TEACHING

Teaching on Revival and Repentance

Now, we have gone through Steps to Revival. We have been talking about II Chronicles 7: 14:

"If my people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and then turn, turn from their wicked ways..."

You see, there is no revival apart from repentance. And repentance in the Greek means an afterthought. You are going one way and now you turn to another. You change the way you are living and you analyze.

In this book I suggest how you do it step by step by step. Take a pad of paper and a pen or pencil. And you get on your knees before the Lord and you say to Him, "God, I have sinned." And as I have said in this book and I say to you again, you don't sin generally, you sin specifically. So get specific.

If you took something that belongs to somebody else, it is not, "Oh, God forgive me of my many sins", but, "forgive me for taking what doesn't belong to me."
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If you cheat on your employer, you confess it. If you cheat on your wife or husband, confess it.

If you have been a pain in the neck and hard to live with, confess it. If there are people in your life that you hate, who have injured you, the Bible says when you stand praying, if you have ought against any, forgive that your heavenly Father may forgive you.

Make a list of the people, specifically forgive. And while you are doing it, ask God to forgive you.

We are bombarded with sexual imagery on the television and Internet and movies and advertising, anywhere we turn. This is a solicitation to the base nature of every human being. Don't act like it didn't happen. God knows what's happened in your life, what thoughts go through your mind. Go to the Lord and confess it.

Put it all down on a piece of paper. Everything. And as I said in this little booklet, be brutal. Not on somebody else, but on you. Be brutal on yourself. God knows it anyhow, so you might as well be honest.

The greatest sin of all is not loving God with all of your heart, your mind and your soul. "Here's how I sinned." Write it down. People say they get page after page of things they write down.

And then you take them before the Lord and you say, "God, this is me. And I ask you to forgive me and I ask you to cleanse me from each one of these."

There are things in your background that you may have kept bottled up and things that you have done that you have never been clean before the Lord about. And things that you should have done that you didn't and things you knew you shouldn't do and did. You have broken His laws.

It isn't just adultery and stealing and that kind of thing. There are little things, little petty things. Pride; think of the pride in your heart. Think of the arrogance you feel towards someone else, someone of less economic status, or lesser education. You have pride. Confess this before the Lord.

And you confess to Him that you are made out of dust and you are a sinner and you come before the Lord. And you hold these things up and say, "Satan, you lose. You thought you were going to trap me, but you lose." And you make a declaration to Satan that he's lost because God has now got you and Satan lost you.

You hold these before the Lord and you say, "Lord, I put these in the sea of Your forgetfulness, as far as the east is from the west. That's how far You take my sins from me." And take a match and light the paper and burn it up and say it is gone because the Lord has forgiven my sin.

Jesus said, "Go and sin no more." You begin to live a life for Him. But you are clean. And the Bible says He wants us freed from a guilty conscience so that we can serve the Lord. He doesn't want you to keep a morbid introspection about all of the stuff in your life that you felt bad about.

What He wants you to be is free now to serve the Living God -- free from a dead conscience. You are freed from this and now you belong to Him. This is the beginning of revival. It is a process. It may not happen all in one day. Things will keep coming to your mind. Shoot them down when they come to your mind and let God minister to you.

Let's move to revival because the next thing that God says is, "…I'll forgive your sins and I will heal your land." (2 Chronicles 7:14)