Two classes I took in high school have consistently proven to be two of the most beneficial classes I have ever taken.  One was Typing.  I don’t know where I’d be without that one.  Do you remember Typing class?  Q-W-E-R-T, over and over again!  It was a little cheesy and got repetitive, but that one skill has proven to be more valuable than I could ever have imagined.  I know people who can’t type, and I grieve for them.  Typing got me through my undergraduate and graduate work without having to pay one single dime to have someone else type a paper for me.  Besides, had I wanted to, it was pretty hard to find a typist for hire at 2:00 in the morning when the paper was due at 8:00 !  All this, of course, was before the personal computer came along.  I never could have imagined a day when I would do my surfing with my fingertips on a keyboard and not my feet on a surfboard.  Now, there’s a visual!

Typing was one class.  The other most practical class I ever took in my entire high school career, that I use virtually every day, was Bookkeeping.  I don’t remember all of it, but I do remember the difference between a debit and credit.  A debit, of course, is a withdrawal from an account.  A credit is something added to or deposited into an account.  I do know how to reconcile my bank statement every month.  It’s a simple skill, but very essential skill. 

If you don’t reconcile your bank statement every month, do you know what happens?  You run the risk of not knowing how much money you have in the bank.  You won’t know at any given moment when you’re writing a check, or using your debit card, whether you have put more money in than you have taken out.  If you ever take out more than you put in what happens next isn’t very pretty at all and can be very expensive.  In fact, if you do it often enough, the State of Texas will ensure that you learn one more skill, making license plates.  And, that will be a valuable skill for at least 5-8 years or 10-15, depending on how many bad checks you write. 

Reconciling accounts, bringing the debits and credits in line with each other, is not just good business.  According to our New Testament lesson this morning, reconciling is God’s primary business with us.  God was in the world reconciling himself to us in Christ.  Not, if you will, debiting men’s sins against their account.  Aren’t those some of the most beautiful words you’ve ever heard?  God was in Christ, reconciling you to himself, not counting your sins against you.  In Christ, God has reconciled the debits of our sin against the credit of his grace.  Thanks be to God!  Because of his credits, and despite our debits, we have not come up short and we the inexhaustible resources of his eternal life to bank on. 

The Apostle Paul mentions reconciliation as both a message and a ministry.  The message is the story about God’s reconciling work for us in Christ.  The ministry of reconciliation is taking what God has done for us in Christ and extending that reconciliation to others by the way we live, work, and build relationships.  It is truly “sharing Christ through caring relationships.”  It is saying to the world, “I have more than I need.  Would you like some of it?”  Getting the message of reconciliation right, first, is essential to doing the ministry of reconciliation.  If you don’t get the message right, the ministry will always be off base, askew in some way or another. 

So, what is the message?  The easiest way I know to answer that question is to use two simple little words, “love banking.”  I owe a debt of gratitude to Willard Harley’s His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair Proof Marriage for that phrase.  Harley conjectures that everyone’s heart is much like a bank vault.  In that vault are stored the riches and poverty of our personal relationships.  We have an account inside our heart’s bank for every person in our life.  Everything they do to us either makes a withdrawal from or a deposit to that account.  Conversely, everything we do to another person either makes a deposit of love or a withdrawal from the account under our name in their heart’s bank.  If, in our relationships, we make more withdrawals than deposits, over time, we can bankrupt a relationship. 

Oftentimes, when someone says their spouse left them for no apparent reason, “out of the blue,” when they go back and reconcile the books of their marriage account, they discover that, over time, in ways both big and small, each of them was making more withdrawals from each other’s love bank than deposits into it.  However it works, if we make more deposits than withdrawals, we bankrupt relationships.  If we make more deposits than withdrawals, there will always be a reserve of love to cover our faults and mistakes, our withdrawals. 

Simple things can make deposits.  Like, if we say, “Thank you,” for even the smallest kindnesses.  Or, “You look nice today.”  Or, “How are you?”  Just simple acts of kindness, respect and concern make deposits of real worth in another person’s love bank.

Sometimes men say to women, “Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it.  That’s what we do.  Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.”  Deposit or withdrawal?  “Whenever possible, please say what you have to say during commercials.”  Major withdrawal.  “If you think you’re fat, you probably are.  Don’t ask us.”  Deposit or withdrawal?

