When you’re living in repentance,
you’re heeding the indwelling Spirit
and maintaining an ongoing, viable love
relationship (fellowship)
with our Lord Jesus
and our heavenly Father.
Unconfessed sin severs all of this.
Introduction
Sue and I were away for a few weeks
recently. Even before we left I knew in my spirit that
something new was going to be demanded of us on our return
home. Therefore I spent a good deal of focused time seeking our
Lord about what He would have us next address on behalf of His
people.
My heart has been heavy concerning this
nation’s sad state of Christianity as well as about the
suffering the economy’s downturn has brought. I’ve
also recognized that the outcome of the forthcoming elections
would change nothing in people’s motives and purpose. I needed
wisdom from our Lord to understand His perspective of these events, and guidance for
what He would have Sue and me do as His servants.
Early one morning my spirit resonated with
this message from my Lord Jesus:
“Help My people to live repentantly.
If they have ANY unconfessed sin, then they have NO fellowship
with Me or My Father. Repentance is the glue that binds the
heart of those who call themselves “Christian” to
Me and My Father. If they choose to live without repenting,
they have no part of Us. Show them the deceit of living with
unconfessed sin yet claiming to be in Me.”
Intertwined within these words was the
deep pain of a Father Who wants so much to share loving
intimacy with each of us. Yet so many who identify
themselves as “Christian” live day in and day
out with unconfessed sin, oblivious of the rupture
they’ve brought about in their fellowship with God.
He grieves for them, longing for them to
repent so that they may enjoy intimate companionship with Him.
But even worse is the tragic reality that those who habitually
ignore their tolerated sins and refuse to return to Him in
humble repentance will stray from their faith as did those
about whom Paul warned Timothy.
In the coming days of chastisement that
are about to fall upon this nation, those who refuse to repent
will increasingly give way to worldly values and goals that
reap lacerating consequences.
But those who desire
to be rich [worldly goals/values]
fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts [covetous cravings] which drown men in
destruction and perdition [lead to their ruin]. For the love of money [the
pursuit they think will empower and satisfy] is a root [a starting
point that feeds other ungodly desires] of all kinds of evil,
for which some have strayed from
the faith [disowned the Lordship of
Jesus] in their greediness, and pierced
themselves through [terrible
self-inflicted pain] with many sorrows
(1 Timothy 6:9-10).
What is our Lord’s antidote to the
tempting trap of self-fulfillment and gratification
that’s apart from Him and His ways? Purpose beforehand in your
spirit to stay repentant and walk in obedient trust through His
Spirit and His Word! As with the
pattern that permeates all of Scrip-ture, depart from evil and
wholeheartedly seek to apply His
good to your life. This calls for
intentional pursuit on your part, recognizing a spiritual
battle that’s arrayed against you:
But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith, take hold of the eternal
life to which you were called when you testified so well to
your faith before many witnesses (1
Timothy 6:11,12).
Elections change nothing. This nation
doesn’t have an economic problem — we have a spiritual one! And keep in
mind that this current distress hasn’t been initiated by
unbelievers; it’s been precipitated by those who call
themselves “Christian” but who live in compromise with the world. Sinful compromise results in prayerlessness or
ineffectual prayer — few standing in the gap before our
Father’s Throne.
The Great Depression of the 1930s (too far
back for most of us to have experienced!) was a lengthy season
of chastisement on this nation. The greed and immorality of
what has come to be called “The Roaring Twenties”
found investments plummeting and savings evaporating. That
which man had relied on proved to be the leaky lifeboat
they’d substituted for a holy life set apart in Lord
Jesus.
Note that the country had faced prior
“depressions” during which the President himself
called for prayer and fasting, bringing the nation to
repentance. This, however, was not the case in the 1930s. Then,
as now, the government became ‘god’ to the people,
many Christians in that number. Surely the
“world’s most powerful nation” could find a
way to bring back the prosperity and stability to which so many
had become accustomed as their right...
