The very first step of entering the kingdom has always been repent. The tragedy is so many people are becoming Christians today without repenting that God is having to tell Christians to repent in this country. He shouldn't need to be telling Christians to repent. The church should be telling the world to repent. Instead, if you're hearing from God you know that He's telling the church Christians in Britain to repent and catch up on what they should have done years ago.
[00:00:26]
Repentance has this unique feature that repentance is what you feel you have done to God. Now that's quite different from regret and remorse. Suddenly you realize, it's God I have hurt most. Like the prodigal son realized it wasn't just his father he'd hurt, he said, Father I've sinned against you and against heaven. As soon as that heaven dimension comes in, and you realize it's God you hurt most, and you realize it's God's laws you broke, it's God's love you refused, it's God's anger you've provoked, it's God's judgment you deserve, it's God's mercy you need. As soon as this God dimension enters in, it becomes what Paul calls it, the godly sorrow that leads to repentance.
[00:02:31]
Repentance is always repentance of particular sins. You can't repent of general sins. You can only repent of this and this and this. And that involves these three steps. It involves first of all changing your mind about particular things and thinking God's way about them.
[00:05:39]
When you repent, your thoughts take a somersault. When you catch at limps of His holiness and His purity, you begin to realize how mucky you are, and you have a much lower view of yourself. In fact, the higher your view of God, the lower your view of yourself.
[00:06:52]
It comes as a shock to many people when they realize in their mind that the best things they've ever done are not good enough for God, and that our righteousness has to be repented of as well as our sin, that our good deeds as well as our bad deeds need to be put away. Now what a revolution that is.
[00:07:45]
To come to yourself means finally to strip away all the covering and get to the real truth of your condition. The interesting thing is, the closer you get to God, the worse you feel. The more you understand how good he is, the more you realize how bad you are. and realizing that, thinking that way, is the first major step.
[00:10:11]
If you'd gone to John the Baptist and asked for baptism, he would have said, then before you go into the water, make a public confession of your sins. They insisted on that. You look up how many times in the New Testament it says, confess your sin to one another.
[00:10:56]
It's so easy to blame someone else for my hang -ups, and to say, well it was my parents and what they did to me. It was what happened to me as a child. To say, I need healing. I don't need forgiveness, I need healing. But listen, we are not the result of what's been done to us. We are the result of what we've done about what's been done to us.
[00:13:05]
If I'm bitter, it's because I've chosen to resent what was done to me, rather than forgive it. In fact, I really believe that more people are in need of repentance than inner healing, though there's still a place for that where the Holy Spirit can go back and sort out a problem from early years. But the basic need...of mankind is not for inner healing but for repentance that makes it possible for God to forgive.
[00:13:34]
We are all the result of our choice and to treat someone as responsible for what they've done is to treat them with the dignity of a human being. They are not a Pavlovian dog. You're saying to someone, you are a human being. You have the will to choose. You have chosen.
[00:14:14]
If we confess our sins, not our sin, if we confess our sins, which means name them one by one just as you do your blessings, then He is faithful and just to forgive each one our sins. And His blood goes on keeping us clean. Beautiful promise.
[00:15:12]
Repentance begins with thought, it then comes out in words, but it must then come out in deeds. I give you two texts. John the Baptist, if somebody came and said, I want to be baptized, said this, produce fruit worthy of repentance, then I'll baptize you.
[00:16:22]
Paul's ministry was a ministry of getting people to prove their repentance by their deeds. I believe we should stop baptizing people on profession of faith and baptize them on proof of repentance. Now just let that sink in.
[00:18:15]
Repentance is putting the past right. You can't put all the past right. sins right, but there are some the Lord will show you that can be put right.
[00:19:08]
That's repentance, deeds of repentance, doing something about it, putting the past right, bringing it to a proper conclusion, cutting the umbilical cord that ties you to Satan's kingdom, tying it off so that you're free of it. It may involve a negative thing like destroying something.
[00:20:07]
So often, that's the problem. We've started at step number two. Jesus and John the Baptist and Peter on the day of Pentecost all started with the word, Repent.
[00:23:19]
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We need to help people into the right kind of fear to be serious. I think you can best do that by pointing out where their present way of life will lead them.
[00:24:16]
A perished human being still looks like a human being, feels like a human being, but can't be used as a human being. What do you do with something that's perished? You throw it away or you burn it in the incinerator. Hell is God's incinerator for perished people. They don't cease to be people, they are just no more use to him.
[00:25:43]
It's possible, for example, for men to feel more guilty about masturbation, which is not mentioned in the Bible, than murder. So we need to help them to be sensible in emotions and not let their feelings get things out of proportion. Psychological guilt is not moral guilt, and it's moral guilt that Jesus cures. Not what we feel guilty about, but what we are guilty of.
[00:32:35]
We need to help people to be sensible about what can be put right and what can't. But in this way we have helped them to repent.
[00:33:50]
