Notes of Faith April 24, 2025
Change Your Mind
Remember therefore how you have received and heard; hold fast and repent. Therefore if you will not watch, I will come upon you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come upon you.
Revelation 3:3
Before the days of GPS, driving could be tricky. If we found ourselves lost, a reliable strategy was to retrace our steps until we discovered where we made a wrong turn. We would change our mind and go a different way.
Changing our mind is at the heart of one of the Bible’s most serious spiritual actions: repentance. The original Greek word for repentance is metanoeo, a compound verb meaning “to change one’s mind or to think again.” We think of repentance as being a serious change in behavior, and it is. But behavior begins with how we think and what decisions we make. So when we find ourselves acting in an ungodly way, we should retrace our steps and see how our thinking led us down a path of improper behavior. That was the message Christ gave the church at Sardis: “Hold fast and repent” or hold fast and change your thinking.
If your behavior is not what it should be, examine your thinking. Ask God to show you how to think God’s thoughts after Him.
Christianity starts with repentance.
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Becoming a believer and follower of Jesus begins with realizing that you are a sinner in need of a Savior. If you do not believe that you are a sinner, you do not need to think differently, act differently, nor repent from anything. When we worship self, (most likely), or anything or anyone else, we will not recognize that we are sinners before the only righteous and holy God. Our lives will change when recognition of sin and repentance takes place because it is God who does the work in our heart and mind! We must seek His face, desire to draw close to Him, closer still every day, and pursue His will for the life that He gives us. It is eternal and we should deeply consider the promises and rewards that are waiting for those who love and worship Him!
Pastor Dale