Legacy Series with Dale Thompson - "The Commands of Jesus" Part 1 "Repent" - October 7, 2012

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible teaching ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.

You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.

Thank you for listening.

Welcome to this episode of the Legacy Series of our Chapter and First podcast.

We're so excited that you're joining us for this message.

Today you're going to hear a message from one of the former pastors of our church, Brother Dale Thompson.

Brother Dale was the pastor here from 1992 until 2019 and had an incredible ministry that saw God do wonderful things throughout the life of the church and that tenure.

We also know that Brother Dale is a highly gifted preacher of the Word.

He has an incredible knowledge of Scripture, and his delivery is wonderful how he speaks directly to you, and God uses him in such a unique way to connect with the congregation and point them to Jesus.

This particular message is the very first message that Brother Dale preached when he became the pastor of First Baptist Church.

In fact, we had someone in our church who has been enjoying our legacy series and been here quite a while who requested that we play this message from Brother Dale and include it in our legacy series.

And you will see why when you hear him preach the word and cast vision for what God wants to do through First Baptist Church.

And so we thought it was a wonderful message to show.

Matthew chapter 4.

Matthew 4 · chapter mention

And we begin a new series today.

As you know, we finished a series last week, a 10-part series that we did on marks of a disciple and where are the disciples and what a disciple is.

And we've talked about that.

And this series that we're going to do is built and spins off that series.

And let me share with you how that works.

In Matthew 28, that great commission that we spent so much time on, Jesus said the great commission was what?

To go into all the world and make disciples of every ethnic group, every ethnos, every people group, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And then he said this, teaching them to observe all the things that I've commanded you.

And so what's interesting is that when Jesus says that, we sort of absorb it, we don't stop and say, Well, what are those commandments?

See, if someone walked up to you and said, Name me five of Jesus' commandments to you, what would you say?

Five?

You might go, Well, high dogs.

Let me think a minute.

Let me think a minute.

So what you will do is this you will cheat and you will revert to the Ten Commandments because you will say, Jesus is God, and God gave the Ten Commandments, so you'll give some of the Ten Commandments.

And then you'll go, but I don't know if I can name five of those.

That's something else you can need to think about, all right?

So what you need to understand is that when Jesus was here in his ministry, he did give commandments.

They were called his commandments.

And he says in the Great Commission, make the disciples and teach them everything to observe or keep all of the things that I've commanded you.

Now listen to what Jesus said in the 14th chapter of John, verse 15.

Listen to what Jesus said.

If you love me, keep my commandments.

Over in 1 John, John wrote, he said, This is how you love God.

You keep his commandments, and his commandments are not a burden to you.

So stop and think about it.

See, loving Jesus isn't a feeling, a warm glow, a fuzzy sentiment.

Jesus says, loving me is keeping my commandments.

Now he's not saying you're saved by keeping commandments.

You're saved by grace, through faith.

It's not of yourselves, the gift of God.

We know that.

But Jesus said, as a follower, as my disciple, if you're going to love me truly, then what you're going to do is, is you're going to observe, you're going to keep my commandments.

So the question is, what did Jesus command?

How many of those commands can you name?

What would you say if someone asked you what those commandments were?

See, his commandments are like our compass.

It's like our uh it's like our GPS.

It's like our guidance system.

His commandments are our guidance system, so we can follow him.

See, Jesus said, if you're going to follow me, you're going to have to deny yourself, take up your cross every day and follow me.

And one of the ways we follow him is not some vague, fuzzy, blurred, out-of-focus idea of what it is to follow him.

But following him means taking up what he says as his disciple, embracing that into our life, following him.

So, what are the commandments of Jesus?

Well, if you were to go through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and you were careful, and you just didn't read it like we sometimes read our Bibles, we just cover the material so we feel better that day.

I covered my material.

But if we thought about what it says, we could start picking out his commandments.

Here's what you'd find.

By some count, some say 48, some say 49, some say 50.

Clearly, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you will find nearly 50 commands of Jesus.

And think about us.

I mean, if someone asks you, you might say, Well, I think this, and I think you might be able to pull a few out, but how well do we really know those commandments?

Now, wait.

Stop with me, think with me just a minute.

How important is it?

Jesus said in the Great Commission, teaching them to observe two or three of the things that I've commanded you.

Is that what he said?

In the Greek, does it say, teach them two or three of the things?

What does it say?

No, in the Bible it says, teaching them to observe all of the things that I've commanded you.

So we got to know what his commands are.

