Kingdom Offerings
Exploring the offerings of scripture concerning the Kingdom of God and becoming aware of the handwriting of Jesus Christ across all of history.
Repent and Believe!
February 10, 2025
Transcript
Hello friends, this is Dave Scherrer here at One Hundred-Fold Ministries and we just started our new series in our podcast format that we call Kingdom Offerings and the new series is called Kingdom Disciplines. And as I noted in our last podcast here at Kingdom Offerings, these Kingdom disciplines, I define them as the specific behaviors and practices that help us turn and disengage from the world.
The world of the, I call it the dark Kingdom. That’s a Kingdom of lies and death. And that Kingdom is led by our adversary, Satan. It’s the world we live in, a world of lies.
And different scholars have looked at this idea of the Kingdom disciplines, and they have various lists out there. And my list is a little different than theirs. But we agree on one thing, and that’s that without practicing these disciplines, we lose sight of our hope and joy in Christ. The world is just too addictive and demanding.
And so these disciplines help us disengage from the world and engage in the Kingdom of God. So I’ve settled on eight Kingdom disciplines, at least till I change my mind. And we’re going to unpack these over the next several weeks. And I want to talk about the idea of the disciplines of repent and believe. And these are big ideas. These are ideas that come right from the lips of Jesus.
When He was first started in His ministry, we read in Mark chapter 1, this verse, verse 14, it says, “After John was put in prison,” now that’s John the Baptist, “Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.” The quote is, “The time has come,” he said, “The Kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.”
Repent and believe. So those are big ideas.
They’re big Kingdom ideas right from the lips of Jesus. Let’s define some terms here. I think that’s going to be important. To repent is clearly a big Bible idea. The Greek word metanoeó translates as “repent”. And in English, that occurs 22 times in the New Testament. And if we follow it through, it started with John the Baptist.
The Word of God came to John, we find this in Luke chapter 3, “The Word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” Okay, we’re talking about John the Baptist. “He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
So in the New Testament, it starts right away with John the Baptist, but soon after that, Jesus enters the scene and he continues on in the same message. In Matthew chapter one, it says, “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
The gospel of the Kingdom, the good news of the Kingdom, repent and believe. A little bit later in Matthew chapter 4, “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ ”
You can see how these go together. This idea of repenting is linked to the idea of Kingdom. And then Jesus goes on to say, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
So finally, a little bit later, the disciples, we start to see them too go out and talk about repentance. Jesus sends them out. In Mark chapter six, we read that. “So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent.”
And of course, the Apostle Paul continues this practice of preaching repentance. In Acts 17, he’s talking to the crowd in Athens, and he says, “We ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.”
He’s appealing to their rational being.” He’s saying, “Hey, it can’t be something that we create.” He says that “the times of ignorance in God are now overlooked, but soon he commands all people everywhere to repent.” People are overlooking God. They’re putting their attention on idols.
And Paul is saying, “Soon, soon, God will command for everyone to repent.” It’s a big idea, this idea of repentance. And so let’s stop here just for a second because I think this last verse gives us a great place to linger for a moment.
You see, Paul is making a distinction between idol worship, putting one’s spiritual hope in some man-made image, or a false value, or a lie in our world, and the opposite of that, conversely putting our hope in the resurrected Lord and King of a true spiritual Kingdom.
The idea of repentance has collapsed on itself a little bit in recent years.
For many, the idea of repentance is synonymous with a feeling of sorrow or shame or sadness. If you repent, you’re sad and you cry. And of course we will feel a number of things, a lot of different emotions, upon a sincere repentance. And that might include sorrow, but it also might include relief. It might even include joy. So it’s not really about the emotion.
If we turn back to the experts, when the writers of Scripture in the New Testament were referring to repentance, they had a much bigger idea in mind. I used that word metanoeó a little bit earlier in this podcast, and Strong’s Greek Lexicon, that word is primarily used to denote a profound change of mind and heart.
It involves the recognition of wrongdoing, and so there’s a sincere regret or remorse, but it also implies a commitment to change our mind, to renounce the world, and instead align with God’s will – to turn our back on the world, turn our face towards God. For the early Christians in the first century, repentance wasn’t merely an emotional response, but a decisive turning point in one’s life.
It was a call to abandon the former ways, my former pagan ways, and to embrace a new life in Christ. And it was so true in the early church, because the converts often came from a non-Jewish background, from a pagan background, and they needed to renounce these previous beliefs and practices. I kind of think of it as coming to believe that the world no longer has any hope, has any hope for us, and so we turn our back on it for good, and we walk instead in the direction towards God’s Kingdom.
As the song says, “No looking back, no looking back.” So that’s repentance.
Now let’s talk a little bit about the term “believe” because that’s all over the place in the New Testament as well, including some really famous verses like this one. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Later in the book of John, he says, “Let not your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.” And this is on the night of His betrayal.
In that same chapter, he says, “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will they do.” The great confessional verse in Romans chapter 10, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, believe in your heart that Jesus raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved.” This belief theme is really, really important.
