The book of Acts speaks about the restoration of all things, spoken of by the mouths of the prophets, who foresaw these days of restoration.
Acts 3: 19Repent (The word repent speaks of the change that takes place in the mind, when we open our heart to the influence of the Spirit) ye therefore, and be converted (command to begin at this moment-two words-1 superimposition-the image of the spiritual realm placed over the natural realm 2-to turn around to walk on the ancient path) , that your sins may be blotted out (to cover something so that it can no longer be seen ), when the times (a period of opportunity) of refreshing (to restore energy and vitality) shall come from the presence (the face, person-to become aware of His Spirit) of the Lord. 20And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: 21Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.
The Gospel of John opens with the message of John the Baptist, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and when people came to him he would say, “Therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with your repentance.” Matthew 3:8.
The common idea of repentance is that we should say, “Jesus, I am sorry. Please forgive me.” Then we go on as though that were all repentance involves.
We must understand that God intends that we repent deeply enough to bring forth the evidence or fruit of repentance within our lives, because He is concerned about counteracting what we have set in motion and what is already beamed toward us.
Until repentance actually places us in another sphere of living, our repentance is superficial; and there is a great danger that not much will be changed in the consequences of our former lives.
The law of harvest is very great; and when a person sins, they set things in motion which are almost impossible to stop. Even if they escape the consequences now, those consequences will follow them (1 Timothy 5:24), because the actions of people never die. Even their thoughts do not die; their words never die.
When we think of the judgment day, we think of a simple little activity and fail to realize that God will bring us into account for every idle word (Matthew 12:36), for good and evil are not just actions; they are living things. Words are living things.
In the judgment we will see the scroll of our destiny, the good works that he has prepared that we were to walk in.
When the enemy brings evil into our life, and we speak hatred or malice or think vicious thoughts, something real and deadly is turned loose that it becomes an action. Jesus said we must not even call a man a fool (Matthew 5:22).
He said that we cannot look on a woman to lust after her without having committed adultery in our heart (Matthew 5:28). Jesus does not place the reality of sin only in action. He places it in the nature, in the desires, in the things that are turned loose in words. It is very important that we understand this principle.
Sometimes the evil turned loose in the world is directed towards good people. The wicked conspire against the righteous, and it appears for a time as though God is not taking account of it and that the righteous are suffering needlessly, because God does not intervene to judge the wicked. But that is not true; everything is carefully recorded. It does not even need to be recorded, because evil is a living thing which does not die.
More evil has accumulated in this generation than we are aware of. The evil also has piled up from other generations, for it is accumulative (Deuteronomy 5:9); but so also is the righteousness of God. When God speaks a word, it too is living. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words shall not pass away.” Matthew 24:35. They are living words (John 6:63).
When we speak the word of the Lord, it will not die; it will live on and on. When you prophesy by the Holy Spirit, you create a living force that will not die. It will never pass away.
When God wants to bring something forth in the earth, He moves upon his people and puts within them His very words. As they arise and prophesy, “Thus says the Lord,” then the course of nations change, the course of people’s lives is affected by that word.
When a prophet speaks, “Thus says the Lord,” a word comes which changes things, because it is a living unchangeable word. It does not return to the Lord void, but it accomplishes that for which He sent it (Isaiah 55:11).
Ultimately in this age, two things will happen.
First, by prophecies and by the flow of the word, the Kingdom will come forth. Through faith we understand that the ages were created by the word of God (Hebrews 11:3). The ages come forth because God speaks a word to the hearts of men. That is the reason the Kingdom age will come forth.
Second, in this age the evil will all return to its source. In the parables of Matthew, Jesus taught that in the end time, when the Kingdom is come and the King comes to govern, some will enter into all the blessing prepared for them. Others will enter into the place prepared for Satan and his angels—the dumping ground of the universe, the place where all the refuse is sent.
God is preparing a place for the vicious things that do not die. “For their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched.…” Isaiah 66:24. He has prepared the dumping ground of the universe for Satan and his angels and for the living evil which people have done.
The wickedness that has been sent forth, the destructive forces that cannot die because they are living things—all will be swept into the refuse pool, into the abyss, the place prepared for them.
There is another place also being prepared, for the Lord will say … Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Matthew 25:34. Come, you who have sown the word of God, you who have spoken the word of God.
Revelation 14:13 says of the cloud of witnesses who are resting with the Lord: … they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them. Because the works are living, they go on and on.
Not any word ever spoken by a man or woman of God under the anointing of the Spirit has ever died. Men may not be hearing it, but the force of it and what it created is still going on. That is the reason we are held in account for every thought, every idle word, every feeling of hatred or animosity; all these are living things. It is alarming to realize that we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ (Romans 14:10).
We must realize that a little superficial repentance is not sufficient to set aside what we have done? How can we counteract all those things with a little phrase of, “Jesus, I am sorry,” which may be only from the top of our mind? It may not come from the depths of our heart.
The repentance in our life must be total, because we believe for God to completely forgive us and to literally stop the processes of judgment which would be against us.
