Repentance Part 1

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Our big enemies are Self, the Devil, and Death. Only Jesus can defeat that awful trinity. Repentance makes us focus on Jesus alone.

Only repentance can remove the guilt and shame of sin.

There is only one judgement for sin. The death of Jesus on the cross.

God has got absolutely no reason to save me and yet He wants to save me.

Repentance must be a specific condemnation of my personal sins, not a vague justification of them.

The Old King James Bible tells us God's true thoughts.

God hates the sin but loves the sinner.

Repentance makes me ashamed of my sins

People keep asking what the purpose of life is. We are born and live out our lives and then die.

So, what do our seventy-odd years of life on Earth actually achieve?

Wealthy people can be very unhappy and often die young.

There is a well-known saying that Money cannot buy happiness.

Famous sport stars only have so many years at the top of their game and then they fade away.

Ordinary people are left wondering how to find something more meaningful in life other than the hard grind of daily survival.

A deeper meaning in life can only be found in the pursuit of something bigger than yourself.

John Kennedy, the charismatic President of America in the 1960s gave out a famous challenge.

“Ask not what America can do for you, but rather ask what you can do for America,”

Many young Americans were inspired to join the American Peace Corps and went out to help people in poorer countries rather than just drifting through their routine jobs at home.

Our lives are too short and we hate and fear Death.

We need a Champion Who can defeat Death and give us hope for a better life beyond the grave.

Death is the ultimate test for a religious leader. Can he come back from the grave in a resurrection that involves an eternal body that can never die again?

Only one man did this, Jesus Christ.

We need to consider what He offers us.

Our two biggest enemies are Self and the Devil.

Self is too weak to fight the Devil and thus, as long as Self rules in our body then the Devil is able to deceive us and defeat us.

We spend our lives trying to build up an image of self-worth and self-esteem.

That makes us avoid criticism and we hide our faults. Instead of making an open confession of our mistakes, we go into a state of denial and seek to blame our circumstances or someone else.

Feeling offended is now our great grievance. This wounds our self-image and undermines our self-importance.

“How dare you say that?” is our angry rejection of a truthful statement concerning our mistakes or poor judgements. We create a delusional bubble of self-sufficiency that we try to dwell in.

Self-deception makes us hate anything that makes us look inadequate.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. Leonardo da Vinci

People crave attention and love, being made to feel special or important. Thus, the last thing they want to hear is that they are lost and cannot help themselves.

When the Gospel tells us that we need to Repent, this is the worst news that “self-righteous” Me needs to hear.

My life is ruled by the self-centred trinity of I, Me, and Myself.

In our modern age of people’s rights, we put all the emphasis on what we are entitled to and what we want but we ignore our own faults and responsibilities.

Life is a balance between giving and receiving. But Self makes us put an emphasis on what we gain.

But repentance requires the death of “Self”.

Repentance is based on sorrow. I am extremely sorry for the sins that I have committed.

I am plagued by a sense of guilt over the harm I have caused others.

I realize that I need a complete change of heart that will produce a real change in my lifestyle.

The best evidence of a repentance conversion is when people then see a big change in your life.

The change had nothing to do with yourself. You actually set out on a path to die to yourself so that you could be fiercely loyal and obedient to Jesus. A truly repentant person is so grateful for God’s undeserved mercy that Jesus becomes the most important Person in that repentant heart.

Pleasing Christ becomes the main focus of the newly repentant heart.

Getting saved is when I realize that God saved my soul 2000 years ago at Calvary. When Jesus said, It is finished, salvation was over as Jesus had won the struggle against sin on the cross.

You were born when Christ breathed your spirit, the breath of life, into your new-born baby body. Regard this new body as if it is a taxi that you are driving through life. Being a taxi, you start giving people a lift. These passengers become your friends and they keep offering advice. Some good advice and some evil advice. Devils offer us a mixture of good and evil. If they just offered evil they would put most of us off. But because they offer good and evil they can be hypocrites who are pretending to be good. That makes them very deceptive.

Under the influence of all these “friends” you start driving down the wrong roads in life and going to the wrong places.

What is salvation? One day you see Jesus standing on the side of the road and indicating that He wants a lift. Your friends in the taxi go crazy. They force you to keep driving so that you cannot stop and pick up Jesus. Any Christian influence is immediately opposed by your passengers.

