1 Samuel 7:3-17
Use this guide to help your group discussion as you meet this week.
Transcript
Uh my name is Chad. I'm one of the pastors here. If you will grab a Bible and go to First Samuel, chapter 7. We are working through the book of First Samuel. And we're going to study uh almost all of chapter 7.
We got into chapter 7 a little bit last week. We're going to study almost all of chapter 7 today. And we're going to see in this story something that is absolutely essential to our faith in Christ. absolutely essential to how we live and what we do as Christians as we follow him. Um if you don't have a Bible with you, you can grab one of the blue ones in front of you.
It will be on page 132 this morning. Um but we're going to study through this. We're going to read through the story and then we're going to kind of go back through and begin to point out some aspects uh that we need to consider this morning as we look at ourselves and as we learn from this story. So 1st Samuel 7 verse three uh well before I read verse three. What just happened was the ark was sent back to the people of Israel.
It was taken over to Kir Jerim and it's been there for 20 years. That's what we just read last week. So the remember they hooked it to some cows and they sent it back. Okay.
Uh, it's back, but it's been there for 20 years. And it says that the house of Israel lamented after the Lord. Verse three, and Samuel said, Samuel's back. We hadn't talked about him in a while, and it's been 20 years in the text. You're like, we talked about him a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, but he what has he been doing for 20 years? But Samuel shows back up. He had been established as a prophet. He begins to speak. It says, "And Samuel said to all the house of Israel, if you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the ash to wroth from among you, and direct your heart to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines." It is possible that Samuel lived in relative obscurity for 20 years and then suddenly started saying this.
I find that very unlikely. I think what is most likely is that they just summed up what Samuel has been saying for 20 years. And some of y'all thought that we went through the book of Exodus slowly. Samuel's on the first commandment for 20 years. He's saying the same thing over and over again for 20 years.
It says they're lamenting after the Lord. It says he goes around and says to all of Israel. Well, if you're really going to turn to him, get rid of your idols. If you're really going to turn to him, get rid of your idols. I think at some point people might say, you say the same thing over and over again.
And he'd say, "You haven't done it yet. I don't have any. We can't do step two if we hadn't done step one." I think maybe that's what his attitude was like. We'll see. Anyway, it says he went around.
He told everybody. Verse four, so the people of Israel put away the baales and the asharoth and they served the Lord only. They listen. They get rid of their idols. So him speaking to all Israel, calling them to repent, calling them to turn from this stuff, they do.
Then Samuel said, "Gather all Israel at Mispa and I will pray to the Lord for you." So he says, "If y'all are really doing this and they're really going to follow the Lord, then everybody come together and we'll pray and we'll see if he'll throw off the hand of the Philistines as we turn to him." So they gathered at Mispa and drew water and poured it out before the Lord and fasted on that day. Okay. So, they gather to fast. They gather to mourn. It says they drew water and they pour it out.
Now, there's nowhere in the Bible in the law or anything that tells them to do that, but it seems to be an act of contrition. It's part of the fasting. Water is hard to come by. Even if they had a close source, a lot of their day would be spent going and getting it, carrying it, hauling it. It's a precious thing and it represents life and fruitfulness.
Without water, crops don't grow. Without water to drink, you die. And they pour it out. Saying, "Lord, you're our life. You're the one we're trusting to bring fruitfulness.
You're the one we're trusting with hope." That they pour it out and they fast. So, they're not seems like they're not drinking. They're not eating. They're humbling themselves before the Lord. says if they fasted on that day and said there we have sinned against the Lord.
So they're acknowledging that they're wrong and they've come to humble themselves and Samuel judged the people of Israel at Mispa. Uh judging does mean at times that he would go in between disputes that judges would do that sort of thing. But most of the time in the text, what it really it's a almost a title for leads. So you'll see the judges in the book of judges are Israel's leaders. And sometimes they just win a decisive victory and then Israel has peace and they'll say they were a judge for that period of time.
It does seem like at times they'll sit and they'll help you work through disputes or help answer questions about what someone should do or not do. But a lot of times it's just kind of like chief. So he was judge over them. He gathered them all. They came.
He's overseeing it. Verse 7. Now when the Philistines heard that the people of Israel had gathered at Mispa, the lords of the Philistines went up against Israel. And the people of Israel heard of it and they were afraid of the Philistines. Okay, couple things happening here.
