Soundbytes for Repentance

I'm speaking tonight on how God invites us to share in the final reality that Hope Wins by inviting us to repent of sin. I'm trying to talk about repentance and obedience without sounding like a freakish, angry Pharisee. Here are a few soundbytes:

Temptation: the lie that life outside of being with God is qualitatively better than life with God.

Sin: breaking relationship with God in order to act in faith on those lies.

Repentance: to turn away from beliefs, motives, or actions that are outside of God’s character and to turn towards God for life and ultimate satisfaction and fulfillment.

Obedience: to live a life in faith on the promises of God that life with him is qualitatively better, more in line with reality than any other thing offered to us.

Repentance and obedience are the relentless campaigns of those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.

All sin is war against God’s peace

God is eager to unleash all the forces of heaven against all the forces of sin and hell to undo sin that has caused death and destruction and disfigurement of men and women whom he created to be image-bearers, to be ones who showed forth God’s glory and beauty and goodness

Sin is thin, the payoff is weak, the returns get smaller and smaller, it gets more and more hollow the further down into it you get; one person's testimony about struggles with pornography: “I was thirsty for real intimacy and my involvement with pornography was like drinking salt water.”

All sin is like this—it promises much and delivers only very little.

Sin is boring, there’s only 5 plot lines in the arsenal of sin: sex, power, money, escape, fame. It’s like a bad soap opera with recycled plot lines over and over again throughout history.

Sin and evil is on a short leash and one day will be done away with, and so there are only a finite number of ways sin can express itself because sin is itself finite and one day will no longer be.

Sin barely exists in and of itself—it only exists as a parasite to the good. Sex is good, sin distorts it. Money and power and recreation and applause are all good, sin just distorts it.

Sin is actually foreign to our humanity. Humanity was not made to live in sin, we were made to be sinless--it is a cancer, a corruption of our human nature

Sin and death and brokenness are all on a leash, the clock is ticking and there will come a day when they will exist no longer.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, how monotonously similar are all the tyrants and famous sinners of the world! How gloriously different and diverse are all the saints.

There are, in fact, billions of ways to delight in the freedom and wonder of holiness, and really only a handful of ways to really revel in sin.

God is infinite and he is holy—therefore, there are an infinite ways to experience the joy and wonder and freedom of holiness.