What is repentance? It is receiving Gods thoughts into our consciousness, causing us to change the way we think about something and think like God does about it.
The reason that you may not receive as much blessing as you could receive is that you are asking the Lord to fill you with His Spirit so you can continue in your present way.
You may not be asking for that exactly. You do want changes, but still in too many areas you are following a course that God may not wholly be in, and so the blessing upon it is limited.
People in the old order of established denominations have some blessing upon them. They have a certain anointing and the Holy Spirit moves upon them to a certain extent.
When you come into a walk with God and turn away from the old order of Babylon, immediately there is a greater anointing upon you.
The closer you come to exactly what God wants, by repenting and turning away from what is not in His perfect will, the greater the anointing will be.
That’s why it is said of Christ who did the will of the Father that upon Him rested the Spirit without measure; there was no limit.
We know there is a limit to the anointing upon us. The limitation is not in the promise or provision of God, for He has provided for it in an unlimited way. But we have limited ourselves by the course we have followed.
It is like someone standing halfway in the shade, wondering why he doesn’t tan faster. He should move out in the sunshine.
Likewise, you must move out of the place of even the permissive will of God if you want His best, if you want unlimited blessing. It may take awhile to understand what we have to change, but we know that all of us have little habits in our conduct and in our lives; there is a certain pattern to our behavior and personality. God blesses us to the fullest extent that He can, but we are always frustrated because we are believing and claiming more than we are walking in.
It may not be our faith that is at fault. It may be that we have to redirect and re-evaluate all our attitudes, all our relationships, all the service we are giving to the Lord.
To the extent that we do what God wants, to that extent the blessing of the Lord constantly increases and the anointing becomes heavier. From year to year the anointing increases as we contend more earnestly for the perfect will of the Lord.
Desiring the will of the Lord opened the whole thing up in the day of Pentecost, as is explained in a few words in Acts 2:37, 38: Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Brethren, what shall we do? And Peter said unto them, Repent ye, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ unto the remission of your sins; and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Repentance was necessary. You don’t receive the Holy Spirit because you repent; you receive the Holy Spirit because you believe and receive the promise.
But people who are faulty in their repentance, who have not really turned from the old ways and let God direct them in a whole new course, are limited in the expression and the power of the experience they receive.
Although many people have received the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues in the recent charismatic renewal that has reached the denominations, not very many of them find much power in their life; they are not really changing.
They are saying, “Lord, fill me with the Holy Spirit so that I can be a good pastor”; or, “Fill me with the Holy Spirit so that I can go out and promote some meetings and succeed as a ministry.” God blesses them to some extent, but they have restricted and limited the amount of blessing they receive.
If they would go all out, all free, not leaning upon any device of the flesh or any support but God, they would go through a transition period that would seem like a wilderness, and they would come out of it anointed of the Holy Spirit and power.
That’s what Jesus did. After receiving the Holy Spirit, He went into the wilderness; He went through the temptations, utterly dedicated to do only the will of the Father, he qualified for the power, the seven spirits of the Lord rested upon him . After forty days He came out of the wilderness to go forth and heal the sick and minister to the people. The Spirit of God was upon Him without measure.
We receive the Holy Spirit and refillings of the Holy Spirit, and almost immediately we are put in a wilderness. But it can be a very brief wilderness.
A wilderness will last only as long as it takes for you to say to the devil, “It is written. This is the way it’s going to be.” When you say that, you can come out of your wilderness in the power of the Spirit because there is an identity with Christ in what He went through.
When you identify yourself with His dedication to do the will of the Father, the anointing upon you will be unlimited and you will move into greater power. This is the key.
In Acts 2:38, notice that Peter said, “Repent and be baptized every one of you and you shall receive the remission of your sins.” It’s not forgiveness; it’s remission.
The Latin word “mittere” means send; just send them away. You want the force and the power of them sent away. Repentance includes that.
If you in any way regard iniquity in your life with favor, or those things that fall short of the will of God with favor, you will continue in them. But when you repent of them they will be taken away.
It’s not enough for you to hate them; it’s not enough for you to fear them; it’s not enough for you to want to stop doing them, if the root of it remains.
The entire sin structure is sometimes so complicated that it includes family relationships and work relationships; it includes general attitudes toward the old order of things and toward the world. If you love the world, the love of the Father is not in you. You have to hate it.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. I John 2:16–17. This is not speaking of a permissive will; the anointing we want is to walk in is the perfect will of God.