The people of Israel seem like they've been at Mispa for a while, which makes sense. Uh, this is why people used to always have really good guest areas in their homes. When someone travels, we're we're the only people because of cars that'll go do something for a day or a couple hours and go back. That's not how this works. People went to a place, they were there for a little while because it took a while to get there.
It takes a while to get back. These are things that are happening. So, they're there lamenting, fasting before the Lord, humbling themselves, and the Philistines hear about it. And the Philistines say, "Oh, y'all want to fight?
We'll fight. Yeah. Okay. It's go time. They said, "Do you hear all the Israelites gathered?" Yeah.
All right. Well, we better go kill them before they kill us. That's what they did. And if you're going, "But why?" Cuz they gathered to worship. Have Have you ever been out somewhere and heard people laughing?
or you've been walking and you pass a group of like middle schoolers and you get past them and they laugh and you have this moment where you think they're laughing at me. If you will assign evil motives to happy people in your vicinity, this is the same human impulse just on a national scale with people who were their enemies. They've been at war. All of Israel has gathered. They go, "That can't be good.
we better kill them. So, the Philistines get ready and start marching. Now, the Israelites have not gathered for war. So, they're afraid and rightfully so.
The Philistines have been beating them. The Philistines have been in some ways exerting rule over them. We find out in chapter 13 of 1st Samuel that the Philistines had so much authority over the Israelites, they wouldn't let them have blacksmiths because they said if they have blacksmiths, they might make swords and they might make spears. So if you were an Israelite and you wanted to get your sickle sharpened or your axe sharpened, you had to go to the Philistines to get it done because you didn't have a blacksmith. So if there are weapons in the camp of the Israelites, their farm tools now with a camp, they probably would have brought some axes and some different things.
Maybe not sickles, but they might have had some things so they could have a camp here. But there's not a lot. They didn't show up for war. They show up to fast. These are thirsty, hungry people who have come together to to lament and to humble themselves before the Lord.
They did not gather for war. So they show up and all of a sudden they hear and it's it's women, children, everybody. And they go, "Oh no, this isn't good. The Philistines are marching down on us." So they were afraid of the Philistines. And the people of Israel said to Samuel, "Do not cease to cry out to the Lord our God for us that he may save us from the hand of the Philistines." So they don't flee.
Seems like they found out about the Philistines when the Philistines are getting there. They don't flee. They say, "Pray." So Samuel, verse 9, So Samuel took a nursing lamb and offered it as a whole burnt offering to the Lord. And Samuel cried out to the Lord for Israel. And the Lord answered him.
And then it's going to go into telling the story. It's going to tell us how the Lord answered him. But it changes focus for a second. Says, "The Lord answered him." Verse 10. As Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines drew near to attack Israel.
So, this is a massive gathering gathering of Israelites and there's an army marching down on them. And they are praying and worshiping and saying, "Samuel, pray." He's offering a sacrifice as that is happening. And as they are marching in, but the Lord thundered with a mighty sound that day against the Philistines and threw them into confusion, and they were defeated before Israel. And the men of Israel went out from Mispa and pursued the Philistines and struck them as far as below Bethar. What?
The Philistines are drawing up military ranks to attack a bunch of Israelites who are not ready for that. If there are some people who have started to gather to face off against them, if they have weapons, we're talking sticks, staffs, axes, maybe a sickle, cuz you know there's probably that guy who brought that, you know. And somebody was like, "Why do you have that?" And you're like, "You never know." It's like, "But okay." Then the Philistines were coming. You're like, "Man, I should have brought my sickle. Look at this dude." Prepper.
All right. Good for him. It's about to be a massacre. And then it says that God thunders from heaven and throws them into confusion. We are thankfully blessed to be relatively um protected from the elements, but there are times when you're out or when a storm is right over your house.
You ever had that time where lightning strikes the same time thunder goes off and everybody goes, "Okay, that's just a normal storm. God's just raining. He's not even mad at everybody." So, what he does here is terrifying. that he thunders viciously, ferociously, powerfully from heaven at the Philistines. And the Philistines knew about Egypt.
They they already knew about that when the the ark went. Now, these Philistines would have known about the ark. That was an ark. It was a a box that defeated them. They got defeated by a box because God's in charge of the box.