In fact, if we if we kind of frame ourselves and see ourselves as the disciple, what we've been thinking about, we kind of be jumping up and down.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm hungry to know what those commandments are.

I want to know what are those commandments of Jesus.

And so I will not try to preach 50 of them to you today.

But what we're going to do today is we're going to start with the very first commandment of Jesus.

And over the next few weeks, we're going to look at some of the very vibrant, very first-level commandments that Jesus gave, things that we can embrace and think about as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If we identify ourselves as disciples, we certainly want to know what direction to go.

Several years ago, Tony and I went to a wedding of one of the nephews in the family.

One of Tony's sisters' boys got married, and we stayed in a hotel in downtown Dallas, and I have this great sense of direction.

And I had taken the car, we had one of those garages you have to pay to be in at the hotel.

And so we had done some things earlier that day, and I didn't want to go back in and have to pay another, so I had a found a parking place in the street on the Saturday in downtown Dallas.

And I and the hotel's right here, and I just turned left and parked it kind of facing away from the and I went down and told Tony, I said, I'll get the car and bring it around and pick you up.

So I went and got in the car, and I we were getting we're going to the wedding, and I took off down the street and I couldn't turn right.

I was going to turn right and come around to the hotel.

So I went down another street, and there was another one-way street, and then I made a couple of turns and then I didn't know where I was at.

I was totally messed up.

I was lost.

Dale Thompson in downtown Dallas.

It's not good for Hicks to go to the city.

And so there I was, you know.

So in my glove compartment, I had the secret weapon.

I had one of those, you know, one of those suction cup stick-on GPSs, you know?

You stick it up there on the deal, and I knew the I had on a piece of paper I had the hotel address, so I punched that in, and uh, there's the voice comes on.

It's a woman's voice.

Have you ever thought, why is it on the GPS it's a woman's voice?

You know, before GPS, it was a woman's voice that says, just stop and get directions.

Now it's a woman's voice saying, Turn right at the next straight, you know.

But anyway.

And then that little lady on the GPS had me take a right here and go down two blocks, take another right, and take a left, and then in no time, I was right there in front of the hotel.

Tony had no idea I'd been lost for five minutes.

Driving around downtown Dallas.

We need uh, we need direction to follow Jesus.

We need a GPS system, we need a compass, something that says, go this way, spiritually speaking.

So in this series, we're gonna have our GPS, we're gonna have our compass, we're gonna have our direction, and we're going to look at some of the commands of Jesus that he talked about.

Nothing, nothing could be more relevant to a disciple of Jesus Christ than to know what are the commands of Jesus.

They're not vague, they're not fuzzy, they're not soft, they're not fluid, they're crystal clear.

So we need to know what they are.

And today we'll start with the first one.

If you started searching through all the gospels and you were to find the first one, this would be the first one.

Jesus is born in Bethlehem, the virgin birth, the incarnation, God in the flesh.

Jesus has a childhood.

We don't hardly know anything about it except when he was 12.

He was up in the temple and he astonished them with his wisdom.

Then he appears on the scene on the banks of the Jordan, and John the Baptist sees him and says, Behold, he introduces him.

This is the introduction of Jesus to the world.

Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.

Jesus goes down to John the Baptist and says, Baptize me.

And John the Baptist says, You should baptize me.

And Jesus said, No, I'll be baptized to fulfill all righteousness.

What Jesus is saying is, Jesus was baptized to be identified with us and our need, just like we're baptized to identify with him and his redemptive purpose in our lives.

And so after you're saved, you need to be baptized to show what Christ has done in your life and identify with him.

After he was baptized, he went up into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights.

He was tempted of the devil directly, three times.

As Hebrew says, he was tempted in all areas, just like we are, yet he was totally without sin.

He came down from the wilderness and he began his ministry.

And when he began his ministry, he began preaching, and there we find the first commandment of Jesus in Matthew chapter 4, verse 17.

Matthew 4:17

Here's what he says.

And from that time Jesus began to preach and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Now I know what you're thinking.

You're saying, Brother Dale, that passage was talking about Jesus talking to the people back then, but that passage doesn't have anything to do with us now because this is 2,000 years later.

Don't you think I'm right on that?

And I'd say, no, I don't.

You're wrong.

This is absolutely, perfectly, just as relevant right now as it was 2,000 years ago.

And it's the first commandment of Jesus is to repent.

It's his very first one.

Many people today really don't care about repentance or want to think about repentance, but that's exactly what Jesus said from the beginning that we were to repent.

Well, let's ask ourselves some questions.

