Repent.

"From that time on Jesus began to preach, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near" -Matthew 4:17

Seems like the church has repented from repentance hasn't it?

I honestly don't remember the last time I preached repentance. I'm sure I could come up with a million reasons why but the honest truth is, repentance doesn't sell. 

Grace on the other hand is easy to sell. So is forgiveness. 

Just say you're sorry and God will develop sudden amnesia and no longer remember your sins. 

[read this next part like the obnoxious infomercial guy on TV]

'But wait there's more!'

'You not only get forgiven of that sin once or twice or three times. You get it all the time... no matter what you've done'

See what I mean? 
That's a lot easier to sell than this... 

“Repentance is a discovery of the evil of sin, a mourning that we have committed it, a resolution to forsake it. It is, in fact, a change of mind of a very deep and practical character, which makes the man love what once he hated, and hate what once he loved.” -Charles Spurgeon.

Lets be honest, we don’t really like to ‘repent’. We don’t want to mourn sin.
We’d rather just pray a 5 second forgive me prayer and move on to feeling better!

It doesn’t matter that there is no forsaking or turning away from the same sin that we’ve been “struggling” with for a long time.

And if anyone points that out, we can always default to the ever effective ‘stop judging me’ trump card.

What we don’t realize is not turning from our sin is keeping us from turning to Jesus.

"Repenting means experiencing a change of mind that now sees God as true and beautiful and worthy of all our praise and all our obedience." -John Piper

So in essence, when Jesus preached repentance, he was offering himself. And when we don’t preach repentance, we are holding people back from the beauty of Christ.

Repentance is hard. Repentance requires death. Repentance demands that you actually own your sin. No excuses. Repentance seeks restitution and embraces accountability.

Repentance is us on the floor, weeping because our sin grieved God, desperate for His Spirit to enable us to turn from it to Jesus.

I need repentance.

"Jesus, I’m sorry for being a coward. I’m sorry that I care more about what others think of me than what you think of me. Please forgive me for acting like you’re someone to be ashamed of. I hate this part of me. I no longer want to be a wimp. Please, PLEASE give me courage to value you above people’s opinion of me"

What about you? What do you need to repent from?

I don’t expect a lot of comments on this post cause like I said, repentance doesn’t sell. But i’m hoping you guys will surprise me. Won’t be the first time.

What do you need to repent of?

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