To give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration are things that Christians talk about all the time. These—and not the enforcement of rigorous moral codes or the punishment of evildoers–stand at the heart of the Christian message. The emphasis that christians place on forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration often puts them at odds with prevailing trends in contemporary American culture. We live in an age of outrage. So, should we give up on the ethic of forgiveness? Is reconciliation just a pipe-dream and restoration simply an excuse not to punish powerful evildoers? To the contrary, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration are precisely what God offers to our culture in Christ, and they are precisely what God demands of His children if we are to be all that He has called us to be.