Sermon Text: Matthew 3:1-12

(1) In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea,
(2) And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
(3) For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
(4) And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.
(5) Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan,
(6) And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.
(7) But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
(8) Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance:
(9) And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.
(10) And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
(11) I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire:
(12) Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

As you can see in your bulletin this morning, my subject "The Call to Repentance" is a subject that has been causing quite a stir in our country. What really is involved in repentance? Is repentance even necessary for salvation?

What I want us to do this morning is simply look into the Word of God, because to be really frank and honest about it, I'm not too worried about what man is thinking. I'm more concerned about what God is saying, to be perfectly honest about it. It's about time we come to grips with the truth in our world today and the truth is that we need to get back to the Bible. We need to forget about what a lot of men are saying, thinking, and teaching. We simply need to go to the Word of God and do what God says we need to do. Now that to me is a pretty simple program. The reason I like it is because I'm a pretty simple fellow. So consequently, I kind of like doing it the way the Bible says it needs to be done. So, this morning I want us to look to the Word of God for a few moments.

Beloved, repentance is a key Biblical truth that needs to be understood the way the Bible teaches it. That's what really counts. Now it's interesting to note the tremendous emphasis that is placed on repentance in the New Testament. For instance, I don't know how many of you who are here today have attended Bible college and seminary but I know many of you have and I'm glad for that. I think that is wonderful. I don't know if you have done a study on this word or not, but if you will look up the word repentance in your Bible, you will find that the word repentance occurs 56 times in the New Testament. That's incredible! Thirty four times in the New Testament it appears as a verb. You who are English majors understand that a verb is going to express action, existence, or occurrence. The remaining 22 times it appears as a noun. Fifty six times that word appears in the New Testament. Now folks, if a word is used 56 times in the New Testament, you are going to be hard pressed to think that that is not something that God is deeming fairly important. You don't have to be too smart to figure that out.

It is my opinion that the church, the ekklesia, is failing to be the force in the world that it should be today. It is because the church has misunderstood the primary demand of the Christian faith or repentance. You must have the doctrine of repentance in your ministry to be preaching the whole Bible. You must have it! If you don't have it, you don't have a total message, because there is a revolutionary significance of this primary demand. This is revolutionary. Therefore, the word repentance becomes imperative for the Christian life. If you don't have a proper understanding of the word repentance you are not going to have the proper understanding of what the Christian life is supposed to be all about. Now that is another message.

I want us to look at the call to repentance and faith because I think it is important that we remember that when we consider such a subject as we are looking at this morning, we do not consider that as a threat but we consider it as an invitation. A lot of it depends on your perspective. A lot of it depends on your view and how you are looking at this. Are you looking at repentance as something threatening or are you looking at it as something helpful? Consequently, I am convinced we are wrong when we look at such a word as repentance and we view it as a threat. The call to repentance is not a call to some type of morbid or remorseful way of thinking. That is not what the word repentance means. That's not what it is about.

Yet I am fearful that we do have some people who have a tendency to look at the teaching in that light because the call to repentance is an invitation to change ones basic and fundamental attitude about God, about self, about things, and about others. That's what repentance is. It's about what you are going to think as far as your attitude is concerned about God, about yourself, about things, and about others. You don't have to be a Phi Beta Kappa to understand that if you have erroneous ideas concerning any of these great ideas of thought or relationships, then you are going to be out of balance. Your life is going to be out of balance. If you don't have a right attitude and a right understanding toward God, toward yourself, toward things, and toward others in life, you're going to be walking through life sort of out of balance.

That's one of the problems we are seeing in Christianity today. We are seeing a lot of Christians who are out of balance. It's not that they are not saved, but they are simply out of balance. They are not able to balance all of that which is around them in an adequate way to where they are successfully walking through life as a child of God. Your attitude and your understanding of God, self, things, and others is all involved in your daily living. It's all there. So, it is an important subject just when we look at it in the sense of practical Christian living.

I want us to notice this morning five key statements in the Word of God in relationship to this matter of repentance. Then we will tie it all together at the end, and we will go home. If you will give your undivided attention this morning, I honestly think there is some truth from the Word of God today that can help you immensely in your Christian life as you would know Christ as Saviour.

Notice first what we read in Matthew chapter 3. Here we find John the Baptist preaching repentance. John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus Christ, is preaching repentance. It's not by accident that the New Testament opens with a trumpet blast from John the Baptist and notice what that trumpet blast is concerning. It is concerning the word repentance when John calls for the people to repent. He is calling them to radically reverse their thinking about God and His demands. That's basically what the teaching is here. They have had a thinking about God that he says they have to change. They have the wrong thinking about God.

The reason we have a lot of people who are rejecting the gospel of Jesus Christ today is simply for one reason. They have a wrong thinking about God. They don't understand what a correct thinking about God is. So John basically begins to teach the people that they must not assume because they were members of the nation of Israel that that gives them some type of position or privilege in the plan of God. We have people today who think in this way. "Well, wait a minute pastor, what are you talking about? I need to be saved and I need to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour? I'm a good person. I try to do what's right. I try to be a good citizen. I pay my bills." That's an individual's wrong thinking about themselves.

