The very first step of entering the kingdom has always been
Repent.
The tragedy is so many people are becoming Christians
today without repenting.
That God is having to tell Christians to repent in this country.
He shouldn't need to be telling Christians to repent.
The church should be telling the world to repent instead.
If you are hearing from God you know that He is
telling the church, Christians, in Britain to repent
and catch up
on what they should have done years ago.
So that is the first step.
But what does it mean to repent?
Most people think it is a matter of feelings,
of tears,
of feeling sorry for what you have done.
But that may not be repentance.
It may be simply
regret.
A lot of people have feelings of regret about how they lived.
I would be surprised if there was anyone here that didn't
regret some of the decisions they have made in life.
And feelings of regret
are about what you have done to yourself.
What you have done with your own life
and your own decisions.
There are other people who have deep feelings
of what we call remorse.
And remorse is what you feel
about what you have done to others.
I remember meeting a man
suffering from venereal disease
as the result of his way of life.
And he had passed on
this venereal disease to his daughter.
And he was filled with remorse
when he saw what he had done to someone else.
He had deep feelings of remorse about it.
But that is not repentance.
Repentance has this unique feature.
That repentance is what you feel you have done to God.
That is quite different from regret and remorse.
Suddenly you realize that it is God you have hurt most.
Like the prodigal son realized it was not just his father he hurt.
He said, "Father I have sinned
against you and against heaven."
As soon as that heaven dimension comes in
and you realize it's God you have hurt most,
and you realize it''s God's laws you broke,
it's God's love you refused,
it's God's anger you provoked,
it's God's judgment you deserve,
it's God's mercy you need. When this God dimension enters in
it becomes what Paul calls, "the godly sorrow
that leads to repentance."
Regret and remorse do not necessarily lead to repentance.
Cain regretted bitterly
what he had done to Abel but he never repented of it.
He never put it right,
he never confessed it.
He only regretted the punishment he was now experiencing.
Well, that was a simple introduction.
I now want to
tell you that repentance involves three things.
So we are looking now at repentance.
In the New Testament repentance
passes through three stages.
Very simply:
Thought, Word, and Deed.
Therefore repentance takes time.
The trouble is when you are trying to lead someone
to Christ in 5 minutes at the end of a meeting
as the bus is waiting for them you can't
take them through repentance properly.
And so we make them say a sinner's prayer,
"Lord Jesus I'm sorry for all my sins, I invite you into my life, Amen."
That is not repentance.
In fact, I doubt if you can repent in general.
You probably know the general confession that is used
in Anglican churches every Sunday.
"I have left undone the things I ought to have done; and
I have done the things I ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us."
All this starts as miserable sinners, which produces a lot
of miserable congregations.
We should be happy saints, not miserable sinners.
But a general confession, when I hear it, and
my wife and I are often in Anglican churches.
Now aah...
One in our village...
I look at the congregation when they are confessing
their sins and I wonder,
"Are you thinking of anything
you have done?
Or anything you have not done?
Or are you just signing a blank check?
You see I am going to show you that repentance is always
repentance of particular sins.
You can't repent of general sins.
You can only repent of this, and this, and this.
And that involves these 3 steps.
It involves first of all
changing your mind
about particular things
and thinking God's way about them.
And when you do this you come to 2 conclusions: First,
God is a much better person than I thought He was.
And second, I am a much worse person than I thought I was.
Usually it is the other way.
When an unbeliever thinks about God
he thinks God is unfair and himself fair.
That he is better than God. Have you noticed that?
A number of people say, "Why does God do this, why
does God allow that, why should God...?"
... "I know better than God and if I were running
the universe I could do it better than He's doing it."
That is what they are saying.
And they are really setting themselves as a better person than God is.
They are saying He is making mistakes which I wouldn't.
He is treating people in a way I wouldn't.
I am, therefore, a better person than He is.
When you repent your thoughts take a somersault.
And when you catch a glimpse of His holiness and His purity
you begin to realize how lucky you are.
And you have a much lower view of yourself.
In fact, the higher your view God the lower your view yourself.
Repentance is a change of mind.
The Greek word 'metanoia' means to have second thoughts:
'meta'- change or after: 'noia'- mind
To think again about the way you have been living.
It begins when you change your mind.
When you think God's way.
And then you realize not only that your bad deeds are pretty horrible.