It went to all they did a little circuit of getting their tails whipped by a box earlier in Samuel. And I'm not trying I don't I'm not trying to speak slow u irreverently about the ark of the covenant. So So don't hear that. And I forgive me if that's the way that came across. But I'm saying that it wasn't an army.
It was the power of God. They they would know that thunder comes from heaven. And a whole bunch of them just say, "Nope. No, no, no, no, no, no, no." And their lines break. And it says they're thrown into confusion.
So somebody's yelling, "Charge." Somebody yells yelling, "Retreat." People are dropping weapons. Horses are running into each other. It's a mess. The Israelites go win. They're so confused.
The Israelites are winning. And I think getting more wellarmed as they go. A guy who started off with a stick gets a sword, then a helmet, takes his time, puts on some new shoes. By the time they're getting to Beth's car, they're tearing these guys up. And y'all, it was such a complete victory.
It says that it subdues the Philistines. It's going to tell us that in verse 13. Verse 12. Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mispa and Shin and called its name Ebenezer. For he said, "Till now the Lord has helped us." Ebenezer means stone of help.
So he sets up right in the middle of that victory a big stone and says, "The Lord has helped us." The song we sang earlier, we sang, "Here I raise my Ebenezer. Hither by thy help I've come." It's talking about this passage. So if your only interaction with Ebenezer was Ebenezer Scrooge, you have a new one. First Samuel means stone of help. That's what they set up.
It's a monument that says, "The Lord brought me here." That's why we sang that. Verse 13. So the Philistines were subdued and did not again enter the territory of Israel. Somebody was like, "Y'all want to go attack him again?" And somebody else was like, "Shut up.
I'm not going back over there." And the hand of the Lord was against the Philistines all the days of Samuel. The cities that the Philistines had taken from Israel were restored to Israel from Echron to Gath and Israel delivered their territory from the hand of the Philistines. So they push back, reclaimed land. The Philistines are knocked back. And this is written very much the way the judge stories are written in the book of Judges.
There's one decisive victory and then it just says things went well from there. underneath Samuel's leadership. There was peace also between Israel and the Amorites. The Amorites don't show up in 1 Samuel much. It's not much of a conflict.
It just says, "And this was also going well." So that's nice. Verse 15, Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life. And he went on a circuit year by year to Bethl, Gilgal and Mispa. And he judged Israel in all these places. Then he would return to Rama for his home was there, which is where his family was from.
So he does at some point go get reconnected. He is around his family, his parents, for his home was there, and there also he judged Israel. And he built there an altar to the Lord. Those places are not very far from each other. It would be like saying he traveled and would do a yearly circuit from Casey to Lexington to Irmo and to Chapen, but then he would head back to Casey because he lived in Casey.
It's not it's not a big area, but they don't travel as well as we do and as easily as we do. So, he just moves from place to place and seems like he sets up in kind of a different area and works his way back, but he's overseeing Israel from that location, which is pretty centrally located. That's it. The story is going to shift into something else as we move forward. We're going to jump ahead again.
We're just told there's 20 years where Samuel was declaring this message and then there's this section of his life where there's peace. But what we see in this text, which is important for us to take up and to consider this morning, is that in this text, we see a beautiful picture of repentance. we see the essential elements of repentance that in this text we're able to see what belongs to repentance. Now if you're a Christian repentance matters to you. It's how you become a Christian.
Martin Luther calls it the first fruit of faith. So when we genuinely begin to have faith, the first thing that happens is repentance. And if you're not a Christian, repentance is very important for you because in the book of Acts, they begin to proclaim that God has now commanded all people everywhere to repent. So that the Bible comes to you with a message of repentance. But it's important for us to know what does that mean?
It's possible you're here today and your only real interaction with repentance is TV shows making fun of someone holding a sign who looks crazy in a city going repent. And you know it's something that that guy yelled and something that you should do but maybe you don't have a good handle on what does that mean. So what we're going to do is we're going to walk through the key elements of it. If you're a Christian I want you to look at yourself. I want you to consider your approach to repentance.
I want you to consider, do does this show up in the way I'm turning to the Lord? And if you're not a Christian, I want you to hear what is asked of you, what is called of you as you come to the Lord. Now, we're going to go through them in the order they show up in the text. And it's not in any particular order. It's not like this one comes first.
