The
key to the missionary and all those who are called to preach, evangelize, share
and teach any kind of group that God has called you to minister to, all has to be
grounded in repentance, remission of sins and Christ Himself is the propitiation
for our sins. There is a depth to these few words that grip your soul and open
heaven when you truly get hold of this message. God spent more time with me on
the subject of repentance than He spent on the subject of Holiness. I
understood later on, the importance of it all in my life and the life of other
Christians.
It
is sad to see how people who professed to be Christians are fighting over
whether the true Salvation called for repentance or not. Just the fact there is
disagreement over repentance tells you how bad we massacred God’s idea of
Salvation to implement our own. If you recall, in one of my posts on faith I
shared with you about the family that I know in the background and one of them
went for communion with a grudge, hatred, and anger in the heart. What I did not
tell you is that the whole family does not believe that repentance is needed in
Salvation. We cannot separate the two and when true Salvation enters your
heart, you can be sure, repentance will not be far off.
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The
truth is, without the gift of repentance in your heart there is a chain reaction
in your so called Christian life and one of them is that you will never have a
spiritual relationship with God let alone spiritual growth. Without repentance
you live the kind of Salvation like a woman with false pregnancy, clinically termed pseudocyesis, which is the belief that
you are expecting a baby when in reality you are not carrying a child. God has
taught me how Salvation and repentance are two links that are attached together
and they carry the weight of everything else that accompany Salvation, such as brokenness,
holiness, sanctification, etc. He taught me that as long as you do not know
what true repentance means, there is no true belief in your heart, there is no
humility, no need to surrender, and there will never be boldness that comes
from God either. One of the reasons He took God so long to teach me about
repentance it is because He needed to teach me how they all relate together. And
before He even taught me about the numerous pastors out there who were not
called or prepared by Him (hence the Gospel with no repentance being preached) and
the avalanche of Christian following this kind of teaching, He made sure I
could see the forest in my own eyes first before seeing others planks.
Before
my wilderness, I had evangelism training, and I used to love telling people how
they needed God. And yes I learned to tell them that Christ died for their
sins, salvation is free so that no one can boast etc. If you ever get involved
in evangelism you know the drill and we all have those verses written down to
invite people to Christ. While I was content with myself and all the work I was
involved in, after I learned the right way from God, I lost my man made
boldness and could not say a word to anyone about Salvation until God felt it
was time to give me the gift of boldness. Imagine, I was a Christian for seven
years, yet I knew nothing of repentance and I had no idea that I needed it. Through
my wilderness time, during the brokenness process and before regeneration and
holiness, God had to deal with my repentance first.
While
I was elated when God gave me the gift of boldness, but I had a sharp pain in
my heart because as I compared my man made boldness that I possessed in my
arrogance and the one given to me by God that was grounded in humility, Agape
love and also because I could see I was spiritually bankrupt without Him, my
heart was weeping. I did more harm than good in sharing the Gospel because man
helped forge a path for me to create my own footprint. One thing I used to love
doing was without having God’s righteous judgement in my heart, I pinpointed
which group was wrong and of course MY group was right. I had no idea that not
only God put all of us in the same basket, but it was not how God goes about
it. I was shocked to find out how all Churches are God’s Church but no Church
is God’s Church. While each one of us is fighting about which group is right
and we are so adamant about building “A BUILDING” for God, He is at work
gathering His own Church.
Oswald
Chambers said “the missionary’s message is the limitless importance of Jesus
Christ as the propitiation for our sins, and a missionary is someone who is
immersed in the truth of that revelation.”
Well, you do not get immersed in the truth of that revelation without
having experienced the gift of repentance coming directly from God. This truth
will be your breakfast, your dinner, your supper, your snack, the water you bathe
in, the water you drink, the life you live and the walk you walk etc. Yet, you
are never saturated enough. When God brought the gift of repentance in my heart
where I came face to face with my own bankruptcy and who He is, I bowed down
and wept for weeks. With true repentance in your heart, you know and compute
that there is a God and it is not you.
There
is a song by By Caroline Bonnett & Sue Rinaldi called “ I will follow you
to the cross and lay myself down” I recall singing this song for hours because
I was in need of God to saturate and purify me with what I found through the
gift of repentance. The truth is, most Christians live life completely
disconnected from God? Before the gift of repentance I had no idea that my life
was disconnected. I still remember my lack of victory over sin and I had no
idea what the victorious life was about. I was tired of being in love with God
for a few days and be my own self for a few months like a yo-yo. It turns out
all of it is anchored in the gift of repentance. Through this gift, my eyes
opened to what the word of God means by “victory over sin”, and I found out “my
daily life, Christ, the Holy Spirit, God, and the cross are one in the same”. All
of the sudden I found out that I have been living a life disconnected from Him,
and at the same time I knew how to connect the dot and the circle was formed
because all the links were in place.
