1. Repentance makes me ashamed of my sins

 Repentance makes me ashamed of my sins

People keep asking what the purpose of life is. We are born and live out our lives and then die.

So, what do our seventy-odd years of life on Earth actually achieve?

Wealthy people can be very unhappy and often die young.

There is a well-known saying that Money cannot buy happiness.

Famous sport stars only have so many years at the top of their game and then they fade away.

Ordinary people are left wondering how to find something more meaningful in life other than the hard grind of daily survival.

A deeper meaning in life can only be found in the pursuit of something bigger than yourself.

John Kennedy, the charismatic President of America in the 1960s gave out a famous challenge.

"Ask not what America can do for you, but rather ask what you can do for America," Many young Americans were inspired to join the American Peace Corps and went out to help people in poorer countries rather than just drifting through their routine jobs at home.

Our lives are too short and we hate and fear Death.

We need a Champion Who can defeat Death and give us hope for a better life beyond the grave.

Death is the ultimate test for a religious leader. Can he come back from the grave in a resurrection that involves an eternal body that can never die again?

Only one man did this, Jesus Christ.

We need to consider what He offers us.

Our two biggest enemies are Self and the Devil.

Self is too weak to fight the Devil and thus, as long as Self rules in our body then the Devil is able to deceive us and defeat us.

We spend our lives trying to build up an image of self-worth and self-esteem.

That makes us avoid criticism and we hide our faults. Instead of making an open confession of our mistakes, we go into a state of denial and seek to blame our circumstances or someone else.

Feeling offended is now our great grievance. This wounds our self-image and undermines our self-importance.

"How dare you say that?" is our angry rejection of a truthful statement concerning our mistakes or poor judgements. We create a delusional bubble of self-sufficiency that we try to dwell in.

Self-deception makes us hate anything that makes us look inadequate.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. Leonardo da Vinci said, "People crave attention and love, being made to feel special or important. Thus, the last thing they want to hear is that they are lost and cannot help themselves." 

When the Gospel tells us that we need to Repent, this is the worst news that "self-righteous" Me needs to hear.

My life is ruled by the self-centred trinity of I, Me, and Myself.

In our modern age of people’s rights, we put all the emphasis on what we are entitled to and what we want but we ignore our own faults and responsibilities.

Life is a balance between giving and receiving. But Self makes us put an emphasis on what we gain.

But repentance requires the death of "Self".

Repentance is based on sorrow. I am extremely sorry for the sins that I have committed.

I am plagued by a sense of guilt over the harm I have caused others.

I realize that I need a complete change of heart that will produce a real change in my lifestyle.

The best evidence of a repentance conversion is when people then see a big change in your life.

The change had nothing to do with yourself. You actually set out on a path to die to yourself so that you could be fiercely loyal and obedient to Lord Jesus Christ. A truly repentant person is so grateful for God’s undeserved mercy that Jesus Christ becomes the most important Person in that repentant heart.

Pleasing Christ becomes the main focus of the newly repentant heart.

Getting saved is when I realize that God saved my soul 2000 years ago at Calvary. When Jesus Christ said, It is finished ( click here ) , salvation was over as Jesus Christ had won the struggle against sin on the cross.

You were born when Christ breathed your spirit, the breath of life, into your new-born baby body. Regard this new body as if it is a taxi that you are driving through life. Being a taxi, you start giving people a lift. These passengers become your friends and they keep offering advice. Some good advice and some evil advice. Devils offer us a mixture of good and evil. If they just offered evil they would put most of us off. But because they offer good and evil they can be hypocrites who are pretending to be good. That makes them very deceptive.

Under the influence of all these "friends" you start driving down the wrong roads in life and going to the wrong places.

What is salvation? One day you see Jesus Christ standing on the side of the road and indicating that He wants a lift. Your friends in the taxi go crazy. They force you to keep driving so that you cannot stop and pick up Jesus Christ. Any Christian influence is immediately opposed by your passengers.

But one day, for complex reasons, you defy your friends and passengers. You stop and pick up Jesus Christ by repenting and accepting Him as your personal Saviour. That is what salvation means, you have a portion of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ injected into your heart.

This immediately creates a big problem. All your friends and passengers are highly offended and terribly upset. They are totally opposed to your decision. It now depends on how genuinely you repented. You must prefer to follow Jesus Christ and be prepared to lose all your passengers and friends. All those spirits that influenced your mind to believe and behave in unscriptural ways.

Their mockery and condemnation of you must leave you unchanged. You want Jesus Christ, not them.

This is the most serious decision that will affect your future. You refuse to listen to them and you start to obey Jesus Christ. You only drive down the roads that compare with Bible standards.

You oppose drinking alcohol and be drunkard , smoking cigarettes, drugs abuse, gambling endlessly, pornography addiction, swearing vulgarities, and enjoy dirty jokes. Sex is only permitted after a marriage between a man and a woman. The marriage vow is for life.

These standards highly upset your passengers who hate the presence of Jesus Christ in your taxi.

They now start getting out of the taxi. As these spirits leave, you are able to start cleaning up your life in a process called sanctification.

Getting saved is like picking up an empty jug that is dirty.

Sanctification is cleaning up the dirty jug so that it can be set aside for service.

Now you are happily steering your way through life, doing your own will in a clean and decent manner.

Then come the nagging doubts. Is this really what God wants me to do with my life?

Jesus  Christ is the only Person Who knows why God called you.

Common sense then dictates that you should swop places with Him and let Jesus Christ sit behind the steering wheel as He steers you into God’s Will, which is always different from your own will.

Handing over your life to Jesus Christ now so that He is in full control of what you do and say,  is called the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Now your mind and physical body are under new management and your lifestyle will again be different. You will only trust what the Old King James Bible says. There are over a hundred new versions of the Bible that are all different from each other. Thus, they can never come to an absolute truth.

Under sanctification, you used God’s grace to clean up the sins in your life.

Under the Holy Ghost baptism, you start to clean up your beliefs as you realize that you must only believe what is written in Scripture. It is written.

The more you understand and believe the Bible, the more your faith becomes purer.