According to Galatians 6:1, it is our job to restore those who have been overtaken in misconduct or sin of any sort. This is one of those scriptures that really flies in the face of normal church tradition and exposes our Achilles heal. The fact is, when Christ called us to be His ambassadors to a hurting world, He equipped and commissioned us to operate in God’s mercy and grace. He intended for you and I to restore Satan’s victims to fellowship with our heavenly Father and His Body, the Church.

Who and how are we to restore?

Who are the people we’ve been called to restore and how do we do it? Those who need to be restored are the drug addicts, the adulterers, the murderers and anybody else who has succumbed to Satan’s schemes and traps. But what does it actually mean to restore someone to fellowship?

First of all, we must recognize the faults in a person’s life and be willing, out of compassion, to bring correction to them. The sole purpose of correction is so that the person can admit and repent of their fault. It takes a very mature Christian to care that much for another person. No one can be restored until they first truly repent. Repent means to bear fruit that shows we’re, not only sorry for our sins, but have completely turned away from them.

Restore also means to reinstate a brother or sister to their full rights of fellowship in the Body of Christ—not isolating them as a form of punishment or treating him or her like a second class citizen. 

Furthermore, we are to “restore such a one in the spirit of meekness.” We must reach out to the hurting with a Christ-like heart of humility and God’s unconditional love. We need to understand that There, but for the grace of God, go I. 

Turn over a new leaf

However, that has not been the Church’s reputation. The Church has fallen far short of her commission to restore, reinstate, reestablish and heal those who need it most. Instead, we are known for shooting our wounded. Blinded to our own sins and weaknesses, carefully cloaking them with fig leaves, we judge, criticize and condemn everyone else. We gossip about people and otherwise feed into an “us” and “them” attitude. It is an attitude which is nauseating, to say the least, to our merciful, compassionate God.

What we need is a fresh revelation of God’s mercy which He pours out on every one of us every day of our lives. How many of us can say we have perfectly served God since we received Him as Savior and Lord? I dare say none. It’s amazing how we, the restored, resent others being welcomed back into the fold. 

Yet, the whole Bible tells the story of a loving God restoring fallen humanity to Himself. How? By loving them back into relationship. Examine your life. How do you treat those who have fallen into sin and out of fellowship with God and His Church? Are you looking to restore such a one in the spirit of meekness? Or are you one of the self-righteous, gathering a posse to shoot the wounded among us? …

God’s love is amazing because it is unconditional… it is unmerited, and we can’t earn it. You and I don’t deserve it… we can’t lose it and, believe it or not, there is nothing we can do to turn God’s love off in our lives. It is so amazing! Don’t you agree?
Look at what God says in Exodus 20:6 NLT:

“But I lavish unfailing love for a thousand generations on those who love me and obey my commands.”

His mercy and His love are so enduring and so real—in other words, “unending”. Now, that’s an amazing love!

It is easy to identify God’s love because it stands head and shoulders above the kind of love we are all used to. The truth is that our kind of love usually has a motive behind it; it is for self-gain; it’s always looking for something back. We can all agree that many times man’s love is manipulative, controlling and turns out in the end to be hypocritical and false.

But God’s love is an amazing love! He actually looks at us as being valuable and precious. Wow! Even from the very foundations of the world we were God’s special creation and we were accepted by Him. I am confident about that because in Revelation 13:8 it says that Jesus was the Lamb slain for our sins since the foundation of the world!!!

You know, when we truly begin to see that amazing love, we recognize that it is so radically different from every other love we’ll ever experience in this world. It’s something we are automatically drawn to because when we’re around it, we feel whole; we feel clean and it makes us feel accepted. Isn’t that we’re all looking for—acceptance?

Aren’t we all longing for God’s love, acceptance and unconditional mercy in our lives? The great news is that this is exactly what He wants to give us because He knows it will release healing and wholeness to our spirit, soul and body. Once we receive that amazing love into our life we can then be a vessel that God can use to pour out His amazing love to others around us.

I want to encourage you to search for that love in this season. I know you will find it because God has His servants all around you. His amazing love is free and it is available to all who desire it. When you find it you can drink out of that unending wellspring of love. Call upon the name of Jesus and ask Him to come and live in your life. He will fill you with His love and no matter how much loneliness and despair you might be facing or rejection and fear that you may be dealing with, that amazing love will wash it away. The bible says in 1 John 4:18a that there is no fear in love and that God’s love casts out fear.

For those of us who have already accepted Jesus into our life, let’s be the outstretched hands of Jesus; let’s be the eyes of Jesus and even the mouthpiece of Jesus. We need to let His love flow through us to a lost and dying world. Only His amazing love can bring the healing and deliverance to a world that is hurting and seems to be fading away quickly. People are looking for the real thing. God’s amazing love… IT TRULY IS AMAZING!!!…