Reliance on man’s ways became
cemented. Rather than a national call to repentance, social
programs were implemented to relieve suffering — programs
such as Social Security that have now spun out of control to
encompass far more people than were initially intended. And
grievously, with an ever-decreasing percentage of workers to
fund this system, our future generations will inherit trillions
of dollars of financial debt that they can never repay.
As Christian pollster George Barna has
reported, there is no moral
difference between Christians and
unbelievers in this nation. In the realm of personal finance,
the love of money ultimately produces fear of loss in the hearts
of those who are beset by its idolatrous influence.
The Bible is replete with God’s use
of signs to point out that something’s about to happen,
along with warnings to heed these signs and respond
accordingly. A sign that the days of chastisement are coming is
the increased fear in the hearts of so many, Christian or not.
This pandemic fear is the kindling for the fires of race
riots which will ultimately ignite the cities across the
nation.
When those dark days come, you can expect
a dictator to arise in the mold of Adolf Hitler. After the 9/11
attacks, fear caused many self-preservationist Amer-icans to
willingly forfeit certain freedoms just so the government would
protect them. They were willing to do anything to ensure that
their personal status-quo would continue! To accomplish this
quest for preservation of the “way things are”, the
President set aside key parts of our Constitution. For example,
people were imprisoned without any charges filed against them.
“Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it”.
George Santayana
There’s a reason that God so often
reminded the Hebrew people to recall their past: certain life
lessons will be forgotten unless they are repeatedly re-hearsed
to each generation. Fear of economic collapse caused the
Germans to forfeit their freedoms in the 1920s. This set the
stage for Hitler’s stratospheric rise to power in the
1930s, a pattern followed by every dictator who surfaces. Use people’s fears as a stepping stone for
personal power—and become
Satan’s emissary to oppress the people.
[You may not realize an important fact of history:
democracies generally don’t last more than 200 to 300
years. Most collapse internally and become dictatorships
— perhaps initially benign but eventually morally
cancerous. How does this evolution most often take place? Out
of wholehearted, frantic pursuit of self. The so-called
“freedom” which democracies provide allow
people to unabashedly pursue their sin nature’s focus on
self-fulfillment, self-gratification, self-preservation.
God’s appraisal of human nature
hasn’t changed. Perhaps that’s why so many western
Christians are reluctant to learn from the Older Testament
about His unchanging character as well as mankind’s
unchanging propensity to sin: “The
LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had
become, and that every inclination
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis
6:5).
This nation is in the final stage of
societal decay, the Atomistic Stage. Old and young have given
way to pursuing what makes them happy, with no regard to
whether it is right or wrong in
God’s sight.]
(For more on the impact of the Atomistic
Stage in a society, see Lifebyte
30. Your
Home: Our Father’s Primary Place For Combating Your Sin
Nature.)
The future dictator who will rule this
nation will advocate such evil that the United States may well
embody the label spoken of in Revelation, chapters 17 and 18:
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF
HARLOTS AND
OF THE ABOMINATIONS
OF THE EARTH.
You may also want to prayerfully ponder
Isaiah 1:1-23. This passage clearly depicts how our Lord
responds to a nation that is so habitually bent on doing evil.
We personally don’t know where our
Lord’s command, “Help
my people to live repentantly”, will lead. But we are
confident of this: We sense a
strong presence of the Spirit of Jesus guiding us according to
the truth of His Word. Some of you who are reading these
Lifebytes want with all your hearts to please our Lord —
and your heart is what He’s looking at and longing for.
• Take a close look at yourself. When
you think of God and of the government of this nation, in which
is your trust really the greatest? How do your life choices
substantiate your response?
• How do you see God’s hand in
the events going on this nation? Is He sitting idly by, or is
He causing events to bring us to repentance? Is dependence on
the government getting in the way of His desire that we repent?
“Unless you find out the world is
evil, you will fall in love with this world. There is no
alternative.”
Michael Wurmbrand,
son of the founder of Voice of the Martyrs
“Evil”. What does this word connote to you? Do
you see yourself as evil? Prior to your becoming our
Father’s adopted child through your response to His
gracious call in Jesus, you were a slave
to evil — sin worked
within you all manner of evil desire (Romans 7:8).
