Does God Care!
We have spent two weeks on sin! We found why God cares about sin! And why its so important for us to to look deep inside ourselves and identify the sin in our lives!
• Sin is devastating
• Sin hurts relationships
• Sin affect more than just you
• And ultimately Sin affects our relationship with God!
So now that we know just how destructive Sin is, what do we do to deal with it and turn away from it? That’s where repentance comes in! so let dive in and look at what repentance is and how we are to repent!!
what repentance is not!!
I see a lot of mistaken notions about repentance
• Some confuse it with morbid self-accusation.
o This means you continually beat yourself up
o You live in this “I am so bad” state all the time
o You never give yourself a break
o True repentance brings peace!
o There is an old child’s hymn,—
“Repentance is to leave
The sins we loved before,
And show that we in earnest grieve
By doing so no more.”
• Some think repentance is a compensation for sin
o There is no compensation for Sin
o That’s why Jesus died
o There is now I did this and now I do that for payment
o If your catholic, that’s right no confession box fixes your sin
o The price for your sin was paid once and for all on the cross
C.H. Spurgeon
There are others who think that repentance is a qualification for faith in Christ.
Such a person says, “If I have repented of sin, I can then believe in Jesus. If I am conscious of my guilt, I may then come, and cast myself upon Christ.” My dear friend, I know that you never will cast yourself upon Christ until you are conscious of sin, for men do not usually eat till they feel hungry, and they do not clothe themselves till they realize that they are naked. It is well for you to have a sense of your iniquity, but, at the same time, it is no qualification for believing in Jesus.
o What he is saying is when you truly believe
o You feel a guilt for your sin
o It is not a requirement to feel the guilt first
o And for some sin you don’t even see it until you get closer to Jesus
• Some have a misunderstanding of how we come to repentance
C.H. Spurgeon “I cannot repent,” says one; “I want to make myself repent, but I cannot.” Now, of all things in the world, that is one of the most absurd and impossible. Shut yourself up in a room, sit down on a chair, and try to make yourself repent. You could not do it. Did a man ever try to make himself love a woman? No, but he was smitten at the first glimpse of her face; he could not help himself, and ere he was aware the deed was done. And it is just the same with repentance; it comes as a secondary thing. Through meditation and thinking over certain other things, the sacred passion of repentance cornea upon us; but it is not a direct operation of the mind, that can be performed at will, any more than faith is.
o We can’t force repentance
o It’s not something we do at all
o When we receive the Holy Spirit it revels sin to us
o We just feel it, like loving someone or be connected to someone we just know
• Self-righteousness is not repentance.
o Self-righteousness is where you see clearly the sins of everyone else.
o You have unbelievable clarity in your vision; glutton, fat, stupid, disorganized, lazy, drunkard, gossip, whatsoever.
o You conveniently overlook everything pertaining to you, like self-righteousness and pride.
• Repentance is not mere confession.
o Confession is where you agree with God. That was a sin.
o Confession in and of itself is not bad.
o It’s perfectly good, but if it doesn’t move to repentance then what you have is someone who feels bad but doesn’t change.
• Worldly sorrow is not repentance.
2 Corinthians 7:10 (NLT)
10For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death.
o Non-Christians can feel sorrow.
o It’s called worldly sorrow.
o Christian who think in worldly ways can have sorrow, but it’s worldly sorrow.
So what is repentance??
Charles Spurgeon writes:
Repentance is a discovery of the evil of sin, a mourning that we have committed it, a resolution to forsake it. It is, in fact, a change of mind of a very deep and practical character, which makes the man love what once he hated, and hate what once he loved.
J. I. Packer writes:
Repentance means turning from as much as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God, and as our knowledge grows at these three points so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged.
John Piper writes:
Repenting means experiencing a change of mind that now sees God as true and beautiful and worthy of all our praise and all our obedience.
Here is my definition of what it means to repent:
To repent means that through the power of the holy Spirit we see the sin living in us, we feel remorse and guilt because of that sin and we processed to deal with that sin and to remove it from our life.
Is Repentance important?
Matthew 3:1–2 (ESV)
1In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea,
2“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Matthew 4:17 (ESV)
17From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Luke 13:3 (ESV)
3No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
Luke 5:31–32 (ESV)
31And Jesus answered them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.
32I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
• Is it important, it is critical to the Christian life
Why is it so important?
If you don’t repent of sin it just leads to death.
• It’ll kill your joy.
• It’ll kill your future.
• It’ll kill your friendships, your marriage, your children.
• It’ll kill your business.
• It’ll kill your ministry.
• It’ll kill our church.
• It’s already killing the world.
• It will kill your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren.
• Sin is evil, all consuming. It is a very literal demonic force at work in the world and it affects, infects everything.
• When we confess and repent and give it to Jesus He takes away the sin and there can be life.
• Apart from Jesus I assure you of this, there is nothing but death.
• I have friends if sin is not repented of, it kills the friendship.
• I have a wife. If sin is not repented of it kills the marriage.
• I have children. If sin is not repented of it destroys generations.
Close
The only way we can move forward in our walk is to repent, and true repentance brings that change we so desperately need.
• Repentance affects more that our walk, it affects every relationship we have
• It effects every aspect of our lives
• Repentance is not just a feeling, it’s a action
• A call to live differently
• We confess our sins, but to repent means putting action behind the confession
• That might mean changing friends
• It might mean changing Jobs
• It might mean changing hobbies
• It for sure means walking in accountability with others
• And we do it because god loved us first
Romans 2:4 (ESV)
4Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?
• God loves you so much and cares for you so much
• He shows you his mercy so you can turn from your sinful ways
• To move off the path that leads to destruction (sin) and get on the path that leads to righteous (repentance)!
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