Here's one of the problems that has developed. In the world and on Christian radio today, you have all kind of psychologists, "Christian" psychologists, and they are talking about this matter of self esteem. If you get a wrong view of self, you are unbalanced. What's going to happen is that the view about self, as far as self esteem is concerned, is going to run into conflict with what you do and with what happens to you. So immediately you are out of balance. We have to have a right view of self. We live with self. There is nobody that knows me better than me amongst this group of people who are here. Everyone of us lives down deep inside somewhere where only we know ourselves and God. True or false? You can't deny that.

Now I have lived with my wife for 43 years come this July 31st and I know her pretty well and she certainly knows me pretty well. But we, after living together for 43 years, still do not know each other as we know ourselves way down deep inside where we live as an individual. Beloved, that is critical in the day and age in which we live. What John is simply doing here is telling these people that if they have erroneous ideas concerning any of these great areas of thought or relationships, they are going to be out of balance. So he says you must think right about God, about yourself, about things, and about others, because all of that impacts you on a daily basis. There is not a day goes by that you will not be impacted by those four simple thoughts. God is going to be there. Self is definitely there. Things are there. And others.

This is one of the reasons we have so much interpersonal conflict today in ministries, churches, businesses, factories, and countries. Look at the nation. Now we have the 15 million-member Southern Baptist Convention boycotting the Disney company and industry. I just received a fax from an organization in California consisting of hundreds of evangelical ministries asking me to join their boycott in support of the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney because they have simply said that we have got to take a stand for family values in this country. It is reality. You cannot deny that. Because of that which is being produced by Disney Productions today, Walt Disney would turn over in his grave if he knew what was happening. Any of you who have sat through various productions of Walt Disney 25, 35, or 40 years ago would recognize that. The theme park in Orlando last year had a gay pride holiday where they turned over the entire theme park of Disney World to the homosexual community. They had a special film where Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were homosexuals and Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck were lesbians. And they showed that in Disney World last year when they had the gay pride day. Now are you for that? Get ahold of it folk!

This is what I'm talking about. We say "Oh, wait a minute, how does this relate to the world I am living in?" Folks, that's how it relates. That's the whole thing I'm trying to get people to see today. This is a living Book. It's not some dead piece of literature you are reading. It's a living Book and it needs to be preached, it needs to be taught, it needs to be proclaimed because the answers that man is seeking as far as God is concerned, self is concerned, things are concerned, and others are concerned are found in this Book. They are not found by going to the teachings of the secular world. You can get man's ideas but you will not get God's truth. That's the issue. Here we find John the Baptist, right out of the chute, preaching repentance.

Jesus emphasized repentance. Turn to Mark 1:14-15.

(Mark 1:14) Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God,
(Mark 1:15) And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.

Jesus preached repentance. Jesus began His ministry emphasizing the need of repentance. That should settle it if anything settles it. The first recorded message that fell from the lips of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is the call to repentance and faith. Literally, He is urging the people to come to a proper attitude toward God, toward self, toward things, and toward others. What He is simply saying here is one needs to come to a proper attitude toward God and respond to God with loving trust that involves cooperation with God. That's the message of repentance.

If you study the life of Jesus you will see throughout his ministry He was continually seeking to change the attitudes of people toward God. Continually He was seeking to do that. Why? Because He recognized that unless there is a change of inner attitude, there is going to be no change in outward conduct. Some people walk down this aisle and shake Pastor Clear's hand or one of our personal worker's hands and they'll get on their knees and pray a prayer accepting Christ, they'll go up into that baptistry and get baptized, and they'll go out and begin to live a life that glorifies God. But then a few months down the road or a year or two down the road, they are history, they are out of here, and they are gone. They are back in the world living in their sin. This is simply because they did not have a proper understanding of repentance. See, they made an outward change but they never conformed inwardly. What does the Bible say? Out of the heart come the issues of life and ...

(Proverbs 23:7) For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he; ...

That's the whole issue. We have hundreds and thousands of people sitting in churches today who think they have accepted Jesus Christ as Saviour and they have never done so because they have never repented. They have never repented of their sin. There is a change that takes place for a while, but then it caves in because of no repentance. That's what Jesus is emphasizing. And it is interesting to note, the Lord concluded His ministry by emphasizing repentance. Look at Luke 24:46-47.

(Luke 24:46) And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day:
(Luke 24:47) And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

There is the end of the Saviour's ministry here on earth and here you have repentance. It is not by accident, beloved, as the Lord gave the great commission, that He emphasized that His servant should go out into the world and encourage people to change their basic attitudes and come to a proper attitude toward God, toward self, toward things, and toward others.

The third thought I want to give you is that the apostle Peter emphasized repentance on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. We'll not take time to turn there in the Scripture but as you study that great message he preached on the day of Pentecost, you'll find that the basic task of Peter and the other followers of our Lord was to bring about a change of attitude in the minds and hearts of their listeners toward God, toward self, toward things, and toward others. That's the whole thrust of Peter's message on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2.