We've got to approach and we've got to define what repentance is.

We've got to approach it and ask ourselves.

Now, number one, listen, repentance is not being sorry and feeling bad that you got caught.

You see a lot of repentance like that.

We see it, you know, the in the when the celebrities and the athletes do something just outlandishly crazy, immoral, and stuff, and they're confronted with it, and the and the news conference comes and they say, Well, I made a mistake.

I made a no, a mistake is something you do on a spelling test, okay?

A mistake is something like that.

When we rebel against God and we're full of ourselves, and we're wrapped up in ourselves, and we don't care what God thinks, and we want what we want the way we want it, and we rebel against God and we do that or have that attitude or take that approach, that's sin.

And we need to repent.

Repentance is not feeling bad.

Repentance is not crying necessarily tears.

Repentance is not being ashamed when we're exposed.

Repentance is not feeling bad or feeling sorry toward God.

Repentance is something different.

Repentance is a change of direction.

The word in the scripture is a word that means clearly a change of direction.

Repentance is uh changing our mind about our sin.

Our sin is not a mistake.

Our sin is not that we, when we uh curse someone or gossiped against someone or slandered someone, that we, as the politicians like to say, I misspoke.

Oh, I love that one.

Sin is wickedness and evil, and often we believe that we don't have to frame our rebellion inside that frame.

But that's what sin is.

When you sin against God, when I sin against God, when I rebel, when I get full of myself, when you get full of yourself, when you do what you want to do, you don't care what, that's wicked and that's evil.

That's iniquity.

It's against God.

It's sin.

We need to change our mind about our sin.

I've never, I never thought I'd see the day in our culture when we call sin anything but sin.

Somehow it's unsophisticated to call it what it is.

It's a mistake.

It's a little, I stumped my toe there.

I was a little out of line.

No.

We change our mind about our sin and see it for what it is.

Here's the second thing we need to think about when we think about repentance.

It's a change of our feelings towards sin.

Sin isn't something that God is unkindly keeping us from or unfairly dealing with us about.

Sin is not something, our feeling about sin should be this.

I hate it.

And I don't want it in my life.

Now you may be struggling with it, but we, when we're repentant, we're at a point where we say, I hate it.

I hate that about me.

I hate that when I think that way.

I hate that attitude in me.

I hate that action that I'm drawn toward.

I hate it.

That's repentance.

So repentance is that we call it for what it is, and we feel toward it the way God feels toward it.

And then number three, repentance means that we walk away.

We turn, we go in another direction.

We make no provision for the flesh.

It does not mean that we'll not struggle with that again.

It does not mean that we'll be perfectly sinless or uh in any way, shape, or form.

But the idea is that when we repent, we turn and we walk away.

I don't want it there and I'm leaving.

It's a change of mind about what it is and what we call it.

It's a change of feeling that we have toward those unrighteous things in our life, and it's a change of direction of what we do spiritually.

Repentance.

Now listen, remember what we're talking about.

Remember what we're talking about.

Remember, Jesus said, teaching them to observe all the things I've commanded you.

Jesus said, If you love me, keep my commandments.

John wrote, the commandments of Jesus are not burdensome for the disciple.

What does the Lord say?

Then, and what does the Lord say now?

Repent for the kingdom of heaven is close by.

It's near.

That is one of the teachings of Jesus.

We should be hungry for these teachings in our lives.

And there are numerous biblical examples that God gives us of this.

You remember David?

David, the golden boy.

David's the golden boy of the Old Testament.

You remember David?

God was through with Saul, the first king of Israel.

He gave the people the kind of man they wanted.

He gave it to him, and he failed and flopped, just like God knew he would.

And so God said, I'm through with him and I'm going to anoint a new king.

He told the prophet Samuel, go to Jesse's house.

And when you get to Jesse's house, he has some boys.

One of his boys is the one.

Go.

So Samuel goes up there and tells Jesse, hey, one of your boys is going to be the next king of Israel.

I've come to anoint him, but I've got some special king anointing oil.

I don't know where you get that, but he had it.

You don't get that at Walmart.

Everything else, but you can't get that there.

So he lines up the boys.

First one.

Handsome boy.

Handsome boy, tall, been working out, got a tan, kind of ripped, you know.

Confident, articulate, nice hairdo.

Samuel thinks, surely this is the one.

The Lord says, Nope, that I'm not him.

Check him off.

He goes down to the boys.

The Lord says to his heart, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

Is that seven?

Nope.

Seven times.

It's not the one.

So Samuel says, You got any more?

