This sermon by Derek Prince emphasizes the importance of repentance, belief, confession, and action in appropriating what God has done for us. Derek highlights the significance of repentance as a decision to change our minds and submit to God, emphasizing that true repentance leads to a willingness to let go of our own plans and desires. He stresses the essential nature of confession in aligning our words with God's truth and the power of giving thanks as a pure expression of faith. Derek also discusses the importance of being baptized, expressing gratitude, and being led by the Holy Spirit in living out our faith amidst the challenges posed by the carnal mind, Satan, and the world.

Derek Prince Ministries, proclaiming the inspired Word of God around the world. Derek Prince is an internationally recognized Bible teacher and author. Through books, audios, videos, and radio broadcasts, Derek seeks to reach the unreached and teach the untaught. In over 50 years of ministry, Derek has reached over 100 nations in more than 50 languages. And now, Derek Prince. He died to create His masterpiece out of the broken lives of men and women. What a message! What a revelation! You know, if you're not excited about salvation, I don't know how much salvation you really have. People say we're fanatical if we jump up and down and clap our hands. I was a magician before I became a Christian. I'd have to say that's the logical response to the revelation of Scripture. If we really believed the things I've been saying, just to sit there and say, well that's good, is totally unrealistic. Now, what I've described is what God has done. The provision is made. And I've told you already, it's perfectly perfect and it's completely complete. But, it still remains for us to know how to appropriate it. I could just close this message at this point and you'd have a tantalizing vision of something glorious. But many of you wouldn't know how to take the steps to come into it. So I'm going to do my best to describe the steps by which we can appropriate what God has done. In my thinking there are four simple steps. Number one, to repent. Number two, to believe. Number three, to confess. And number four, to act out what you believe. I'll say that again. Number one, to repent. Number two, to believe. Number three, to confess. And number four, to act out what you believe. Now let's look at a few Scriptures. The first essential step which no one can ever bypass is to repent. The whole of the New Testament, in fact the whole of the Bible, makes it clear that no one can ever be reconciled to God out of sin and rebellion without repentance. I see today that the teaching of repentance is very weak and ineffective in many areas of the church. I think the church suffers greatly. Like many people who have been a pastor and a counselor and so on, over the years I've counseled multitudes of people. I don't do much of that now. I discovered there aren't many Christians who don't have problems. And my conclusion after spending a lot of time with Christians with problems, was this, that fifty percent of their problems were due to lack of repentance. In other words, had they really repented, their problems wouldn't be there. You see, there's no way around repentance. I think it's important to emphasize this because I believe there's some teaching that repentance is negative and we don't need it. Repentance may be negative but we certainly need it. Let's look at the words of Jesus in Mark 1, verse 15. This is the beginning of His public ministry. The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel. God never tells anybody in the New Testament to believe without first telling them to repent. And I believe it's impossible. You cannot really believe unless you've really repented. You can go through all the outward motions and forms of believing, but the reality isn't there. What is repenting? Repenting is not an emotion, it's a decision. The Greek word that's used in secular Greek is almost invariably translated, to change your mind. So repenting is changing your mind. You've been living one way, you decide to live another way. You've been pleasing yourself, living by your own standards, doing your own thing, you decide, I'm going to submit to God, I'm going to live God's way, God's going to tell me what to do and I'm going to do it. A person who has truly repented does not argue with God. See I've had letters, even since I've been here, from people with problems. I would say, and some of them are people who've had problems a long while and are almost despairing of a solution. I think in a way, at least in some cases, those people have not really repented. Because they want their problems solved in order to be able to do what they want. They have their plan for what they'd like to do and be in life. But that's not repentance. Repentance says, Here I am God, do with me what you want. I won't make my own plans. I'll lay aside my ambitions. You may have totally different plans for me. I lay down my own plans, my own desires, and God I'm open to what you tell me to do, whatever it may be. That's repentance. Now I don't say that to criticize those people, but I don't think they realize. Let's look at just a few passages where this is emphasized. After the resurrection, in Luke chapter 24, Jesus explained to His disciples the Scriptures about His death and resurrection. He said in verse 46, Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in His name. What's