Blessed By Repentance

I do not know if anyone likes to be wrong. Now some are better at it than others but for many of us admitting we are wrong is like swallowing a handful of gravel. It going to take some time and effort and we probably won’t get it all. We might have to do it but we don’t have to like it.

But maybe we should.

In Acts 3, Peter is preaching yet another gospel sermon. After a miracle of healing, he is telling the crowd about the plan of God fulfilled in Jesus and the evil that had been done to him. Peter tells them that even though they “had acted in ignorance” (17), they still needed to “repent and turn to God” (19). He warned them failure to heed the message would end in destruction (23). Yet consider what he proclaims in the last verse of the chapter:

"For you first, God raised up His Servant and sent Him to bless you by turning every one of you from your wicked ways."

How were they blessed here? By God sending Jesus. How had that blessed them? By turning them from their wicked ways. Without Jesus, they would still be stuck in their evil ways. By letting them know their error, they now could change for the better. And that is a good thing.

And it still is.

Don’t make the mistake of seeing being helped to overcome wrong as a bad thing. Ignorance of evil doesn’t make it right it just makes you in the wrong. Failure to see and change leaves you there. It is a blessing to be rerouted from error. Don’t let your pride keep you from seeing that truth.

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Until Midnight

In Acts 20, there is the tragicomic event surrounding a young man by the name of Eutychus. He did what a lot of folks before and after him did, he fell asleep during a sermon. Unfortunately, he was setting in in the third story window at the time. So instead of nodding off and hitting the pew in front of him, he fell to his death. The good news was the apostle Paul was delivering the sermon and had the ability to bring him back. I don’t know, however, if we can judge Eutychus too harshly. The sermon had gone on till midnight. Paul wouldn’t finish it up till daybreak. That’s a long lesson. I know some folks that might want to jump out of a window if I had a lesson that long, yet these Christians wanted to be there to hear Paul. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing for all night sermons but I think we might need to adopt these folks' dedication. They knew that Paul was only in town for a limited time only and they were determined to ...

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Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

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