RSS

Tag Archives: Repentance

Finding Total and Lasting Change

25 Sep

When you become a Christian, the strangest thing happens: you begin to like things you didn’t like before and do things you didn’t want to do before. The end result is remarkably predictable: you end up paying close attention to an ancient book, talking often to other people about “religion”, and singing loud in church.

And in your wildest dreams, you would have never imagined.

Now, you can call this a miracle – and that’s true, it is – but you might also call it the New Covenant:

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.  Hebrews 8:10, 11 (ESV)

How can you explain this, when out of the blue, suddenly someone longs to serve Christ and study His word and tell the world about Him. But when you think about it, how else could this whole thing work, but that God would actually change our desires, or as Jonathan Edwards called them, our affections? You see, we like new stuff because…we are new. We like things we’ve never liked before…because we’re not the people we used to be.

My favorite verse on this is found in the Old Testament prophet of Jeremiah:

I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. Jeremiah 32:40 (NIV)

Inspired to fear Him! Glorious!

So…has it happened to you? Have you come to know a God who has done so much good to you that you are positively inspired to love and serve Him? Mind you, you’re not perfect in your obedience…but you’re definitely inspired. And would you say that by the power of His grace, the LAST thing you want to do in all the world…is turn away from Him?

If so, then give glory to God, because unless I miss my guess, you too are a partaker of the New Covenant.

 

For Monday, September 28th: Hebrews 9

 
1 Comment

Posted by on September 25, 2015 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , ,

Why Do I Need to Repent if Salvation is by Grace Through Faith?

03 Jul

For years I was confused about the call to repentance in the Bible. I knew that salvation was by grace through faith, and yet I wondered about the emphasis on repentance which I saw in the New Testament. This emphasis is certainly all over the place, and so it’s clear that to become a Christian, a person must repent and believe in Christ, but repentance seemed like a “work” and therefore a contradiction of the idea of grace by faith alone. Here’s what I came to understand:

I got it confused because I misunderstood the word repentance in the first place. Repentance is not changing the way we act. In fact, it is not an action at all, but instead is turning away from sin in your mind.  Now, don’t be mistaken, turning from sin in word and deed is what always happens when there is repentance, but repentance is not doing anything; instead it is changing your mind about sin.

When a preacher says, “Repent!”, what he is saying is, “Change your mind.”  The word for repentance is metanoeo.  Meta – means with.  Noeo – means, the mind, or thinking.

Literally, with the mind.

Therefore, repentance means…change the way you are thinking about sin. This makes perfect sense – if a person is going to call on the name of Jesus for salvation from their sin, wouldn’t they first have to think differently about sin? Of course.

It’s only when a drowning man realizes the water is killing him that he calls for help. To him, water is a big negative, and that’s an understatement. And it’s the same way with sin. 

Therefore, in order to call on Jesus for help, I have to realize that sin is a mega-negative. It has caused me pain and loss.It has severed relationships and broken me time and again.  Therefore I need a Savior, and to repent is to realize the harmful, negative nature of sin. The call to faith is also the call to see sin for what it is.

This idea gets clarified in Luke 3:8 when John the Baptist takes repentance to the next step and says,

Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. Luke 3:8a (ESV)

In this, John is saying to do something, but this is distinct from the call to salvation. If you have really repented, he is saying, then you will change.  Your deeds will be evidence that you have repented, but hear this – deeds are not necessary for salvation – they are only evidence that salvation has come, as in the case of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10 ESV). If a Christian has really decided that a particular action is sinful, then by the power of the Holy Spirit Who reminds us of our sonship, that person will work to stop doing that particular action. But it will not be perfect work. There will be fits and starts. He will stumble and fight…all his life, but he will fight.  Because of what Christ has done for him, he will fight against sin and slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, bear fruit.

But we do not call people to salvation by saying, “You must do something and believe.”

Instead…we call them to repent.

For Monday, July 6th: Luke 4

 
1 Comment

Posted by on July 3, 2015 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

The One Thing John the Baptist Did With His Life

01 Jul

If you had to sum up the one thing that John the Baptist did, what would you say it was? There was one main thrust of his life, and the fascinating thing was that his father was told by the Angel Gabriel what it would be…before he was born:

“…For he will be great before the Lord. And he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.” Luke 1:15-17 (ESV)

There is a key idea in the life of this man they called “the Baptist.” Do you see it? He changes lives. Well…God does through him. He turns the hearts of men and women around, preparing Israel for the Lord Jesus.

Ultimately it’s about getting people ready for Christ, but the overall sense of things is that he does this by changing people through the power of the Holy Spirit. Fathers, for instance, will stop hanging out with their buddies at the city gate all night and start staying home and playing games with their kids. Through John the Baptist, you see, change comes. What a glorious calling, to help people change for the better.

And I was drawn to a particular description of how his happens: the disobedient are turned to the wisdom of the just or the righteous.The inherent idea here is that being disobedient to God is not wise. But a lot of times we already know that and yet are not empowered to change, and therefore, what people need is an encounter with God to see the truth of it afresh…and repent. And often times, that encounter happens through another person, sometimes a preacher like John, and sometimes a neighbor or co-worker or friend…like you.

God grant that each of us might be John the Baptist in the lives of others, and that He would send a few Spirit-empowered John the Baptists into our lives as well.

For tomorrow, Thursday, July 2: Luke 2

 

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on July 1, 2015 in Uncategorized

 

Tags: , , , , , ,

 
%d bloggers like this: