180 Degrees

1 John 1:⁹ “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (NIV)

If you want God to lay His hands on you and fill your life with the Holy Spirit, the second of four things is REPENT. Repent of your sins, wrongdoing,

evil, gossip, backbiting, and hatred.What does it mean to repent? It simply means to take a one hundred and eighty degree turn. If you were going northward, you turn and start going southward. That is what it is to repent. Repentance is not a feeling. Repentance is an action. It can start with a feeling, but it culminates in the action. 1 John 1:⁹ “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” (NIV)

The truth is that we do not like confronting our sins. We would much rather say I had a bad attitude today. Instead of saying to God, I am sorry for being nasty and badly behaved. We like covering our sins and painting them in different ways. We would rather confess other people’s sins. What about you? What about yours? When I confess my sins what I am saying is that there is ugliness in me. And nobody likes to admit that they have ugliness. But when we confess our sins, it means we are admitting that there is ugliness in us. And we are saying, Lord, let Your loveliness take care of my ugliness, I receive Your love. But we do not like it. The unwillingness to call sin, sin is what keeps us stuck.

The Word of God says in Isaiah 59:1-2 (please read) that the hand of the Lord is not shortened that it cannot save. It is not weak that it cannot deliver. But there is insulation of iniquity and sin. When you repent and iniquity and sin are taken out of the way, the hand of the Lord is released. The hand of the Lord is released upon you in the Name of Jesus. There is so much freedom in that I can ask God for forgiveness, and He can wash me clean. It is so freeing, yet a lot of people do not get it. That is why people are sometimes upset with people who repent, and God has forgiven them. As far as they are concerned the person still needs to suffer some more.

Such people are the “Jonahs” of this world. Jonah refused to go to Nineveh because he knew God would forgive the people and he did not want any of that. He wanted the people to suffer. The beauty of repenting is the freedom we have in God. For the hand of God to be unleashed in our lives, we must repent. To repent is to do a one hundred and eighty degree turn. Repentance is an action, not a feeling. Repentance can start with a feeling, but it culminates in the action.

Prayer (song): O Lord Your Tenderness, Melting all my bitterness, O Lord, I receive Your love. O Lord, Your loveliness, Changing all my ugliness, O Lord, I receive Your love. Amen!