Repentance prepares the way for the Lord

I have often wondered how to explain the fullness of the gospel to a new or not yet believer because it is sometimes hard to properly explain or understand the union of the following three truths:

1. We are saved ONLY by grace through faith in Jesus

2. Repentance (turning from sin and idols) is a necessary and integral part of coming to Christ for the first time (salvation) and walking with Jesus for a lifetime.

3. It is not legalistic or preaching "works salvation" to say that repentance and grace go together.

I feel like my spirit knows how to understand these truths together without becoming legalistic or without preaching works salvation, but it has often felt hard for me to explain it to others without feeling like I am speaking out of both sides of my mouth. Especially when sharing the gospel with a seeking person, I love to share about the uniqueness of righteousness and merit with God being rooted in grace, not works. This sets Christianity and the person of Jesus apart from every other religion in the world! 

But to the person who does not really want God over the world, I do not want them to have false assurance of salvation if they intend on continuing a life of sin and worldliness but think that because they have prayed a prayer, they have unlimited grace, forgiveness, salvation, and "fire insurance". To this heart, the Bible says in Romans 3:8 "their condemnation is sure." God is incredibly kind, patient, and merciful when we do not deserve it, but at the end of the day, if we do not want God, he won't be mocked, and he won't force his way upon us.

I understand true faith and regeneration to have this progression: 

1. The Holy Spirit first awakens our spirit to even have the ability or capacity to see, desire, or respond in faith to God (John 3), without which we could never come to saving faith

2. We are enabled by the Spirit to see God (as in a dim mirror since we are not face to face with him)

3. As we see God high and lifted up, we are utterly disgusted with our sin and see how wretchedly nothing we are in comparison to his character

4. In this place of despair over our sin and a longing to be free, whole, and "fully human", the gospel becomes good news indeed. We realize the incredible mercy of God to come as a human to reveal Himself to us, to pay for our sins on the cross, and to offer this gift of reconciliation with Himself and forgiveness for our sin.

5. Because we view sin as disgusting slavery, and God as beautiful, merciful, holy, good, etc, we see repentance NOT as an obligation or duty, but as a great freedom and privilege. We desire to repent and be purified as God is pure. 

6. We rejoice over the crazy reality that the God of the Universe would dwell inside of us as His temple and sanctuary, and we flee from anything that would hinder our intimacy with Jesus because he is the treasure of greatest worth. 

7. We do not see repentance as anything that earns us more righteousness or love with God because we have already received and understood salvation as a free gift of rescue from the pit of our sin. When we are saved, Christ's righteousness is applied to us, and this is not a righteousness of our own, but one that comes through faith. We say with Paul in Philippians 3 that we count all of our previous "religious credentials" and the things that we once thought made us "righteous" before God as complete garbage so that we might be found in Christ, not having a righteousness of our own, but one that is by faith in the performance of Jesus on our behalf to make us righteous. It is an alien righteousness, entirely not of ourselves.

8. We see repentance as John the Baptist did: Preparing the way for the Lord's coming, making clear the path for Him to dwell richly in our hearts. 

9. Just as a married woman who loves her husband will keep herself pure for him and not pursue other lovers, so should we do unto Christ as his bride. How adulterous it is to not repent. If we do not want to repent, we do not know or love God sufficiently, and we need to fall on our knees to beg God for mercy in desiring Him over the world and self.

Now we all know that we struggle with this. We all know that there are times when sin looks more enjoyable than God (Francis Chan actually gave an awesome sermon titled this, and you can find it among all the sermons in the previous entry) and when repentance does not feel like a joyful freedom. Why is this so?

Trent gave a talk at Cross Training this week addressing the topic of why the gospel is sometimes not the best news we have ever heard. Here are a few of his notes that I wanted to share:  

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The Gospel

• We were made for unhindered intimacy with the one who made us.  
• Relationship was broken when we chose to be our own little god rather than trusting in the goodness of our creator.
• But God so loved us, and so desired that unhindered intimacy, that he, through Jesus, took the punishment in our place so that our wrongs would be made right.
• Now, through Jesus, we have access once again to unhindered intimacy with God, and the easy yoke of knowing without a doubt, what we were made for, that we are loved unconditionally, and valued supremely.

That is good news indeed, and should radically affect the way we, as individuals and as a church interact with the world!!

There’s a problem: It would appear, except in rare cases, that you and I put our hope in the same things that the world puts it’s hope in.  We live broken, scared, hurried little lives, with little evidence that the Gospel is to us good news at all.

Why?!  Why is that not the best news we have ever heard!!