At the end of Jesus’ time on earth, He’s getting ready to ascend, and He says, “Go into the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation, and whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.”
So this is big news, this idea of believing. In the Bible, believers were called disciples. And that’s a great term disciple.
In general, a disciple is someone who actively pursues becoming like the one he or she admires. I’m a disciple of this artist or maybe a musician. I think even politicians these days have certain people they admire and they become disciples of certain thought and practice. I think you find it in business. It’s all over the place. Anyone who adheres to a teacher in such a way as to hold the tenets and behavior and oftentimes the lifestyle of their mentor is called a disciple. I am a disciple of this train of thought, this person.
In the book of Acts, we read that the disciples of Jesus were so committed to becoming like Him that, I think, meaning it as an insult, the detractors began calling them “little Christs” or “Christians”. But I think actually that’s a term of honor.
In another instance, Peter and John were brought before the Jewish Council for trial. And even the Sanhedrin noticed how they acted and spoke like Jesus.
In Acts 4, we read, “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures, and they recognized them as men who had been with Jesus.”
These days, it feels like the term “Christian” has lost most of its meaning. It’s become something to designate one’s religious preference.
So they call themselves a Christian, but it has more to do with culture or upbringing than it does true faith in Christ. I think it’s lost its meaning in large part. And so to have a belief in Christ is to imagine to believe by faith that He holds the secret to my eternal salvation. By his death and resurrection, I believe that He and only He can save me.
Oh, I want to wrap up, but I want to move forward because I’m calling these behaviors of repentance and belief “Kingdom disciplines”. Because I believe that they are the gate or maybe the ticket, so to speak, to joining the Kingdom life and to staying in the Kingdom life. Without repentance, the idea of changing your mind and turning from the world and then believing in the sufficiency of the crucified and risen Lord, there’s no Kingdom hope.
And so we live in need of daily repentance and believing, confessing our hope in this new King and His Kingdom. And the more we live in that day-to-day, not on a one-time basis, then I can practice setting my eyes on Jesus’ Kingdom and turning my back on the values and the behaviors of this world that hold me back and make me sad.
And I can remind myself in prayer and meditation that I believe in Jesus and His saving love. These practices aren’t, as I said, a “one and done” kind of intention. We repent and believe once and for all, but we also renew our faith by confessing our heart to Jesus every day, moment by moment. All right, I want to continue to build on these ideas, but we’ll do it some more as we move through these Kingdom disciplines.
So I want to finish. The good news is you don’t have to be a Bible scholar or a missionary to Africa or make a pledge of poverty to qualify as a follower of Jesus. You only need the faith of a child to experience the Kingdom. And you repent and you believe and you experience the Kingdom in ways you’ve never known it before.
This is Dave Scherrer, this is Kingdom Offerings. Thanks for checking in.
We’ll talk some more soon.
The world of the, I call it the dark Kingdom. That’s a Kingdom of lies and death. And that Kingdom is led by our adversary, Satan. It’s the world we live in, a world of lies.
And different scholars have looked at this idea of the Kingdom disciplines, and they have various lists out there. And my list is a little different than theirs. But we agree on one thing, and that’s that without practicing these disciplines, we lose sight of our hope and joy in Christ. The world is just too addictive and demanding.
And so these disciplines help us disengage from the world and engage in the Kingdom of God. So I’ve settled on eight Kingdom disciplines, at least till I change my mind. And we’re going to unpack these over the next several weeks. And I want to talk about the idea of the disciplines of repent and believe. And these are big ideas. These are ideas that come right from the lips of Jesus.
When He was first started in His ministry, we read in Mark chapter 1, this verse, verse 14, it says, “After John was put in prison,” now that’s John the Baptist, “Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.” The quote is, “The time has come,” he said, “The Kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.”
Repent and believe. So those are big ideas.
They’re big Kingdom ideas right from the lips of Jesus. Let’s define some terms here. I think that’s going to be important. To repent is clearly a big Bible idea. The Greek word metanoeó translates as “repent”. And in English, that occurs 22 times in the New Testament. And if we follow it through, it started with John the Baptist.
The Word of God came to John, we find this in Luke chapter 3, “The Word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” Okay, we’re talking about John the Baptist. “He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
So in the New Testament, it starts right away with John the Baptist, but soon after that, Jesus enters the scene and he continues on in the same message. In Matthew chapter one, it says, “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”
The gospel of the Kingdom, the good news of the Kingdom, repent and believe. A little bit later in Matthew chapter 4, “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ ”
You can see how these go together. This idea of repenting is linked to the idea of Kingdom. And then Jesus goes on to say, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
So finally, a little bit later, the disciples, we start to see them too go out and talk about repentance. Jesus sends them out. In Mark chapter six, we read that. “So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent.”
And of course, the Apostle Paul continues this practice of preaching repentance. In Acts 17, he’s talking to the crowd in Athens, and he says, “We ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.”
