When we live in a way that we believe we deserve certain privileges or standards of living we actually knock God out of the center of our lives and rather place ourselves there. Entitlement means being self-centered and when we don’t get what we believe we deserve this can lead us to questioning the goodness of God.
When we hear the word repent it is not simply to turn away from sin and turn back to God – no – in this process of turning away true repentance is actually changing our mind about our sin. It is recognising that our sin is against God first and this should grieve us – we should feel sorrow when we sin because we break God’s law. We should actually mourn our sin because it is that very sin that sent innocent Jesus to death. When we recognize the weight of our sin this should lead us to change our mind about it as well as our interaction with future sin.
Our faith, our living relationship with Jesus, is the most valuable thing we have in this life. Regardless of what you place value on a genuine faith in Jesus is the most valuable thing that you will ever possess, if you ever actually possess it. Since it is important that we test the authenticity of what is valuable in this life, it makes sense that we test if our faith in Jesus is genuine. Fortunately for us the Bible has more than one way to test if we have a genuine faith and today we are going to be looking at what Jesus has to say regarding the importance of true, authentic faith and how it will one day be tested to see whether is genuine. Sermon by Luke Kincaid Download the Summary