Amazingly you begin to see that your good deeds are just
as offensive to God.
It comes as a shock to many people
when they realize in their mind
that the best things they have ever done are not good enough for God.
And that our righteousness has to be repented of as
well as our sins.
That our good deeds as well as our bad deeds need
to be put away.
What a revolution that is!
Most people think repentance
covers the bad things you have done.
But in the Bible it covers the good things you have as well.
Let me give you 2 texts from the Bible which are a bit blunt to
a Christian congregation. The Bible is a blunt book.
It has unfortunately been tidied up in English for polite congregations.
But in the Hebrew and Greek it is a very earthy book.
Isaiah said this, the ladies will understand this,
Isaiah said,
"Our righteousness, to God,
is like a menstrual cloth."
(A disposable napkin)
That is how you feel about your righteousness
once you think God's way.
Here is one for the men.
Paul says in Philippians 3
"When I consider the commandments I kept,
not those I broke."
(And he kept 9 of the 10 commandments.)
He said, "When I consider the ones I kept
I count them as dung."
He feels like a little boy who emptied his bowels into a pot
and holds it up saying, "Look what I have done."
And he uses a very down to earth Greek word for
human excreta for which this is the well known English equivalent today.
That is the Bible.
In other words you realize that your righteousness
is as far short of God's standards as your bad deeds.
And you leave them all behind you and you say,
"Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to your cross I cling."
That is to come to the truth about yourself.
I love that story about
an old preacher in the slave plantations
in the deep south of America. He was preaching on the
Prodigal Son and he said...
"He took off his jacket and threw it away.
And he took off his shirt and threw that away.
He took off his vest and threw that away.
And then, brothers, he just came to himself."
You have missed the pun.
You're not quite with me.
To come to yourself means to finally strip away all the
covering and get to the real truth of your condition.
It is interesting, the closer you get to God the worse you feel.
The more you understand how good He is,
the more you realize how bad you are.
And realizing and thinking that way is the first major step.
But that's not the end of repentance.
The second step
is the word of repentance.
And that means first to confess sins.
Protestants, in reaction to the Catholic practice of confession,
have neglected confession.
If you had asked John the Baptist for baptism
he would have said,
"Then before you go into the water
make a public confession of your sins."
He insisted on that.
You search the New Testament and see how many times it
says confess your sins, to one another.
You know I found it is therapeutic if I am counseling an inquirer
to get them to name
the sins they want forgiven.
That does two good things for them. First of all, it helps
them to be accountable for specific things.
Somebody comes to me and says, "I'd like to be a Christian."
-"Oh, you'd like your sins forgiven?"
- "Yes."
"You'd like to be saved from your sins?"
-"Yes."
-"Then you tell me what sins you want to be saved from."
I find that's when repentance begins.
And somehow naming it gets it out into the light.
My heart always leaps when somebody says to me in those situations,
"I've never told anyone this before."
I think there is a release coming in a moment.
It's coming into the light.
It's getting out.
Even just saying it
somehow does something about it.
And it is specific then.
"Lord it is this
and it is this
and it is this."
There is no confession of general sin
in the New Testament. There are only confession
of sins, plural,
a list.
Confession also helps
to make a person responsible.
When you confess sins you can't make excuses.
You can't say, "Well, it wasn't my fault."
Because confession is to say, "It was my fault,
I chose that way."
Let me say something that could be misunderstood.
There's an awful lot of 'inner healing' around now.
And I find Christians would rather have 'inner healing'
than forgiveness.
Because forgiveness demands repentance.
And it is so easy to blame someone else for my sins.
And to say it was my parents and what they did to me.
Because of what happened to me as a child.
and to say, "I need healing, I don't need forgiveness,
I need healing."
But listen, we are not the result of what has been done to us.
We are the result of what we have done about what has been done to us.
It's the choices of reaction that we have made,
that has made us what we are.
If I am bitter,
it's because I have chosen to resent what was done to me
rather than forgive it.
And in fact I really believe that more people are in need of repentance
than 'inner healing'.
Although there is still a place for that,
where the Holy Spirit can go back and sort out
a problem from earlier years.
But the basic need of mankind is not for 'inner healing'
but for repentance that makes it possible for God to forgive:
of saying, "I am what I am now
because I chose
at crucial points in my life
a way that leads to this character.
