Repent and Believe – But don't I owe you?

Read: Romans 3:22-26 After realizing and understanding our sin, it’s easy to start thinking about what we owe God.  Imagine a conversation like this similar to the parable of the prodigal son: But don’t I owe you? Yeah, but that debt’s been paid. But what can I do to make it up to you? You don’t have to do anything. But God, I finally reconciled with the fact that I’m a sinner. It’s not just mistakes. It’s a sin. What do I need to do? I owe you so much. God’s going: You owed me so much you couldn’t pay it, so I had somebody else pay it. Listen to the rest of this verse from yesterday: “Freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” God presented him, not you. “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.” That’s just a fancy theological way of saying this: We were mistakers; we were going to figure it out on our own; we were going to do better; we were going to convince God that the good outweighed the bad; we were going to pay back our debt to society; we were going to do better next summer; we weren’t going to work as hard; we were going to break that habit. … Mistakers are all about trusting in self to get it right. Sinners realize: I can’t. I don’t need to do better. I don’t need a motivational speaker or a cheerleader. I need a Savior. What does it mean to follow Jesus’ first command to repent and believe?  How can we become Christians?  It starts with recognizing: I sin; I’m a sinner; I need a Savior, and Jesus came to be my Savior. John 3:16 may be one of the most famous verses of all time, but it also gives us some insight into how to find forgiveness, hope and life in Christ.   ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ‘ At C3, we like to break it down like this: God loved, God gave, We believe, We receive. What does it mean to believe?  You transfer your confidence and trust from yourself—I’m going to figure this out and get it right—to Jesus Christ as your Savior. You say, “I am now placing all my weight, all my trust, in what you did on my behalf. As a sinner, I realize there’s nothing I can do to pay for my sin. Even if I got it right from this point forward, there’s no way to go back and make up for what I’ve done wrong, and what I did wrong was not simply make mistakes. I’ve sinned, and now I’m placing all my faith, all my trust, in what Christ did on my behalf. I believe when he died on the cross, he was not the sacrifice for my mistakes—he was the sacrifice for my sin. That’s why the sooner you embrace the fact that you’re a sinner, the sooner you are enabled to engage in God’s grace toward you. The sooner you’re able to experience his forgiveness, the sooner you’re able to engage in a personal relationship with a Savior.  That is why Jesus’ first command is to repent and believe.]]>