But one day, for complex reasons, you defy your friends and passengers. You stop and pick up Jesus by repenting and accepting Him as your Saviour. That is what salvation means, you have a portion of the Holy Spirit of Jesus injected into your heart.

This immediately creates a big problem. All your friends and passengers are highly offended and terribly upset. They are totally opposed to your decision. It now depends on how genuinely you repented. You must prefer to follow Jesus and be prepared to lose all your passengers and friends. All those spirits that influenced your mind to believe and behave in unscriptural ways.

Their mockery and condemnation of you must leave you unchanged. You want Jesus, not them.

This is the serious decision that will affect your future. You refuse to listen to them and you start to obey Jesus. You only drive down the roads that compare with Bible standards.

You oppose drinking, smoking, drugs, gambling, pornography, swearing, and dirty jokes. Sex is only permitted after a marriage between a man and a woman. The marriage vow is for life.

These standards highly upset your passengers who hate the presence of Jesus in your taxi.

They now start getting out of the taxi. As these spirits leave, you are able to start cleaning up your life in a process called sanctification.

Getting saved is like picking up an empty jug that is dirty.

Sanctification is cleaning up the dirty jug so that it can be set aside for service.

Now you are happily steering your way through life, doing your own will in a clean and decent manner.

Then come the nagging doubts. Is this really what God wants me to do with my life?

Jesus is the only Person Who knows why God called you.

Common sense then dictates that you should swop places with Him and let Jesus sit behind the steering wheel as He steers you into God’s Will, which is always different from your own will.

Handing over your life to Jesus so that He is in full control of what you do and say is called the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Now your mind and physical body are under new management and your lifestyle will again be different. You will only trust what the Old King James Bible says. There are over a hundred new versions of the Bible that are all different from each other. Thus, they can never come to an absolute truth.

Under sanctification, you used God’s grace to clean up the sins in your life.

Under the Holy Ghost baptism, you start to clean up your beliefs as you realize that you must only believe what is written in Scripture.

The more you understand and believe the Bible, the more your faith becomes purer.

Faith that saves produces a Godly sorrow for sin

The Holy Spirit will always hate sin and grieve when we fall back into sin. Then the Spirit convicts us to repent so that we can start again to develop a deeper obedience towards God and a greater love for His Word. Only that path seems secure.

Faith is the basis for our relationship with God. We have to believe that God is Almighty and that we can only approach Him if we believe in Him. If we confess our sins then He is faithful to forgive us our sins.

Repentance clears the heart and allows us to genuinely approach God for a new start.

Saving faith produces sorrow for sin because faith has a strong desire for holiness.

In a hospital surgical theatre, everything must be sterilized and germs are an enemy that must be eliminated. Equally, people desiring holiness do not fool around with sin.

Repentance cleans the heart and allows us to see God more clearly. This clearer vision of God increases our faith in Him.

Thus, repentance and faith walk hand-in-hand to help us draw closer to Jesus.

II CORINTHIANS 7:10   “For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death”.

Unsaved people are only sorry for their sins if they are caught out and have to be punished. They are sorry for the punishment, not for the sin. If they get away with the sin then they think that they are very clever.

But godly sorrow, inspired by Christ’s Spirit within us, makes us feel very bad about our sins. Condemned by my conscience, my only escape is to repent and make right where possible.

I do not need other people to tell me of my sins, my own conscience convicts me.

The repentance that drove me to ask Christ for His salvation is something that will never be regretted.

II CORINTHIANS 7:11   “For behold this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort, what carefulness it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, yea, what vehement desire, yea, what zeal, yea, what revenge! In all things ye have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter”.

When I genuinely repent of my sins then Christ gives me godly sorrow.

This is not just an emotional response. It is a response that transforms me as it leads to spiritual growth.

Earnest and eager to please God I become very indignant about my failures as I have let God down. I reject any behaviour or attitude that is contrary to sound faith. The fear of God motivates action on my part, it does not paralyze me. This is similar to a person who is scared of losing their job. Fear of being unemployed makes them try harder in order to keep their job.

Forgiven of sin and offered Heaven in the place of Hell gives the repentant heart a zeal to do something for God in return. Wanting to be careful to choose God’s Will and not my own.

Matthew Henry sums this up very well.