We are all a result of our choices.
And to treat someone who is responsible for what they have
done is to treat them with the dignity of a human being.
They are not a Pavlovian dog.
You are saying to someone, "You are a human being.
You have the will to choose. You have chosen."
I have heard men in court plead,
"Well, I got into bad company Your Honor."
I have never heard a man say, "I chose that company."
Just: " I got into bad company"
But we choose our friends. We choose the company we keep.
We choose the ambitions we have.
We chose, we choose.
And confession is saying I made the wrong choice.
And I am responsible.
That is the beginning of lifting a person
to the dignity of a responsible human being.
And to get them to spell it out in words is very important.
If we confess our sins- not our sin.
If we confess our sins, which means,
to name them one by one, individually.
Then He is faithful and just
to forgive
each one--
of our sins...
and His blood goes on keeping us clean.
A beautiful promise.
As well as "Confession"
that is one part of the word for forgiveness.
It is also important with certain sins
to get a person to "renounce" that thing.
To say, in words, before God, "I am finished with it,
I will not go back to it."
To 'renounce'.
In early baptism they were always asked to renounce
the world, the flesh and the devil.
And to say publicly, "I have nothing more to do
with those false masters."
To 'renounce'
Now comes the hard part
of repentance, which is 'deeds'.
Here is a part of repentance that many people don't realize.
This is what takes time.
Repentance begins with THOUGHT
It then comes out in WORDS
but it must then come out in DEEDS.
I'll give you 2 texts:
John the Baptist said this when someone came to be baptized.
"Produce fruit worthy of repentance
then I will baptize you."
They said, "What do you mean?"
If you have too many clothes give some away.
If you're cheating with your finance, get your books straight.
If you are bullying someone because of your power, stop doing it.
And then here is one for today.
Be content with your wages.
Where are the preachers in Britain preaching that today?
Preaching it to the teachers preaching it to the nurses.
Where are the preachers preaching that?
We're not that because we are not preaching repentance.
But boy there is a practical repentance.
Be content with your wages.
How many people who are baptized in your church
do you ask them, "Are you content with your wages?"
We laugh nervously because we know we are just
getting them to repeat a general confession and
the 'sinner's prayer'.We are not pinning it to reality.
Now Paul said this,
"I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision."
But what heavenly vision was he not disobedient to?
I wonder if you know?
If you read the verse it says this,
I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision
but I preached repentance to the gentiles
that they should turn or convert to God
and prove their repentance by their deeds.
And Paul's ministry was a ministry to get people to prove
their repentance by their deeds.
I believe we should stop baptizing people on profession of faith alone
and baptize them on proof of repentance.
Now just let that sink in.
Zacheus...When Jesus came to have lunch with Zacheus, the little
man up in a tree in more ways than one.
Jesus came to his house for lunch and Zacheus said,
"I have been defrauding people."
But from now on I am going to,
"I am going to honest and straight from now on."
He did not say that
He said, "I'm going to go to everyone I have defrauded
and pay them back with interest, four-fold."
And Jesus said, "Today salvation is come to this house."
Repentance is putting the past right.
You can't put all sins right.
But there are some, the Lord will show you, can be put right.
I preached in Canberra
in the houses of parliament to members of both houses
from Australia.
And after the
time together, which was
pretty hot as they know how to heckle a speaker there.
And it was hot, but after a time
one of their most prominent politicians
as he left the room, whispered to me,
"I'm going home to re-write my income tax returns."
My heart lept!
There were no tears
but there was repentance.
He had THOUGHT God's way.
He put it into WORDS
And he was going home to re-write his income tax.
That's where the rubber hits the road, as they say.
That's repentance.
DEEDS of repentance,
doing something about it.
Putting the past right.
Bringing it to a proper conclusion,
cutting the umbilical chord that ties you to Satan's kingdom.
Tying it off so that you are free of it.
It may involve a negative thing like destroying something.
The last time I was in Ashford I had to advise
someone to go home and burn his Freemason's apron,
which he did.
Sometimes we need to do that.
In Ephesus they burned
thousands of dollars worth of occult books.
You read Acts 19.
this is all part the of the DEEDS of repentance.
And this has been so neglected in our preaching.
It is no wonder that the Lord is having to tell Christians
to go back and repent and put things right.
