Blessed Repentance

One of the big concerns among us here these days is that our gospel doesn't seem to have enough force to affect changes in the lives of the people who are coming to us with their needs and The obvious reason why our gospel doesn't have the force it should as it goes out of us Is because it doesn't have the force it should as it comes into us If we want to have a a tongue that's on fire all we need to do is have a heart that's on fire and Why aren't our hearts on fire Luke 15 verse 1 and following Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him and the Pharisees and the scribes murmured saying this man received sinners and eats with them So he told him this parable What man of you having a hundred sheep if he has lost one of them Does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness and go after the one which is lost until he finds it And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders rejoicing When he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors saying to them rejoice with me for I have found my sheep Which was lost Just so I tell you there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents in over 99 righteous persons who need no Repentance or what woman having ten silver coins if she loses one coin Does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors saying rejoice with me for I have found the coin Which I had lost just so I tell you there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents The core of our Lord's gospel That actually makes it a gospel good news is the word from God that God's desire is to forgive and I know a lot of people are bored by that because they don't seem to feel any need of forgiveness But for those who know themselves to be sinners, that's tremendous news And the people who heard Jesus talking like this we're hearing something for the first time in their lives. They never heard anybody Representing God tell them Such things as this that God is not looking for excuses to destroy us because of our sin But is on the other hand for the very on the other extreme really Looking for every possible means he can use short of violating our wills to save us to forgive us The God's forgiveness is aggressive Like this man who for forsakes his 99 sheep leaves them in the wilderness and goes after that one that's lost Turns the wilderness upside down scours the countryside until he finds that one sheep Or the woman who turns her house upside down looking for that one coin until she finds it Now it's the forgiveness of God that heals our lives heals everything in us that needs to be healed everything that's wrong Which is easy to say your sins are forgiven or to say rise and walk But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins rise take up your bed and go home When we're looking at Jesus hanging on the cross We're looking at God going to the ultimate extreme to forgive us Breaking his own heart that we might be delivered and Yet Though we had this river of divine forgiveness flowing closer to us than our breath Most of us are still living in a desert On the one side of this river of forgiveness is the desert of guilt and on the other side of this river of forgiveness is the desert of laxity and Most of us are in one of the other of these places Many of us are spending all our time under a cloud of guilt We can't seem to have any joy in God were blocked from any peace or doing anything useful by a condemning heart Others of us are so lax That we've allowed a thousand things to crowd God out of our lives and we still continue to go through the motions of faith But we're hollow inside Why should this be Why Should we who have tasted the stream of forgiveness revert back to becoming hollow men and women or guilt-ridden neurotics When that river of life flows right by our side And the reason is that we have failed to do the one thing that is necessary for God's forgiveness to get inside us We have forgotten How to repent and then we wonder why nobody repents How can we expect to bring people to repentance if we ourselves are not living in repentance How can we call people to come down into that pool of repentance when we're not standing in it ourselves? The most refreshing exercise we can engage in not just when we first come to faith But all through this life of flesh and blood is repentance You know to be resilient enough childlike enough to constantly turn back and repent I'm not talking about willfully going out and doing evil with the idea that by 330 this afternoon. I'll repent you know forever going out and getting drunk and then repenting and then getting drunk and repenting, you know and Considering this to be normal In fact when I begin to live a life of repentance, it won't be necessary for me to go on doing these stupid things.

I do Many of us have come to think of repentance as a negative thing. I blow it again now I have to repent I'll never make it See what repentance is our Lord calls us to it is a positive thing It's the doorway to life Every time I repent before the living God I'm visited by God repentance always brings God into me Luke 15 begins with these two parables the lost sheep and the lost coin Which both end with the description of how much joy there is in heaven over our repentance And these parables are really a description of what repentance is from God's side We see God going to all these extremes All out this to deliver us into the to save us See and in the case of the sheep the sheep doesn't do anything but wait until finally the shepherd catches up to it and The coin can't do anything. It's just a lie in the chink in the crack until the the lady finds it but in the third parable in Luke 15 Jesus now begins to reveal what's involved in repentance from the human side You know that something has to take place inside the heart of his prodigal son in order that he might be restored to his father It's not just something only that God does but it has to be something that we do too And he said there was a man who had two sons and the younger said to his father father Give me the share of property that falls to me and he divided his living between them Not many days later the younger son gathered all that he had and took his journey into a far country and there squandered his property and loose living When he had spent everything a great famine arose in that country and he began to be in want So he went and joined himself to the to one of the citizens of that country Who sent him into his fields to feed the swine? And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate and no one gave him anything But when he came to himself, he said how many of my father's hired servants have bread enough to spare But I perish here with hunger.