What made the gift of the Holy Spirit so effective in the early Church? It was because their repentance was total. They were faced with something.
In this sermon Peter told the Jews, “You were the ones who with wicked hands slew the Lord of glory. You did it!” They were confronted with the fact that they were the murderers of Christ.
You will find your repentance easier if you face the fact that as Christ is coming forth in a many-membered Body, some of you could put Him to an open shame and crucify Him afresh, and be just as guilty as the Roman who thrust a spear in His side.
The first ones to come into the Church were those who had cried, “Crucify Him,” those who had murdered Him. When they saw what they had done, their repentance was so deep and so complete that they became the effective spiritual saints of the early Church.
In Acts 2, Peter said, “You with wicked hands have slain the Lord of glory.” You are not guilty of that, but you are all probably guilty of stifling and restraining the Christ that is coming forth in the Body. If you see this as a sin against Christ, you won’t say, “I have a bad relationship with my mother.”
Don’t look at it that way. You have a bad relationship with Christ—that’s the problem. You may not be loving your mother enough, or doing enough for her. In your frustration you may have withdrawn from the duties that you should accomplish. But love Him first. Don’t suffocate it.
Repent and turn toward the Lord with all your heart. Repentance is so basic. We can receive by faith, and open up to the flow of the Spirit of God as we sing and worship.
But we want to constantly deepen in the flow of power and effectiveness, in the manifestation of Christ that will come out of this Body; and that will be based upon the depth of our repentance before the Lord of everything that has to go
…and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For to you is the promise, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call unto him. And with many other words he testified, and exhorted them, saying, Save yourselves from this crooked generation. Verses 38–40.
Peter had the same thing to deal with and he said, “Turn away from the establishment. Save yourself from this crooked generation. You must be redeemed from it.” The only way you can save yourself is by coming with inner repentance of the whole thing, repenting of it in your heart and saying, “I’m tired of it. I’m tired of my conformity.”
And be not conformed to this world (age), but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind…Romans 12:2. You must think differently so you will no longer be a slave of the whole system round about you, of the deep patterns and ruts of thinking.
On an old country road back in the Midwest after the spring thaw, the first car that comes sliding along makes a crooked rut, and everyone else follows along in that same crooked rut. If they got out of it they would probably slide in the ditch. Those ruts are often so deep that one hardly has to steer the car; it can almost steer itself.
That’s what you do in your life. Day by day you follow the same course: you think the same way, you react the same way. Determine to let the Holy Spirit so fill you, determine to so repent of the old way, that every response will be in God. You should be so in tune that no reaction is wrong, everything is just right before the Lord.
We must open our hearts and say, “Lord, we repent of our responses to the flesh. We repent of all the things that are second best in our lives. With certainty we come to abhor them. We can’t be instruments of the Holy Spirit in the earth, we can’t be the oracles of God, until things are changed. Our entire way of living will have to change until our response to people, to everything, is in Thee.
Lord, we repent of everything within us that is conformity to the world around us. We repent of everything that is in conformity within ourselves, that makes us afraid to stand and encounter evil and be a living rebuke—whether audible or silent—against the thing that is wrong. We still conform because we want to get along; we don’t want to cause any extra trouble, we don’t want to rock the boat.
O Lord, we do want to rock the boat! We want things changed! It may mean that people will separate from us but others will be drawn to us and there will be a new level of activity and thinking, a new level of the Spirit in our lives, and we will come into something good.
We may not change instantly; it may take a little while but today we’re going to change and we will continue changing.
Everything that your Spirit puts upon our heart that is wrong, we will repent of, and see changed. Lord, we’re not only repenting now, but we are asking for a spirit of repentance to rest upon us until the job is completed. This we claim in the name of the Lord. We look to You for it.”
As you are being filled with the Spirit, you’re not getting just a little charge, another shot in the arm so you can go on in the same level.
You are looking for the Holy Spirit to fill you so you can break into a new level, so that repentance can be working in your life by the Holy Spirit at the same time as your ministry is reaching up to new levels, exhibiting and manifesting Christ to the people round about you.
Many of you have offensive reactions which you want changed. “Lord, we repent of them and we believe, because you are our Savior, You will save us from all sin, everything within our thinking that is wrong. We are going to be God’s holy people.”
In our everyday way of life we don’t want to reason and think on a human level. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Are ye not carnal and walk as men?” We don’t want to walk as men. We want to walk as Christ. Carnal means fleshly and we want to come out of that. We are to walk as the children of God. God will help us.