The nature of repentance in Scripture precludes the nonsense of partial repentance or contingent repentance. Genuine repentance does not turn from one sin while safeguarding others; partial repentance is as incongruous as partial pregnancy. Loyalty to God in selective areas is no longer loyalty, but treason. To repent of disloyalty in select areas, while preferring disloyalty in others, is no repentance at all. God does not ask us to give up this or that idol while permitting us to nurture several others; he demands, rather, that we abandon idolatry itself and return to the God against whom we have “so greatly revolted.”
Author: Jojo Agot
Pastor at Victory. Faculty and adviser at Every Nation Leadership Institute (ENLI). MA in Theology and Mission at Every Nation Seminary.
What “Pray Without Ceasing” Means
Pray without ceasing. (1 Thes. 5: 17)
Is this advice from Paul realistic? I mean, have you ever seen someone who is praying round the clock? I bet you haven’t, not even in monasteries.
A careful study of the original text of this verse tells us that it means to pray without leaving an interval or gap, without intermission. It is the same word Paul used when he said he was in “continual sorrow” for his fellow Jews who rejected Christ (Romans 9: 2). A point worth noting here: people in sorrow don’t have to be reeling with anguish all the time. They go about there normal routines just fine while they grieve in their hearts without having to break into tears every five minutes.
Abiding in Christ
I believe that the real struggle among Christians is not really the struggle to fight off sin but the struggle to abide in Christ on a daily basis. And the reason we are losing our battle against sin is not for lack of faith but our fighting the wrong battle.
To put it plainly, our real struggle is to get up every morning and open the pages of the Bible, get on our knees and pray. And then to keep that holy fire of God’s presence burning in our hearts all day until we get to our knees again at night and refuel our empty tanks.
We lose to sin because instead of taking care of our devotions, we rush to the day, trying hard to keep our eyes closed whenever we are bombarded with images of sin and lust, trying very hard not to steal and talk back and harbor anger. We spend our energies trying to quiet down our internal urges, trying to keep ourselves in check.
Humility in the Wrong Place
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself.
The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason…
The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn…
There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it’s practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic…
The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether…
We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
–from G. K. Chesterton via John Piper
Broken Clocks
“[There’s a story] of a man who used to go to work at a factory and every day would stop outside a clockmaker’s store to synchronize his watch with the clock outside. At the end of several days the clockmaker stopped him and said, “Excuse me, sir, I do have a question for you. I see that every day you stop and adjust your watch with my clock. What kind of work do you do?”
The man said, “I’m embarrassed to tell you this; I keep the time at the factory nearby, and I have to ring the bell at four o clock every afternoon when it is time for the people to go home. My watch doesn’t work very well, so I synchronize it with your clock.”
The clockmaker says, “I’ve got bad news for you. My clock doesn’t work very well either, so I synchronize it with the bell that I hear from the factory at 4:00 every afternoon.”
If you’ll pardon the grammar, what happens when two wrong watches correct themselves by each other? They will get wronger and wronger all the time. Even a clock that doesn’t work may show you the right time twice a day…but it’s not because it’s keeping time!”
Excerpted from Ravi Zacharias, Address to the United Nations’ Prayer Breakfast.
Losing Our Ability to Reason
“In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, lyrics and music that gave rise to a new term, ‘the generation gap.’ In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protests. Church, state and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.
In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of nihilism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with ‘self’—self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion. It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and few had the nerve to tell them that there was indeed a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.”
Jojo Agot 