PROCESS OF ELIMINATING SINS’ WAGES

To love God is to honor Him in every area of our lives. This isn’t an easy thing to do… especially when we’re in sin.

One reason repentance is so important to talk about as a Christ-follower is that it’s the reason we have such a hard time maintaining or even discovering true intimacy with God. Repentance is key to a transformative lifestyle, where intimacy with God is at the center.

Acknowledging sin’s existence is technically first, but recognizing its presence in our lives is key. Once we realize sin has the power to destroy our soul, we can also comprehend how forgiveness from God through faith in Christ is the roadmap to freedom; to salvation.

SAVED BY CHRIST THROUGH REPENTANCE

Salvation isn’t received by knowledge alone. It’s only after we branch from acknowledging sin’s deadliness to repenting of our sins that we actually begin to turn away from the lifestyle of sin, towards freedom in Christ.

In other words, it’s a choice to receive salvation.

We’re shackled to sin as long as we hang onto behaviors keeping us from experiencing God. We cannot fully experience the love of God as He intended when we haven’t repented of the sin in our lives. The reason is, when we hang onto our sin, the damage of sin to our spiritual selves has an effect: distance from God.

GOD IS IN CONTROL

Let’s be sure we understand this, because it’s important. Apart from God, we can be nothing and do nothing (John 15:5). He is in control. God is our heavenly Father; our Creator, Designer, and Sustainer. To rebel against God is to rebel against the source of all life (1 Corinthians 8:6). That is what sin is: any act, word, or thought in transgression of God’s will, holiness, and perfection.

FREE WILL AND SIN

God deeply wants a relationship with us, as He displayed in how He sent His Son to die while we were still in our sin (Romans 5:8). Sin is what keeps us from Him, and He wants us near to Him like a parent wants their child close to them. Anything that gets in-between Himself and His children, He hates; God hates sin. When His children are the ones choosing the very thing that keeps them distanced, it forces Him to be distant because He won’t make us choose Him. That’s what it looks like to have free will.

By continuing to sin—not repenting of our sins—we keep ourselves distant from God. In real-time, that looks like keeping ourselves from hearing the way He’s speaking to us, or from noticing how He’s acting on our behalf. And it especially hinders our ability to experience the joy of knowing God has a unique purpose for us as we trust in His direction of our lives.

PRIDE & CONSEQUENCES OF REFUSING TO REPENT

When we hang onto what’s causing separation from God, we find ourselves unable to feel close to Him, and the distance causes life to feel incomplete, unguided, and unfulfilled. We all fill the void with something. For many people, this void plants doubt that there is even a God at all. But this is an enemy tactic; to separate us from God by keeping us in our sin and causing the rift to make us stay away from His power in our lives.

The real culprit isn’t that God doesn’t exist, nor that He doesn’t care about us. It’s really that we refuse to repent of the worldly attachments we’ve prioritized ahead of God. We live in opposition to receiving His act of forgiveness by not letting go; our pride blinds us from seeing the simplicity of God’s free gift of salvation through Jesus (2 Corinthians 11:3).

A HOLY PAYMENT DECLINED BY PRIDE

When I say “the simplicity of God’s free gift of salvation,” it references a misunderstanding so many of us have about the reality of being sent to hell. Many of us don’t see clearly what Jesus dying for sinners actually means, and we don’t grasp what His death and resurrection accomplished, spiritually. It’s not complicated, but it is awe-inducing what God for us in Christ.

God’s very presence requires perfection because He is perfect. But, He also knows we can’t attain perfection due to the pernicious nature of sin (after the Fall). That’s why He sent Jesus, and Jesus (God in flesh) was killed after living a perfect, blameless life without need of repentance. He accepted our wages upon Himself on the cross. To reject faith in Jesus is to reject repenting for our sins, and therefore it is to reject God’s presence, and His kingdom (heaven).

Jesus is the only way to God; therefore, to reject Jesus is to reject eternal life, and in turn, it is to accept the wages of our sins; the wages Jesus already paid for, but whose payment was declined by our lack of faith.

It’s simple, it’s free, but most of us decline because we’d rather stay in our sin.

UNBIBLICAL PASSIVITY TOWARDS SIN

Another issue that corrupts our ability to understand repentance is that many people substitute the truth of God’s love with an unbiblical, unfounded passivity towards evil deeds, thoughts, and behaviors. The “love is love” approach is in vain. God is a God of love just as much as He is a God of righteousness. His purity and holiness demand justice, and that means there are wages for sin in the eyes of a just God.

Otherwise, why concern ourselves with morality and conscience? If the belief is that God is just love and not righteous (which is contradictory, by the way), and Him allowing us to live our own way doesn’t upset us, then why are people so disgusted by the thought of active pedophiliacs roaming around freely? If people should accept sinful lifestyles more over time under the demonic guise that sin is only a religious construct, then eventually gay marriage and child sex trafficking will be the least of our concerns as a society.

LEGITIMIZING SIN RATHER THAN REBUKING IT

We are not loving God first when we give ourselves over to sinful lifestyles. Likewise, we are not honoring God when we validate people who label sin differently over time (relativists). When we allow ourselves and others to believe sinful behavior is more acceptable over time, or when we mitigate the intense reality of sin as eternally deleterious, we begin to legitimize people’s desire for sinful behavior as more prominent than God’s unchanging biblical commands.

