Luke The Orderly Account of Truth - 3 Essentials for Repentance - Luke 13:1-9

If you would turn with me to Luke chapter thirteen.

That's where we're gonna be at today. Luke chapter thirteen.

We're gonna be reading verses one through nine. If you

do not have a Bible, please go grab one. We

have them out for you on the connect desk out

in the lobby. Yours key, grab one. It's awesome. I mean,

you can follow along with us, and also if you

want it, you can follow along with us on the screen.

But you should have your own Bible. If you don't

have your own bible, go get one. Anyways, all right,

so we're gonna read this pray and jump into it.

So Luke chapter thirteen, starting in verse one, says this. Now,

there was some present at that time who told Jesus

about the Galileans whose blood pilot had mixed with their sacrifices.

Jesus answered, do you think that these Galileans were worse

sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?

I tell you no. But unless you repent, you two

will all perish. Or those eight eighteen who died when

the tower fell in Sloam or the tower in Salom

fell on them, do you think they were more guilty

than all the others living in Jerusalem. I tell you no,

but unless you repent, you two will all perish. Then

he told this parable. A man had a fig tree

growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for

fruit on it, but did not find any. So he

said to the man who took care of the vineyard

for three years now, or I've been coming to look

for fruit on the fig tree and haven't found any.

Cut it down. Why should it use up the soil, sir?

The man replied, leave it alone for one more year

and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it

bears fruit next year, fine, If not, then cut it down.

This is God's word. Let's pray, or do we give

you this time? We devote this time to you as

we get to open your word. We just asked, as

we've been singing these songs the weeks that we've had,

all of it would have is used by you to

have been preparing our hearts to receive the word that

you have for us today. We just asked that your

spirit would be here among us so that these words

would not be from me, but they would be from you.

That there would be exactly what we need to hear

for today. We thank you that you're so gracious and

kind and loving towards us, and we give you all

the glory in Jesus name. Everyone said amen. Okay, So

this week a little bit of story time. This week,

my mom bought my family a game. She brought us

home a deck of cards that is AIDS, but it's

the Bible edition, right, So you open it up and

on the cards there's level one and then there's level

two questions right on each card. So me and my

kids were going through this deck of cards to kind

of just see what was in there right looking through it.

And I explained the game and how it worked to

my daughters, but we may mainly spend our time just

going through what the card said. My youngest Nora asked

she she just kept saying like, I want to I

want to read a card. I want to read a card.

So I'm like, all right, So I give her a card.

She stares at it and then she said what we

both know and she's like, I don't know how to read.

I'm like, it's okay. And so then I would tell

her what was on the card. And then my oldest daughter,

who is reading. She grabbed a card. She just kind

of stared at the card and said, I don't know

how to do this one. It's like, okay, well, let

me see it. And so I took the card and

on the card the top thing said sinner. I said,

you just have to be yourself. That's how That's how

I replied to her, now here the dead. That might

sound harsh or like a sick burn on my six

year old, but I want to show you. After I

said that, she giggled, and I followed it up. I

make sure to follow it up with we're all sinners

and that's why we need Jesus today. That's exactly what

we're gonna see Jesus telling us. If you're taking notes,

it's a little bit long. But our main point that

we're gonna be looking at today is this. We are

all sinners in need of true repentance or we will perish. Now,

this is one of the most fundamental, maybe basic statement

of Christianity, that we must repent or perish or if

you grow up in like maybe a fire and brimstone church,

maybe her turn or burn. Right, that's kind of a

more graphic way of putting it, but today, as we

look at this, I want us to see what Jesus

is truly getting at. I could technically get away with

just saying repent and believe in Jesus or parish for

all eternity, and then we can go home. But I

don't think that's all that is here in this text today.