He said, Got one more.

You got a scrawny one.

You scrawny?

He's a scrawny one.

The youngest one.

Go get him.

So they go out.

David, he's out keeping the sheep.

Here comes David trotting in.

Scrawny little guy.

Trotts up.

The Lord says, That's the one.

In the NIV, Samuel says, Are you sure?

He anoints him king of Israel.

And he sends him back to keep the sheep.

The man out there keeping the sheep, he slays the lion, he slays the bear.

I mean, he's a go-getter, he's courageous, he's a renaissance man.

This guy writes music.

This guy writes poetry.

This guy looks at the stars.

This guy kills lions and bears with rocks.

Hot dogs.

He's a man's man and a singer, too.

He just doesn't have a guitar.

One day, his father tells him to go check out the battle that's going on between Israel and the Philistines.

He arrives on the scene.

Goliath is there.

You know the story.

Goliath's there.

He's been out there challenging them to a one-on-one winner-take-all battle between their champion and him.

Goliath, nine and a half feet tall.

Big old giant guy.

Everybody's afraid to fight.

David says, why isn't somebody fighting?

Everybody says, everybody's afraid.

David says, I'll fight him.

They put Saul's armor on him.

He doesn't like it.

He throws it off.

He goes and gets five stones out of a stream.

Takes his sling, takes his shepherd staff, his dog whopper, they used to hit the wild dogs with.

He goes out, and you know the story, he kills Goliath, knocks him down with a stone, takes Goliath's own sword, whacks his head off.

The Philistines flee, he becomes a hero, and they write a song about him that's on the radio, if they'd have had radio.

But the women sang it.

The women had a song they sang.

They make up songs.

Man, if you have to carry water and wash it.

Well, you still do that for men, don't you?

But anyway, you have to do all this stuff.

You've got to have something to sing about.

So they had a song.

Saul has killed his thousands.

David has killed his ten thousands.

Well, actually, he just killed a giant.

But Saul's killed his giants, and David's killed his ten thousands.

And he fell out of favor with Saul, ends up running for his life.

He's in the wilderness with his companions for a long time, almost gives up.

Saul's killed in battle with the Philistines.

David's made king of Israel, and it's a golden age.

David's king of Israel.

David did not have to run for office, but had he run, he would have won every single time.

Even with the Electoral College.

He would have won.

He was popular.

One during one season of the year, his armors were off in battle.

He normally went to battle.

He decided to stay home, take a couple weeks off, got his vacation time signed up.

He's up at the King's Palace and he's up on the roof and he sees his neighbor, Uriah the Hittite's wife, next door, Bathsheba.

In that moment, lust, self-centeredness, and pride and a lot of other sins mixed into a recipe overwhelmed all of the commitment and training and wonderful relationship that he had with God.

He compromised himself with Bathsheba.

She was with child.

David decided that he could fix this.

He calls in your Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba's husband, from the battle, so that he could get a report on how things were going.

He just knew that Uriah the Hittite would then go home, spend the night with his wife before he went back to battle, and that would sort of cover everything.

But Uriah is so faithful to his companions, he refuses the comforts of his home when they're in the battle, so he sleeps on the front porch of the palace, goes back to the battle.

Plan B.

Put Uriah the Hittite in the midst of the battle and withdraw from him.

They got him, made him point man on a battle against the wall.

They went against the enemy.

He was the point man, and just as they engaged the enemy, everyone else withdrew, leaving him all alone.

Well, that's a dastardly thing to do, isn't it?

He was killed.

Now he's got it covered.

Now he's got it covered.

David outwardly seems to be such a gracious king, takes in the poor, grieving widow, Bathsheba, makes him one of his wives.

He's got a lot of wives.

He's going to have lots of problems.

One day, Nathan, the prophet, comes by.

Says, David.

I gotta tell you, there's a big problem in the kingdom, big problem.

We've got a big problem in the kingdom.

I'm the prophet, and I've delivered the messages about the big problem, we got a big problem.

You know the guy down the road down here that has the little lamb, has the little lamb he calls Rover?

That's in the NIV.

I'm kidding.

Okay.

It's his only lamb.

He's made a pet out of that lamb.

It's his only lamb.

He loves that lamb.

And on further down the road is uh, you know the big corporate guy down there that has the big sheep incorporated, sheep corporated international, sheep corporated international unlimited.

That guy?

We have a hard time getting taxes out of him, that guy.

He had a bunch of corporate guys come in for a big sheep convention.

They wanted to have a meal.

He had some of his strongarm guys come down the road and get Rover.