“The happy fruits of true repentance are mentioned. Where the heart is changed, the life and actions will be changed. It wrought indignation at sin, at themselves, at the tempter and his instruments. It wrought a fear of watchfulness, and a cautious fear of sin. It wrought desire to be reconciled with God. It wrought zeal for duty, and against sin. It wrought revenge against sin and their own folly, by endeavours to make satisfaction for injuries done thereby. Deep humility before God, hatred of all sin, with faith in Christ, a new heart and a new life, make repentance unto salvation. May the Lord bestow it on every one of us.”

Repentance involves certain fundamental ideas

No human likes to feel guilty. There is no more effective way of removing guilt than by making a full confession. Thus, repentance opens the door for us to have our guilt removed and that alone saves us from the condemnation of our conscience. A nagging conscience is a very uncomfortable companion.

None of us want to face our sins as we cannot bear to see them. It is natural that we turn away from that horrible mess in despair. But in turning away from sin we find ourselves facing God, and to our great surprise we find that God is keen to forgive us. God loves us despite what we have done.

God has got absolutely no reason to save me and yet He wants to save me.

That is total grace, undeserved favour.

Another fundamental rule of salvation is that God wants to save us so badly that He offers us a free salvation.

II PETER 3:9   “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward,

not willing that any should perish,

but that all should come to repentance”.

God then sets up the conditions in our lives that eventually drive us to want to get saved.

ROMANS 2:4   “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering;

 not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”

Even when life seems hard, God is still acting in our best interests as He uses these adverse circumstances to drive us towards Him.

Rather like the painful cuts that a surgeon makes in our bodies to remove a malignant cancer. Once the distress is over, we are grateful for the operation.

Repentance is the beginning of the Gospel.

You do not know God if you have not repented. You just know about God.

LUKE 24:47  “And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem”.

Until we have repented, we are not Christians.

MARK 1:1   “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;

MARK 1:4   John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins”.

Repentance is not something that Jesus introduced.

Before Jesus appeared, John had already called the Jews to repentance.

The first step on the path to getting right with God is to repent.

The Gospel of Luke tells us of the prodigal son who senselessly wasted his inheritance. He realized that he deserved no sympathy for his foolishness but decided to risk going back home. Maybe his father would employ him as a servant. To his shock, his father was overjoyed with his repentance that had been brought about by his bankrupt struggles to survive.

We dread hard times and bankruptcy but they have a good side when they drive us to repentance. Anything that makes us take Jesus more seriously is good for us.

A hardened criminal thief was crucified next to Jesus and somehow saw that Jesus was the King. He knew he had no real chance of getting into Heaven but in a desperate hope, he asked Jesus just to spare a thought for him when Jesus was in His Kingdom. To his complete shock, though he knew he was total scum, he found Jesus was more than willing to open the Door to Heaven for him.

More than that, bad though he was, Jesus would send him to Paradise to warn all the great Old Testament saints that Messiah was coming to release them from Paradise and take them to Heaven. Such is the power of repentance. Jesus saw the sincere change in his heart.

Jesus is more than willing to use bad sinners even if they only repent in the last minutes of their life.

LUKE 5:32   “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance”.

Self-righteousness is a major human problem.

We see ourselves as basically good people. People often grow up in a Christian home and thus end up living a clean and decent life. There is no real bad sinful experience in their history and thus they feel that they are fine with God as they were basically born as Christians.

I JOHN 1:8  “ If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”.

Every human is born a sinner and needs to repent.

JOHN 16:8   “And when he [the Holy Spirit] is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:”

Because we live in a sinful world it is easy for us to assume that our lives are fine if we live by better standards than the sinful world offers.

But we must learn to judge sin by God’s standards.

JOB 15:15   “Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight.”

God is so righteous that even Heaven is not clean in His sight.

If God has no trust in His saints, then even the best of saints can mess up. How much more do the rest of us let God down when we think we are serving Him.

There is only one judgement for sin. The death of Jesus on the cross.

We only connect with Christ’s sacrifice when we repent.

Repentance, not self-righteousness, is the only way to escape the Judgement.

We must start with a conviction that sin is ugly and beg Christ to forgive us. We must desire to be free from anything that offends the holiness of God as we try ever harder to be involved with the righteousness that pleases God.

ISAIAH 55:6  “Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near"

God’s overwhelming mercy is that He is always near us and can thus hear our innermost thoughts.