These are all parts of repentance. And in the Bible, sometimes the text will just say repent. It'll just say confess. It'll just say believe and be baptized. And all of this is baked into that.
And that's why it's not really an order doesn't matter as much as that it all is a part of it. Okay. First one, repentance is from the heart. So this is verse three. He says, if you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, he's going to say to direct their heart.
But repentance is from the heart. is something that you feel that you experience et internally. It's not just a thought process. It's not just uh understanding some new facts about a thing but it's something that happens in us that our heart is changing. When the Bible talks about the heart, it's talking about the the seat of our will of our decision making.
So there's something that happens inside of us that we're changed internally that we see his goodness. It's one of the things I was blessed and encouraged by as we're celebrating baptism which is the step after repentance. You you repent, you place faith, and then you're baptized. They're articulating how good the Lord is, how kind he is, how merciful he is, how he's loving. But when we see that, when we see his goodness, we see our sin.
That's why Peter is on the boat with Jesus. Jesus tells him to cast his nets over here. They cast, they begin to pull all these fish up. Peter quits pulling them up, falls down and says, "Please get off my boat. I'm a sinful man." Because he brushed against holiness.
He saw his wickedness. And it happens inside of us. That we're changed internally. That our hearts are broken over. This is what Psalm 51 says.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. He's saying that God doesn't just want sacrifices from us. Like he wants our labor like we can pay him off like that. You can show up to God and go, "Okay, how big do you want the check to be?" He says, "No, but if your heart's broken over your sin," he won't despise that.
If you come to him and say, "I need mercy," then you'll receive mercy. If you come to him and say, "I need forgiveness," and you'll receive forgiveness. That it's a broken and contr contrite heart that he will not despise. When Peter preaches in Acts chapter 2, it says that they heard it. They were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "What shall we do?" And this is where repentance begins.
that's in our hearts that there is no repentance where our hearts are unaffected. There's two Puritans I want to quote because they thought deeply about these things and I think they uh distilled it nicely. Jonathan Edwards says this, "The sorrow of the soul for sin is the first genuine feeling that accompanies the awakened conscience. God shows up and wakes you up to him. You feel your sin and you have sorrow over it.
Richard Baxter, he says, "He who doth," and doth just means does this context, "He who does not grieve over his sin does not know the weight of it." So if in your life you would say, "I'm a Christian." But you haven't grieved your sin, you haven't seen your sin, you haven't had sorrow over your sin, your heart hasn't been broken over your wickedness, you haven't come to the place where you said, "If he doesn't show me mercy, I'm in trouble." And maybe you just know some stuff about Jesus, but you've never really interacted with him. So I would ask, has your heart changed? Have you felt the work of the spirit in you? Have you come to the moments when you realize, I'm despicable without the grace of God?
That's the first thing. Repentance is from the heart. Not first in order, first in. We're talking about it today. I said these were in no particular order and then I said first a bunch.
So second thing today we turn from our sin. We turn from sin. He says if your heart's coming to the Lord then put away the foreign gods. And in verse four it says so the people put away. You change.
If you're genuinely repenting life changes. That's a part of it. It's not the only part of it. You can't just clean yourself up. You can't just fix yourself.
But it is a part of it. That if someone just says, "Well, I'll just do all the things and then God will owe me." That's incorrect. But if someone says, "Well, I'm saved by grace, so I can do whatever I want." That's also incorrect. Your heart changes. Your appetites change.
Your desires change. And you stop some stuff. You've spent your whole life in rebellion to God, pursuing sin. And if you're genuinely following Jesus, you put it away. And this shows up all over the New Testament.
When John the Baptist is preaching repentance, he tells them to bear fruit in keeping with repentance, which means look like you've repented. And they ask how. And he tells them specific things to do to different people. It shows up differently in different people. When Jesus is with Zakius in that story, Zakius is a tax collector.
Jesus is with him and then he stands up and says,"Lord, I'm going to pay back everybody I've robbed. I'm going to who I've defrauded. I'm going to pay him back four-fold and then I'm going to give half of my goods to the poor." And Jesus says, "Salvation has come to this house today." And he doesn't mean, "Wow, you wrote a big enough check." That's not what he's saying. He's saying that because what Zakius's repentance reached his heart, then it reaches his hands, shows up. If you have repentance and you're genuinely following the Lord, but it hadn't made it to your wallet, it hasn't made it to your time, it hasn't made it to the way you speak to people or about people, it hasn't made it to what you watch and listen to, that it hadn't shown up.