Let me give you the fourth thing you'll find in your Bible in relationship to repentance. The apostle Paul preached repentance. We'll take time to look at that because you may not be as familiar with that passage of Scripture as you would with Acts chapter 2. Turn with me to Acts chapter 17 and look at what verse 30 says. Notice, the Bible says the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent.

(Acts 17:31) Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

What is the apostle Paul doing here? Paul is in sophisticated scholarly Athens and he is preaching Jesus Christ as the one who was crucified and who conquered death and the grave. Then he says on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, "I am challenging you and I am commanding you to repent, to change your mind and change your thinking about God, about self, about things, and about others. You've got a wrong thinking. You've got a warped thinking and you need to change that." That's what Paul is saying. It is interesting to note in Acts 20 what Paul did when he visited with the leaders of the church at Ephesus as he returned to Jerusalem. Look at Acts 20:21 and you'll see in that verse as Paul returns to Jerusalem, he declares that he had emphasized the necessity of repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.

(Acts 20:21) Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

What is Paul saying? Basically, you have to change your attitude toward God, toward self, toward things, and toward others.

The fifth and last thought is that Jesus encouraged the churches of Asia minor. If you'll read Revelation chapters 2 and 3, in these seven epistles to the churches of Asia minor, you will see repentance is not just an initial act by which one responds to God and receives the gift of forgiveness and eternal life. It's a journey. It is a long journey. It's a pilgrimage from the mind of the flesh to the mind of the spirit. We've got to change our thinking. We think wrong, is what he is saying. When we were born, we were born with wrong thinking because we have an Adamic nature. We were not born perfect, innocent, and beautiful little precious boys and girls like we think.

Last week Brother Palpant's Sunday School class went to the ball game. You need to call them and tell them to give you free tickets, because they win when you go. My son and daughter-in-law went to the game while we kept their daughter. Now, she's a petite cute little thing but she's as mean as a snake. She goes to bed at 9:30, we were told. So at 9:30 we were ready to get her to bed. About ten minutes after nine, I had been studying so I thought I would get her and rock her and by 9:30 it would be history. At 9:30, I was sleeping and she was wide eyed. I woke up and I still had her and she was looking at me. So finally, Grandma took control and said "It's time to go to bed." So, off to bed she went and closed the door. Like the sweet, innocent, and obedient child she is, she immediately closed her eyes and went to sleep. How many believe that was the plan? I see you've been there already. That wasn't the plan because when that door closed, I heard one of the most hideous ear-piercing cries I have ever heard in my life. When that door closed she was not a happy camper. It wasn't time to go to bed by her standard. Hear she is, she's only a tiny tot. She's already got the wrong idea and so do you until you come to know Jesus Christ as Saviour and repent of your sin and recognize then that you are going to be changing your mind about God, about self, about things, and about others as you grow in grace and knowledge of your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

There needs to be a turning from sin, not just once folk but again and again and again, because there are no perfect people. We are continually sinning! So there must be that daily confession of sin and repenting of sin in the life of the child of God who knows Jesus Christ. This mindest that "Oh, if I have this wonderful image of myself, it doesn't matter what I do, God still loves me." Listen, it matters what the Bible says. It's high time that people who name the name of Jesus Christ got ahold of that truth and determined by the grace of God as a Christian that they are going to obey what God says in His Bible. Therefore, I need to change my thinking about God, about self, about things, and about others. That's what repentance is all about.

My prayer today is that way down deep inside where you live as an individual, you know that you have accepted Jesus Christ as Saviour and you've repented of that sin of unbelief and you're continuing to repent of that sin that so easily besets you as you walk in the society and world in which you are living. That is the need of the hour in churches all over the United States of America today. May God by His grace allow us at this church and ministry to understand a Biblical basis for this issue of repentance.

God help us to see today that repentance is both an act and an attitude. God help us to see today that repentance is a journey in which we continually seek the mind of Jesus Christ and search and know the will of God for every area of our life. God help us to do that today.

My dear friend, if you are here today and you've never changed your mind from an attitude of revolt and rebellion against God to one of submission and obedience, let me encourage you to look to the cross of Jesus Christ and entrust your life into the hands of God today. I plead with you to do that. I beg you in Jesus' name to do that. If you are here today and you must admit that you've ignored the person of Christ, let me encourage you to look to the cross and recognize the fact that God loves you and sent His son to die on that cross for you. You can look to Him to meet the needs, beloved, in your life. You can do that. Just like if you have never faced the issues of eternity. You have never looked at the empty tomb that Christ conquered and recognized. God wants to give you eternal life. You need the Saviour today. My prayer is that you will decide today to let Him become the loving Lord and leader of your life.

In just a moment when we stand and our instruments play a couple stanzas of our invitational hymn today, "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me", I trust from all over this auditorium, as the Spirit of God would speak to hearts and lives, you'll do what God wants you to do. Honestly, down deep inside where you live as an individual, you do want to have God's perspective on what He says about Himself, what He says about you, what He says about things, and what He says about others from the Word of God.

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