. 7:9). You and I are praying that this reality will come to earth every time we pray the prayer Jesus taught us to pray in the Gospels, "your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:10). Do we know what we are actually praying when we say this? We are saying, "Lord, get rid of or change every church that doesn't have a rainbow!" God loves to mix his colors into a brilliant portrait of unity and harmony in the love and grace of Jesus. Sometimes we don't want to mix with other colors, cultures, and nationalities, but God says, "That's an order. The love of Christ compels you."
If you've been in Jesus long enough, you are discovering that there are some wonderful people who just happen to be white, and that there are also some wonderful people who just happen to be black. You have probably noticed that there are also some really mean people who just happen to be black, and there are also some really mean people who just happen to be white. Their meanness doesn't stem from the color of their skin. It's the product of their sin and fallenness. Dr. Mark Chironna says that there are only two races on the earth: "One is racing towards heaven; the other is racing toward hell. Which race are you in? One is a mara thon and the other is a sprint." The stronghold of racism isn't a human problem; it is a human symptom of a spiritual problem. We need to tear down the stronghold that has successfully invaded and wrecked human lives and divided the church for centuries. All of us who call upon the name of Jesus, regardless of our color, nationality, or gender, need to declare and claim our freedom in Christ, so we can offer it to others without shame or apology. Here is the issue that God puts before us as ministers of reconciliation: Do we need to repent for our racism or for our families' racism? I believe that God is asking each one of us to tear down some ungodly altars from the past. This is a demand placed on every believer, regardless of color, ethnicity, culture, or racial history. When the prophet Daniel was interceding and standing in the gap for his nation, he realized that there was some sin that hadn't been dealt with in the purpose of God. He began to pray, "we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled. We have turned away from your commands and laws" (Dan. 9:5). Now, the record shows that Daniel himself was a righteous person, so why was he repenting for acting wickedly and rebelling? Daniel was taking spiritual initiative and personal responsibility for the sinful actions of his people. Perhaps you and I should do the same. Maybe we have come to the kingdom for just such a time as this. It doesn't make any difference what color you are if you are part of the body of Christ. The reality is this: The Bible says, "If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other" (Gal. 5:15). Somebody in the body of Christ has to take some initiative for reconciliation, and that "somebody" is you and me. Joseph Garlington is senior pastor of the Covenant Church of Pittsburgh and a favorite conference speaker, especially at Promise Keepers rallies. He is also the founder of Reconciliation! Ministries International. In addition to being a worship leader, Joseph is the author of Worship: The Pattern of Things in Heavenand Right or Reconciled?(both published by Destiny Image). This article is adapted from Right or Reconciled?by permission of the publisher. |