And I don't know if salvation's reached your house because change comes with repentance that we are to put some things away. In the book of Acts, there's a whole bunch of people who are becoming Christians and it says they came forward confessing and divulging their practices. And they started saying, "I've been practicing magic. I've been doing pagan rituals." And they get together and they start burning their books. and then says someone wrote down how expensive it was and it's an insane amount.
They got rid of it. Some of you have some things you need to burn. Somebody in my group sent all the guys in our group a video of them flushing something down the toilet. There's some things you need to get out of your house. Some script some subscriptions you need to change.
Some of you need to get uh not have a smartphone. Someone says, "What kind of phone is that?" You say, "It's a flip phone." And they say, "Why?" You say, "Cuz I love Jesus." and also mind your own business. There's some things that should change. John Calvin, one of the reformers, he says, "Repentance is not merely a change of mind, but a change of the whole life in so far is as it is a turning of the heart to God." Your life changes as your heart changes. Repentance is not just you believing some new facts, but it shows up in your life.
And so I would say I would ask, are you a Christian? If you said yes, I would ask, has your whole life changed? Or do you look the same? Do you still care about the same things?
Still chase the same things? Is there fight in you when you see that? Do you hate it? Do you continue to turn?
Do you continue to put it away? I'm not articulating at all that Christians are perfect. Far from it. But Christians hate sin and fight against it. It shows up.
Is repentance for you? Just when your group does care night, you show up and say the same things you've been saying, but you hadn't changed one bit of a habit. You could almost just go, "Well, you know what I'd say next?" But there's no heart of sorrow and there's no change in life. In repentance, we turn from sin. In repentance, we turn to the Lord.
He says, "And direct your heart to the Lord and serve him only." Put away the false idols. Turn direct your heart towards the Lord. This is something that we do intentionally. I like that he has an action verb in here. Direct your heart.
Aim yourself. That's one of the things that happens in repentance is we turn ourselves towards the Lord. It happens naturally as he changes our appetites. And it happens as we fight. And y'all, your desire to fight from the Lord is fight for the Lord is from the Lord.
I've had people sit in my office before and they go, "I just want to please the Lord. I just want to love him. And I'm so sinful. I just want to follow him. And I keep chasing all this stuff.
I just I just want him. And I I can't." And then so often they'll say, "Do you think I'm a Christian? Am I even a Christian?" And I'll say, "You know, only Christians just want to follow the Lord. I've never once had someone who hated Jesus be like, I just love to follow him." That pain that you're feeling over, I want I want him. I want to follow him and I'm I just feel.
He's like, "Yeah, Paul wrote about that." But that's part of it that we want him. When we say Jesus is better than everything else, we're not blowing smoke. We believe it. That's not a cute slogan. It's a it's an eternal reality.
And he actually is better. He doesn't just show up and say, "Hey, you know all that stuff that used to make you happy? Get rid of it." and then not replace it with something of eternal glorious value, real delight, real pleasure, real joy, real peace, real satisfaction. He shows up and says, "Oh, he's so much better." Have you directed your heart towards the Lord?
Did you become a Christian? Show up on Sundays and be like, I don't want to sing. And then you were like, all right, then we're supposed to. I see. Now, I read Colossians.
He says, too. Okay. So, you start singing like this. And then you start singing a little more. You start singing a little more and you show up and you're like, I want to sing to the Lord.
Some of you said, I don't like reading. Have you grown to where if you don't read your Bible, you miss it? Some of you are like, if I hear y'all say community group one more time, I'm going to try to assault someone. And you were like, I'm awkward. They're awkward.
I'm annoying. They're annoying. I don't want to be there. But you go, you started going. You've been around.
you go out go out of town for two weeks and you miss these people. Has that happened to you? Has your heart begun to change? Because I'll tell you, if you say, "I love Jesus, but you don't need to be a part of a Church. You don't need that.
You don't need to be around Christians. You don't need that. You don't need to sing to Jesus. Not my thing. You don't need to read the Bible.