I also want us to see that Jesus not only

tells us that truth in a plain, matter of fact way,

but I believe Jesus also lays out here for us

what true repentance looks like. He doesn't just tell us

to repent, but he actually tells us what repentance looks like. So,

if you're taking notes, today's message is titled three Essential

three Essentials for true repentance. At the end of today's message,

we're going to look at those three essentials or even

three steps for real repentance. The first what we're gonna

do is we're gonna go through today's text and kind

of lay the foundation for those essentials. And I do

want to say that you may have grown up in church,

or maybe this is your first time here, and you

might be familiar with repentance, You might be familiar with

some of the words that we're using. But I'm going

to ask you not to tune me out because I

think just in the same way that I benefited this

week from studying through this text, I believe that it'll

be beneficial for you as well. So we find ourselves

in Luke chapter thirteen, because as a church, we've been

preaching through Luke for the last thirteen chapters so far,

and we've been following this gospel of Luke following Jesus's

life and ministry for the past several weeks. We've been

kind of breaking up a teaching that Jesus has been

discussing with the crowd. There's some things that Jesus himself

has been bringing up. There's other things that people are

kind of shouting or starting to bring up to Jesus,

and so he kind of almost seems like weaves it

into his message. Today he is coming to a close

with that message, so we're gonna be looking at the

end of it. Before in Luke's gospel narrative, he kind

of moves on to the next thing. Last week we

heard Jesus is warning that he had come to draw

a line in the sand and that now is the

time to get right kind of makes sense. Rights as

Jesus is ending or landing his message, that kind of

the urgency talk is now ramping up. All right, So

we're gonna look at We're gonna see Jesus get even

more pointed in his messaging to the people around him.

Once again, Jesus is going to be responding to something

that the crowd brings up. Our first point for today

looking at the first five verses is going to be

we're all sinners in need of repentance. So let's read it.

It says now there was some present and at that

time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood pilot

had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, do you think

that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other

Galileans because they suffered in this way? I tell you no,

but unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or

those eighteen who died when the tower and saloam fell

on them, do you think that they were more guilty

than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you no,

but unless you repent, you too will all perish. So

what we're seeing happen here is there's these people who

have come to Jesus and they're bringing up kind of

like some local news of what's going on. There's this

local atrocity that has been committed that they bring up

to Jesus. And we don't actually know really more details

about this event, but based off of what is stated there,

we can kind of piece together why this is a

big issue. So we see that there's this act of violence.

We don't know what the motives were behind it. The

Roman governor Pilot, likely via some of his soldiers and

the authority that he had over these soldiers, had killed

some Jewish Galileans and it was most likely in the

temple court of Jerusalem. And now we're going to talk

about why. As it has said, Pilot had mixed their

blood with their sacrifices. This kind of seems random or weird,

but as a Jewish person, the only valid place to

offer sacrifices was in the temple in Jerusalem. So it's

supposed that while they were making their offering, Pilot, for

some reason had these Galileans killed, and that obviously would

have been a huge scandal that you had, most likely

gentile Romans in the temple courts killing people while they're

offering sacrifices. Right, it's like all kinds of backwards, all

kinds of wrong. So they bring this up to Jesus,

and now Jesus is going to use this opportunity to

address some misconceptions that the crowd has not, misconception being

that those Galileans who suffered suffered such a terrible thing

because there were worse sinners than everyone else. Jesus is

going to be challenging this misconception. Jesus says, do you

really think there were worse sinners because they suffered in

this way? Jesus gives them a rhetorical question because he

answers it for himself. He says, no, but unless you repent,

you too will all perish. He then gives another example

and says, or what about that tower that fell and

killed those eighteen people? Do you think that happened to

them because they were more guilty than the rest in Jerusalem?

Once again he says no, but unless you're you two

will all perish. So do you see what Jesus is

starting to do here. He's challenging a belief, and that

belief is that bad stuff happens to people because they're

more bad bad stuff happens to people because they're more guilty.

Now we have to ask a question, well, for some people,

are their natural consequences to their wickedness? Of course, are

there some cases where God does show up in divine

judgment to kind of put to a stop whatever wickedness

is going on? Totally? But what Jesus is getting at

is who are the wicked? Who are the wicked? Jesus

is saying, do you really think you're any different? Do

you think that what happened to them was because they

were worse than you? Jesus says a resounding no. Unless

you recognize your own sinfulness and repent, you will also perish.

