Be in the Business of Restoration

Photo by Dietmar Becker on Unsplash

If you have read me recently, you may have detected that I have been struggling; weighed down by the burden of what felt like significant discouragement.

Yet, of course, all I needed to do was challenge and change my bearing. In merely a few moments, that bearing has been restored. It’s like the time when everyone is telling you you’re heading off course, and you somehow know it, but frustratingly you don’t know how to get back on course.

When you read of this restoration,
you will see why it worked:

So much of the time in our lives
we look for results,
when all life asks of us is simply
to make our offering.

For some time, I have been jaded because of the negative results I seem to have gotten, of recent. Of course, this negates the many positive results that have happened in the meantime; but we don’t focus on those do we?

I was given a Word:
we are sowers, not reapers,
for God, alone, is the reaper.

Our example is the Father: the father in the parable of the prodigal son. He gave away half his estate without question, and even as one of his lads squandered this portion of his fortune, the Father willingly accepted him back, indeed, he was overjoyed at his prodigal son’s return. I know as a father I do not behave like this often enough, but I know I need to more often, to love my children, and all God’s children in the same manner, by simply sowing without expectation of a return. It is only with this sort of attitude that I can maintain my joyful service to humanity under God.

This is the love that the Father asks of us in our relationships, to initiate with love, and to respond with grace.

Initiate with love. Respond with grace.

Taken further, I want to suggest it’s like this:

Everything we initiate we are to do with unconditional love,
as if nobody has ever disappointed us.

We give people the choice, even our own children, because they need to learn how to fail and often. If they don’t learn to fail and often, they won’t learn the relevance God in their lives. If they don’t learn the relevance of God in their lives they will never be saved. And the relevance of God in our lives is for restoration. Saving is restoration.

God is restorative. Salvation is restorative.

With everything that we receive,
including the hurtful things,
we respond with grace.

It doesn’t mean we need to keep trusting or even stay in relationship with those people who abuse us. God wants us empowered to develop, implement and use wise boundaries. But when we respond with grace, we prove a power rules in us that is more potent than anything. As we absorb abuse in the moment, trusting God will rescue us at the right time, we show our persecutor that we are not merely flesh and blood; they war with the spiritual leviathan of Jesus in us who can absorb so much.

Absorb the chaos of the moment, reflect and recollect,
and respond in grace,
which can be a firm boundary,
but executed with the power of love.

Absorb the momentary abuse.
But don’t continue to allow it.

Now, everyone around me seems to be in the business of restoration, whether it is restoring a kitchen, or a home, or a car, or even their own body. Everyone, it seems to me, has a goal around restoration. And those that don’t are usually taking a break or they are so imbalanced as to have given up.

If we agree that our purpose in life is restoration — and that purpose runs beyond restoring things, and enters into the domain of restoring people — then we join forces with the most powerful drive known to humankind.

We agree that we want to be restored.

As soon as we express the desire that we want to be restored, we begin to change the way we operate, entering into a kind of contract with God. We pledge our allegiance, and we let His restorative work begin in us and through us. It must start this way. We allow Him to restore us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually through our submitting to and abiding in His truth that He loves us and wishes the best for us. Once this work is started, we recognise that he wants to restore us in the eyes of others, just as we see that He wants to restore them too.

Before long, we see that God
is in the restoration business.
He is the Master Restorer.

He calls us to join His business. This is not about being told what we must do, and it certainly isn’t about telling others what they must do.

Restoration is an operation of love.

Restoration is a mindset whereby we envision goodness and wonder and abundance which together are a tree of life. When we see through the eyes of restoration, we see potential, and we see the purpose in things, and we begin to see like the Father, seeing everyone as 10 out of 10. Only when we see everyone like this will we have any power for restoration in God’s kingdom.

Without a restoration focus we cannot see what God wishes us to see in every person and in every situation; to bring everything into polished completion.

If we are not building for restoration,
we are tearing down through destruction.

We either move forwards or backwards. And God gives us the choice. At any given moment we are restorers or destroyers. So, which will it be?

We are encouraged to be in the business of restoration.

Love is life for all. We can only give love when we give as if nobody has ever hurt us. And though we have been hurt, we aren’t forced to respond from hurt.

We can respond with grace.

Initiate with love. Respond with grace.

Acknowledgement to Pastor Nick Rensen.