Here is the gospel.  “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”  “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23a).  In other words, left to our own resources, our sin would have forever bankrupted us with God.  But, when God looked at the balance sheet, he rushed to the bank and made a deposit only he could have made, the life of his son.  “The wages of sin is death,” the scripture tells us, “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23b).  This is the message of reconciliation for us.  We, if you can believe this, can never sin so much that we bankrupt God’s love for us.  Reconciliation is the work of God in Christ of balancing a person’s moral and spiritual bankruptcy with the inexhaustible supply of God’s grace deposits.  God’s love, extended to us in Christ and for us and for our personal benefit, will always be of greater value than all of our sins added together.  Do you believe that?

That’s the message of reconciliation.  This is the ministry.  If the words, “God was in Christ reconciling himself to us,” are the most beautiful words, these may well be the most challenging.  “God was in Christ and giving us the ministry of reconciliation.”  On the one hand, that ministry involves sharing the message of reconciliation, which means simply telling the story of how God does his bookkeeping.  But, there’s more than that.

I was having a conversation through email about this with Jerry Haag, who is the President of the South Texas Children’s Home, who preached here not long ago.  He made a comment to me that helped me understand how we can do evangelism when he said that, as much as anything, sharing the good news involves living in such a way that people are naturally drawn to us, curious about what makes us so loving and gracious.  Do we live like that?

The Apostle Paul put it this way.  “We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:3-10).  Do you hear it?  Do you hear these words?  Living in such a way that we don’t become a barrier to others hearing and seeing the reconciling work of God in Christ, even if everything is not going our way all the time.  Perhaps especially when things are not going our way.

Here is the ministry of reconciliation.  In all of life’s ups and downs, ins and outs, living as one who knows that life can never take away from us, no person can ever take away from us, no experience can ever rob from us, what God cannot and will not cover with his limitless grace and mercy.

Have you ever heard someone say something like this?  “I’d be a Christian, if it weren’t for all of those hypocrites down there at the church.”  Have you ever heard that?  Who hasn’t?  We come up with all these cute, cheesy little sayings to respond to that.  Something like, “Well, if you ever find a church without hypocrites, be sure and don’t join it, because it won’t be a church without hypocrites anymore.”  We can say that.  Or, we can listen to what people are telling us when they say those things.

One thing they may be telling us is that we don’t understand the very grace we claim to be proclaiming.  That we still treat each other and other people based on how they perform for us, and not out of a spirit of unlimited grace.  Though we preach grace, we are saying, in essence, “You had better shape up and live right, or God won’t love you.”  “When you quit cheating on your wife . . .when you stop lying . . . when you stop being gay . . . when you stop . . . when you stop living a certain way then God will start loving you.”  No!  Grace means that God started long loving us long before we had a chance to commit our first sin, making deposits of love into our account that can never be outstripped by our sin.

Or, these people who talk about hypocrites at the church may be telling us they would really like to get to grace, but we are standing in the way.  We, who are supposed to be the agents of reconciliation, are acting just as afraid as they are.  Afraid that we better get while the getting’s good.  We better eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.  And, he who dies with the most toys really does win.  If we preach grace, and we live like that, we deserve the title of “hypocrite” that they have attached to us.  I like what my friend George Mason once said about dying with the most toys.  He rephrased it a little.  He said, “He who dies with the most toys . . . dies.”  This is what’s so hard about this text of scripture.  The only thing standing in the way of some people getting to grace, believe it or not, are those who claim to have found grace but who live just as frightened that they are going to lose as those who have never heard of grace.

Just this week I watched a documentary, The Smartest Guys in the Room.  It’s about the Enron debacle.  It made me wonder, as I looked at the unbelievable, obscene greed that drove that company into the ground and cost thousands upon thousands of people their jobs and their retirement and pensions.  What is it that can make a person that greedy, unless it is fear that they better get while the getting’s good, because it really is up to each of us and no one else to get ahead of everyone else before they get ahead of us in whatever game it is we’re playing commonly referred to as “life”? 

Enron’s executives came to a place where, unashamedly, they lived by the philosophy that they should be rich by making others poor.  Those who have been reconciled to God, because they know a different story, live in a different way.  As Paul said, “As poor, but making many rich.”  Which means never using any advantage of mine as an excuse to take advantage of someone else, but instead as an opportunity to prove that what I absolutely must have, only God can give.  And, what God can give, no experience of life can ultimately take away.  It is truly the Romans 8 lifestyle in action, celebrated in the spirit of Romans 8:31, my paraphrase, “If God is for us, who can possibly be against us?”