And this perish isn't just him speaking about like just dying, right,

everyone's gonna die. He's saying that this is an eternal sense,

that there's something more important, that if you don't repent,

that there's a perishing that you were not coming back from.

This is this spiritual death, this eternal perishing. Jesus is

challenging the thought of the day that if bad stuff

happens to you, it must be because you're getting punished

for something you did wrong. But I don't know if

you guys have ever read the Book of Job. If

you have, you know that that entire book, pretty long

book in the Old Testament, is an antidote to that

entire way of thinking. Because Job was a righteous man.

He wasn't sinless, but he was a righteous man before God.

And this righteous man, Job has everything taken from him.

Yet what makes the story so profound is that he

remains faithful to God. What's interesting is if you read

the story, the entire story is honestly, it's kind of

this conversation back and forth, and this conversation is all

like basically one by one, each one of his friends

and even his wife come to him and like, Bro,

you had to do something.

How what do you do to make God so mad?

Because that must be why all these bad things are happening.

There's no way it could be you had to have

made him mad. Job isn't convinced. Job, it's like I

didn't do anything.

It's kind of that's literally that for like forty chapters. Okay,

but Job, even though Job didn't understand what was happening,

it was happening to him, He didn't understand what was

happening to him. Job still understood his place. And because

of that, instead of cursing God, which is what people like, Hey,

just curse God and die. Everything is so terrible. Curse

God and die. That's what they were telling to Job.

This is what Job doesn't said. We're actually gonna look

at on the screen. Job won at this. This is

after winds blowing, knocking over Barnes, killing people at this.

Job got up and tore his robe, shaved his head.

Then he fell to the ground in worship and said, naked,

I came from my mother's room, and naked, I will depart.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. May

the name of the Lord be praised now when tragedy strikes,

how many of our responses look like this? Probably not

too many. But what's amazing about this picture. What's amazing

about this story is that Job knew he wasn't owed anything,

that everything he had been given was given by God.

And you see his gratitude. He falls to the ground

in worship. He recognizes that the Lord gave, the Lord

takes away. He's like, I came into this world with nothing,

I'm going out of this world with nothing, and he

praises the Lord. Job was humble before God. He didn't say, well,

how dare you? Why did you? How could you? He

submits to the Lord. He's humble before the Lord. So again,

some of the people of Jesus's day, and honestly, there

could be some of us here who, when we see

tragedies strike, are inclined to think that it's because those

people must have really deserved it, those people must have

had it really coming. Those people aren't They're not like me.

But I'd also argue, I I want to argue a

counterpoint to that that in today's day and age, the

vast majority of people in the world have the opposite problem,

ask the opposite end of the question. We asked, why

do bad things happen to good people? How could something

so terrible happen to innocent people? But it's actually in

that question and in saying that, that we reveal that

we have the same problem that those people had back

in Jesus's day. That is our misunderstanding of the nature

of mankind. I remember years ago I started coming to

this church and I joined the worship team, and when

we had our weekly worship rehearsals before like usually as

one of the breaks between different things that were going

on that evening. We would stop for a few minutes,

get into a huddle, and we would talk about or

reading in the Bible. And I remember distinctly that there

was one time I was in a group Pastor Greg,

and he's sitting there, is going on and on and

on about how terrible we are and how sinful we are,

and how sinful he is. And it was weird. It

was very weird, to say the least. And I remember

leaving that rehearsal thinking to myself, why was he being

so harsh on himself? Why such a negative view of mankind?

And then guess what happened. I started reading my Bible

just a little bit more and I came to the

shocking conclusion that he was right. Pastor Greg didn't, in

fact make any of this stuff up. He was just

saying what the Bible said. So it wasn't, at least,

how I remember, it wasn't a couple weeks later that

I'm there having my brain melted, going like, guys, I'm

so bad, I'm so sinful. Can you believe it? A

lot of them could believe it, actually, But and for yourself,

if you really want to know how bad you are.

We could go We could do this in many different ways.

You already know I probably don't really need to convince you.

