Repentance and Prayer by Norman Kissinger

Published: March 30, 2021, 3:40 p.m.

This is Norman Kissinger from redeeming the time brothers ministries and podcasts. And today we're going to finish up our series that we started several weeks ago on the process of repentance and prayer in the early church. And one of the things that we can always do as Christians is go back to the Bible and go back to the foundations of our faith in order to understand any subject to make sure that we're doing things in a way that would be pleasing to the Lord as Christians. And so we've been talking about repentance, and we talked about how that repentance says one of the most misunderstood concepts in Christianity. In fact, churches almost completely avoid the word or the idea of somehow believing that it condemns people. And the reality is, is that that's a completely a lie from Satan. Repentance has nothing to do with condemnation. The Bible says that we're fearfully and wonderfully made. The Bible tells us that God loved us so much that He died for us, He sent His Son to die for us. And so this idea that repentance is something that is evil and bad and and is only about condemning people is simply a lie from Satan. Repentance is the most important process in Christian growth. And Christian should be participating in repentance in their lives as they go along on their day to day walk. Now, we looked at many things over in the book of Acts. And as we studied repentance, we talked about the the idea that repentance and the Old Testament says, and the words and the Hebrew words, they're meant 180 degree turn in the opposite direction, that speaks to behavior in the New Testament, in the Greek mind, which they were thinking people and people philosophy, they, their word means to change one's mind. And so notice in both of those, whether it's the behavior or it is the thinking process, it's simply to go in a different direction, either with your behavior or with their thinking, or both. It's it speaks nothing to the worth worthiness or worthlessness of the person who is involved in the process. In fact, in the Old King James, there was a couple of times in the Old Testament, where the God says that he repented of something that he did, I believe that the King James said, and you can look up this passage in the King James, I believe, but when he was talking to Moses as he repented of, of his choosing the people Israel. And so that was the idea that he just was changing his mind in regards to them. And so in change, look at them from a different perspective. There's repentance is agreeing with God, about who I am, and what I need to accomplish in life and where I stand, it's agreeing with God about the good, the bad, and the ugly of me, and the good and the bad, and the ugly of the world around me, and the good and the bad, and the ugly of other people. And that's all that repentance is it's agreeing with God. In some sense, every prayer that we pray should be a prayer of repentance, because we should be agreeing with God with what we do, and what we believe. And so here in the book of Acts, we're going to review some of the things we talked about, which creates repentance and revival, as found in the first couple of chapters of the book of Acts. And we'll use this and just review some of those concepts. As I mentioned earlier, when we go back to the early church, we can find God's plan for how revival and repentance takes place in the life of the Christian. And so using our early brothers and sisters in Christ, the very beginning of the church in both in the book of Acts, both chapter one and two. We discovered many principles there. But one of the principles we talked about was the idea of prayer, that prayer was pre eminent in the early church, not even preaching, not have been studying the Word that prayer was imminent in the early church. And so prayer has to be imminent in the life of the Christian and in fact, our failure in the Christian Church in America has, if we're honest with ourselves has to do with our lack...