God's Outstretched Arms

 Our God is a reconciling God.  It seems that God is always reaching out in healing and restoring acts of amazing grace, to draw us to Himself.  We don't have to be separated from our Creator.  His love has driven Him to us, in the context of our humanity, and reached into our lives restoring us and reconciling us to His very life.  Jesus is God's supreme reconciling response to our lives.  In fact, Jesus is God's response to the deepest needs of the human heart.  In Him, we are not separated from God, alone because we have been disconnected from our Creator.  Instead, Jesus is God's outstretched arms, extending to us a grace and mercy and love that staggers the imagination.

           

When God could have written us off He included us.  When He could have judged us and rightly sentenced us to the kind of life deserved by those who would sin against God and who, in their nature, fall short of His glory, He died upon the cross of Calvary so as to draw us to Himself and to make a place for us at His table.

           

Now we are called to participate with God In His reconciling life.  His love fills our hearts and moves us to be to others what God has been to us.  He didn't hold our sins against us, and we extend the same grace to everyone in our world.  Jesus is for everyone and we are called to stand with Him as He extends His crucified and resurrected life to the entire world.

           

What a God we serve!  What an awesome God to love us so fully and freely that we are privileged to share with others the greatest news ever to come down the historical pike.  In Him we are free to resign as manager of the universe and become voices of grace and mercy.

           

What a God!