Tag Archives: repent

THE GOSPEL OF MARK – CHANGE YOUR AWARENESS

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CHANGE YOUR AWARENESS

At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”
12 At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, 13 and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.
14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” Mark 1:9-15

There is something of great significance in this story – three phases:

  1. Jesus spent the first thirty years of His life just being the Son; He lived in anonymity and obscurity in a Galilean village in northern Israel. He said and did nothing that was recorded except one incident recorded by Luke when He was twelve, giving us a clue to the bent of His life. At the end of those thirty years, on the eve of His public ministry, He received an audible verbal affirmation of His Father’s approval, and the visible descent of the third person of the Trinity upon Him. Both of these manifestations were assurances of God’s presence in a way a human being could understand.
  2. He was compelled into circumstances by the Holy Spirit that would test His humanity to the limit, both natural and supernatural. Trust in God is not established in ideal circumstances but in any circumstances. The awareness of God’s presence had to be cultivated in every possible human situation. There was no need for Jesus to withdraw to some ideal environment, or have everything in His life running smoothly to be aware of God. Feeling and awareness are not the same thing. Awareness has nothing to do with emotion. It has to do with conviction and response.
  3. Jesus’ announcement, “God is here,” was based on the absolute certainty of who God is, and on the experience and reassurance of God’s presence across the whole spectrum of human circumstances. He could pass on that good news to everyone around Him because He had experienced it for Himself. It was more than a doctrine. It was a conviction.

This awareness changes the whole flavour of our lives. We don’t have to change what we are doing. We need to be aware of in whose presence we are doing what we are doing; learning to do life in God. We need to cultivate that awareness as a process that will never come to an end. This one simple truth changes everything. “God is here!” Relax, rest, shalom. God is here!

THE BOOK OF ACTS – THE PROMISE IS FOR YOU

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THE PROMISE IS FOR YOU

“Cut to the quick, those who were there that day listening asked Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers! Brothers! So now what do we do?’

“Peter said, ‘Change your life. Turn to God and be baptised, each of you in the name of Jesus Christ, so your sins are forgiven. Receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is targeted to you and your children, but also to all who are far away — whomever, in fact, our Master God invites.'” Acts 2:37-39 (The Message).

The gospel in a nutshell!

Peter’s hearers had got it! They were guilty and they knew it. No excuses, no blame-shifting, no procrastinating. In an agony of conviction, they cried out, ‘What shall we do?’ Peter’s response was equally simple and direct: ‘Change your life. Turn to God. Be baptised. Receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’ Thank God there was an answer for their dilemma.

Four simple steps to a brand new life and the invitation is wide open to anyone and everyone who responds. No need for special knowledge, for practising rituals or keeping rules, for trying to get to God through a priest or through Mary or any other human mediator.

Step one: Own your guilt. You are estranged from God because of your sin nature and your rebellion against Him. Own it! You did it! You put Him to death as though you were there. He had to die because of you. Change your attitude. You are blind and deceived. You thought you could live your way but your way doesn’t work. It only leads you deeper into guilt.

Step two: Turn to God. Your blindness caused by deception and unbelief will be taken away. “Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” 2 Corinthians 3:15 (NIV).

Step three: Be baptised into the name of Jesus Christ. For them, no baptismal classes were necessary. They understood baptism, ritual washing in running water signifying cleansing and identification. Baptism was practised regularly in Jewish culture – new priests were baptised into their priestly office, Gentiles were baptised into the Jewish religion etc. They were “washed” and initiated into a new status.

Step four: Receive the Holy Spirit. This is the step that is either ignored or overstated with a lopsided emphasis on gifts or “goose-bumps’. The Holy Spirit is God’s ultimate gift to every believer on the basis of Jesus’ sacrifice. He is the “Spirit of sonship” who fuses us to Himself, guarantees and makes real who we are in Christ and administers to us everything we have inherited as sons of God.

We must receive Him as purposefully as we received Christ. We must acknowledge His presence in us, with or without evidence, and respond to Him with increasing understanding and recognition. He will do what He does if we do what we are supposed to do.

The promise is for everyone and that means you!