Evil is
synonymous with wicked. Unless a deep love for your Lord Jesus abides
in your heart compelling you to be free of sin’s
influence in your life, you’ll never fully confront the
evil motives that rule your soul (your mind, will and
emotions). Please, be sure that your sin nature-controlled soul
isn’t ruling you when you show up at the Judgment Throne.
Our Lord has given you abundant opportunity to be free in Him!
An overriding heresy of our age is that
people are basically good. Accor-ding to pervasive humanism, society has made
people do evil. Perpetrators of wickedness are considered
victims themselves, and are therefore not responsible for their
actions. Tragically, western Christianity at large has bought
into this lie. How do we know this? Because the emphasis on
repentance, that is, the call to turn away from wickedness
and turn to a holy and righteous God, has been silenced among so
many Christian faith communities.
Your Covenant With Your Heavenly Father
Begins With And Is Maintained Through Repentance
By the grace of our holy and merciful God
we are rescued out of the world’s darkness into His
wonderful light and indwelling presence. That grace — His
wonderful call to our spirit to respond to His Spirit —
is accessed as we come to Him the way His Word calls us to. The
Hebrew Scriptures set the stage of His redemptive work in the
Newer Testa-ment, making clear throughout that He has very
defined parameters for those who enter His Kingdom.
In our Hebraic Article, The Gospel of the Covenant is the Pilgrimage to
Salvation, we discuss the five
stipulations our Father has revealed in His Word for entering
into Covenant with you. His stipulations for ratifying and
consummating His Covenant union with you are these:
1. Your Salvation Pilgrimage both begins and Continues with
your Repentance
2. Your Salvation Pilgrimage both begins and Continues with
your agape (ahav) Love
3. Your Salvation Pilgrimage both begins and Continues with
your Obedient Trust
4. Your Salvation Pilgrimage Both Begins and Continues with
Your Forceful Conviction and
Steadfast Determination
5. Your Salvation Pilgrimage Both Begins and Continues with You Forgiving Others
[We encourage you to peruse this Hebraic
Article for a fuller understanding of these scriptural
requirements.]
Even though man-pleasing, false gospels of
today have made repentance optional, our Father hasn’t.
Living repentantly binds our hearts with His and restores the
fellowship in which His perspective becomes our perspective.
Please keep in mind this particular
aspect of His perspective as you scrutinize the condition of
your own life: Your Lord does not want His “called-out
one” to simply be a church-goer. He is establishing a
Kingdom on earth among those He has called out to be
separate from the world’s ways and standards (see 1 Peter
2:9). As His workmanship, He has called you out with a special
purpose: to do your part in His body in love-grounded obedient
trust. That ongoing, loving trust evidences to both the world
and to His own that you belong to Jesus.
What has Lord Jesus called you out from? A world
system that belongs to Satan and is manipulated to do his
nefarious will. Just as Paul commissioned Timothy to expect to
suffer as a soldier of Christ, we too are to realize that
we’re in a battle against evil. We’re confronting a
world that hates His righteousness in us and is going to
respond to its father, the devil, to discredit and persecute
those who bear His name.
All forms of religion are of the devil, even contemporary
Christianity. In fact, your most
virulent enemies will be those who are devout adherents of religion, including
a Christianity that is enmeshed in man-centered
“churchianity” but has lost focus on the supreme
Lordship of Jesus in their lives.
Our Lord is establishing a Kingdom of
obedient, repentant followers who love Him with all their
heart, soul, mind and strength and therefore serve Him in doing
His will. Nothing less is expected of you if you truly belong
to Him, for He has empowered you by His Spirit to actively and
willingly fulfill His purposes.
A key purpose of any authentic follower of
Jesus is the mission of reconciliation between our gracious
Father and desperately needy humanity:
All things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Christ and has given [you]
the ministry of reconciliation:
that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not
counting men’s sins against them. And He has committed to [you] the word of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18,19).
This “ministry of
reconciliation” is exactly what our Lord Jesus has called
Sue and me to do through helping you to live repentantly out of
love for our Lord Jesus. Every time you repent of that which
has violated God by word, thought or deed, you are being
reconciled anew with your heavenly Father and His Son Jesus!