You want to try and be perfect, Try and be

perfect for one day, see how it goes. Maybe give

yourself a better shot one hour. What about thirty minutes.

You think you can be perfect for thirty minutes? We

all know that you're going to struggle, and that ultimately

your biggest obstacle and problem to being perfect isn't anything

else or anyone else but you. This week I read

a great kind of instance where there is this newspaper

that used to end all of its articles with what's

wrong with this world? What's wrong with this world? And

there's a Christian philosopher who wrote, in response to the letter,

this is all you wrote back, dear editor, what's wrong

with this world? I am faithfully yours. GK scripture makes

it very clear that all have sinned and fall short

of the glory of God, that all are dead in

sin and trespasses. And one of the key places I'm

not gonna go to a bunch of places, I'm gonna

go to one. It's kind of long chunk that's gonna

give us a nice, well not so nice review of mankind.

We're gonna look at this in Romans chapter three, and

as you turn there you might even see that the

header for that section just says no one is righteous,

no one is righteous. Let's loo get it. Chapter three,

starting verse nine. What shall we conclude, then, Do we

have any advantage? Not at all, For we have already

made the charge that Jews and gentiles, that's Jews and

literally the rest of the world alike, are all under

the power of sin. As it is written, there is

no one righteous, not even one. There is no one

who understands. There is no one who seeks God. All

have turned away. They have together become worthless. There is

no one who does good, not even one. Their throats

are open graves, their tongues practice deceit. The poison of

vipers is on their lists or their lips. Their mouths

are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift

to shed blood, ruin, and misery mark their ways in

the way of peace. They do not know. There is

no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know

that whatever the law says, it says to those who

are under the laws, so that every mouth may be

silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Now

my question for you, as we look at that list

that was a description of mankind, do you believe that

is true? Do you believe this accurately reflex mankind? Because

the Apostle Paul does in scripture does That's why the

Apostle Paul grabbed all of those scriptures from all over

the Bible that say, look at the case against mankind,

he is not good. He concludes all of that in

verse twenty three of the same chapter says this for

all has sinned and all falls short of the glory

of God. So, now, in view of what the Bible

has to say about us, how should we view the

question why do bad things happen to innocent or good people?

We'll just looking at that small section of scripture, we

realize that it's not an accurate question because no one

is innocent. Everyone is a sinner. I read another great

quote this week. There was a famous I know of

this quote as a famous pastor, in response to this

actual question why do bad things happen to good people?

He said, why do bad things happen to good people?

That only happened once? And he volunteered. We're gonna get

to that. But Jesus is addressing the crowd. He's addressing

this crowd, and they think it's because those people were

extra bad, not this stuff happened. And he says, no,

you're just as bad and in need of saving as

they were. And here's a deal. You're still alive, You're

still living. So unless you repent now, you will also perish.

And if we think now even today, that we're good

people and that we don't deserve punishment, we need to

hear Jesus say no. But unless you repent, you too

will perish. In either case, Jesus is addressing anyone who

thinks that they are better than other people. And do

you know what we call those people self righteous hypocrites.

Now here's the deal, heavy, right, Okay, this is the

text for today having to work through this. Now need

we need this, we need this. We just say that

this is very, very important. Jesus is trying to help

us here. At the beginning of this message, Jesus has

been teaching, and he started this whole message off telling

the people around him to beware the hypocrisy of their day,

beware of the religious leaders of their day who practice hypocrisy,

They were these self righteous people. Why was this so important?

Why is it so important that we beware of those things,

that we beware of self righteousness, that we beware of hypocrisy.

And ultimately, it's because self righteous hypocrisy will never lead

you to repentance. It will never lead you to repentance.

Why why will it never lead you to repentance? Because

self righteousness and hypocrisy makes you think you don't need it.

It makes you think you don't need it. But it's

in contrast to that humility. When you have humility, it

makes you see yourself, or actually it's probably the other

way around. When you see yourself or how you truly are,

that's humbling that gives you the humility when you see

yourself for how you really are, what you truly are,

and that is a sinner in need of a savior.

