” Repent and believe the Gospel”
Mark 1:14-15
Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed, Hallelujah! Rev. A word of prayer!
Gracious Lord; Your Son Jesus Christ; the risen Lord is the perfect answer to the numerous question raised by our sin-blackened hearts. It is by the power of Your Spirit He declared the Good News saying, God has created a new and forgiven heart within us. Lord I pray you grant this blood-bought forgiveness to each and every ear which listens to us this day. Amen.
Rev. before anything; I must state that people don’t like to repent…not even children!
You see the problem is simple. A person who needs to repent is a person who has done something to repent of. Now the world likes to soften these repentable acts by renaming them, by calling them: errors, mistakes, lapses, ect.
The Bible refuses to play that game of understatements and labels these acts for what they are: sin. Sin is offensive to God; sin separates us from our Loving God who is the Creator of all things…either visible or invisible. Our sin when left unpardoned, demands condemnation and leads to everlasting destruction.
Rev. that sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it?
Of course it does… and so it should be: most especially if our ear has become used to the idea that Jesus loves us and accepts us just the way we are… when we have convinced ourselves that God would never, and could never send anyone to hell… especially if you believe that nobody, and by that I mean not even God, has the right to judge you and tell you to repent… so it will sound harsh!
My dear listeners, Repent of your sins for the kingdom of God is at hand! Indeed, so strong is the ordinary person’s willingness to repenting… and unrepentant sinners will go to hell?
Rev. wait a minute, I know… for Christ sake all sins are forgivable…
My brother you are right… kindly read (Matthew12:31-32) reads, “Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven. And whoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever shall speak against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age, or in the age to come.”
The same idea that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable is found in Luke 12:10 and Mark 3:29.
Rev. How do we blasphemy against the Holy Spirit?
Friends and my dear listeners; that One sin against the Holy spirit is unbelief… with our unrepentant attitude we make the Holy Spirit a liar….
How do mere human make the Holy Spirit a liar?
By refusing to believe that Jesus is the Son of the Living God; by denying the fact that Jesus is God… we make the Holy Spirit a liar by teaching things contrary to Scriptures. Mind you the Holy Spirit proceeds from God the Father and the Son with one purpose… to comfort us and to lead us to understand Jesus’ teachings…Period!
Many preachers have now decided; it is in their best interest to avoid talking about sin, repentance, condemnation, and hell.
Now I would not have you think, not for a moment, that these decisions are purely pastoral. They’re not.
Church boards and committees, whose aim is to keep attendance figures up and congregational budgets high, encourage their clergy to avoid any message which might disturb the members.
Rev. wait a minute… if you don’t pamper your members and you preach harshly, you will go hungry
Well, I pretty know… but my conscience is captive to Christ and Him crucified!
Having spent couple of years on the pulpit; I can testify: it is a hard thing to keep preaching repentance… your congregation will not grow; meanwhile other groups will start within your vicinity and blossom in no time.
How come Rev
Simply because they preach a “God loves you just the way you are” message. I agree with you Mr. Kyei when you said, I will go hungry if I continue to preach repentance…The irony is the very matured member you have raised over the period in the church will leave you and join them…
Lord have mercy. So, which form of Christianity is right?
To tell you a story: a church had a new pastor… a straight-shooting pastor who believed in condemning sin and calling for repentance and the forgiveness which comes only through faith in the crucified and risen Christ. He did a good job, a great job, but even so there were some of his people, including some of his church officers, who were upset with his directness.
One day a delegation made an appointment to see him. They entered his office, shut the door… and they began: “Pastor, you are a great guy, but we would appreciate if you could find a way to tone down your message just a bit.
With all this talk about sin and hell, repentance and remorse, contrition and confession, you’re scaring people. We don’t think it is in anyone’s best interest to be scared this way.”
This young pastor listened carefully to the people and then, when they had finished, he asked them to excuse him for just a minute. The pastor entered the office toilet and brought a gallon… which had the words POISON and the symbols which portrayed death.
Setting the gallon on his desk, the pastor replied, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I will be glad to do what you suggest if you will do me a favor. Almost all of you have a bottle like this one in your homes. What I would like you to do is go home and remove the labels and the warnings and in their stead paste another label which says, Apple Juice. Oh, and make sure your label has a photograph of some beautiful red and golden delicious apples. What do you think? We have a deal right?” said the pastor.
The visitors were shocked. “Pastor, how can you ask us to do such a thing? Our children and grandchildren might not know the bottle’s contents. They might just believe the pretty picture… read the words, and take a drink. It could kill them!”