But when they do there is a tremendous relief.
I was preaching in Aberdeen for 3 nights in the Central Theater.
And after the second night a girl came up to me.
She was very upset, she was blotchy faced.
She was crying, she was shaking
and she said, "Oh Mr. Pawson you are frustrating me.
I want to be a Christian; I've tried to be a Christian.
I've gone forward at every evangelistic
meeting in Aberdeen for 18 months,
including the Luis Palau Crusade."
She said, "Nothing has changed
nothing has happened, I've signed cards, I've been
consoled, I've been to classes.
Nothing has happened. I'm beginning to doubt
if there is anything in it.
But I still want to be a Christian."
What do you do with a girl like that?
I looked her in the eye,
I said, "Who are you living with?"
She said, "I live with a young man."
I said,
- "Are you married to him?" - "No."
- "Are living like you are married?" - "Yes."
- "Why aren't you married?" - "He doesn't believe in it,
he says it is just a legal bit of paper.
As long as we love each other that is all that matters."
I said, "You have a very difficult decision to make.
I wish I could make it for you but I can't. You've got to make it.
You've got to decide which man you want to live with,
that young man or Jesus."
And then she really got angry.
She said, "No one else told me I had to do that."
I said, "But you've told me you are getting nowhere with any of the others."
I said, "Jesus won't join in an arrangement like that.
You've got to decide."
Now if this were a preacher's story, I would tell you she fell
on her knees, confessed and was gloriously saved.
But it is not a preacher's story, it is the truth.
So I better tell you the truth. She ran out of that theater
sobbing her heart out.
And I have thought of that girl again and again and again.
I know how Jesus felt about the rich young ruler who
wouldn't give up his money.
Do you know what the problem was?
Everybody that consoled that girl had told her to believe in Jesus.
They hadn't started by saying "Repent".
Do you see?
And so she was stuck.
And so often that is the problem.
We have started at step number 2.
Jesus and John the Baptist and Peter on the day of Pentecost
all started with the word "repent".
Now, at the practical level
to help someone to repent
you need to help them to do 3 things.
The first thing we need to help them to do
is to be serious.
Because repenting is a serious business.
It can't be taken lightly.
I am going to repeat the words of the marriage service now.
These words should not be taken lightly.
I can't remember them
I knew I said them.
Well now how do we help someone to be serious?
I doubt very much if they will be serious
unless something of fear
is in the relationship
the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
And we need to help people into the right kind of fear
to be serious.
And I think you can best do that by pointing out
where their present way of life will lead them.
The word I found most helpful for people to realize that
is the word 'perish'.
I say, "Do you realize
what it is to perish?" Now that word, in English
means exactly the same as it does in the Greek.
If you have a perished hot water bottle,
what do you have?
Is it still a hot water bottle?
Hands up of those who say it is still a hot water bottle?
Hands up those who say it is not a hot water bottle?
Hands up those who don't like putting hands up.
[The audience laughs]
Well is it still a hot water bottle or isn't it?
It looks like one, doesn't it?
It can't hold water. But is it still a hot water bottle?
Listen, when a hot water bottle is perished or a tire
it can't be used for the purpose for which it was made.
It still looks like one,
it may feel like one,
but it can't be used as one.
A 'perished' human being still looks like a human being,
feels like a human being,
but can't be used as a human being.
What do you do with something that is perished?
You throw it away.
Or you burn it in the incinerator.
Hell is God's incinerator
for 'perished' people.
They don't cease to be people
they are just no more use.
I think that is the most terrible destiny that a
human being could ever have
to become utterly useless.
Unemployment and redundancy
is enough to destroy your self respect.
But to know that you have ceased to be of any further use
to God or to anyone else,
that is what 'perished' means.
And God so loved us that He didn't want us to 'perish'.
That's what hell is.
It is a place where you are no use to yourself,
to others or to God.
And you spend the rest of your existance
with people who are no use to you
or to themselves or to God.
I can think of nothing more terrible than that.
That is the end product of living without God.
The fear of becoming utterly redundant
in God's universe.
That's the fear of the Lord.
Jesus said something about nuclear disarmament,
He said, "Don't fear those that can kill your body.
Rather fear Him who can destroy body and soul
in hell."
'Perished' people.
The second thing we need to do for people,
to help them to repent is to help them to be specific.
