Repentance...

2 Tim 4:1-5


"I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at^[a] His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry."



A. W. Tozer's 'The Cross: New vs. Old'
http://faithbiblechurchnh.org/tozer_new_cross.htm

This is kind of what's been troubling me. Not the messages, but how we as Christians are living up to it. It has been troubling me how churches all over the world are taking this, to the point that I should have been in bed at 12am latest, but as of now, having done more research and reading up on my own, it is 12:47am even as I type this sentence.

Somehow, people start to shun away from the topic of repentance. Repentance is a personal decision, and no amount of exhorting or encouraging by others can get you to repent.

Of course, before I address this whole thing, I also got to make sure I'm having daily repentance too.

I've always maintained that the life we were meant to live is balanced. Repentance is part of it.

Now, sometimes, some things aren't easy to take away overnight. Tell a smoker of 30 years to quit smoking immediately, and nothing - short of the grace of God - can do that. Yet, it starts with a desire to change, it starts with repentance.

Repentance is necessary for lasting change. It is REQUIRED to enter the kingdom of God. We all need to repent every day. For sure, we cannot save ourselves; God's grace covers that. But it is imperative we choose to humble ourselves and repent. Some things are harder to change from, but the main thing is our choice.

Of course, repentance is just the 1st step. What do we do after that? We move on, we continue in life. However, the key is repentance. It is the doorway to the living room, it is the narrow gate by which we must pass through into His kindgom. Even as I type this, the fear of the Lord is upon me. What have I been doing? What are the unconfessed sins? What has caused my heart to harden? What do I need to repent of right now, and confess my sins and receive His forgiveness from?

Repentance, of course, is not a 24/7 thing, meaning you don't be in a mode of repentance every second of your life. When you sin, the Holy Spirit convicts you of that sin (God convicts, the devil condemns, but that's another blog post for another day), and you repent. Simple.

We are told to work out our salvation with fear. We are told that we were saved, are being saved, and will be saved. This means 1 thing: we can lose our salvation. That fact alone should put the fear of God upon you, as it always does to me, when I am reminded of it. To teach and preach about the grace of God alone (and grace is meant to be empowering - there's much more to what the grace of God can do that today's churches talking enough about), without talking about repentance and the fear of the Lord, to preach forgiveness without the need for one to take a step to repent...is to take away words from the Bible.

And often, we are all like that at some point. We tend to focus too much on something, and lose sight of the other things God has taught us. We're human, we fail, we fall. In our zealousness, we often lose sight of the whole picture. Look at the great men in the Bible - many of them failed at fatherhood, whilst carrying out God's commands. David, Samuel, Solomon, some of the kings listed in 1 & 2 Kings, and 1 & 2 Chronicles. Yet, they never lost the foundations of God. The very same foundations, the commandments, that Jesus said are written no longer on tablets of stone, but in our hearts.

It is only when we acknowledge our failings, then repentance comes. David committed adultery and indirect murder. Yet he was esteemed better by God, over Saul. Why? Because he repented, and Saul did not. The Bible is a whole; it is not new covenant is better than old covenant so Old Testament stuff is irrelevant. Saul went about as he pleased, and did not change due to correction on numerous occasions. David did, despite not getting immediate correction when he committed the sins.

That doesn't mean, however, that we go around berating people for what we perceive as wrongdoing. Instead, remember that 'knowledge puffs up, but love edifies'. We exhort, we rebuke, out of love. We are corrected by God out of love. Similarly, we need to correct others out of love. Like Kel mentioned, deal with the issue not with the person.

I guess the whole point of this post (and recent ones on the same topic) have been borne out of a sorrow that today's churches are buying into parts of the Bible but rejecting other parts of it, and increasingly so. Now, no church is perfect, and no one is perfect, but that doesn't mean we go to the extremes.

Balance, indeed, is the key to life.