As I understand it currently, here is why:

1. The Gospel is not good news because our hearts are not broken by the sin in our lives.
2. We don’t recognize the gravity of our sin because we possess a cripplingly insufficient view of God.
3. We have an insufficient view of God because we don’t really know Him
4. We don’t know Him because we are attracted to, and spend our energies in pursuit of lesser things

A.W. Tozer describes the progression this way:

 
"The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long; but even if the burdens [of this life] may be lifted from him, the burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another.  That mighty burden is his obligation to God.  It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably.  And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.  
    The Gospel can lift this destroying burden from the mind, give beauty for ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.  But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden.  Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them."

Tozer is describing a man who has gotten a glimpse of God in the context of eternity and who:

• is poor in spirit because he realizes that he has nothing apart God
• is heartbroken over his sin and mourns having been in the presence of God 
• hungers and thirsts for righteousness because he sees the free gift offered in Jesus

We’re told in Matthew 5 that the Kingdom of God is reserved for such as these. So...

• If we are to become men and women that will inherit the kingdom, we must become poor in spirit
• If we are to become poor in spirit, we must see God more rightly as he is  
• If we are to see God more rightly as He is, we must spend time with Him in adoring silence  
• If we are to spend time with Him in adoring silence, we must choose Him over lesser things

We have a little bit of a chicken and the egg sort of issue here.  On the one hand,

• we are not poor in spirit because we don’t know God,
• but on the other hand we don’t know God, because we are not poor in spirit (ie. don’t feel our need for him).

A lot of us neither fear God, nor sense our need for Him. For this reason, I fear that our predicament is even greater than we think, that the obstacles to our being in right relationship are great, and that when any one person comes to desire and choose God over the pulls of our culture, it is an absolute miracle.

Fortunately, what is impossible with man, is possible with God

So where do we start?

1. We beg God to help in revealing Himself
2. We trust God that he is the greatest and the best, that following Him is life on the highest plane, and that the end is worth it, and we make decisions for our life that allow him the space and time to reveal himself.

Tozer describes the two steps this way:
 
"Knowledge of such a being cannot be gained by study alone.  It comes by a wisdom the natural man knows nothing of, neither can know, because it is spiritually discerned.  To know God is at once the easiest and the most difficult thing in the world.  It is easy because the knowledge is not won by hard mental toil, but is something freely given.  As sunlight falls fee on the open field, so the knowledge of the holy God is a fee gift to men who are open to receive it.  But this knowledge is difficult because there are conditions to be met and the obstinate nature of fallen man does not take kindly to them."

Time and again in the bible, we see that God pours himself out on those who have great need and desire for Him, and He withholds himself from those who think they have all that they need. Jesus always says to people, “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” But he never forces his way on anyone. He draws the people who really want Him, and lets those who do not want him to “see, but not really see” and to “hear, but not really hear.”

Dallas Willard on the life of a disciple

• The person who loves and desires God and who wants to be free from sin systematically and progressively arranges their affairs to that end. Just as someone who wants to be a doctor has to systematically and progressively arrange the affairs of their life towards that end. We are all systematically and progressively arranging the affairs of our life towards some end, whether we know what it is or not. We are all worshiping and treasuring something.

Time is of the essence...tomorrow is not promised and our life is but a breath, a puff of smoke. It is my prayer that there would be amongst us (myself first), a sense of urgency. We are all quickly becoming who it is that we are going to be. CS Lewis says that no minute is insignificant as we are always moving either more towards God or away from him

• Surfing analogy: the current is always pushing you back towards the shore, so if you are sitting still, you are actually moving backwards. If you compare yourself to the people around you, you might feel like you are paddling so fast and start to feel proud, but when you compare yourself to a fixed object on the land, you realize how slow you are paddling. The current is the pulls of culture. If we are sitting idle in our pursuit of God, we will actually be falling away

Watch this clip by Francis Chan on living eternally:



When we see God, all is made well!

Without fail, those who come before God in desperate need are met by him.

• Despise themselves and repent (Job: 38-42 and especially 42:1-6)
• Declare themselves to be sinful men, unworthy of God’s presence (disciples: Luke 5:4-11)
• Fall down as one dead (Ezekiel 1:26-28, Revelation 1:17)
• Declare themselves to have unclean lips: Isaiah 6:1-5 (and vs 6-8 when his guilt is removed by this holy God and his sins forgiven, he is filled with so much boldness and surrender)
• Realize they have nothing but God (Psalm 73)

To these men and women who meet with God and recognize their sin, the news that Christ has reconciled them to their Creator, that they can be set free from the sin in their lives and enter boldly into His presence, and that they can experience a love relationship with Him is GOOD NEWS INDEED!!! He who has been forgiven much, loves much (Luke 7:47) and He who has been forgiven little, loves little.
Let us together resolve to see God high and lifted up, renounce all that is not of him, and with His help enter boldly into the relationship with him and one another that we were made for.


--end of sermon--