They took Rover back to his house, killed him, roasted him, and ate Rover.

He's got 10,000 sheep, but they ate Rover.

David said, I'm not putting up with this.

I'm not putting up with this.

We're gonna deal with this.

Who is this guy anyway?

And Nathan said, David, it's you.

Then David knew his cover was blown.

He was ashamed, he was embarrassed.

But when you look in the Bible, he did really repent because he went back to the Lord.

Changed the direction of his life.

His life was really never the same again.

But he returned to the Lord.

The 51st Psalm in your Bible is David writing to the Lord, his repentance about that sin.

And he returned to the Lord.

It is a picture in the Old Testament of repentance.

And he really did change the direction of his life, and there are numerous pictures of that.

Repentance.

Let's remember what we're talking about.

Teaching them to observe all of the things that I've commanded you, the commandments of Jesus.

If you love me, Jesus said, keep my commandments.

And the first one is repentance.

Now listen, there are two ways to look at repentance.

Number one, when someone comes to truly receive Jesus as their Savior and Lord, they come repenting of their sins and receiving Jesus Christ as Savior.

You can't, though some people think, though some people think, you can't say, I want Jesus as my Savior, but I also would like to hang on to my sins because they're my weaknesses, and I'm sure God will understand.

No.

The Bible says repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Repentance toward God, coming to grips with our sins, saying, I'm sinful, I'm wrong, I fail, I need forgiveness of my sin, I need a new direction, I need a new life, and Jesus as my Savior.

Now you're not saved by works, you're saved by grace through faith.

But there's a change of mind and a change of heart when you really come to know Christ as Savior.

You'll see lots of people in our culture make, we call it, make decisions for Christ, but then they go right back to their old life, and there's no transition in their life, there's no sensitivity in their soul about where they're at spiritually.

That's a picture of someone who has made a false confession.

Oh, preacher, you're kind of being hard on that.

No, that's just the reality of it.

Now, Christians aren't perfect.

Born-again believers still have struggles and still have sin.

But we do not love it.

We do not excuse it, but we flee from it.

We seek victory over it.

It is the longing of the disciple to be right with God.

Here's a second way to look at repentance.

The second way to look at repentance is it's it's ongoing in the life of the disciple.

More or less, repentance is something that disciples do regularly.

Not as a ceremony, but repentance is something that disciples do because it keeps us right with God.

We sometimes call that confession, but we confess and turn.

We confess and go the other direction.

We confess and forsake.

We confess and seek cleansing and a new life in that area in our relationship with Christ.

Your fellowship with Jesus Christ has to be maintained.

You got to cut the grass.

You've got to be cleansed from time to time.

Physically, a couple of days without a shower, and we start physically smelling a little ripe.

Physically, if we don't get showers, we begin to have a unique aroma about us.

What we don't understand is, is that spiritually we need to shower too, or repent, confess, turn back to God, and maintain our relationship with Him.

We're not maintaining the relationship so that we'll go to heaven.

That is established by the death of Jesus and His resurrection.

We maintain repentance so that our fellowship is unbroken and our relationship with him is open.

You fall out of fellowship at your house.

If you're raising kids, you fall out of fellowship every once in a while.

Kids hear what you have to say.

You tell them what they're going to do, they say, I ain't going to do that, I want to do that, yang, yang, yang.

There's a whole, there's a, there's talking, there's discussion, and some people discuss things at higher volume than necessary.

And then sometimes there's a door slamming jamboree.

And somebody goes to their room.

Bang.

Are they still your kid?

Yeah.

You're not sure you want that way, but yeah.

They're still my kid.

Are you going to throw them out?

No, you're not going to throw them out.

Do you really love them?

I really love them.

Do they really love you?

Yeah, no matter what they say, they love you.

But are you in fellowship?

Nope.

There's a division going on there.

And things need to be made right to bring that back to the right place in the relationship.

We need to repent as Christians.

Confess.

Turn.

Return to Him.

What are we talking about?

We're talking about the commandments of Jesus.

We're talking about the fact Jesus said, if you love me, this is how you do it.

Keep my commandments.

What's the first one?

Repent.

Repent.

Let's talk about repentance just for a second.

I want to give you five steps in recognizing true repentance.

Number one, true repentance recognizes that you live in the literal, actual presence and the sight of a holy God at all times.

The Lord sees you, hears me and you, looks upon our hearts.

Just as Isaiah said when he saw the Lord and his holiness, I am undone.

I'm a sinner.

When we get in God's presence, we recognize our sin.