But there is an important condition. We must not ignore God’s mercy for too long as there will one day be a cut-off time. We will hear the awful words, “Too late”.

We must be careful not to sin away our day of grace.

Repentance requires turning away from sin

We must never compromise with sin nor condone sin.

ISAIAH 55:7   “Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon”.

We must put away wrong actions but we must also discipline our minds to reject wrong thoughts and motives.

Repentance is not just saying the right words to ask for forgiveness. It also involves personal inner house-cleaning. We must stay away from bad habits and unclean thinking. Pornography is a deadly danger to many minds today. When North Korean soldiers went to Russia to fight against Ukraine in 2024, the first thing they did when they had the freedom to search the internet was to view pornography. They wanted the freedom to sin. Such is the nature of sinful man.

We tend to focus on the troubles and problems that are the consequences of sin instead of focusing on sin itself.

There are untold problems associated with drinking alcohol:

Behaviour problems and mental changes, such as inappropriate behaviour, unstable moods, impaired judgment, slurred speech, impaired attention or memory, and poor coordination.

Chronic diseases, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, liver disease, and digestive problems.

Health problems, such as cancer, mental health issues, liver problems, brain damage, and a weakened immune system.

Negative consequences, such as injuries, violence, domestic violence, chronic diseases, cancers, risky sexual behaviours, absenteeism from work or school, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Death on the roads caused by drunken drivers

The cost to a country as it tries to cope with all these abuses is frightening.

All these issues could be resolved if people just stopped drinking.

The same applies to our personal lives.

Sin has many bad side effects. If we allow God to remove the sin from our lives, all the side effects would vanish too.

Sin is simply the number one problem on the Earth today.

The only effective antidote to sin is genuine repentance. That is the only permanent cure.

A repentance that is not completely sincere sees a person trying to serve God as well as still enjoying some sin. Christians who drink a little, smoke a little, swear a little, gamble, dirty jokes, racial hatred, inappropriate dress, drugs, etc.

A genuine repentance changes our mindset until we hate sin, but we must also learn to love the sinner. This can be difficult.

We must develop an attitude that rejects sin but tolerates the sinner.

This is a difficult balance to achieve and we must pray to God for wisdom so that we can successfully separate between the sin and the person.

Remember, God hates sin but He loves sinners.

Hitler was one of the biggest mass-murderers in history. Yet as a young boy, he fell into a canal and was drowning when a Catholic priest came to his rescue. God was giving Hitler another chance.

Hitler, as a corporal in the First World War, was sitting with two friends in an isolated little hut. Officers entered the hut for a meeting and told the corporals to move out. They moved far enough away so that they could not hear the officers talking. Twenty minutes later a big artillery shell landed and exploded. The hut and the officers were blown to pieces. The three corporals were far enough away so that they were not injured. God was giving Hitler another chance.

During the Second World War there were numerous occasions when enemies planted explosives that would detonate and kill him at a certain time in a meeting. In every case he escaped death by some strange circumstances. He sometimes left the meeting earlier than expected or the bomb failed to detonate. God was giving Hitler more chances, but sadly he sinned away the days of his life until he finally killed himself.

Thus, sinners go lost because they stupidly reject the salvation that Jesus offers them.

However badly off a sinner is and however pitiful and miserable the sinner’s circumstances, there are no preconditions for salvation other than a deep desire to repent and turn to God.

Salvation is simply God offering mercy to those who realize that they are lost and hopeless.

All sins are bad, even if some are worse than others. There are no good sins.

All sins have to be repented of, as there is no other way of getting rid of sin.

Sin is like a dark stain on a pretty dress. It simply wrecks the dress which no woman has any desire to wear.

An effective career is overshadowed by an incautious sin. Bill Clinton was a talented and effective President of America for eight years but his legacy is ruined by his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. That is the part of his presidency that most people remember best.

Our sins have a bad habit of finding us out.

Any sin is bad and causes God grief.

God’s Law is like a chain. If any link snaps, then the whole chain breaks.

JAMES 2:10   “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all”.

The Covid-19 pandemic that caused so much pain and misery turned out to be a very tiny virus.

Size is not necessarily the sign that something is serious. Any sin can have bad consequences.

But humans from their hearts tend to rebel against God, especially if God has blessed them with a clever mind. Clever scientists easily become atheists to show that they do not need God.

