August 03, 2025
Assigned Scripture
2 Corinthians 5:11,16-21
11 Because we understand our fearful responsibility to the Lord, we work hard to persuade others. God knows we are sincere, and I hope you know this, too.
16 So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! 17 This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
18 And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. 19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. 20 So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” 21 For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin,[a] so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
Matthew 5:9
9 God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God.
Group Response
It is almost a cliché to say that society is polarized. In fact, we are coming apart faster than any other Democratic nation. Yet a too heavy emphasis on this has kept most of us from tending the old, private, and still undisclosed conflicts of our own doing. These are the hardest places to make peace. Using a popular story of the OT (Jacob and Esau), we’ll look at what is involved in making peace and discovered that the conflict often lies, not in the space between us, but in the space within us.
Discussion Questions
1. Who are your least favorite people to work with? Live with? Name the one thing they do that really irks you. What would it mean to make peace there?
2. Have you ever intervened in or been part of a Jacob-Esau type conflict? What is it that makes reconciliation so difficult in these circumstances?
3. Think of your greatest adversary. What if you made peace with them? What if you went first? What would be a good first step toward reunion?