"Your Story" is the truth of your life as it pertains to your relationship with God. That story can be impacted and perhaps even stained or bruised by failures of others to the point where you do not desire to share your story in a way that leads people to Jesus because you have not let Jesus into all of the areas of your story. Reconciliation is a way to experience the fullness of what Jesus is doing in your life, and without experiencing reconciliation we leave ourselves cut short of the fullness of our story.
This week we are asking our body to actively seek this cleansing reconciliation(in at least one of these areas) so that the story we tell is pure and clean for all those we share it with. This is not an easy thing to do, it requires you to surrender your pride and be honest about where you are and what you want Jesus to do in a relationship you currently have with either a person or even God.
Three Exercises To Experience Reconciliation
1) Allowing Others to Forgive For You- There is always the possibility that someone has hurt you in a way that is difficult to forgive. In those moments you will typically have a desire to forgive them.... but are not quite ready to do it yourself yet.
- Identify someone you want to forgive but do not have the strength to meet with them to seek that.
- Find a friend who is also a Christ follower and ask that person if they would take active steps to pray for your ability to forgive them.
- That person will then pick a time and each day pray for 10 minutes and asking God to give you the ability to forgive the person who has wronged you and "bear that burden" with you Colossians 3:13
2) Forgiving Someone Who Has Hurt You- Are you in a place where you CAN forgive someone and you would like to experience that? here are some practical ways to forgive someone in a biblical way.
- Identify- who are you in a good enough place with to forgive? Make this a prayerful exercise and not something that you blindly just choose because you need to. Let the Spirit take you to the person who NEEDS to experience this reconciliation.
- Identity- Once you know who you need to forgive.... you need to know who YOU are. Memorize this verse before you do ANYTHING.
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.[a]The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.18 All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation;19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
- Perspective- I find that once i know who i have forgive it helps to pray for understanding as to why this person acted the way that they did. see things from their point of view and hopefully understand how it will feel for them to receive or experience forgiveness for the thing that they have done to you. - 2 Corinthians 5:17-19
3) Communion Reconciliation- While this is all still fresh in your mind and you are actively seeking reconciliation choose to change the way toy see the way we take communion each week. As you take the bread and the cup realize that Jesus is sitting next to you.... and yes ...... He forgives you. For your pride. For your selfishness. For your arrogance. Whatever you have done this week. Yes He forgives you. soak that in. realize how hard it is for us to forgive one another for the wrongs we do to one another and then realize that Jesus is trying to teach us every Sunday what forgiveness and reconciliation looks like. As you swallow that, choose to share that story of the ways you have been forgiven!
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