I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him father I have sinned against heaven and before you I am no longer worthy to be called your son Treat me as one of one of your hired servants and he arose and came to his father Notice in This instance the father does not go chasing after the son grab him by the collar Drag it back home and force him to eat the fatted calf the father waits Until the son decides to turn his heart around Until the son repents and This holds not only For the center who has never tasted God's mercy it also holds for those of us who have experienced God's mercy and come into all this and have then gradually drifted into a life of lukewarm mediocrity and Those of us who are dwelling in that lukewarm pool of mediocrity Often complain of the fact that we can't seem to sustain our faith over any length of time You know, we believe for a while and then it seems to die away our vision of God evaporates What we don't understand is that the life of faith is a life of repentance Turning to God all the time. That's what it is Jesus lived a life of faith and he had no sin to repent of and yet Jesus was constantly turning into his father's will denying himself not my will but thine be done learning obedience through the things which he suffered and For us this turning to the father is repentance It's the absolute requirement of having any of that flow of forgiveness coming into us There is no way that we can live a life of faith until we learn to live a life of repentance Until It becomes a daily thing hourly moment-by-moment matter of living in repentance our vision of God will all the time evaporate and our hearts will get hard and Our minds will be formed by the atmosphere of the world around us Even if we live in a red-hot Christian community or if we live in an island in the middle of nowhere Trying to stay away from the world Repentance Begins by emptying ourselves of our pride always But when he came to himself, he said how many of my father's hired servants have bread enough to spare? But here I perish with hunger. I will arise and go to my father Now this man knew all along That his father's hired servants were eating better than he was But he wouldn't admit it We're the same way it's like he was saying if I have to starve to death, I'm not going to come down off my high horse and So he perishes with hunger until he finally faces the truth Every time you and I experience any kind of estrangement from God Our pride is getting in our way every single time no exceptions And We say to ourselves so often but I have nowhere to turn there's no way out of this But we do have some place to turn there is help if we will come down off our pedestal and give up our vanity Perhaps for instance you're giving your wife or your husband the silent treatment And it's beginning to come become just as unpleasant for you as for your mate And the moreover, you know very well that this is hindering your prayers You but you've invested three days of misery in this campaign You don't know what I'll lose out on this God offers you healing for this mess if You will swallow your pride and repent Repentance involves confession to God Every kind of corporate worship that has ever been engaged in by believers has developed into some kind of liturgy May not be the what we're using here, but it's something I don't care if it's Quakers or was people who say we're just gonna wait on the spirit and say nothing Eventually it develops into some kind of structure Just like your body would be really you wouldn't even be able to breathe if you didn't have a skeleton You'd be a blob lying on the floor You'd suffocate in no time And the brothers and sisters in the faith down for the centuries have always understood that corporate worship begins with confession Oh God our Heavenly Father we confess unto thee That we are by nature sinful and unclean that we have sinned against thee Or all we said today I confess unto thee that I have grievously sinned against thee in many ways not only by outward transgressions But also by secret thoughts and desires, which I cannot fully understand Then we have to start getting specific if we say we have no sin We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us if we confess our sin He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness Father I have sinned Against heaven before thee and I'm no longer worthy to be called your son How many times there's some definite thing in here and we know what it is we know it But we won't even utter it to God We won't name it You know the thoughts that have been going through your head and you know the things that have crossed your lips through on the telephone and All kind we could make a long list We know what these things are doing to us We won't even name them to God and we won't we can't say we have repented until we have named these things that we know Name it say tell him After that repentance then involves the receiving of God's forgiveness with a childlike heart And He arose and came to his father But while he was yet at a distance his father saw him and had compassion on him and ran and embraced him and kissed him And the son said to him father.

I have sinned against heaven and before you I am no longer worthy to be called your son But the father said to his servants bring quickly the best robe and put it on him Put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet bring the fatted calf and kill it and let us eat and make merry for This my son was dead and is alive again. He was lost and his Once-the-father welcomes the son home And begins to shower him with love The son receives it He doesn't make some big production out of his unworthiness He's confessed his unworthiness And now as the father blesses him and showers him with good things the son receives it with childlike joy It's the epitome of pride to say no when God stretches forth his hand to forgive you Receive that forgiveness with joy and give thanks when Jesus says to you your sins are forgiven Receive it and praise him And when you come up to the altar today to eat the bread and drink the wine don't grovel Eat this and drink this with joy. It's the food of forgiveness paid for with the death of your Lord But it makes you worthy because you're unworthy And you're invited to this table receive it with joy and Thanksgiving and praise in your home Finally Repentance always involves turning and Beginning to show to those around us the forgiveness that we have received from God always Bring forth fruits that befit repentance and don't say to yourself.

We have Abraham for our father and The fruits that befit repentance are always the fruits of forgiveness Forgiveness to the people perhaps we live with that we feel are taking us for granted and we walk around With us on our hearts all the time Get rid of it. Forgive it forgive them pray God's blessing on them Or the people we wish would try to understand us and they never even begin to try it seems And we walk around feeling sorry for ourselves forgive them Get it out of your head and don't talk about it anymore Instead of having attitudes toward those strangers you don't even know Mercy Instead of cynicism toward everything around us mercy Instead of suspicion all the time suspicion mercy deeds of mercy words of mercy and especially prayers of mercy But all of this these are the fruits of repentance And if these fruits of repentance are found in our lives our repentance has no more substance than some foamy shaving cream You know, we can come down and utter crocodile tears don't five o'clock tonight But if we don't go out and so bear the fruits that befit repentance, it didn't mean one thing But when he came to himself he said how many of my father's hired servants have bread enough to spare But I perish here with hunger. I will arise and go to my father There's not an hour of our lives that our hearts are not inclined to go back to that far country to that desert of unreal thoughts false experiences Unforgiveness And every time we do the Spirit of God praises name Nudges us and encourages us to remember that the father waits for us.

It will return Why should we spend another minute in that desert When a stream of life flows right by us and all we have to do is stoop down and drink If we really want to live a life of faith If we really seriously desire to walk in God's peace and Practice God's love and If it is our earnest desire to have a word from God that will be life for those who we serve Then we're going to have to begin to make repentance our way of life If we have to repent a million times a day Because every time we do The father is there waiting every time Even now help us now to get our eyes off our brothers and sisters and all their sins And to see where we are with you Lord God and And to be open enough to Get it as the spirit begins to Indicate to our hearts those things that are getting in the way Help us Lord God to repent right now us Lord Oh God help us And teach us as a people to live lives that are continuously repent all the time father that we won't grow stale and Stagnant and finally petrify into religious mummies We ask it in Jesus name