Religious Repentance vs. Gospel Repentance

Last Sunday we looked at 3 different ways to live:

1. Religion makes law and moral obedience a means of salvation

2. Irreligion makes the individual a law to him or herself

3. Gospel takes the law of God so seriously that Jesus paid the penalty of disobedience, so we can be saved by sheer grace.

It's very easy to think you are living a gospel centered life all the while you are really living a life of religion or irreligion -- both of which are attempts at making yourself your own God.

The answer is repentance!!!  But how do you know if you are even repenting properly?  Maybe these will help. 

Religious Repentance

  Goal is to keep God happy  

Gospel Repentance

  Goal is to experience eternal joy in Christ

  

Religious Repentance

  Sorry for sin b/c of consequences 

Gospel Repentance 

  Sorry for sin b/c it breaks God’s heart 

Religious Repentance

  Way to pay the price for our own sin 

Gospel Repentance

  Jesus suffered and paid the price for our sin

Religious Repentance

  Earn our forgiveness with our repentance 

Gospel Repentance

  Just receive it

Religious Repentance

  Disappoints b/c your counting on your own morality

Gospel Repentance

  Brings freedom b/c Christ always loves us

From the Sermon this week

The Gospel Coalition is an organization of gospel minded church leaders across the globe. This is a tweet from their Twitter account from today that stuck me as I prepared for the message this week. "The gospel doesn’t just make you right with God, it frees you to delight in Him."

Works based justification makes you pay attention to who you are and what you have done and honest evaluation of this always makes you feel the weight of your inadequacies. Faith based justification puts the work on Jesus and what he has already finished and always leaves us filled.

This all reminds me of a verse that I am struck with lately (Genesis 2:25). I long to be so Christ focused that I am naked and unashamed.

Two Points:: Thursday November 18

Point 1

"You are no more capable of doing better than you are of creating new world." A W Pink.

So many of us, even those who seek to know, understand and apply the gospel, are plagued by this need to do better, to be better. I was involved in sports and church as a kid. A lot of my sports teams were very good and we were pushed to work hard, practice hard, give max effort all the time and that would yield success.

In church, I was taught the same thing. Our offering envelopes that got mailed to our house every three months had boxes on them to check off. The boxes were giving, bible brought, bible read daily, Sunday School attendance, outreach attendance and some more that I do not remember.

The point of these boxes was to get the minds of the members to think about such things. But the result that was poured into my conscience was that these are things that I could do to make God happy, to be a good Christian. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. But there is something very wrong with my working to get to God.

Point 2

Genesis 2:25 says that Adam and Eve were (pre-sin) naked and unashamed. Gen 3:7 says that Adam and Eve (post-sin)knew they were naked and so they did things to cloth themselves.

What if we stopped focusing on who or what we are and started to focus on who and what God is? What if that took away this need to try harder or try to cover ourselves? What if our problem is that we are too focused on ourselves and we need to get back to that place in the garden where we were naked and unashamed. Between Genesis 2:25 and 3:7 the physical thing that happens to Adam and Eve is that their eyes are opened to who they are. That is, they are distracted from God and His pure beauty and provision by themselves.

God is faithful

The Lord has been taking me on a journey to better live out the gospel but more importantly, to speak the gospel to the lost. For the past several months everywhere I go and everything I do has been done with the thought of, how can I communicate the gospel today. This is not a sign of my spirituality as much as it is the Lord's faithfulness to teaching me urgency in my obedience in this matter.

We, in the past couple weeks, I have had the opportunity to speak the message of Christ's death, burial, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sin, to 3 different individuals specifically. Each of these opportunities has stemmed from the Lord simply saying to me, "If you are willing and surrendered, I will use you." And so that has been my approach each day, and it's been amazing to see the Lord's faithfulness, even in my unbelief and timidity in those moments. Ask me the stories, they are really cool!

Will we remember that God's faithfulness is the means to our obedience? I challenge you to simply say each morning, "Lord I want to be minister of reconciliation today. Make me aware of opportunities to speak your name today and give me your grace to walk in obedience. I surrender."

Gen 18:14 - "Is anything too hard for the Lord."

Journeying to better obedience with you,
Dave