A Blessed Invitation - Repent!

 

 The word “repentance” is a word of invitation.  You find this invitation in the Bible from one page to the other.  Many people are afraid of it; they are afraid of conviction, but they forget that it is the goodness of God that leadeth them to repentance.  There is never a meeting that we attend but that someone ought to repent, saint or sinner.  There is never a meeting when the goodness of God doesn’t make someone feel the convicting power of the Holy Spirit telling him, “Child, there is something wrong in your life” – perhaps a lack of love or prayer, or carelessness.  Your sin may not be a flagrant sin but if it is an unrepented sin, it cannot be forgiven.  Surely your sin will find you out.

What happens to those who don’t repent?  They become like whited sepulchers.  They cover their sins. The devil helps them to put on a nice exterior to fool themselves and they try to fool people and try to fool God.  What a dreadful thing that is!  That is where the dead church comes from.  That is why it has a form of godliness but denies the power thereof.  The power of God doesn’t let sin live.  It convicts.  It uncovers.  It exposes the thing that curses you, that drives you to hell, that is your destruction. 

In speaking to the first church He said, “I counsel thee to repent.”  There was a church that glowed with spiritual gifts and was adorned with holiness, as it were.  Oh, what a wonderful church, and yet there was something Jesus had against her.  How sweet of Jesus to tell her about it!

Aren’t you glad when God points out your faults to you?  Aren’t you thankful when He convicts you and doesn’t let you slip by?  I know people, sometimes even Pentecostal people, who can get away with sin.  They sin, and isn’t it strange, they don’t seem to be convicted?  That is because they have practiced it so often, they have stifled conviction, they have said, “Go away Holy Ghost, I don’t want You to talk to me.”  That is an awful thing.  We ought to open our hearts when the voice of Jesus calls us to repentance, when the loving voice of the Savior points out our sin to us.

“I have somewhat against thee, because thou has left thy first love.”  You remember how you used to pray?  You remember how you used to be eager to come to the house of God and to wait upon the Lord at the altar?  Do you remember how you loved Jesus?  Do you remember how you loved the saints, how warm your heart was, how you were filled with the Holy Ghost, how you couldn’t get enough of the Word and how you sought communion with the Lord Jesus Christ early in the morning and late at night?  It isn’t just like that anymore!  You have gotten a little bit careless. Now you do a lot of talking, a lot of visiting with people, but the Bible is on the shelf and you don’t sink at Jesus’ feet as you used to.  Be careful – that thing will lead to death.  Your candlestick may be already removed.  “Repent and do the first works.”

Repentance means to come back to Jesus.  When you do, you will find the baptism as powerful and the unction as it was when you were first baptized with the Holy Spirit.  Then you will find the love of Jesus blazing as it did of old and, best of all, He will cleanse you from your backslidings.  How powerful the results of true repentance are!  He says, if you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.  That is the wonderful thing.  Otherwise repentance wouldn’t do me any good.  I could cry my eyes out and it wouldn’t blot out one transgression, but the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth from all sin.

Oh, child of God, have you wandered far away from God?  Don’t you want to get back?  Don’t you want to be cleansed and anointed again with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven?  There is only one way – the way of repentance.  Some saints think repentance is only for sinners.  But it is to the saints that Jesus says, “I counsel thee to repent and to do the first works.”  A saint ought to be a past master at the art of repentance.  He ought to be practicing it all the time, not only once a day, but every time he discovers a slip, however slight.

“Keep me as the apple of the eye.”  What does the Psalmist mean?  He isn’t talking about a cold or lukewarm Christian.  No, he is talking about one who desires to walk the highway of holiness, who wants to keep close to Jesus.  “Keep me as the apple of the eye.”  (If you don’t know how to pray, pray Psalm 17.  You know, the best prayer book is the Bible.)

Everybody knows how sensitive the eye is.  You can have a hand full of dirt and not feel uncomfortable at all because the hands are not sensitive.  But if the slightest particle enters your eye you cannot rest until it is removed.  God in His goodness gave it a special protection.  I always say He put it in the hardest bone I have – in my head.  He sunk it right in, covered it, protecting it from assault and He gave us eyebrows and eyelashes to keep the dust out.  But then in addition to that He did something else:  He gave you a very sensitive nerve that registers the slightest particle of dust, so slight that sometimes you can’t see it.  Many times friends say, “Look into my eye.  It smarts.  It burns.”  I have looked but couldn’t discover anything.  Oh, for a heart that is sensitive like that!

