What is lacking in our churches?

Tonight, I’m leading The Uprising, and we have been talking about What Happened to the Power of God?. Tonight’s discussion will focus on true repentance and why we don’t do it.

After writing the discussion on repentance, a lot of things got turning in my mind. We look at repentance as this great condemning thing. We think of judgment, death, guilt, shame, etc. But that is quite the opposite of what it really is. Repentance is the door to freedom in Christ. Only the power of Christ can set us free and make us holy and wholly like Him. But we can only gain access to that power through repentance.

Now, repentance is not that time you came to an altar and asked for forgiveness only to go back to those things that you supposedly repented of the very next day. On the contrary, true repentance causes a revolution to take place in your life. If we continue to live as before, then we must question our salvation and question our repentance. True repentance will cause deep change to take place in our lives.

As I got to the end of writing, this part of it really nailed me.

We aren’t ruthless with sin! Many “Christians” spend half of their time sinning, and the other half of their time repenting of that sin! This should not be so. Sin defiles and destroys, it pollutes and poisons, curses and corrupts. Yet we think it’s sweet! We tolerate it because of the temporary benefits it gives us.

The problem is superficial repentance. We repent with our lips, but our heart still longs for the things that sin gives us. We really aren’t free because we really don’t want to be. We still maintain the possibility of committing that same sin. But God will never remove the guilt as long as we continue to entertain the sin. It is deep folly to desire that God forgive us of something that we intend to commit. The Lord is looking at the heart and is more concerned with how we respond to temptation today than with what we promise to do with the temptation tomorrow.

Ouch. God, may I always be a person of deep repentance like David, that repented not because he was wrong, but because it hurt you and put a wedge in the relationship.