Psalm 86:1-10 and Romans 8:18-21 teach us to be real with God as we pray. We need to trust God! And the world is waiting for us to be real.
John 5:36-47 shows us how little the Jewish leaders understood about their Messiah.
Luke 24:25-27, 44-48 shows us that Jesus needed to tutor his disciples so that they could understand how he fulfilled the prophecies for the Messiah. Wow! I wish we had notes of everything he said!
II Corinthians 5:17-21 helps us understand that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. How so? Jesus became sin that we might become the righteousness of Christ (verse 21). We have no worthiness of our own, but we have the gift of his utter worthiness! Freed from any need to save ourselves, t God can work through us as ambassadors to proclaim this good news: Our God is not an angry, distant deity. Our God is a tender Abba who has forgiven the sins of the world in Christ’s death, and demonstrated his acceptance of Christ offering through raising him from the dead.
Our task is to show God’s goodness and kindness in the world, and one of the most important ways we do this is to beg people to be reconciled to God!