Stay Salty | A Ministry of Reconciliation

Albert Einstein once said you don’t understand something well enough until you can explain it simply. Something similar could be said about the gospel: you may not understand the good news of Jesus well enough if you don’t see the necessity of unity and reconciliation. The good news is all about reconciliation: Jesus bringing us back from our rebellion and sin to God through the cross. The disciple, pastor, and writer in the early church Paul knew this, and he puts it this way: we have been given a ministry of reconciliation. What might it look like to take this seriously? In this message, Pastor Joel tells the story of Philemon and Onesimus, a slave and master whom Paul worked to reconcile across even the terrible chasm of slavery. For Paul, we find, reconciliation means hard work, and has to flow first out of Christlike character, which Paul describes in detail in another letter and which Pastor Joel practically walks through to close the message.