preached first? Not forgiveness, but repentance. We have no right to leave out repentance and offer people forgiveness. I was in a meeting in Southeast Asia where an American minister was preaching. He preached an excellent message on healing. He pointed out how we can receive healing through the Word of God. The message blessed me. But at the end he said to this mixed multitude, most of whom were Chinese, If you want this wonderful life and all these blessings, come forward and receive. He didn't mention the word repentance once in the whole message. Well, a lot of people came forward who were idol worshippers and all sorts of other things, and they wanted, but they didn't get. The result in a sense was confusion at that point. Ruth and I found ourselves trying to minister to people. We couldn't speak their language, they didn't understand us. It was very clear to us they hadn't met the conditions. But it wasn't their fault because the condition hadn't been stated. We with a background of biblical knowledge, we can sometimes assume that people know they have to repent, although I think it's a rash assumption. But you go to another culture and another background and they have no concept of what repentance is. For many people, repentance is inflicting suffering on yourself, climbing the steps of St. Peter's on your knees, or all sorts of things, flagellating yourself. Amongst the Muslims there are those people who actually flagellate themselves amongst professing Christians. Repentance is not inflicting suffering on yourself. Jesus has endured all the suffering. Repentance is making up your mind to change, or to be changed. Letting go of everything you hold on to, saying, God, I'm at your disposal. You look in Acts chapter 2, the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit had fallen, a multitude of people were convicted of their sins. They didn't know what to do. Verse 37, they said to the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? And out comes Peter with the three-step answer. Repent, be baptized, receive the Holy Spirit. What's the first requirement? Repent. That's right. I believe that's God's answer today. I don't believe that's a sort of installment deal, I believe it's a package deal. You should get them all at one time. Repent, be baptized, receive the Holy Spirit. I don't personally—well, I'll come to that in a moment about being baptized, so just let me hold it there. And let me just show you the ministry and the message of Paul in Acts chapter 20. Paul is speaking to the elders of the church at Ephesus, reminding them of his ministry in Ephesus. And he says, verse 20, I kept back nothing that was helpful, but proclaimed to you and taught you publicly and from house to house, testifying to Jews and also to Greeks, repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. It didn't matter whether they were Jews or Greeks or who they were. The order was first repentance, then faith. Then we come to believe and confess. And as I made my outline I didn't know whether to put confess before believe or believe before confess. Because in actual fact, in the New Testament, really they're not separated. Let's look in this key passage in Romans chapter 10, where Paul describes the conditions for New Testament salvation. Romans 10. And I want you to notice the order. He talks about two things, the mouth and the heart. And he mentions them in each verse. The first two times he puts the mouth before the heart. The third time he puts the heart before the mouth. Now we don't think that way, but in actual fact, in a way, you get faith from saying it. Some people say, well I don't believe it so I can't say it. I say, you say it and you'll discover you begin to believe it. Now let me say about confession for a moment. It's a key word. It means literally to say the same as. It's from a little Latin verb confitio. And confession is saying the same as God has said in His Word about you. It's making the words of your mouth agree with the Word of God. And it's absolutely essential in the process of salvation. You cannot really experience salvation without right confession. Now let's look at what Paul says, Romans 10, verses 8, 9 and 10. The Word is near you even in your mouth and in your heart. Where is it first? In the mouth, that's right. That is the Word of faith which we preach. Verse 9. That if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, or Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. What do you do first? Confess with your mouth, believe in your heart. See that isn't the way we think, but it's actually true to experience. And then the tenth verse, the third time he says with the heart one believes to righteousness and with the mouth confession is made to salvation. So, when you've done it twice with your mouth, then you have it in your heart. When you have it in your heart, you say it with your mouth. Because Jesus said out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. But the way to get it into your heart is to accept it as the Word of God and start to say it. The more you say it, the more you believe it. The more you believe it, the more you say it. But there's a kind of tradition, I think especially amongst churchgoers, that you don't talk about your faith. I know I grew up in Britain amongst people who were good churchgoers. And some of them undoubtedly were real saved Christians. But no one ever told me what it was to be saved. For people in those days religion was something personal, you didn't talk about it. Well that's not the way it is with the gospel. You talk about it. You believe, you confess. You confess, you believe. And you will discover when it comes to making the right confession, there's a dark evil force that stands right in front of you and wants to keep your mouth shut. And you have to use your will to open your mouth and say the right thing. I want to show you the position of Jesus as high priest in relationship to our confession. I want to take you through three passages of Hebrews. Hebrews chapter 3 and verse 1. Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, consider the Apostle and high priest of our confession, Christ Jesus. Jesus was the Apostle sent out by God to provide redemption. Having provided redemption, He returned to God to be our high priest in the presence of God. But He's the high priest of our confession. That is radical. No confession, no high priest. If you close your lips on earth, you silence the lips of your advocate in heaven. Bear that in mind, the high priest of our confession. The more you confess, the more you release His high priestly ministry on your behalf. Then in Hebrews 4.14 it says, Seeing then that we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. Notice every time it speaks about Him as a high priest, it's related to our confession. Chapter 3, verse 1 says He's the high priest of our confession. Chapter 4, verse 14 says let us hold fast our confession. What does that mean? Say it and keep on saying it. Don't back off. Don't get discouraged. And then in Hebrews 10.21 and 23, the writer returns to the same theme. Having a high priest over the house of God, verse 21. Verse 23, let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. Now, notice the change there. It's not the confession of our faith, it's the confession of our hope. Because if you confess faith long enough, it becomes hope, you understand? Faith is the substance of things hoped for. When you've built a substance on that comes hope. My definition of hope in the Bible is a confident expectation of good. But it says, let us hold fast the profession or confession without wavering. First of all He's the high priest of our confession. Then we're to hold fast our confession. Then we're to hold it fast without wavering. Why do you think it says without wavering? What does that imply? Well let me put it to you this way. If you're traveling in an airplane and the sign goes on, fasten your seatbelts, what does that tell you? Expect turbulence. What does without wavering tell you? Expect opposition. Here is where the battle is fought out in maintaining your confession. The tactics of Satan. He'll use every kind of pressure, every kind of inducement. He'll use every kind of lie, whatever he can. He's got one aim. What is it? To get you to make the wrong confession. How can we defeat him? By maintaining the right confession. Oh, how vivid that is. All right, now, when you have repented, when you are believing, when you are confessing, there's one more thing you have to do. You have to act out your faith. James 2.26 says faith without works is dead. Faith that is not expressed in appropriate actions is a dead faith. And I want to suggest to you three appropriate actions that express our faith. Number one, be baptized. That's your first opportunity to identify yourself openly with Jesus as your Savior. Mark 16.16, Jesus said, Go and preach the gospel in the whole world to every creature. And He said, He who believes and is baptized shall be saved. I don't believe you are entitled to claim salvation until you're baptized. You remember I made a distinction between the new birth and salvation. You can be born again, but you haven't entered into salvation. He who believes and is baptized shall be saved. And if you study the book of Acts, no one in the book of Acts ever claimed salvation without being baptized. They attached urgent importance to it. Philip led the eunuch to the Lord on the road to Gaza. And there was a pool of water by the road. The eunuch said, Not Philip. So you see, Philip had already made clear to him the necessity of baptism. Now it doesn't say that. The eunuch said, What hinders me from being baptized? He went down into the water and baptized him. You remember in Philippi, Paul and Silas were in jail. There was an earthquake. Everybody was set free. The jailer got saved. What happened? He and all his household were baptized the same hour of the night. They didn't wait for the morning. I've heard so many pastors say, We have a baptismal service in three weeks, put your name down. That is not New Testament. It is believe and be baptized. I have seen some of the most exciting meetings of my spiritual career, when people have believed and been baptized. There was one we held years ago in Tauranga. And I mean, all sorts of people got baptized. The funny thing was, there was a group of Baptists that came just to watch. And it was taking place, if I remember, in a swimming pool. And there was such a presence of God that people were just going down under the power of God on the edge of the pool. And those dear Baptists said, We wish we could have had it this way. You see, just making baptism a kind of ceremony in the church calendar, is like making salvation something that happens if you come to church on Easter. It's detaching it from its real significance. So the first thing you should do when you've believed, is be baptized. Find