And amazing enough, we find that only in the person

and work of the savior Jesus Christ. Now in our

texts today, back Luke thirteen, we see this name of

the man, ponscious Pilot or might just say Pilot. There

he was the Roman governor over Judea. And what's fascinating

is that the next time that we encounter this man

will be when Jesus is on trial before him, where

Pilot will sentence Jesus to death on the cross. We

see Pilot in our texts today having treated these Galileans

in a violent manner and having mixed their blood with

their sacrifices, and it's really, it's honestly just something fascinating

to note that the next time we see him he'll

be sentencing Jesus the Galilean to death. Yet in that case,

he's going to wash his hands of Jesus's blood because

he found Jesus to be an innocent man. Pilot found

Jesus to be an innocent man. You go, why did

he die then? Because Pilot was also a coward. He

was a coward, and he feared the crowds who were

shouting crucify him, crucify him, and he ultimately went on

to sentence Jesus to suffer and die on the cross.

But here's what's amazing is it wasn't an accident. This

was also through the sovereign plan and purpose of God

that Jesus would suffer on the cross in our place

as a perfect sinless savior. You'd be the perfect sinless

sacrifice on our behalf, so that if any sinner looks

to Jesus and believes in him, they will receive forgiveness

for their sins and have their guilt wiped away. So

what does that mean in light of what Jesus has

been getting at. That means Jesus just told them. He

just told us that not one of us are innocent.

All of us are sinners in need of repentance. And Jesus,

who is the only innocent one to ever live, died

in our place, so that if you repent of your

sin turned to Christ, you can have your sin forgiven

and your guilt taken away. Because Jesus, the innocent, died

for the guilty. It's amazing. Jesus the innocent died for

the guilty. No one is good. We deserve punishment, We

deserve to perish and suffer. But Jesus took our place

on the cross so that we can be made right

with God. We see this. It is one of the

most popular verses John three sixteen. For God so loved

the world that he gave his one and only son,

that who ever believes in him shall not perish, but

have eternal life. Jesus tells us to humble ourselves, to

see ourselves as we truly are, and not compare ourselves

with others. Right, we do much better in our self

righteousness and in our hypocrisy when we get to choose

the standard. If my standard is Joe down the street,

I know I do better than him, so I think

I'm doing pretty good. But when we're reminded that our

standard is the sinless savior, Jesus Christ, uh Oh, I

fail that test every single time. Jesus warns that if

we don't, we too also perish. As we saw last week,

there are no second chances. When you die. Now is

the time to get right. You don't have forever. Jesus

is really hammering this point in and think about it.

Jesus even gives examples, and in the examples that he

gives it can be seen that things are out of

our control. So we can't delay getting right with Jesus

because we don't even know if we'll make it home tonight.

I read another great quote this week said, when it

comes time to die, make sure all you have to

do is die. Jesus tells us to see our sinfulness

as it truly is, and repent or we two will perish.

But Jesus isn't done. He has a parable for us.

This parable is this picture. To help get his point across.

He's going to echo what he's just been saying, but

I believe also drive it deeper into what repentance looks like,

and once again the necessity of that repentance. If you're

taking notes, you can write repentance is shown by the

fruit we bear. So look at the rest of the

verses for this chapter or for this section, says Then

he told this parable. A man had a fig tree

growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for

fruit on it, but he did not find any. So

he said to the man who took care of the

vineyard for three years now, I've been coming to look

for fruit on this fig tree, and have him found any.

Cut it down. Why should it use up the soil, sir?

The man replied, leave it alone for one more year,

and I'll dig around it and fertilize it. If it

bears fruit next year, fine, If not, then cut it down.

Jesus gives this parable the man who owns a vineyard

who comes to collect fruit from a fig tree. But

he finds that there's no fruit on this fig tree.

