Relationships

Relationships …… and reconciliation

In the first place…. don’t despair! - you’re not on your own. The world is full of relationships that have gone wrong. What’s more, the closer the relationship, the worse it can get – often leading to violence. It seems sometimes that hate lives next door to love.

How then can you put right what’s gone wrong?

How can you repair a broken or strained relationship?

The first thing we need to do is to put right the most basic relationship of all. You see, the first relationship in history to go wrong was the relationship between us and God. The Bible tells us that we are enemies of God. And as soon as that relationship went wrong, the rest soon followed….before long we’ve got a domestic on our hands that ends up in someone getting killed.

How does that affect my broken relationships?

Simple. God calls on us to pick up the phone, cross the bridge, and then start to treat our parents, our boyfriend or girlfriend, our step-father or mother, our brother or sister – in fact, everyone, just like God has treated us.

How does
that work?

By starting to think of myself differently. I can’t change the way other people treat me, but by God’s grace and help, I can change how I treat them.

That means that like Jesus, I need to humble myself, to stop thinking of what my friend, my father, my sister said or did to me, and forgive them. Unconditionally and across the board! And, if I’ve done or said anything that caused the relationship to go wrong, to ask them to forgive me.

Impossible?

Amazingly however, the God whom we have hated and turned against, has made the first move back. In Jesus He has reconciled us to Him. When Jesus died on the cross, a bridge was re-built between heaven and earth, between God and us; the telephone lines blown down in the gale of sin were re-connected.

Too right if you haven’t got the Spirit of Jesus whom God gives to everyone who gets reconciled to Him living inside you. On the other hand, if you have, you’ve got no choice! You must and you can!

The Bible says, “Let the same attitude that Jesus showed, be in you, who even though He was God, didn’t make a big thing about what He was entitled to, but became a nobody …………”

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