No, I don't know. I could go. I don't know. I hadn't picked up a Bible. I hadn't opened a Bible in six months." I would just every once in a while I'll talk to my wife in the evening.
Wait till I finish the story. Sometimes I'll talk to my wife in the evening and I'll say, "What did you have for lunch?" Oh, I talk to her a lot. Every once in a while this conversation happens. I hear it. I hear it now.
That makes sense. She talks to me more All right. Every once in a while, I'll talk to her and I'll say, 'What did you have for lunch?' And she'll go, "I don't I didn't have lunch today. I don't think I had lunch today." And I have this thought. Your relationship to food is so different from my relationship to food.
If I haven't had lunch, something happened. Or I'm plotting on supper and I want to be double hungry. But I've thought about food. I hadn't just let food slip by. I'll stop thinking about my children to eat food.
She'll be like, "Is the baby crying?" I'm like, "I'm eating a sandwich. I know where he's located. I can hear him. Can you go a long time without thinking about the Lord, without caring, without noticing?
Just doesn't show up. Oh, I don't know. I guess I hadn't been around. I guess I hadn't showed up on Sunday. I guess I hadn't been around a group.
I guess I hadn't opened my Bible. God, I don't know the last time I prayed. But boy, I love Jesus. Do you?
Cuz that's not how it works. If you asked me, "How's your wife?" And I was like, "Oh gosh, I hadn't seen her in two months." She's probably fine, though. I guess I really love her. You'd be like, "Wife, you're suspect number one, man. Do you notice?
Do you think that Christ, the most glorious, wonderful, delightful, who without whom we cannot exist, for whom the whole world exists, that if you really knew him, you could go without noticing that he was missing from your life? Look in the text. Look in the Bible and say that that's shows up here. That that's what happens to people who come to know it. In repentance, we turn to the Lord.
Our hearts change and they're directed to him. It does take some energy. It does take some fight. But it also is something that we become dependent on and we thirst for. And without it, we feel like nothing.
Fourth one, repentance requires confession. The fourth thing we should note from this text, if you'll look down to verse six, says, "They gathered at Mispa and drew water and poured it out before the Lord and fasted on that day and said there, we have sinned against the Lord." When you turn in repentance, you are acutely aware of your sin. You're acutely aware of what it is, what it is that disqualifies you, what it is that makes you soiled and dirty and unclean. and we confess. We get rid of it.
When John the Baptist was baptizing, it says they came to him to be baptized confessing their sins. When they're burning their books in Acts 19, it says that they divulge their practices. They confess them. James commands us to confess our sins to one another. That's not some sort of we have to have a a priest that has to hear it and then they talk to God.
No, we have one mediator between us and God. We get to talk directly to God and we ought to confess directly to God. But one of the other things that we get to do is unbburden ourselves from hiding sin. Sin is like mold. It grows in the dark.
And we are to be people who confess, bring things into the light, and in our confession find freedom. Y'all, they gathered to publicly confess. This is something we do. and more so than the Israelites because we have a perfect savior who if we confess our sins is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. I tell my group sometimes that I always feel like confession is kind of like throwing up.
Every time right before I'm going to throw up, I feel like I might be about to die and it's the worst thing ever. And I feel the exact same way before I'm going to confess things. This is going to be the worst thing ever. After I throw up, I'm like, "That was great. I should do that more often.
I feel wonderful. I'm going back to sleep or whatever." Like, you just feel good after you. And that's the way I feel after confession. I finally share this. And sometimes sometimes the Lord is tightening down on me to where I'm going to confess.
He he's it's coming. That is also similar to throwing up. You can't just be like, "I was going to, but then I stopped." That's not how it works. There are times where the Lord presses something out and then the people around me act like they know Jesus, too. The Christians around me act like they they need Christ, too.
And then I get to realize that my worth and my value doesn't come from my behavior. It doesn't come from my ability to be good. It doesn't come from people's assessment of me. It comes from Christ who forgives my sin. Do you confess?
Do you repent? When you repent, do you repent specifically? My boys sometimes I'll say, "Tell your brother you're sorry." I'm sorry. I'll say, "For what?" I want them to articulate. I want to see if they know.