We must draw upon the cross of Jesus Christ and His sufferings to stop the consequences of the past life of sin.
In this positioning, we receive a total and complete release from the debt we have acquired through the provision for our release that was made. Oh, what a timeless thing Jesus has done. When people repent and believe into the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, they shift into another life, a life to bless, a life to love. Jesus says we cannot even hate our enemies (Matthew 5:43, 44). For our own sake we cannot hate them. We cannot turn loose the force of our hatred, for the things we send come back upon our own heads.
What happens to the man who is selfish: … and there is that witholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty. Proverbs 11:24.
Jesus said about those who give, “It is given unto them heaped up, shaken down, and running over” (Luke 6:38). It is the great law of the boomerang.
If we send out a curse, we may think we escape; but the curse will come back on us. If we send out hatred, it will come back on us.
Judge not, that ye be not judged. Matthew 7:1. The same judgment we mete out will be measured to us again (Matthew 7:2).
We receive our own judgment, not another’s judgment of us. Our judgment goes out like a living thing, and it may or may not affect the one to whom we sent it, but ultimately we will face that judgment. That judgment will be heaped upon us.
We need to believe in change, but we have to believe correctly. We want it to work in our life. We want to become the instrument, the channel whom God will use to bless. We want the Lord to say to you, “Come, ye blessed of My Father; enter into the joys that are prepared for you” (Matthew 25:34).
The blessings of God are accumulative; they have been piling up, and we can enter into them. But the judgments also are accumulative, and they have been piling up too.
The principle of judgment is very simple. God does not intend to reach down and arbitrarily pick some people to throw into hell. All God is doing is allowing the laws which were created to work in people’s lives. If they send out hatred and bitterness, or live selfishly, it will come back on them. There is some truth in the saying that we make our own hell, for evil does accumulate.
In the Kingdom, which is to come, people will be given various ranks. Why is it that some will be down on a low level, while others will be given charge over much? Why do some just barely make it? It is being decided right now; we are determining what we shall have by our faithfulness in walking with the Lord and by the way in which we walk with tenderness of heart.
Let us have a new concept of what repentance means. It is not just a little experience we go through when we first become Christians. It is an experience, and it is also a process. It is a way of life. The more light we receive, the more we repent. We apply the blood of Jesus Christ and continually humble ourselves before the Lord.
The depth of our repentance determines how effective our lives will be and whether we are completely delivered and sheltered from all the consequences of the old life and all the things which would have happened.
What we sow, we reap. Through deep repentance we can truly become instruments of God for His blessing to flow through us. Everything is changed. Our responses are not from the old nature, which constantly brings to itself condemnation.
God does not condemn us when we begin to repent. Our old nature and the evil is condemned already. It is the evil which God would put away from us.
There must be in our hearts a desire for holiness and righteousness. There must be that which repents deeply, which grieves over anything that is wrong.
The Scripture says, For godly sorrow worketh (to be the cause of) repentance into salvation, a repentance which bringeth no regret.… 2 Corinthians 7:10. This repentance must be our way of life, a part of every day we live. There is no other way we can live without condemnation.
Self-condemnation comes because we are aware of something in our life which is not right even though we may not be able to identify what is wrong. Only deep repentance removes self-condemnation from us, because then we reach a depth where self-condemnation no longer operates in our life at all. All sin is forgiven and there is not that deep, disturbing conviction in our spirit that things are not right with the Lord.
“Bring forth the fruit of repentance.” What is the fruit of repentance? It is the consequences of our life showing the evidence of repentance.
We may say we are sorry and still have a wrong spirit. Our spirit becomes right when we have a broken spirit and a broken and contrite heart-psalm 51:17. When our spirit is broken it is separated from the sin so that it is filled with godly sorrow.
An apology from another person can be very deceptive, and we may be deceived about the way we ought to respond to an apology.
If someone superficially (shallowly) tells us they are sorry, we cannot say, “That is all right; I forgive you,” if their apology is not from their heart. We cannot forgive what God has not forgiven.
Do we want to forgive what God is bringing to the surface, and thereby allow the thing to stay down in their heart? It must come to the surface to be dealt with.
When someone says they are sorry, we listen to them and stay with them until that problem surfacing in their life is completely removed. This is eternal.
We are to become the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world. Philippians 2:15b. This is what God desires of us.
When God brings something to the surface in our life, we do not stop repenting until we have put the axe to the root and that thing is dead. We are doing no one a favor by letting things stay under the surface.
We will either do the will of God, or we will not do it. What we are looking for is to hear Him say, Well done, thou good and faithful servant.… Matthew 25:21.
We do not just want to bear thirty fold (Matthew 13:23). We want to bear a hundredfold.
The degree to which the perfect seed of God’s living word brings forth fruit in our lives depends upon the extent that we remove the cares, the thorns, and the things which hinder.
It depends upon our producing a depth of soil for that word to grow in (Matthew 13:22) and upon our willingness for the weeds and the hindrances to be removed.
We lay the axe to the root of the tree (Matthew 3:10). We do not pull off a few branches; we get at the problem in our life that God puts His finger on.