Once the human mind decides to rebel against God, we see the wrong-doings of many religious leaders capture the headlines.

Church leaders tend to cover up many sins in order to protect their reputation and their income.

This merely proves that if there is no sincere repentance, secret sins can strike down anybody.

We have to be very careful to stay away from circumstances that can give rise to sinful conduct.

Humanity is in possession of a spiritual policeman called our conscience.

His job is to arrest any bad behaviour before it manifests itself.

The quiet voice of conscience makes one happy when you have done something good and it leaves you troubled when you have done something bad.

The voice of conscience should never be ignored, especially when it bids you to repent because you have transgressed God’s law.

Sin is simply any transgression of God’s law.

Eventually, all of our lives will be weighed up in the balances of God’s Judgements and Justice.

Babylon was the first Gentile kingdom represented by the image of a man that Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream.

Then a mysterious hand produced the writing on the wall.

“Weighed in the balances and found wanting”.

The nation of Babylon fell that night and never recovered.

We too have to give an account of our lives before the Judgement Seat of Christ.

Will He find any evidence of a sincere repentance on our side, or will we stand condemned in our own self-righteousness because we thought we were good enough.

Any single sin can condemn us because it is an abomination against the holiness of God.

Repentance must be specific and not vague.

“Forgive me for failing to keep your standards” is a good start as I then begin to name and shame my sins to my own hurt. Then I know that I am convicted of my sins.

“If I have offended someone” is a waste of time, a so-called repentance. A vague and pointless statement. It is like shadow-boxing as it does not hurt me in any way.

True repentance must cause pain and grief plus producing an energetic effort to try harder and improve. We begin to shine the harsh light of truth into our lifestyles and habits and make hard decisions to mend our ways.

PSALM 51:4   “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight:”

David is specific. He says this evil. He precisely pin-points his sin. There is no beating around the bush. His honesty is refreshing and makes him a trustworthy witness who is worth listening to.

Remorse is not always repentance as it can fear the consequences of sin rather than the sin itself.

Remorse fears the judgement of the law. It can be a shallow form of regret that lacks the deep shame and horror of sin that true confession causes.

A true repentance makes us turn away from our sins if we are truly sorry for them.

If we really turn far away from our sins, we will find ourselves turning towards God. We find solace in prayer as we hand over our struggles to God and rely on His mercy rather than being obsessed with our own interests.

A repentance that is so superficial that it allows us to continue with our sins is rather hypocritical.

Repentance leads to a new dedication to prayer as we realize we need God’s guiding hand to steer our lives. We simply cannot control all the events that cut across our lives and thus we desperately need the guidance of God.

God has an amazing way of bringing good across our paths by “chance” meetings with people who can help us. What we tend to call “Chance” is actually God’s Grace.

Things change when we pray more and thereby give God more freedom in running our lives.

We only meet God if we turn far enough away from sin

Repentance changes our thinking in certain ways.

We think differently about God and about Self.

We think differently about sin and about righteousness.

Repentance makes us see God differently.

We want to see the One that we previously ran away from.

We sought our own comfort and gain but now we are prepared to suffer for His cause.

JOB 13:15  “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him”.

Even if God kills me I will serve Him. What a change in my mindset!

I used to say that I served God because he blessed me and made it worth my while.

That was the Prosperity Gospel. Serving God was all about the benefits I got and my greed knew no bounds.

“Though He slays me”. I actually deserve death for my sins. There is absolutely no way in which I deserve a blessing.

God loves me as a filthy sinner with the stink and guilt of sin that clings to me. God hates that sin. I am so embarrassed by the filth that covers me but my desire to survive drives me to seek God like a new-born calf clings to its mother as soon as it can stand.

The calf ignores the messy afterbirth that clings to it. Mom will sort that out in time by licking it off. Such is the love of a mother. The calf just stays next to the mother. Much more than that is the love of God for a sinner.

The repentant sinner just wants to be close to God. God will sort things out for me. I just want to love Him and serve Him and stay next to Him.

My loathing for my sins somehow creates a mindset that sees me longing for the grace and mercy of God. My heart breaks under my burden of sin and tears the inner sins out of my heart. My strongest desire is to establish a deeply personal relationship with this Mighty God Who I somehow sense can solve all my problems and guide me on the right path.

Somehow I can sense that God loves me. Even though I do not deserve His love in any way.

If I have to pay a price, so be it.