somebody, anybody. I was teaching on this in the University of Youth with a Mission, just a week or two ago. And I was very careful not to be controversial. So I simply said what I've been saying tonight. Believe and be baptized. I didn't talk anything about the method of baptism. People started to come up to me afterwards and say, I want to be baptized. I hadn't said a thing. So one of the professors there said, This is your problem. They marched off to the swimming pool and got baptized the same hour of the night. That was exciting. I think when the Gospel isn't exciting, we've lost something. When we don't have action, I think there's not much faith. All right, what's the first thing you do? Be baptized. What's the second thing? I mean you could do them in the opposite order. Give thanks. That's right. The purest expression of faith is saying thank you to God. If you really believe what I've been teaching you, you'll have to go out of here this evening thanking God. I mean otherwise you're either an unbeliever or you're the most ungrateful person in the city here tonight. The truth is you're not ungrateful, but you are slow to believe. Some of Jesus' miracles were achieved only by giving thanks. The feeding of the five thousand, all Jesus did was say thank you. And five loaves and two fishes became enough for a crowd of perhaps ten thousand people. There is almost limitless power in giving thanks. Jonah was, you know, three days and three nights in the belly of the fish. He didn't come out when he prayed, he did a lot of praying. But in Jonah chapter 2 verse 9 when he started to give thanks, the fish couldn't hold him any longer. So if you're in the belly of the fish tonight, start to give thanks. And then to conclude this on the actions, I turn people to Romans 8.14. As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are sons of God. So God doesn't have one single program for every believer. You take the first step, be baptized, and after that the Holy Spirit will show you God's plan for your life. Don't pattern yourself on some other believer, because God has an individual plan for every believer. Now, I want to say something in closing, which is important. Because if you only heard what I've been saying up to now, you might go out of here and you might be saying to yourself, well, there's something wrong with me because he made it sound so easy and it isn't easy for me. There's nobody here like that this evening, but if there were, I want to help you. My comment on that is it's simple but not easy. See the difference? I'm going to give you three reasons why it is not easy. You have three enemies that will do everything in their power to make it difficult. Number one, you have an enemy within. The Bible calls it the carnal mind, the unrenewed mind. In Romans 8, verses 7 and 8, Paul says the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So in our minds we have within us an enemy of God that's going to resist the things that God wants us to do. And we have to bring that mind into subjection to the will of God. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, we must take our thoughts captive. Interestingly, the word for captive is not a civil prisoner, but a prisoner of war. In other words, your thoughts are at war with God and you have to take them prisoners of war and bring them into subjection to God. Now most Christians, the main battles that they fight are in their minds. Is that right? Don't be surprised. It's part of the total deal. And then we have an enemy without, who resists us. What's his name? Satan. That's right. Peter says in 1 Peter 5, 6 and 7, Your adversary the devil goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may destroy. And then it says, Resist him steadfast in the faith. And that's a continuing present tense. There's another tense which just means do it once and that's it. Doing it once with the devil is not sufficient. You have to keep on resisting him. He'll keep on pressuring you, you have to keep on resisting him. James says, Submit to God first, then resist the devil and what will happen? He will what? Flee from you. That's right. But he's pretty stubborn. He's got to be convinced you really mean it. He'll try four or five different approaches and tactics before he gives up. And then finally we live in a hostile environment, which is called the world. That's right. And Jesus said to His disciples, Don't be surprised if the world hates you, because it hated me before it hated you. And in John 15 and verse 19, He uses the phrase the world five times. He says, Do not be surprised if the world hates you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. But because you are not of the world but I've chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Five times in one verse. Now we need to understand, just briefly in closing, what is the world? The world is people and systems that are not subject to the righteous government of God in the person of Jesus Christ. So anybody who is not willing to submit to God's righteous kingdom and government in the person of Jesus, is in the category of the world. And the world and the church are two completely distinct groups. The greatest problem for the church is when the world gets into the church. And that's where our problems begin. So let me just close by pointing out to you the three forces we have to meet with. The old theology, the world, the flesh, and the devil. That's why it's simple but not easy.