Until
you learn true repentance from God, Salvation will be that disconnected thing
you acquire piece by piece and you decide which piece is important to you. Another
thing God taught me is that every one of us true Christian is a missionary
working with Him. The day that He taught me about being on mission with Him, I
woke up like a crazy person on a mission. I could not do anything except
getting in the car and drove miles away where I bypassed the same store chain
and I landed exactly where He wanted me to go. As I walked through the doors of
this store, I found the book sitting right there and it was in the bin because
they did not have more of it so they reduced the price. It was right before the
wilderness got really bad and I still had my car. The book is called on mission
with God written by Henry Blackaby. God
not only talked to me through the book, He wrote things in there just for me. Like
an idiot I had no idea these things were written just for me, I sent email to
my Bible study group telling them the pages where I learned all that I learned.
God taught me from this book for a whole month so that I could understand and
cooperate with Him in the work He was about to do in me. Later on, I wanted to
revisit certain things that I read, I opened the book and strangely I could not
certain things that I knew I learned from the book. I went back to my email to
see which pages I referenced before. To make a long story short, when I talked
to a friend who is kind of sampling Christianity and not interested in making a
commitment to God yet, surprisingly the person said to me “sometimes, God
writes things just for us and it is just another way of teaching us His word.” Suddenly,
I felt like God talked to me through a donkey.
God
has taught me so much about repentance that I could write a book on it, but the
truth is God has not directed me there yet and I sense that most Christians are
not ready to digest what I have learned. But the good news is, whether you are
a pastor who has never acquired the gift of repentance or whether you are a
Christian who has managed to butcher what you have received from Him, no matter
where you are at, there is hope, there is forgiveness, and there is life in
Him. Satan has done a great job with Adam and Eve in taking away and adding to
the word of God until they lost their position and died spiritually. Even in
your spiritual blindness you know something is wrong in your relationship with
Him, and often time what we do, we learned to shut up the spirit with verses
about God’s love and goodness to keep us exactly where we are, which is really,
“nowhere.” Those verses that we are claiming at the wrong time in our lives
help us to ignore this little nagging voice that is so deep down inside. You
should know the reason the voice is almost unrecognizable and so faint, it is
because your lamp is running out of fuel. There is time to go to Him and beg
Him to bring repentance in your heart, beg Him to teach you how to turn around
and make your life about Him. Pray and
never cease to pray until He answers you. Stop taking this life for granted and
stop shutting His voice down. Pray for God to lead you in a path that is
pleasing to Him, pray that He opens your heart to the truth, and pray that He
would help you to drop everything that you think you know at His feet and to
give you a blank mind to start over with Him. Most of all, pray that He gives
you the proper attitude toward Him. Pray that He would put His humility in your
heart, pray that He would teach you how to get rid of all fear to take up your
cross and follow Him. Pray that you learn to heed to His word while there is
time. Pray that you stop being scared of the word “surrender” and pray that He
drills in your heart a need to go forward in confidence, because we serve a
high priest who has been there too. PRAY, PRAY, AND PRAY.
I will
follow You to the cross (Lay myself down)
By Caroline Bonnett / Sue Rinaldi
I WILL FOLLOW YOU TO THE CROSS,
And lay myself down, lay myself down.
I will follow You to the cross
And lay myself down, lay myself down.
And lay myself down, lay myself down.
I will follow You to the cross
And lay myself down, lay myself down.
Rid me of these dirty clothes,
Cleanse me from all this pollution.
I choose to walk in purity,
Oh, purify me, purify me.
Cleanse me from all this pollution.
I choose to walk in purity,
Oh, purify me, purify me.
Kiss me with Your healing touch,
Take me to the heat of the fire;
Bathe me in Your liquid love,
Oh, saturate me, saturate me.
Take me to the heat of the fire;
Bathe me in Your liquid love,
Oh, saturate me, saturate me.
Humbly I stand, humbly I kneel,
Humbly I fall at Your throne.
With a craving for You
That no words can describe:
Humbly I fall at Your throne.
With a craving for You
That no words can describe:
Saturate me, saturate me;
Saturate me, saturate me;
Purify me, purify me;
Purify me, purify me;
Purify me, purify me
Saturate me, saturate me;
Purify me, purify me;
Purify me, purify me;
Purify me, purify me
Oswald
Chambers Message of October 15