For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.
1 Peter 3:18 NIVUK
In 2022, we discovered what King Charles’ favourite TV show is.
And before you ask, of course it’s not ‘The Crown’.
His favourite TV show is a BBC TV show called ‘The Repair Shop’, where families bring the stars of the show family heirlooms in need of repair and they restore them.
The church should be a repair shop: a place where people come to be repaired and set right.
I’ve been in churches where people do their utmost to pretend they are okay. I've been in others where brokenness is practically a virtue and they have resembled a human junkyard.
The reality should be neither of those. We should come to church broken to be repaired and restored.
Why?
Because that's what Jesus came to do. That was His mindset. It was not to cast us aside for being broken, it was to mend us and fix us up.
Even if we are the reason we are so broken.
Of course, during His life, Jesus repaired and restored many people of physical, mental and spiritual ailments. The amazing thing is that even right before and after He died, He still restored people.
Let me give you a few examples.
Let’s start with Peter. Jesus predicts Peter's denial, but just before it says this to Peter:
‘Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.’
Luke 22:31-32 NIVUK
Do you see it? Jesus sees beyond the imminent painful failure and sees who Peter can become. And then what do we see after the Resurrection?
The Risen Christ restores His broken and dejected disciple (John 21:15-19).
Let’s look at the Emmaus Road disciples. They had clearly given up. They were leaving the city. A seven mile hike is quite some distance to walk if you’re just going for a stroll.
Yet something completely remarkable happens. Jesus meets with these disciples who are in the very act of abandoning Him (Luke 24:13-22). This is an incredible act of grace. He doesn’t discard them or scold them for abandoning Him. He simply opens the Scriptures to them.
And what happens? They return to Jerusalem at once. Having actively abandoned Him, they are now all in (Luke 24:33).
Jesus has again restored His broken and dejected disciples.
Take the disciples hiding out in the locked room (John 20:19-23). The were afraid of the Jews, and quite rightly, given the circumstances. But in that room were ten men who had fled from Jesus’ side when He needed them the most. Ten men who had not understood and at times even refuted His teaching that He would rise from the dead.
But there is Jesus, wishing them peace and re-commissioning them to His service.
Take Thomas: a man who was willing to die with Jesus (John 11:16), but had a really hard time with the idea that He could have been raised from the dead (John 20:24-25). Yet despite his struggles, Jesus reaches out to Him in person and restores Him (John 20:26-29). Tradition even tells us that Thomas left that room and took the Gospel as far away as India!
Every one of these people – without any exceptions – had let Jesus down in His time of desperate need. Yet Jesus restored them, despite their hurtful failure.
And He is still in the business of restoring people like us, who still fail Him (1 Peter 5:10). One day He will restore all Creation (Acts 3:21).
This is a most wonderful truth, and something we can and should cling to when life is hard and we make mistakes.
The question is, though: are we like this? Do we restore the people who fail us? Or would we much rather keep them down and far away?
The Early Church realised that it had a calling to restore people, even those who had disappointed them and let them down (Galatians 6:1).
But do we?
Questions
1. Does the story of any of the people who were restored by Jesus stand out for you? Why?
2. How did Jesus restore you? What did He do?
3. How could you extend this restoring touch to others?
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