The Need for Repentance
The problem isn't other people.
Throughout December, we are bringing you excerpts from Malcolm Webber’s book To Enjoy Him Forever. We pray that it will be a blessing to you!
There is a further manifestation of religious knowledge without heart surrender that we must recognize. One of the most subtle and most effective ways to hinder a move of God in your life, or in your church, is to misinterpret His dealings as being for the purpose of bringing others to repentance and surrender to God. But in a manner of speaking, God is not trying to bring someone else to repentance — He is trying to bring you to repentance!
Unfortunately in all of us there is a desire to avoid the cross, while at the same time piously assigning its demands to others and to “the church” as a whole.
But it is YOU who needs repentance; it is YOU who needs to surrender and to abandon your life to God; it is YOU who needs the cross. If YOU would submit your stubborn heart to God and allow Him to work in your life then God’s greatest hindrance to accomplishing His will in the church and bringing His people to a place of reality before Himself would be removed.
Dear brother or sister, if only one person in your church would get down and pray it through before God, and come to a place of total surrender to Him — not merely an understanding of this, nor merely a religious profession of it, but the inward reality of a complete abandonment of their life to Jesus — if only one would do this — if God had only one pure instrument, only one channel through whom He could travail and birth a work, then the fire of the Holy Spirit would soon sweep your church and no one would be left untouched. So let that “one” be you.
It is easy when God begins to deal with you, revealing your own hypocrisy and religious hardness, to immediately see the shallowness of everyone else’s relationship with Jesus. But you cannot blame others for not yielding to the Holy Spirit. Really the problem is with you, and you just want to point out someone else’s hard heart to hide the fact that your life is not surrendered to God.
True revival must start somewhere — and it must begin with you. If there is not revival in your church then the fault does not lie in any direction but one.
The problem lies not in your brother;
The problem lies not in your sister.
The problem lies not in the pulpit;
The problem lies not in the pew.
The problem dear brother,
The problem dear sister,
The problem,
The problem
is
you.
One of the most subtle manifestations of self in our lives is to acknowledge the need of repentance and yet to loudly consign that need to everyone but ourselves. And even more awful is the bitter and fault-finding spirit and the censure of others — for their not yielding to God — that frequently accompanies this attitude. All along, self is allowed to hide and take refuge behind this disguise which, amazingly, is the loud and uncompromising proclamation of the need for repentance and death to self! What an extraordinary sight: self fearlessly expounding upon the absolute necessity of death to self! And more incredible yet, in this very process self is actually being defended and even strengthened!
But God has not called you to castigate others over their need for repentance and dying to self. He has called you actually to repent and to die to self — yourself! And without that work in your own life, all of your heated exhortations and admonitions of others will be to no avail, and will probably cause more harm than good.
God does not want self-righteous expositions of everyone else’s problem, but your own utter raw abandonment.
It is the same for all Christian exercises. Without this most fundamental of operations — that is the abandonment of the heart to God — all are destined to failure.
There are a myriad of goals and activities pursued by Christians. Yet coming to the knowledge of Jesus Christ is our only true goal, our only real prize. But to come to the knowledge of Jesus requires the abandonment of our lives to God.
But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ… (Phil. 3:7-8, 10)
If our supreme goal is to come to the true knowledge of Jesus then we must abandon our lives in entirety to God, and this is why “substitute goals” are so popular: because all of them can be outwardly pursued and an external veneer of Christianity and spirituality fabricated while inwardly the heart has never surrendered to God and self is still served.
Religious man is capable of great self-deception. We must not rest while even the slightest trace of this appears in our hearts and lives, for the massive iceberg lies beneath. Let us cry day and night to God that He will bring us to Truth.