The Sandwich Man

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THE SANDWICH MAN

 “‘Doom, Chorazin! Doom, Bethsaida! If Tyre and Sidon had been given half the chances given you, they’d have been on their knees long ago, repenting and crying for mercy. Tyre and Sidon will have it easy on Judgment Day, compared to you.

‘And you, Capernaum! Do you think you’re about to be promoted to heaven? Think again. You’re on a mudslide to hell!

‘The one who listens to you, listens to me. The one who rejects you, rejects me. And rejecting me is the same as rejecting God, who sent me.'” Luke 10:13-16 (The Message).

It’s funny how people shrug off warnings like these as the raving of a religious fanatic!

Some 500 odd years before Jesus spoke these words, the prophet Ezekiel warned that the Phoenician city of Tyre, built on an island in the Mediterranean Sea, would disappear into the sea because of its wickedness. Alexander the Great did the unthinkable. When Tyre, thinking it was unconquerable, resisted his armies, he built a causeway from the mainland to the island and took the city, reducing it to rubble.

Although Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities, they had many links with Israel in the Old Testament era. Jesus visited the area and healed a persistent woman’s daughter who was plagued by demons. These cities did not have the opportunities to repent as did the towns of Chorazin and Bethsaida did who were visited by the very Son of God Himself.

Jesus was not sandwich man, wearing a board that said, “Prepare to meet thy doom!” He expressed His concern over their hardness of heart. Had Tyre and Sidon received the same opportunity as they had been given, they would have grabbed it and turned away from their wickedness. How tough it would be for the people of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum which Jesus frequented, healing the sick and preaching the good news of God’s kingdom on many occasions, when they stood in the blinding light of God’s holiness to realise that they has wasted their opportunity to receive Jesus and live God’s way!

Even as you read these words, there is a reaction in your own heart as there is in mine. We can either read them as history or literature, or we can take seriously what the people of these towns did not do. Why did Jesus spend time with them? He had a passionate desire to reintroduce them to the God they had either forgotten or missed in the rubble of their religion. He wanted them to know and love His Father and return to a life of submission to Him in order to experience real life.

We are so conditioned by the persistent bombardment of the entertainment world to be spectators that we are inclined to take nothing seriously. We can watch the most evil and perverse programmes and feel nothing. Every form of wickedness is portrayed on the screen to entertain us so that we become so hardened by crime, violence, and sexual perversion that we are no longer horrified and outraged by them. Even so-called Christian television has become a form of spiritual entertainment.

Jesus’ words of warning should alert us to the reality of the most pernicious disease that afflicts people both inside and outside of the church — no fear of God! What does that mean? Put in very simplistic terms, we have the same attitude as the cities and towns Jesus warned — we don’t take Him seriously.

Let’s make a resolve today, if we consider ourselves to be His disciples, that we will read what Jesus said as though He really meant it and respond with faith and obedience to His Word. What difference would it make, what changes would happen to our lives, to our homes, to our work places and to our communities if we did that?

If we really love Him, we cannot afford not to.

Stephen’s Defence

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STEPHEN’S DEFENCE

“Then the Chief Priest said,’ What do you have to say for yourself?’

“Stephen replied, ‘Friends, fathers and brothers, the God of glory appeared to our father Abraham when he was still in Mesopotamia…and told him, ‘Leave your country and go to the land I’ll show you.’ ……..

“And you continue, so bull-headed! Calluses on your hearts, flaps on your ears! Deliberately ignoring the Holy Spirit, you’re just like your ancestors. Was there ever a prophet who didn’t get the same treatment? Your ancestors killed anyone who dared talk about the coming of the Just One. And you’ve kept up the family tradition — traitors and murderers, all of you. You had God’s Law handed down to you by angels — gift -wrapped! — and you squandered it!” Acts 7:1-53 (The Message).

No wonder Stephen got the better of his opponents! He not only knew the Scriptures. He understood the Scriptures. With great skill and insight he opened the Scriptures; one more nail in his own coffin. The men he was standing before were supposed to be the experts in the Scriptures but here was a man, on trial for perverting the Word of God, who accurately and skilfully summarised the entire Old Testament with one aim in view — to put them on trial for their treatment of Jesus and His followers.