This is lukewarm Christianity at its finest: trying to accommodate sin under the facade of being “open-minded,” rather than rebuking it with the power of Jesus’s holy name. 

CHRISTIANITY ISN’T ABOUT OUR DESIRES

If we want to honor God, we need to remember that life is not about us. Upon repentance, we are no longer ours, but His. Jesus paying the wages of sin for our souls means He purchased our souls with the blood He shed. This is why as Christ-followers, we say we are “saved by the blood of Jesus.” If we receive Jesus, then we must knowingly receive what it means to be a Christ-follower and live uniquely apart from the world; no longer pursuing our worldly desires, but maturing in the knowledge of Scripture, growing in Godly wisdom and in the strength of the community of the church.

REPENTANCE LEADS TO LETTING GO OF OURSELVES AND THE WORLD

If we didn’t want that relationship, we wouldn’t have repented and asked for Jesus to be our Savior in the first place. He’s only our Savior when He’s saved us from ourselves. Think about this for a moment. If we haven’t removed ourselves from our sinful lifestyles, it’s not because His power isn’t strong enough, but because our repentance wasn’t genuine. Maybe we misunderstood what it meant to take off our old self and put on our new self in Christ. That means we learn to surrender our fleshly desires of wanting to live our lives our way in order to live into the purpose God had planned for us from before the world’s creation (Ephesians 1:4).

UNREPENTANT SIN STILL HAS A COST

Jesus said to preach the gospel to all the nations of the earth (Mark 16:15). The Gospel message is to repent of our sins and receive salvation through the grace of God in Jesus. The Good News is that Jesus paid for our sins’ wages, but that reflects the truth that we have in fact sinned, and those sins, if not repented of, aren’t forgiven. 

When we live as though the grace of God means we’re free to sin because we’re forgiven, we’ve completely misunderstood the concept of grace. God’s grace extends to the humble of heart who are then able to see that the division between them and God is their prideful view of sin.

ORDER OF OPERATIONS

When we’re in our sin, we see it differently than when we’re out of it. While still in it, we don’t see life, God’s presence, His blessings, or His love the same way as after we’ve repented of it and received salvation in faith.

Salvation comes after repentance, not before. Repentance comes after we understand the reality and eternal damage sin has on our unrepentant soul. God’s grace is His allowing us to see what He sees from His perspective.

FAITH KEPT IN THE DARK VS LIFE-CHANGING REPENTANCE

Faith appears to lurk around like a secret in the lives of those who have claimed faith in God, but whom haven’t actually let go of their sin. Rather than repenting and turning away, they’ve merely decided to consider that a God exists and that there may be some truth to the Scriptures. That’s lukewarm. That’s the type of believer that Jesus spits out of His mouth (Revelation 3:16). That’s not a person on fire for God, willing to put it all on the line like Jesus did for us. That isn’t life-changing repentance. There’s no testimony to God’s grace in our lives when we hang onto sin as though God accepts our terms.

We can know we’ve received Jesus when we’re ready to let go of who we were and learn to wear who Jesus is within us. That is how it is “No longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me,” as Paul writes in Galatians 2:20.

HEART CHANGE IS AT THE CENTER OF THE FIELD OF APOLOGIES

To be crystal clear, God forgets all repented sin. If we return to our sin, then we repent again and turn away again. The key is that we aren’t looking for a way to rebel, we’re looking for God’s power to remove from us our desire to seek out sin in the first place.

Repentance isn’t like a mood switch, it’s a heart change. We’re not merely apologizing, we’re seeking to be completely remade from the inside out. We aren’t just considering not sinning anymore, we’re committed to doing whatever it takes to live in the light of Christ and to reflect His love in our thoughts, deeds, and behaviors.

Jesus was flogged and nailed to a cross for our sins. He died for us. How far are we willing to go for Him in our faith life?

IMPORTANCE OF THIS MESSAGE

There is no perfect Christ-follower. We’ve all fallen short and continue to do so (Romans 3:23). The reason why this topic of repentance is so important is because it is so undermined; so misunderstood. Too many people seem to hold onto some fallacious notion that God’s grace is so strong that our repentance doesn’t need to be.

We won’t move towards a life of glorifying God if we don’t grasp what it means to repent from sin. It’s not to say it’s easy, but with God, nothing is impossible (Luke 1:37). Why do we make so many excuses for sin instead of repudiating it through repeated use of Scripture? The devil is prowling around like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). Can we really afford to continually excuse sin, underestimate the potency of repentance, and ignore leaning everything we are in the direction of “putting on Christ”?

FINAL WORDS

This message is for someone. It’s time to repent and turn away for good. It’s time to make the decision that starts all new ones. It’s time for a life-changing set of habits that replace sinful ones. It’s time to pull back and let God speak while we listen and obey. It’s time to get plugged into the church body so we’re not facing our spiritual battles solo. It’s time to read the Bible consistently and daily, and to use Scripture to direct our lives away from fleshly thinking and toward Holy Spirit-led thinking. It’s time to let God show His power, grace, and love through our lives. It’s time!! In Jesus’s name I pray, amen!

Photo by José Martín Ramírez Carrasco on Unsplash