That precious direct access in His Spirit is the restoration of
fellowship with God.
• Examine your inner person closely.
When was the last time you repented of any sin? Have you become
so desensitized to sin that what God calls evil in His Word is
rationalized or excused by you?
• Are you free of ALL unconfessed sin
right now? Stop and scrutinize yourself. If you have
unconfessed sin, you have no fellowship with the Father and
Jesus. Does this even bother you? What will you do about it?
It isn’t this nation that God has told
us to help live repentantly. It is redeemed people like
yourself who believe they belong to Him. You are the one He is
concerned about if you’re living unrepentantly and
bringing His name down among unbelievers in both this country
and the rest of the world. If you are
“fellowshipping” with others who share a common
disregard for walking in Christ’s likeness and are
compromising with the world’s ways, our Father is also
concerned. Why? Your individual and collective tolerated,
unconfessed sin is evil in His
sight.
In Matthew 18:15-20, Jesus addresses the
“called-out ones” about their responsibility to
uphold communal righteousness in their fellowship with others. This passage
is one of only two in which Jesus speaks directly of the
“called-out ones”, His church. Out of love for both
our Lord and our stumbling brother or sister, we must confront
the one who is sinning that he or she might repent. Maintaining
communal righteousness within the spiritual family is critical!
A faith community that’s dedicated
to expanding the Kingdom must confront the unrepentant in their
midst. Your companions influence the way in which you live, for
better or for worse (Proverbs 13:20, 28:7; Revelation 1:9). If
you tolerate or excuse sin in your faith family, you’ll
be tempted to excuse sin in your own life — and your
children are watching to see if your life lines up with your
words! If the one you confront both individually and with
witnesses doesn’t repent, he must be excluded from
fellowship until he turns from his sin and is restored by our
Father (1 Corinthians 5:11-13).
The KINGDOM that Jesus is building in the
hearts of His followers requires personal
and communal righteousness for
true fellowship to exist —
both with Him and His Father
and with each other.
Unrepentance halts all fellowship with the
Father and Jesus! (See 1 John 1:6,7.) The KINGDOM of our Lord
is built upon the Cornerstone, King Jesus, and is manifested in
the lives of those who live repentantly with a heart’s
desire to please their Master and live in unbridled intimacy
with Him.
The apostle Paul is God’s spokesman
in his command to expel those who sin and refuse to repent.
This process isn’t contingent on the say of just one
person. Two or three witnesses are called upon to confirm that
one who is sinning is refusing to repent — to not only
confess but to also turn away from the sin.
When two are three are in agreement to
expel the person who refuses to turn from his sin, the Lord
Jesus is in their midst to uphold that action in heaven
(Matthew 18:18-20).
By confronting a brother or sister who is
walking in sin, you’re not against the person. You’re showing him or her love through being
an instrument of reconciliation as well as restoration. And,
you’re for restoring communal righteousness in your
fellowship family.
(See Chapter 11 of our book Restoring the Early Church, a free download, for
more on communal righteousness.)
• When was the last time you
witnessed an unrepentant person being removed from fellowship?
If you haven’t, is it because no one has unconfessed sin,
or because no one wants to confront the unrepentant?
• Have you ever been accused of being
“judgmental” when you’ve confronted sin in
your faith community? What is God’s perspective on
discerning and confronting sin, according to His Word?
“Isaiah was right when he prophesied
about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor Me
with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me’” (Mark 7:6).
Let’s define a hypocrite from the
biblical perspective:
A hypocrite claims to belong to God, or
falsely claims to do things on His behalf, but is neither known by Him nor does His will.
The word hypocrite is a Greek term for a
stage actor, someone who is playing a role he really
isn’t. So in our discussion, a hypocrite is pretending to
be acceptable in God’s sight yet in reality is a
deceiver.
