October 5, 2026
Monday, October 5
A while back, my kids showed me a famous comedy sketch by two British comedians, Mitchell and Webb. They play German SS Officers on the Eastern front during WWII. One of them is all business, getting ready to fight the Russians. But the other is distracted. He’s been looking at the SS caps they wear, and notices that their emblem is a skull. He asks the first officer, “Are we the baddies?”
I’m sure some of you won’t find the sketch as funny as I did. But it brings up a good point: No one ever sees themselves as the bad guy. Even Nazi SS Officers must have convinced themselves they were justified in the horrific things they did. I propose a disturbing idea: What if, to someone out there, you’re the baddie? What if there is a person, or even a group of people, who look on you as the person who made their life miserable? And what if they’re right?
This week, we finish our long series about forgiveness. Last week, we saw that forgiveness is different from reconciliation. You can forgive someone even if they’re not sorry. But reconciliation takes two. I made the point that, even when we are the ones who are wronged, God still wants us to pursue the path of peace. But what if we’re the villain in the story? What can we do to reconcile with someone we hurt?
If you’re not there now, you will be. You realize that you hurt someone, and they’ve never forgiven you. Maybe it happened years ago, or yesterday. Either way, you feel this awful sense of guilt. Or perhaps you’re in the middle of an ongoing feud. You try to ignore it, but it’s there, under the surface, like an ulcer. And then there’s a third scenario: You know something is wrong between you and another person, but you have no idea what it is. They are avoiding you, treating you coldly, or acting irritably around you. You can’t figure out what happened.
Here’s the way the world trains us to handle such situations: “I’m not responsible for your feelings.” “You should be over it by now.” Or, “Sure, I sinned, but you hurt me worse.” Our sin nature wants us to disavow any responsibility. But Jesus responded quite differently than us. As Paul puts it in Romans 5:8, while we were still sinners, He died for us. Do you get that? We did wrong. We were the baddies. Yet He took responsibility. In v. 10, He goes further: For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
“Reconciled to God.” How beautiful is that? Tomorrow, we’ll see how we can pursue reconciliation with those we’ve hurt.
“Lord Jesus, I can’t comprehend your love for me. That you would go to the ultimate lengths to make things right between us, when the fault was entirely mine. Now, when I have hurt someone else, teach me to do whatever is needed to reconcile with them—for your sake. In your name, amen.”
Senior Pastor
First Baptist Conroe
More from Pastor Jeff at his website: jeffbergerwriting.com