We need to find out what we need God to do in our life. If we truly want to walk with God, we can walk with God. This deep repentance will make the difference between failing and giving up or saying, like Joshua, “There hath not failed ought of all the things that God hath promised. All hath been fulfilled” (Joshua 23:14). Not one promise failed. But of Joshua it is said that he wholly followed the Lord his God (Joshua 14:9). That is the reason not one promise failed.
If our repentance does not go deep enough, one day we will have a rude awakening when we realize how responsible we are for the corruption and the vileness left in our heart because we did not repent until it was completely gone. If we are going to change, we have to change all the way. If we are going to be a new creature, we need to be a completely new creature.
“For if you do these things,” Peter wrote, “then there shall be given unto you an abundant entrance into the Kingdom” (2 Peter 1:10, 11).
In the same text when Peter speaks of the time of the restoration of all things, he says, “Repent, that seasons of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. (Acts 3:19–26).
Do we want to be a part of what God is doing in this day, or do we want to just watch someone else walk in it, and be the partaker of it?
The Bride has purged herself; she has cleansed herself; she has made herself ready. She is adorned with fine linen, clean and white, which is the righteous acts of the saints (Revelation 19:7, 8).
Those acts live on and on; they are living things! Whatever is lacking in our experience with the Lord, we need to go back and take care of it, not with a lot of introspection and self-condemnation, but with the objective that we are going to be a son of God. We are going to walk as a son, not as a child who is constantly falling into the mud and needing someone to clean him up.
If we are going to walk with God as one of His sons, then we must repent in order that our sins may be wiped away—not just forgiven.
To walk with God we must be cleansed from all unrighteousness. Righteousness and sin cannot coexist. Do we still love the world; or do we really want to escape from it? Do we want to be released from the pollutions of this world? Do we want to move into the righteousness and the holiness of the Kingdom? Then one thing is necessary: But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Matthew 6:33.
We cannot be believers unless we are also good repenters. There is no way we can accomplish in five minutes all that this word opens up for us to do. We cannot continually allow these things to exist in our lives. We must be released.
The Lord will speak to our heart. Murmuring, complaining, backbiting, and criticizing set in motion things which poison the spiritual life. These cause us to follow the Lord afar off. Murmurers and complainers have one foot still in the world; they always need a coffee break from God so they can run out and get something to keep the old flesh alive.
Oh, the wicked traits that come up in the human flesh—that vicious anger, temper, and malice! Do we now wish that when we began to serve the Lord, we would have been serious enough to wait before him until we were changed?
Are we tired of limping along with things in our life that ought not to be there? Let this be the hour we are delivered from the futility of the flesh.
We need to enter into a course of repentance that will bring us into everything God has made available to us. We must become deeply repentant and ask God to make this our way of life.
We must not be one who is constantly slipping back as a dog to its vomit or a sow to her wallow (2 Peter 2:22). We must desire to be cleansed from all unrighteousness. We must want to walk with God and really mean business. We do not want to come to this tremendous hour of destiny and miss it because we are playing around with the flesh.
If we are set for this course of repentance, God will help us. We may have days in which we will struggle with it; but if we will set our course and go after it with faith in our hearts, God will meet us. That is the reason God sent His Son to die. This is His eternal purpose.
He ever lives to make intercession for us and He is able to save us to the uttermost (Hebrews 7:25). To the uttermost is completely, perfectly, thoroughly.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9. This becomes the objective of our repentance, to be cleansed from all unrighteousness. This is not a strange kind of life; it is the only way to live.
In Old Testament times men came before the Lord with fear and trembling; they exposed themselves to God, they would open their hearts to Him. Many times the word of the lord comes to us telling us to open our hearts.
Many times we confuse our need by saying we need ministry when in reality we need only to worship and expose ourselves to God. The greatest changes that occur in a person’s life come as the result of their exposing their selves to God.
Is there any revelation of God without an exposure of oneself to the Lord? We recall Isaiah’s meeting with God. In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Isaiah 6:1. Immediately Isaiah said, “Woe is me” (Isaiah 6:5).
The revelation of the Lord must mean an exposure of ourselves to Him. A coal of fire from the altar was placed upon Isaiah’s lips, for he was a man of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5, 6). A change was wrought in his very nature whereby he could be what God wanted him to be.
Lord, we commit ourselves to this course of repentance. We must stop the course of idle words, of gossip, of murmuring, of complaining, of backbiting, of lust, of hatred, of malice, of division, of judging, of criticism.
We must stop the course of these things, or we will suffer the consequences. We want to sow in the spirit so that we may reap everlasting life (Galatians 6:8).
Lord, we begin this course by saying how sorry we are. May it be a godly sorrow that will work repentance. Our repentance will not be just for a moment. We covenant before God that it will be a way of life. It will be a process that will be a real cleansing in our lives.
We pursue this course of repentance because we want total, absolute reality in our lives. Whatever is lacking we ask you to finish it. You are the author and the finisher of our faith (Hebrews 12:2). Cleanse us and perfect us completely , we claim it now in the name of the Lord.