“I agree”, replied the pastor. “And what you are asking me to do… to put a different label on the sins which I preach about, the sins which God has condemned in the Bible. You want me to say, ‘God prefers you not to do these things, but when all is said and done, He’s not going to get all that upset if you do what you want.’ Folks”,
The pastor continued, “in the same way, I can’t relabel sin so it goes down easier.”
It is getting interesting, did he finally agreed to the people’s proposal?
He didn’t.
Rev. on behalf of our listeners, kindly let me ask. Does God consider sin and the repentance of sin to be all that important?
The answer to that question is an unqualified, “Yes.” When Adam and Eve first sinned in the Garden of Eden, God didn’t look upon that as mere mistake.
He brought that sin to their attention, delivered the punishment that sin had incurred, and then, in grace through the promise of a Savior, extended a way they could still be saved. When the sins of the world had grown ponderous, God selected Noah to speak to any who would listen. For many years he called people to repentance… and, after many years, with that message unheard, God destroyed the world.
Throughout the entire Old Testament God sent His prophets to call His wandering people to repentance of their sins and reliance upon the forgiveness which could be had in the family of faith.
Read the books of the Old Testament; read the story of those prophets. Not one of them spoke about mistakes or missteps. They would not have dared to minimize the message God had given them to share.
And what was that message Rev?
God’s direction to Ezekiel is representative. God told His prophet: (Ezekiel 33:7-8 (ESV) “I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way; that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.” No, the prophets couldn’t relabel the bottle of poison to make it less frightening.
After thousands of years of prophets pronouncing God’s often unheard word of warning, the Lord sent His Son into the world. So the people might be prepared to welcome their Savior, a forerunner, a front man by the name of John the Baptizer arrived first upon the scene. And what was the message John so clearly proclaimed? The Gospel of Matthew says, “In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.'” The Gospel of Luke tells us John also said, “Bear fruits (that is, live your lives to show you are) in keeping with (this spirit of) repentance.”
Preaching repentance has never been a popular thing to do. John found that out. When his call to repentance included King Herod, the prophet was thrown into prison. There, after a while, he would lose his life for refusing to compromise his commitment. When John was being held in Herod’s dungeon, the time came to pass for Jesus to begin His ministry. You know Jesus, don’t you?
Of course you do. Repent and believe the Gospel.
Everyone knows Him as the Jesus who loves everyone, who accepts people just the way they are. And what was the message of this gentle, loving, non-judgmental Jesus? The Gospel of Matthew says this, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.'”
Did you hear that? Jesus calls for people to repent. He calls upon them to leave their old ways, their old sins, their old disobedience behind and be turned to faith in the Gospel message that His perfect life, His innocent, sin-bearing death, and glorious resurrection from the dead would bring about.
You know; today it is fashionable for people to say, “Jesus loves everybody and He would never send anyone to hell.” …………My friends, those words are true. They are true, IF they are properly understood.
Jesus doesn’t have to send any one to hell. Every sinner in the world, which means every person in the world, is headed for hell already. Our violations of God’s will and Word have made that a done deal.
And, no, that’s not my opinion. It’s a fundamental fact of Scripture. The Bible says: “the wages of sin is death.” In another location it maintains, “the soul that sins will die”, and in yet another spot it reads: “death spread to all men because all sinned.” Jesus isn’t going to send anyone to hell, but their sins are. So that we might be freed from that inevitable and inescapable reward for our transgressions, Jesus was born into this world.
If sin is no big deal, He could have saved Himself the trip. If sin is something God will ignore, there was no need for Jesus to endure the problems, pains, and penalties He endured while among us. But sin is a big deal. Sin and its consequences are so big, so overwhelming, so tragic, that the Triune God decided He would let His Son die so all who believe on Him as Savior might be rescued and redeemed.
And how about that idea that Jesus loves us just the way we are? That expression is also true. Repent and believe the Gospel. Jesus does love us the way we are, but He never leaves us the way we are. When He healed the crippled man, He forgave the man’s sins. When He rescued the woman who was to be stoned for adultery, He forgave her sins. When He healed the blind man, He forgave the man’s sins. When He met the Samaritan woman, He changed her entire life.
The reality of redemption is this: when the Holy Spirit brings a sinner to Jesus, those transgressors come before Him covered in the filth and the condemnation of sin. Jesus, in love, scrapes off that filth and makes us clean. But He does more. He takes those sins and carries them. He carries them to a place, to the cross of Calvary where they can never hurt us or condemn us again. St. Paul said it better than I ever could.
He said this (2 Corinthians 5:17-19 ESV): “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”
Repent and believe the Gospel
May the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ be praised now and forever more.. Amen!