To confess sins. (plural)
To name them,
to get down to the nitty gritty.
If you ask someone, "Do you want to be saved from your sins?"
"Oh yes."
"Which sins do you want to be saved from?"
"Oh, all of them."
"Which ones shall we start with?"
It is too easy for people to say, "Oh yes I'm a sinner,
everybody is, everybody has sinned. I'm a sinner."
"In what way have you sinned, then?"
We need to help people to be specific. So how can we do that?
There are three ways.
The first way is a guided conversation.
In which you steer them.
Now you must keep their confidence. They must feel
you will keep their confidence.
But just steer them:
"Then, what is your besetting sin?"
What is the one you would most like to free of?
Because Jesus wants to set you free of it."
"What's the one you most hate yourself for?"
A guided conversation can become specific.
The second way is to give them a detailed list.
And a friend of mine has actually prepared a list of all kinds of
things that people get involved in.
Before he consoles someone he gives them a sheet of paper
and says, "Go through this list.
Have you you been involved in any of these occult things or
in any of these perverted habits.
And they go through and they tick them
and then he's able to console them.
It is a very practical way of doing it.
The New Testament contains about thirty lists.
And between them they cover 120 sins
which God counts as sin.
And sometimes it helpful to have a detailed list
and help them to through it
and mark them off.
A third way:
This is available to the counselor
who is moving in the Holy Spirit.
It is an immediate revelation.
Sometimes I have asked the
Holy Spirit to show the person I'm counselling
what the root problem is,
what the tap root is.
At other times I've ask Him to show me
what the root problem is and then surprise them
by asking them about it.
But the Holy Spirit wants to reveal the tap roots.
As a illustration, I found that
behind every homosexual man that I've counselled is
a sad history of a father and mother
who exchanged roles.
Where the mother became the dominant authority figure.
and the father the comfort figure.
That is why so much homosexuality is being produced.
Why the roles are being confused.
And it is the children and grandchildren who suffer
from confusion.
And I was counselling a lovely school boy;
lovely Christian.
But he was just crippled with this
temptation, which he gave way to regularly.
I felt sorry and said, "When did this begin?"
He said, "At boarding school."
Now, boy's boarding schools have a lot to answer for, believe me.
But I said, "No, the Holy Spirit is telling me
it began long before that."
And he said, "No, I can't remember it beginning before boarding school."
I said, "But the Holy Spirit tells me it was before that."
"So tell me about your parents."
It was a sad case of a wife who had been through 3 husbands.
A dominate woman who just changed partners when she wanted to.
He was the product of the third husband.
And the wife had taken the authority role in the home.
She had dominated.
The result was that when he wanted comfort
he climbed into bed with his father not his mother.
And did not realize that the father was not getting
comfort from the mother.
And was getting it from the son.
The whole thing emerged.
And it was necessary for the Holy Spirit to reveal this.
So that we could get down to the real root problem.
These are the 3 ways to get down to the specifics.
A guided conversation,
a detailed list
and an immediate revelation.
And finally, and this must be in one minute.
To be sensible.
That is necessary in 2 ways:
First: to be sensible as far as the emotions
of repentance are concerned.
Sometimes people have an exaggerated sense of guilt
over the wrong thing.
Their feelings have deceived them.
It is possible for men to feel more guilty
about masturbation, which is not mentioned in the Bible
than murder.
So we need to help them to be sensible in emotions.
And not let their feelings get things out of proportion.
Psychological guilt is not moral guilt.
And it is moral guilt that Jesus cures.
Not what we feel guilty of, but what we are guilty of.
And the other way we need to be sensible
is in the actions of repentance.
You can't go back and put everything right.
So we need to help them to be sensible about what they do.
One friend of mine went to the police and confessed
to a crime he had committed.
Taken to court he was given the lightest possible
sentence of two months,
went into prison,
preached Jesus and the prisoners called him the bishop.
So when he came out he confessed to another crime
and got back into another prison and preached
the gospel there.
He proudly told me I am the only evangelist in Britain
entirely financed by Her Majesty the Queen.
[Laughing]
Now that was within the realm of common sense.
He might have gone overboard on it.
We need to help people to be sensible about what
can be put right and what can't.
But is this way we have helped them to repent.
In the next talk we will talk about how to help people
to believe.