Quotes about Reconciliation

Paul is not only urging and requesting but actually embodying what he elsewhere calls 'the ministry of reconciliation'. God was in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself, he says in 2 Corinthians 5.19; now, we dare to say, God was in Paul reconciling Onesimus and Philemon.

Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross.

the death of Jesus, reconciling people to God, generates the renewal of their human vocation.

And if anyone tries to say that the good news is not about all these things—about freeing slaves, about helping the poor, about reconciling warring factions, ethnic groupings, and whole nations, about looking after the blessed world we live on and in—but instead is only about coming to faith in the present and going to heaven in the future, then we must reply that something has gone very, very wrong in their thinking.

The divine intention, as Paul saw it unveiled in the messianic events concerning Jesus, was to create a single worldwide family; and therefore any practices that functioned as symbols dividing different ethnic groups could not be maintained as absolutes within this single family.

The old creation lives by pride and retribution: I stand up for myself, and if someone gets in my way I try to get even. We've been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it.

Other ideas, particularly the popular image of "God punishing Jesus," envisaged as a separate, noncovenantal abstract transaction, have come in to take the place of that all-important theme. Many distortions have resulted not only through that teaching but also, ironically, through teachings that, in reaction against the distorted view, have themselves proposed equally unsatisfactory alternatives.

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

The death of Jesus was the moment when the great gate of human history, bolted with iron bars and overgrown with toxic weeds, burst open so that the Creator's project of reconciliation between heaven and earth could at last be set in powerful motion.

The death of Jesus was the moment when the great gate of human history, bolted with iron bars and overgrown with toxic weeds, burst open so that the Creator's project of reconciliation between heaven and earth could at last be set in powerful motion. The myrtle will at last replace the brier, and the cypress the thorn.

Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God's plan to put his whole world right. That

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.