SERMON INTRODUCTION:

“This morning we're talking about: He Himself is Our Reconciliation. We're talking about very human, very earthly things this morning and how God speaks to that.

We live in a world of polarized hostility, a world of division, a world of hatreds. And we look around and we see wars, and front and center right now for us is Israel and Gaza, and we see what's happening there.

We live in an entirely polarized political environment in our country. You watch one commentator and he or she says this side is terrible and it curses this side as evil. And then you turn the channel and you see another commentator going to the other side is castigated and cursed as evil.

Hostilities and divisions have been in our presence. In the church as well, if you know the history of the Christian church, there's a lot there that we are not proud of. Things like racism and antisemitism and a lot of other isms we see very clearly there.

We see it now in social media where you can find somebody castigating another believer, one believer castigating another believer and really cursing them as evil in a way. Finally, we don't really have to look further than our own hearts to find the proclivity to divide, to dismiss, to prefer ourselves supremely. We really don't have to look any further than ourselves to find that.

So, what's the solution to these divisions? Well, I'm going to say this morning that I don't have the solution to world peace. I don't have the solution to a polarized political situation in our nation. I'm speaking more to the third and the fourth issues that I talked about—the church and our own selves.

As we work through the book of Ephesians, we have seen and we have celebrated the grace of God and the gospel of salvation. The spiritually dead are brought to life in Christ. They're made an eternal monument to the grace and the kindness of God.

Last week we saw that there is a proper response to the grace and the gift of God and that response is faith, trusting only and trusting fully in the work and the person of Jesus Christ.

The natural and necessary result of biblical salvation is good works—verse 10, chapter 2, verse 10 talks about that. Life in Christ is a different and a new kind of life. Our daily walk is actually transformed by the power of Jesus. It matters, you see.

Today we'll see that not only does the power of God and the gospel bring about heavenly reconciliation, reconciliation in the vertical relationship, but it also brings about reconciliation on earth—human reconciliation and reconciliation in the horizontal relationships. The message is that the gospel brings about oneness by tearing down intractable human barriers.”

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