I’ve tried to think this past week of some things that have made deposits in my love bank and things that I have seen make deposits in others’ love banks.  A new friend recently told me that one of the most powerful ways of making a deposit in someone’s love bank is something called “positive gossip.”  There’s a strange phrase.  We think of gossip in evil terms.  We think of people saying bad things about each other behind their back as gossip.  But, what if we said good things about other people behind their backs and they find out about it?  Positive gossip.  Have you ever had someone say to you, “I was talking to someone the other day, and they said they really appreciate and love you, or they think you’re really attractive, or whatever.”  Do you know how good that makes you feel, to know that someone’s been talking about you behind your back, and they were saying something good?

I thought of one other thing that really has made a difference in my life at times.  Handwritten notes.  Not emails.  Handwritten notes of appreciation.  I got one just the other day from Frances Hamrick.  Frances had to leave us not long ago.  After her husband died, she moved to be with her children.  Frances is 84 years old.  This is something she wrote in her note to me, about us.  She said, “I believe long ago, as God saw down the years of what would happen to Cliff Temple as well as other inner city churches, he began making his plan.  Part of his plan was that we would help serve his purpose in our own generation.  Not by filling the Temple, as in its glory days, but by helping the unwashed and unlovely and lonely and hurting souls in the shadows of our beautiful stained glass windows.”  That’s a note suitable for framing in stained glass – and a huge deposit in all of our love banks, wouldn’t you agree?

I remember, and I still miss, Pearl Price.  She used to sit right over here.  I may have told you this story before, but hang with me, if you will, because some people haven’t heard it.  Pearl Price died at the age of 101 but kept her mind until the very last day, which even I can’t claim this morning.  Pearl was a remarkable woman.  I never, ever once saw Pearl, even though she lived to 101, and all that goes with that, I never once encountered her but what she had something positive to say.  One Sunday, as she was sitting right here, I walked up to say hello to her before the worship service started, and she stopped me and said, “Pastor, have I ever told you why I thank God for your bald head?”  I said, “No, Pearl , you haven’t told me, and actually, I’ve never had anybody else tell me why they thank God for my bald head.”  “Well, I thank God for your bald head, because, my eyesight has begun to dim and can’t see very far.  But, every time you stand in the pulpit, that bright light shines down on your bald scalp and, by its reflection, I can find you.”  Not many people can take something that is supposedly negative and turn it that positively.  But, Pearl could.  She could even take something others thought of negatively about themselves and find a way of spinning it positively so that it turned a personal debit into a credit!

Getting old is hard.  It’s a time of life when you lose a lot.  Pearl lost a lot before she got old.  She lost a child to a tragic death in her young adult years and never drove a car again.  She began to lose her sight, and with it her personal freedom.  She became totally dependent on others.  She lived so long that she lost more friends than not and attended more funerals than anyone ought to have to.  She lived so long that her funeral was poorly attended, because she had outlived most all of those who knew her well enough to grieve her passing.  But, in all of that, she had the most incredible capacity to see life more from the perspective of what God had done and was about to do for her when he gave her new eyes in heaven than anything life was taking away from her a day at a time as.  She lived like that so much that, when I was around her, I wanted to be like her!  I still do!

That’s what it means to be an agent of reconciliation.  To live as one so full of God that other people around you want to be a part of it.  Finding something good and beautiful in life and sharing it.  In afflictions, hardships, calamities, labors, sleepless night, Pearl possessed purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God.  And, many were reconciled to God through her life.

What it boils down to is this.  You and I cannot reconcile anyone to God.  But, God has given us the privilege of participating in his reconciling work by doing two things.  We can tell other people about how God keeps the books.  We can also live as though we really believe what we are saying, always making more deposits in people’s love banks than withdrawals. 

I promise you, you watch, and you tell me if I’m wrong, if this coming week, you will intentionally make more deposits into the love banks of those around you, you will be surprised at how it changes even the most difficult relationships you have.  It may not make you rich as compared to some, but you will be rich in mercy and love, hope and grace.

However many days God has left for me to live, I really want to live in such a way that just one more person would see me and see so much peace and hope in me that, no matter what happens to me, they wouldn’t just want to be like me, they would want to know the God who made me like that.

Don’t you?