We all know the power of our flesh.

We all know rebellion.

And often the first step towards sin is we think we're covered and we forget there is nothing concealed from his sight.

Nothing, not even our thoughts and attitudes.

So when we repent, we understand God sees it all.

Number two, we realize that repentance is a change of mind.

Who will be the Lord of my life?

Me or him?

Repentance approaches that question.

Satan will always press us toward self-rule.

He did it with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Satan himself wanted self-rule.

I will rise up, I will be like the Most High.

Our sin is centered often in our selfishness.

To be equal with God and run our own lives.

Repentance says, I'm wrong, I'm changing my mind in my direction.

Number three, our sin is a grief in our hearts, and we grieve over our sin.

We stop and consider that our sin put Christ on the cross, and that sin drives a wedge between us and the Father and our relationship with Him.

We don't blame others when we repent.

Unrepentant people say, I wouldn't have done that if you hadn't done that.

Unrepentant sinners say, Well, it really is my father or my mother 20 years ago.

When we're not really repenting, we're saying, Well, I got it from my grandfather.

He had a temper like that.

When we're not repentant, we always point somewhere else.

We don't point at ourselves.

But true repentance doesn't make excuses, doesn't rationalize.

Those things, excuses, rationalization, and blame, are the enemies of true repentance.

Repentance said, it's me.

I'm fouled up.

I'm guilty.

I need God's forgiveness.

I need to change the direction.

Number four, repentance walks away from sin.

We hate the sin.

We hate it.

We don't want to relate to it.

It may pursue us, it may seek to tantalize us, but we hate it.

And we turn and go another direction.

We renounce it.

We call it what it is.

It's evil, it's wickedness.

Some of us have never ever acknowledged that we have done evil or treated other people wickedly or had evil motives or taken actions that were desperately sinful.

You can't get to true repentance until you get there.

The command of Jesus is to repent.

But he puts it in this context.

Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

He's not talking about a timeline when the kingdom will come, though the kingdom will come.

But what he's saying is this repent, because the kingdom of God is right next to you.

Meaning this: that when Jesus rules in our heart, we are functioning inside the rule of Him.

When we are functioning inside that rule, we are clearly within the boundaries, inside the boundaries of the kingdom of God.

See, some of us are running around today inside the kingdom of self.

The kingdom of me.

Isn't that a sweet sound?

The kingdom of me.

That's pitiful, isn't it?

The kingdom of Dale, Dale's kingdom.

Dale's the king, and here's his little kingdom.

He's doing a little Dale's thing to die.

Look at me.

Aren't I wonderful?

That's the kingdom of Dale.

When I repent of my sin, when you repent of your sin and we submit to Christ and we turn to him and we submit ourselves to him, the kingdom of God is that close.

There's a kingdom coming.

But that's the kingdom now.

And Jesus says, if you love me.

If you loved me, keep my commandments.

They're not burdensome.

That's how you love me.

Repent.

Receive Jesus as your Savior.

Stop it with your own little made-up religion.

Stop it with your claims to righteousness.

Stop saying you're a good person.

You're not.

Neither am I.

Stop saying that you deserve God's acceptance.

Stop with your religious opinions.

Stop with your homespun philosophies.

And repent and receive Jesus as Savior.

If you have received Jesus as Savior, as a Christian, repent.

Give yourself to being his disciple and following him.

And the first commandment that directs us in that direction is just that.

Repent.

Now I know what some of you are thinking.

My brother really needed to hear this sermon today.

Here it is, the only Sunday that my wife's off and she didn't hear this one.

This is for your ears.

This is for your life, not someone else.

Jesus says the first commandment.

If you love me, the first commandment.

Repent.

Heavenly Father, I pray you'd mold our hearts and draw our hearts towards you, toward your will, toward your purpose, towards your design, and I pray you'd be glorified wonderfully.

Father, I pray as your disciples, we would leave this place with new direction, with a compass, with a place that we can go.

Something that we can wrap our arms around and say, this is a commandment of our Lord.

Father, I pray you'd make us hungry to know what your commandments are so that we might pursue them obediently.

Father, we pray you'd work in this hour.

And for those souls that are present today who have never made peace with you through Jesus Christ, by repenting of their sins and receiving Jesus as their sin-bearer, their savior, their redeemer, I pray that this morning you would have mercy on them as you had mercy on me.

And Father, I pray you draw them to your Son, to the cross.

In His name we pray.

Amen.

We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus.

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.

Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.

Thank you for listening to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith First Baptist Church.