When you when you confess, when you repent, do you say what it is? Do you just say, "I'm sorry?" Do you say, "I'm sorry that I did this in this way?" I had somebody recently come to me and they said, "Hey, in the conversation we just had, I need to I need to repent to you. I need to confess something." And they articulated what was going on behind the way they were wording things. I never would have known, but they said, "The Lord convicted me I shouldn't be angling the conversation that way for that reason." That's what Christians do. We get to be free from sin.
We get to articulate what's happened. Do you only confess when you're caught? Do you only confess the details you think they already know? Or do you hate your sin and bring it into the light because Jesus is good?
Is there something right now that the spirit is pressing on you and you're thinking, "Well, I can't share that. I can't say that. Everything will change. Everything will fall apart if I just if I share that. I've got to hold on to that." Say, "Trust him.
He's good." Fifth one, final one. Repentance seeks forgiveness. Forgiveness requires sacrifice. The point of repentance is to receive forgiveness, to seek forgiveness. But repentance, forgiveness requires sacrifice.
Verse 9. So Samuel took a nursing lamb and offered it as a whole burnt offering to the Lord. And Samuel cried out to the Lord for Israel and the Lord answered him. He sacrifices a lamb. They confess their sin.
He kills a nursing lamb. Have y'all seen lambs? They're cute. This woman was still dependent on its mother. This is precious and it has to die.
Hebrews 9 indeed under the law almost everything is purified with blood and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins as we come in repentance do you know that blood has to be shed for us to be forgiven I think sometimes we read these stories and we go oh man that's so feels so backward feel so tribal feels so whatever that they thought that they needed to have a sacrifice y'all we think we need to have a sacrifice we do in Christ who shed his blood for us. But we still believe in blood atonement. It's just Christ, not animals. It's something that can last forever. It's something that has much more significance and value and worth so that he can pay for all of our sins.
But forgiveness requires sacrifice. It requires blood. So that if you say, "Well, I'm repenting, but you're just talking to the Lord and you're not talking to Jesus. If you're repenting but you're not trusting in Christ, then you don't have a sacrifice and there is no forgiveness. This is Luke 24.
Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all the nations. The hope of repentance is forgiveness. Forgiveness is purchased through blood. Jesus suffered and rose. And there is a repentance for the forgiveness of sins proclaimed in the name of Jesus.
He's our hope. And just like in this story, it is effective for salvation. God thunders from the heavens. Well, our God came down. He died.
He rose. He rules from the heavens. And he says that all who will come to him in repentance will be forgiven. Do you see your sin?
Do you know your wickedness? Do you know you are unclean? Do you have sorrow over your brokenness? Do you feel an inability to love the Lord as you ought?
Do you want to be forgiven? Can I tell you that you can be in Christ and you will be washed and you will be free. Nobody stood up here today and said, "I wanted to declare that this is my next step in the road to awesomeness and self-actualization." If they did, they would not be allowed in. This is I was in my sin. I'm buried in my sin.
And I rise because Christ rose. Christ died for my sin. He was buried. I'm buried with him. He rises to new life.
I rise to new life. and I'm washed clean and it's effective for salvation. When we come to the Lord and say, "I need you to give me mercy." He gives mercy. "I need you to rescue me," he rescues. "I need you to forgive me," he forgives.
And we're forgiven. The reason we walk in continued repentance is not because we've suddenly lost our salvation and need it again. It's because we have the joy and the delight of salvation and sin gets in the middle of it. And so, we say, "Lord, continue to wash me.
Continue to keep me. Continue to help me." And he does. Have you repented? Will you repent?
If you do, nobody who calls on the name of the Lord will be put to shame. He will forgive. He's paid the debt. Turn from your sin. Trust in Jesus and be free.
Let's pray. God, we thank you that there's victory and peace and rescue and hope and joy and salvation and life in Christ and Christ alone. Lord, may we turn from our sin. May we turn to you. May you pierce our hearts so that we might trust in Jesus.
And Lord, may you save to the full extent all those who cry out to you in Jesus name. Amen. Band's going to come back up. We're going to sing. If the Lord's dealing with you, don't fight him.
Don't press against that. But repent. If he's calling you to repentance, come accept the sacrifice. Accept the hope. Trust in Jesus.
Be made new. There's forgiveness and no other name under heaven. There's no other name given by one we might be saved. Would you trust in Jesus?