So what is his response. He calls for the fruitless

fruit tree to be cut down. And this was very

easily a picture of Israel at the time that he

came to his own people who had rejected him. He's

come to his own people and they're not following the

ways of God. We have John the baptist who paved

the way for Jesus, and he was baptizing people for repentance,

and he was telling them to bear fruit and keeping

with repentance, like prepare the Savior's come. And the Savior

is coming, so repent. And now Jesus has arrived, and

he found a fruitless and faithless Israel. He found a

people by and large still in need of repentance. And

if you don't know what the word repentance means, it

means at turning away from a changing of one's mind

or course. And this is where the fruit element comes in.

You can say you have repented, but has your life

changed at all? It's truly easy to say, oh I repent,

I follow Jesus, But would anyone know is that evident

in any kind of way? Have you turned from your

sin to holiness, from life or death to life, from

your idols to Christ. That's not the only part of

the parable. At the end, there's this man. He's like,

all right, I hear you, but let's give it a year.

Let's put in some work, let's do some stuff. Let's

see what happens. If there's still no fruit, then we'll

cut it down. And once again Jesus has introduced this

time element, this warning that if things don't change before

the time is up, all that is left is for

the tree to be cut down. It's not good for anything.

So unless we repent and bear fruit, and keeping with

the repentance, we will also be cut down and perish

as a result. Now here's the deal. Jesus didn't pull punches.

I already said this is heavy, But Jesus doesn't pull punches.

And that's a good thing. Because we live in a

world where we're told that we're perfect just the way

we are. We live in a world where we find

every excuse for sin by saying it's not a sin,

or maybe it's a sickness, and I have no control

over that. But here's what's amazing is that Jesus tells

us the truth. He is the good physician who isn't

afraid to give us the diagnosis because he also offers

the cure. He also offers the cure. No one is righteous,

and we all sin in many ways, but unless we repent,

we will all perish. But thank God that we have

Jesus Christ as a savior, because as we continue to

understand just how bad the bad news is, it only

makes the good news that much greater. We're gonna go

into that application that I had talked about at the beginning,

and so I need the band to come up, please.

We're gonna look at the three essentials for true repentance.

We've covered the ground for them in today's message, but

I want to put them together in a nice discinct way.

Now you might think that's gonna be funny, because the

first one is the first way I summed everything up,

is a little bit longer, and then we're gonna get

to a place where I made it a little bit shorter.

But first I do want to say, if you haven't

repented ever, if you've never turned to Jesus, you're still

an unbeliever in your sin. Then Jesus has made a

way for you to be right with Him, and he

calls you to repent and find salvation in Him alone.

And for us as believers, repentance is actually a really

interesting thing because repentance isn't a one time thing. There's

a sense in which it does require repentance to initially

first come to Christ, but repentance is this ongoing process

until either Jesus comes back or we go to him.

The rest of our life will be one of repentance.

And there's another quote that Christian life is one of repentance,

or another way I kind of was thinking about is

that the Christian life will be marked by ongoing repentance.

If we don't understand this, it's very important that we

understand because if we don't, we're going to be very

frustrated with our Christian life. We're gonna be very upset

with ourselves. We're gonna be very upset with everyone around us.

But as Christians, that is those who are being sanctified,

those who are being transformed and conformed to the image

of Jesus, we need to remember that this is not

an overnight process. It's over many, many nights. Most of

what our days will look like is, every day I

wake up repenting of the sin that I'm currently struggling with,

and then every night repenting of the new ones that

I discovered just that day. But we praise God because

as we continue to see and have the sin within

us revealed, we know we have the antidote to that sin.

We have an antidote to that guilt. And what's even

better is the spirit to combat it, the spirit to

tell it no, the spirit to fight it. So we're

gonna go over those three essential things for true repentance.

This is something that must be grasped for you to

initially come to Christ as your life savior, and something

that must be put into practice daily as you strive

to look more and more like who God has called

you to be. Here you look at the three essentials

for true repentance, and this is the first one. The

recognition of our sin and guilt and our desperate need

for a savior. This is where we have to start,

the recognition of our sin and guilt and our desperate

need for a savior. That is our starting point. We

don't need a savior if we don't have anything to

be saved from now. The second one is to turn

to Jesus as the only perfect savior who can take

away my sin and guilt. When I feel that weight,

when I feel that pressure, when I'm getting crushed down

by my sin, I can wallow or I can turn.

