By the desire of God, through the work of God and because of the love of God we have been reconciled to God through Jesus. I know we have talked about this a lot throughout this study but I believe we can’t overstress the fact that from the beginning, every single action that God has made has been because of His love and for our benefit. It was God’s initiative to create man, God’s initiative to spare him after sin, to promise redemption and to plan for reconciliation. Man has made no movement toward God but God has not stopped moving toward man. He has always loved us, always been patient with us and always pursued us. Paul wrote in Ephesians 2, “Like the rest, we were by nature children of wrath. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our trespasses.” Not only is God’s nature and character love but His actions flow from His love. It is not enough to say “God is love”, we have to also realize that God is actively, presently and purposefully loving us. All the work of God is birthed out of His love and so all of His working is also loving. We have not come to God, we have not found God, we have not hit the bottom, come to the end of our rope or realized the error of our ways; we were God’s enemies and God loved us so fully that He came to us, again, we have always been pursued. God reconciled us to Himself in Jesus. He did the work, we are the recipients of mercy, meaning we have not been given what we have truly earned and we are the recipients of grace, meaning we have been given what we could have never earned. I have quoted Jeremy Myers several times over the last couple of months, “Sin has separated us from God; it has not separated God from us.” Romans 5 could not make this any clearer: “God demonstrates His own loved toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us . . . For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” As the old song says, “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe . . .” We have been reconciled to God because of God’s love and Jesus’ work, our part in this process is being loved by God and surrendered to His work. Reconciliation requires a surrender, basically all we bring to the table of salvation is the white flag of our hearts, if we will wave it in surrender God is faithful to forgive us of our sins and cleanse and purify our hearts and lives from all unrighteousness. Today I want us to see that verse 18 doesn’t simply end with our reconciliation but it goes on to tell us that we have been reconciled to God for a purpose. We are reconciled because He loves us but we are reconciled to then live in the ministry of reconciliation. There are a few things I pray we will receive today: We cannot minister in what has not first been administered to us, meaning you can’t give what you have not received; the ministry of reconciliation is always and only about being made right with God, our relationships with each other are supposed to only reflect our relationship with God, every time the order is reversed the work becomes impossible and finally a ministry is completely dependent upon being committed to its message. This morning my hope is that we will all receive what is being freely given so that we can learn how to give what we have so freely received.