Stephen, like Jesus and His apostles, had no thought for his own skin. He was bold to proclaim and defend the truth and, in doing so, he signed his own death warrant. Once again the accusing finger pointed at the religious leaders and once again they shrugged off responsibility by removing the accuser.

Stephen was not as gentle with the men of the High Court as the apostles had been. Although they indicted them, the offer of forgiveness was woven into their accusation which the Sanhedrin neither heard nor heeded. They did not want forgiveness — they wanted power and the money that came with power! They had passed by their opportunity and Stephen spoke, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, with deadly accuracy.

What message does this incident hold for my readers? One of the clear messages of the Bible is the mercy of God extended to anyone who will listen and heed His invitation to repent, return and lay down their arms against God. He cleared the way for reconciliation and graciously gives it to anyone who will receive His gift.

But there is another side to the coin. He has endless mercy for those who will receive it but His wrath remains on those who refuse His offer. God will never force His love on anyone. He respects His gift of free will too much to go back on it. He will always give us what we want even if we destroy ourselves in the process. On judgment day no one will ever be able to accuse Him of being unfair.

No matter how unfair man’s treatment of man may be, God’s justice is final and impeccable. Stephen put his life on the line by delivering the message but it had to be done to serve God’s purposes for the Sanhedrin.

But why should Stephen have to pay for delivering a message they refused to receive anyway? God is painting His picture on a canvas much bigger than we can see or understand. It is not our place to question but to trust because He is trustworthy

Turn to God or Die

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TURN TO GOD OR DIE

“About that time some people came up and told Him about the Galileans Pilate had killed while they were at worship, mixing their blood with the blood of the sacrifices on the altar. Jesus responded, ‘Do you think those murdered Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans. Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you too will die.” Luke 13:1-3 (The Message).

Can you catch the atmosphere of this conversation? Perhaps those who were reporting the incident were expecting an outburst of outrage from Jesus against Pilate’s bloodthirsty cruelty. They would have revelled in seeing His reaction and felt justified for bringing Him the news. They thought that He would have joined with them in condemning Pilate’s action.

What they did not expect was Jesus’ sober and non-theatrical response, turning the tables on them by putting them right in the picture. It was not about Pilate, or those he had murdered, but it was about them. They were in no position to condemn Pilate when they were equally guilty of a life of sin that would kill them if they did not repent.

Jesus made it clear that God does not grade sin when it comes to our eternal destiny. There are no such things as big sins and small sins. Everything that falls short of God’s perfection is sin. God even sees the imperfections of our physical bodies as ‘sin’ because that is not what He created in the beginning – hence the laws in the Old Testament that made provision for diseases, deformities and the shedding of blood. Anything imperfect was called ‘unclean’ – tamai – and required a sacrifice once cleansing had been established.

The fact that people died an unnatural death at the hands of a tyrant was no proof that they were worse sinners than anyone else. It only revealed the decision of an evil person in an evil world. God is so often blamed for the bad things that happen to us as though He were responsible for the choices we make and the consequences of those choices.

“The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth He has given to man.” Psalm 115:16 (NIV). God gave us human beings the task of governing the earth from the beginning, with the understanding that He would set the standards by which to rule since it is His world. Adam chose to reject God’s authority and set up his own standards under the devil’s influence. God did not withdraw His mandate but He does hold us responsible for what we do with it. Hence responsibility brings with it accountability to our Creator and irresponsibility, punishment.

There are no degrees of falling short; we can miss God’s perfection by an inch or a mile; it’s all the same. Missing the mark will bring retribution – that’s what Jesus was getting at. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Galileans who died at the hands of Pilate, they were all guilty. They all fell short and did not avail themselves of the mercy God invited them to receive through the death of His Son.

Comparing ourselves with those we consider worse than us does not absolve us of our guilt. It only reveals our foolishness in believing that we can somehow get past God’s perfect justice. God does not act arbitrarily. His justice is perfectly just because He leaves us to choose.

“And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” 1 John 5:11, 12 (NIV). God has extended an unconditional invitation to everyone to choose life based on His mercy. If we receive it, we have eternal life. If we reject it, we will experience the eternal hell He warned us about.

The choice is ours.