Welcome to God Today. My name is Bobbi Kumari and I am the founder of Living in Light. I am always so overjoyed to be able to share the Word of God. I want to thank the Lord for the incredible way that His Word is at work in each and every one of your lives, and that He is so faithful that He will surely fulfill His word spoken over you. This is so exciting.
I would love to share something from Mark 6:12 with you all. This verse is about Jesus’s disciples going out to do ministry, and it says this. “They went out and preached that men should repent, that they should change their minds for the better, and heartily amend their ways with abhorrence to their past sins.” Now I’ve read this verse hundreds of times, but I read it recently and the word “heartily” amend their ways literally just jumped out at me. And even though I know what heartily means, I looked it up and it says, “to do something actively with zeal, vigorously, energetically, and often loudly expressed in an enthusiastic and strong way.”
Now that’s not a posture that I usually associate with repentance. Usually, in my mind, repentance brings images of mourning and weeping and sackcloth and ashes. We all know that oftentimes that is exactly what repentance involves, and that’s the kind of repentance that God requires of us in so many different circumstances. But I love what Matthew 5:4 tells us. It says “Blessed, forgiven, refreshed by God’s grace are those who mourn over their sins and repent for they will be comforted when the burden of sin is lifted.”
We’re reminded here in this verse that when the burden of sin is lifted, there is comfort. There is joy. There is enthusiasm because we recognize that we need to change our ways, and we recognize the burden of sin that we were under. And that’s what Godly repentance is all about. Godly sorrow is all about when we recognize that something that we are doing is keeping us away from God, away from the Kingdom.
When I was pondering all of this, I was reminded of an encounter that I’d had with the Lord when I was still quite a young believer. I remember I’d been saved for a couple of years and I love the Lord. I was passionate. I was devoted, but I was struggling with smoking. Because I knew that my body was a temple and I knew that I was defiling my body every single time I smoked, I felt so much shame and condemnation. It got to a point where I just sat on my bed one day and I said, “Lord, You know what? I’m trying to do this in my own strength. I’m trying to follow a set of rules and I can’t do it. So I’m just going to trust our relationship. I’m just going to trust that as I surrender to You, in intimacy with You, that You’re just going to change me.”
I remember over the next couple of days, I did smoke, but I refused to be condemned. I just kept thanking God that He was going to change me. Two days later I was brushing my teeth. I was standing in front of the mirror and I heard the Lord say to me, “Bobbi, when you smoke, it hurts My heart.” I was so filled with Godly sorrow to think that something I was doing was hurting the One that I love. I gave up smoking on the spot. Because that’s all I needed to know. I didn’t need to know what I was doing wrong. I didn’t need to know the rules that I needed to keep. What I needed to know was that something that I was doing was hurting the One that I love. Something that I was doing was bringing Him grief.
At that moment I did a 180-degree turn away from an old way of thinking towards a Kingdom way of thinking that brought me so much freedom and life and salvation and deliverance. This is what Godly sorrow is about. This is the joy of repenting – when we recognize that we are doing something that actually isn’t good for us and that we change the way that we think. We move towards the Kingdom and we repent of our ways and we begin to bear fruit that shows that we have changed.
I would love to pray over us that not only would we be those that repent heartily, but that we would take a posture daily to come before the Lord and ask Him, “Is there anything in my life right now that’s bringing You grief? That’s hurting You? Show me, search my heart so that I can do a complete 180-degree turn away from any old or ungodly way of thinking towards a Kingdom way of thinking.”
Father, I thank You so much for Your love for us. I thank You for Your precious Holy Spirit that convicts us and helps us and changes us. I thank You, Lord Jesus, for that inner relationship with You, that we just get to surrender and trust and we know that You will be the one who will complete the work that You have begun in us. I pray, God, for a fresh posture of heartily repenting in each and every one of us, where daily we give You permission to search our hearts, and we enthusiastically embrace those places of conviction so that we can be changed. We can move away from ungodly thinking and move towards Kingdom thinking, towards life, towards salvation, and towards true freedom. In Jesus’ name I pray, amen. Be so blessed God Today family.