Being in the will of God and under His protection is all that matters.

My heart is torn in grief for my sins but that leaves no room for pretence in my heart.

Tearing my heart open to expose my inner sins is beneficial. Tearing my clothes is just an outward show that produces no deep change. Caiaphas the High Priest tore his garments when he condemned Christ. That sham display of demonic fury actually ended the Levitical Priesthood who were not allowed to tear their robes.

With no Levitical Priesthood anymore, the way was clear for Jesus to take over as the High Priest of the Order of Melchizedek where every saved Christian is a Priest. All Christians are equal before God. No Christian is above another Christian. No Pastor is the head of a church. Jesus alone is the Head of the church.

Nobody stands between a Christian and Jesus. Nobody stood between a Priest and the High Priest.

God alone, with His thoughts written in the Bible, is the only Person Who can tell a saved Christian what to do.

The New Testament church never had a Pastor as the head of a church. That is copied from the Roman Catholics who put a Priest in charge of a church about 1900 years ago. The Roman Catholics got the idea from the pagan Babylonians who always had a Priest in charge of a Temple. It was a good business model and made the Priests rich.

In the New Testament, every local church was always run by a group of local elders.

JOEL 2:13   “And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”

My faults, failures, and sins are all open before Him. I hand that whole dismal mess over to Him.

I will now seek God’s Will and leave Him to look after my needs. Not my wants. Not my greed.

MATTHEW 6:33   “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness;

and all these things shall be added unto you”.

We need Jesus to be in charge. He alone knows what the wrath is that is to come.

So, He alone can deliver us from that oncoming wrath.

I THESSALONIANS 1:10  “And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come”.

Only believe what the Bible says. Church traditions must not replace the Bible.

If anyone disagrees with the Bible, do not listen to them. They will not escape the wrath that is to come.

When we turn away from sin we must have something to turn to. That something is the Bible.

It is God’s Word which expresses His thoughts.

You cannot separate between God and His thoughts.

The most accurately translated Bible is the Old King James Bible.

There are many modern Bible versions, but they all disagree with each other, so it is safer to avoid them.

Newer versions keep getting revised which creates more confusion.

We cannot properly turn to God until we have turned away from sin and are pleading with God for present forgiveness as we rely on God for daily grace.

None of us truly realize just how awful our sins are

The more we understand how terrible our sins are, the more we will understand the depths of God’s love and grace towards us. The fact that God wants us to turn to Him as He will abundantly pardon a repentant heart that is eager for reconciliation.

But we perish if we do not repent.

LUKE 13:5  “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish”.

The knife of sorrow cuts out the cup that holds our joy.

The more we grieve over our sins, the more we appreciate God’s grace.

God owes us nothing, we owe Him everything.

There is absolutely nothing we can do to atone for sin.

We must have zero tolerance for sin in our own lives.

But we must seek persistently for wisdom to know how to love the sinner but hate the sin.

When we repent, our awful sins flow onto Christ on the cross where a cross-over effect occurs as His righteousness and innocence flows back onto us.

ACTS 3:19   “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord;”

We come to God covered in sin but we cannot stay in this sin. The blood of Jesus on the cross cleanses us from all unrighteousness.

JEREMIAH 31:18   “… turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God”.

We must allow God’s Spirit to enter us as God alone can effectively turn us away from the sins that so easily beset us.

When we undergo a change in our hearts then there will be a noticeable change in our behaviour and lifestyle.

We have to be inwardly humbled and humiliated to produce an outward show of holiness and obedience towards God.

A tree is known by its fruit.

Repentance is a declaration of faith in a forgiving God but it is always accompanied by works that testify to the change in heart. The forgiven heart hates sin and is careful to avoid any circumstances that may lead to sin. Sin is an offence to any person who repents so that the repented person has no desire to partake of sin again.

A repentant heart trembles in the presence of a holy God and thus avoids all sins, however small.

The repentant heart realizes how serious the sin issue is and how awful the consequences of sin are. The love of God that is awakened in the repentant heart makes that person dead scared of approaching God if he or she harbours any sin in their heart.

A repented person wants all sins rooted out and through the power of faith tries to establish a stress on virtue and godly living. The focus now is on a decent and helpful life wherewith the person can labour in some way for the glory of God.

Wanting to be obedient to the Word of God is a noticeable fruit of repentance.