I can turn to the one who has made it

possible for me to be right. And if I've already

turned to him initially, I just need to remember this

good news. I need to remember that this is what

He's done on my behalf. And now number three, turning

from my former life of sin and pursuing a life

of holiness in Christ. That is the long formed version

of those essentials. I'm going to compress them a little

bit so it's easy to remember. But we need to

recognize just how far we fall and how desperately wicked

and in need of a savior we are. And we

don't stay there. We turn to Jesus. Once we turn

to Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins, we turn

from those sins. Because here's the deal. As a Christian lord,

willing you have that spirit withinside or inside you, you're

going to get sick and tired of how much you're sinning,

and you're going to pray to God that tomorrow I

can last a little bit longer not having to fight

the sin. I don't want to fall. I don't want

to fall. But that's amazing is when we do fall,

we have a savior, We have something we can remember,

We have grace to turn to. And it's you might say, okay, cool,

I'm doing this and I'm struggling. The reality is the

struggle is real. The struggle is real. There is a

real struggle going on that our flesh wants to draw

us back into those things, call us back into that darkness.

We have this new spirit within us, so there is

literally an internal struggle going on. But the thing this

is what's different is with the Savior is we have

hope that gets us through that struggle, and we have

hope that struggle will not be forever. So I condensed them.

This is the three steps for repentance. I need to

acknowledge my sin, turn to Jesus's savior, and pursue holiness.

Every time we fall, we repeat this process every single time.

This becomes a part of who we are as believers,

and it makes things easier because a lot of times

we don't we don't want to start here. We don't

want to acknowledge our sin. We don't want to acknowledge

her wrong. No one likes admitting they're wrong. That's just

the reality. But this is where we start. We start here,

and once we confess this, we just need to get

in the regular routine of going. Man, I missed it again,

but by God's grace, I won't next time. Man, I

missed it again. I'm so grateful for his grace. But

we never settle into I guess this is just how

it's gonna have to be, because that's not what we've

been called to. We've been called to acknowledge our sin,

turn to Jesus, and now pursue holiness, rinse, repeat. Our

hope is that our lives will be marked by repentance,

so when we do wrong, we're quick to repent and

pursue and continue pursuing him. Now, before I close, I

want to give us a couple go to verses, just

two verses that are great for you to put in

your pocket when you are needing to repent or remember

why it's good to repent. We're gonna look at it first,

John too, Verses one through three says my dear children,

I write this to you so that you will not sin.

But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with

the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. Amen. He is

the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours,

but also for the sins of the whole world. We

know that we have come to know him if we

keep his commands. So right there you see all three

of those that we can recognize our sin, turn to

Jesus as our advocate, and that we pursue holiness, pursue

holiness into the things that He's called us to. And

now this one, this is just if you're wrestling with

this idea of your own sinfulness, your own wickedness, your

own guilt. Well, let's read what the apostle Paul has

to say about himself. And what he actually almost prescribes

is just like this is a good saying for everyone.

Let's look at it. One Timothy one fifteen through sixteen.

Here is a trustworthy saying that it deserves full acceptance.

Christ Jesus came into the world or to save sinners,

of who I am the worst. But for that very

reason I was shown mercy, so that in me, the

worst of sinners Christ, Jesus might display his immense patience

as an example for those who would believe in him

and receive eternal life. We might grow impatient in our repentance,

but what we have to remember is that the Lord's

been patient with us all along. He's there, he calls

us to repentance, and so now is the time to repent.

God is so faithful and amazing to save sinners such

as I, And I'm grateful that he has shown me

my sin and that he's given me the cure to

that sin. That I found hope in Christ. And I

pray that you would be encouraged by today. It could

be heavy, but the thing is is, once again he's

given us the diagnosis, but he didn't leave us there.

He gave us the cure, and he is the cure.

So I hope they would hear Jesus called to repent,

to continue repenting unless unless you would perish. Would you

guys please stand