If you look up “hypocrite(s) in a
concordance, you’ll realize how deeply pained our Lord
was by the religious leaders who foisted such guilt on the
people. His voice vented anger at the whitewashed tombs he
called “Hypocrite!”— those who claimed
to be serving God but were making people “twice as much a son of hell as
themselves” (Matthew 23:15).
Hypocrisy in the religious arena is just
as prevalent today. The religious leaders who are straining to
perpetuate their position are failing to help their people live
repentantly. If numbers in attendance is the measure of their
success, you can be sure that communal righteousness is neither
addressed nor practiced.
Yet Jesus is still rebuking those leaders
whose chief concern is their own well-being and reputation: “You hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of
heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor
will you let those enter who are trying to” (Matthew 23:13).
Ask yourself this probing question: Are you a hypocrite in God’s sight? If you are, wouldn’t you want to know
this while you’re still breathing so that you can repent
and be restored with your Lord and lovingly hear from Him and
serve Him? Our Lord warns in Matthew 7:21-23 that there will be
those in our midst who claim to do great things in God’s
Name. While from man’s perspective they’re heralded
as religious wonder-workers, from God’s perspective they
are hypocrites. They’ve failed to do His will, and will
be told straight away, “I
never knew you. Depart from Me, you who practice
lawlessness!”
Matthew relates two key passages, 24:45-51
and 25:14-30, in which our Lord compares “faithful and
wicked servants”. In each case the individual is judged
on whether he carries out the will
of his Master. This parameter is
also how Jesus identifies those He considers His family: “Whoever does
the will of My Father in heaven is
My brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50).
To fail to know the will of the Father is
irresponsible for someone who claims to follow Jesus. To know
His will and to not do it carries dire consequences. This is
especially true when He has commanded His people repeatedly to
“Repent!”
A key reason stands out for the
chastisement coming upon this nation:
Western Christendom at large has failed to
wholeheartedly seek the will of the Father and carry it out.
Too many “Christians” have
been duped into complacency by hypocritical religious leaders
who speak amusing pleasantries but avoid confrontation with sin
and the holiness of a righteous God. Faith enactment consists
of attending religious services and engaging with others in
genial social activities that do nothing to fulfill Kingdom
purposes.
Our loving Lord does not want to face
these people at the Judgment Throne and tell them, “I
never knew you.” Out of His
wondrous love He is sending dark days of chastisement to give
as many as possible a chance to repent. That’s why He has called the two of us to help
prepare you to be light in these coming days of darkness.
Please, don’t wait for those
dreadful days to come. Reexamine the purpose our Lord gave us
for the Hebraic Restoration: “Preparing
the Family of Jesus to Be Light in
Darkness”.
Wouldn’t you rather be one of our
Lord’s servants who is fully prepared to love and serve
Him during the coming darkness rather than one He must
chastise?
We encourage you to prayerfully go through
each of these Lifebytes on repentance. Prayerfully discern His
will for you and your household, making sure it aligns with His
Word. Then put it into practice, no matter what it costs you.
You’ll then be girded to go through the dark times as His
light of hope and witness to those who are suffering without
Him.
You may have noticed by the cover of this
Lifebyte that fleeing the Nicolaitan religious establishment is
essential if you’re to live according to God’s
requirement for communal
righteousness. Be certain that
others you plan to fellowship with are in fellowship with our
Lord BEFORE you fellowship with them.
Take seriously Paul’s warning to
Timothy about those who love pleasure rather than loving God (2
Timothy 3:4,5). These aren’t “pagans”! These
are folks who have a form of godliness; they may even live piously and practice
religious activities. However, as Paul notes, they deny the power that’s
needed to live in true godliness — the power that only the
indwelling Spirit of Jesus can give.
Paul leaves no room for doubt in his
command regarding spiritual counterfeits: “Turn away from
these. Have nothing to do with them!” (3:5). Their
compromise will taint your own faith walk and tempt you to
compromise as well. Thus is the name of Jesus brought down
among those who observe you.
You know if living repentantly isn’t
emphasized and upheld in your faith community. Disregard for
communal righteousness is both unedifying as well as sinful for
you and your family. Either abide by Matthew 18 and remove the
unrepentant, or get out yourself!