Are you clean tonight?  Are you a repentant child of God?  Do you walk the path of repentance?  Do you keep checking up?  Is your heart like the eye that is constantly being washed by a living stream?  Does He keep you as the apple of His eye?  Or is your heart so calloused that you don’t even notice sin anymore, you can’t even feel it?  Oh, that is such a sad state!  I have met professing Christians who can lie, who can gossip about their neighbors, and who can live carelessly and it seems nothing bothers them.  One time I saw a man who had his eye bandaged, and I said, “What happened to your eye?”

He said, “I lost it – I broke it?”

“How did you break it?”

“I dropped it into the sink.”

It was a glass eye.  It wasn’t sensitive at all.  That is the way some Christians are.

See to it, Peter says, that when He appears you “be found of Him in peace, without spot, and blameless.”  Those three things!  Today we are waiting for the coming of the Lord.  How do you expect to meet Him?  You want to be clean, don’t you?  You want to be whiter than the snow?

You know, it is a dangerous thing to bank too much on forgiveness.  Some people when they sin say, “Oh well, I can just ask forgiveness,” and then they go and do the same thing over again and again.  That is a sure way to become calloused.

I need more than forgiveness.  I need to be cleansed from my sin.  The result of repentance is to be cleansed.  It is to have that fault removed, that weakness, that sin taken away so that it will not trip you up anymore.  Oh, child of God, our great need is to have a heart and a conscience that is void of offense toward God and man.  How shall it be unless I maintain that tenderness of conscience through the power of the Holy Spirit? 

I know of a couple who have been married about forty years.  They are ministers, and their lives have been marvelously blessed of God.  Oh, what rivers of living waters have flowed from them and are still flowing to this day.  I know how they live, for I have lived in their home.  I know how carefully they walk, how carefully they talk.  I have never seen them quarrel, but sometimes, you know, in the best regulated families there will arise some little difference of opinion, and some little word will escape that hurts the other party.  But they told me they never go to sleep until this matter is straightened out, until it is taken out of the way, and not only towards each other but towards God. 

Do you go to sleep at night having a guilty conscience or having something in your nature or life that defiles, or do you know the art of repenting?  Now you can repent.  You can do your first works.  You can get right with God.  He says, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”  That is a wonderful word, but don’t you think that because you sin isn’t as scarlet that you don’t need to repent and need cleansing.  He says to the church, “I have somewhat against thee.”  Just a little thing, but that little thing, that little fox is there, and it is the foxes that spoil the vine. 

Madame Guyon says that the spouse has to be much more careful not to hurt the feelings of her lover than a servant.  A man might excuse a servant of many things, but his spouse, oh, how carefully he watches the ties of love between them!  The closer you get to Jesus, the more careful you will live, because the more jealous God will be.  How is it now?  Do you live close to Him?  Are you living in His presence very carefully? 

There are many people who depend upon unctions of the Spirit.  They come to meeting and get a blessing, and they think, “Now it is all right because I got a blessing.”  Don’t you know that it is the goodness of God that leadeth thee to repentance?  That blessing doesn’t make up for your sin.  Oh, no!  The blessing is the mercy of God.  It is true, He embraces you and He blesses you, oh, to get that sin out of the way, to get rid of that blackness, to have that lukewarmness of your heart set on fire again with the love of Jesus Christ!

Brother, sister, do you have a tender conscience toward God?  Do you see to it that every defilement and every uncleanness is put aside – nothing between my soul and the Savior?  Oh, what a life God has for us – a life in fellowship with Him, not only over there but here!

Oh, beloved, let’s repent.  Let’s get right with God.  Let’s get under the blood of Jesus.

Precious Lord, wash me now without, within, and purge with fire if that must be.  Father, what is the uncleanness Your holy eyes behold in my life?  Jesus, there is no question at all that I want You to search me in the very depths of my thoughts and my being and to take out everything that is displeasing to Thee.

Will He do it?  He says so.