He’s appealing to their rational being.” He’s saying, “Hey, it can’t be something that we create.” He says that “the times of ignorance in God are now overlooked, but soon he commands all people everywhere to repent.” People are overlooking God. They’re putting their attention on idols.
And Paul is saying, “Soon, soon, God will command for everyone to repent.” It’s a big idea, this idea of repentance. And so let’s stop here just for a second because I think this last verse gives us a great place to linger for a moment.
You see, Paul is making a distinction between idol worship, putting one’s spiritual hope in some man-made image, or a false value, or a lie in our world, and the opposite of that, conversely putting our hope in the resurrected Lord and King of a true spiritual Kingdom.
The idea of repentance has collapsed on itself a little bit in recent years.
For many, the idea of repentance is synonymous with a feeling of sorrow or shame or sadness. If you repent, you’re sad and you cry. And of course we will feel a number of things, a lot of different emotions, upon a sincere repentance. And that might include sorrow, but it also might include relief. It might even include joy. So it’s not really about the emotion.
If we turn back to the experts, when the writers of Scripture in the New Testament were referring to repentance, they had a much bigger idea in mind. I used that word metanoeó a little bit earlier in this podcast, and Strong’s Greek Lexicon, that word is primarily used to denote a profound change of mind and heart.
It involves the recognition of wrongdoing, and so there’s a sincere regret or remorse, but it also implies a commitment to change our mind, to renounce the world, and instead align with God’s will – to turn our back on the world, turn our face towards God. For the early Christians in the first century, repentance wasn’t merely an emotional response, but a decisive turning point in one’s life.
It was a call to abandon the former ways, my former pagan ways, and to embrace a new life in Christ. And it was so true in the early church, because the converts often came from a non-Jewish background, from a pagan background, and they needed to renounce these previous beliefs and practices. I kind of think of it as coming to believe that the world no longer has any hope, has any hope for us, and so we turn our back on it for good, and we walk instead in the direction towards God’s Kingdom.
As the song says, “No looking back, no looking back.” So that’s repentance.
Now let’s talk a little bit about the term “believe” because that’s all over the place in the New Testament as well, including some really famous verses like this one. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Later in the book of John, he says, “Let not your hearts be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.” And this is on the night of His betrayal.
In that same chapter, he says, “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will they do.” The great confessional verse in Romans chapter 10, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, believe in your heart that Jesus raised Him from the dead, you’ll be saved.” This belief theme is really, really important.
At the end of Jesus’ time on earth, He’s getting ready to ascend, and He says, “Go into the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation, and whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.”
So this is big news, this idea of believing. In the Bible, believers were called disciples. And that’s a great term disciple.
In general, a disciple is someone who actively pursues becoming like the one he or she admires. I’m a disciple of this artist or maybe a musician. I think even politicians these days have certain people they admire and they become disciples of certain thought and practice. I think you find it in business. It’s all over the place. Anyone who adheres to a teacher in such a way as to hold the tenets and behavior and oftentimes the lifestyle of their mentor is called a disciple. I am a disciple of this train of thought, this person.
In the book of Acts, we read that the disciples of Jesus were so committed to becoming like Him that, I think, meaning it as an insult, the detractors began calling them “little Christs” or “Christians”. But I think actually that’s a term of honor.
In another instance, Peter and John were brought before the Jewish Council for trial. And even the Sanhedrin noticed how they acted and spoke like Jesus.
In Acts 4, we read, “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, for they could see that they were ordinary men with no special training in the Scriptures, and they recognized them as men who had been with Jesus.”
These days, it feels like the term “Christian” has lost most of its meaning. It’s become something to designate one’s religious preference.
So they call themselves a Christian, but it has more to do with culture or upbringing than it does true faith in Christ. I think it’s lost its meaning in large part. And so to have a belief in Christ is to imagine to believe by faith that He holds the secret to my eternal salvation. By his death and resurrection, I believe that He and only He can save me.
Oh, I want to wrap up, but I want to move forward because I’m calling these behaviors of repentance and belief “Kingdom disciplines”. Because I believe that they are the gate or maybe the ticket, so to speak, to joining the Kingdom life and to staying in the Kingdom life. Without repentance, the idea of changing your mind and turning from the world and then believing in the sufficiency of the crucified and risen Lord, there’s no Kingdom hope.
And so we live in need of daily repentance and believing, confessing our hope in this new King and His Kingdom. And the more we live in that day-to-day, not on a one-time basis, then I can practice setting my eyes on Jesus’ Kingdom and turning my back on the values and the behaviors of this world that hold me back and make me sad.
And I can remind myself in prayer and meditation that I believe in Jesus and His saving love. These practices aren’t, as I said, a “one and done” kind of intention. We repent and believe once and for all, but we also renew our faith by confessing our heart to Jesus every day, moment by moment. All right, I want to continue to build on these ideas, but we’ll do it some more as we move through these Kingdom disciplines.
So I want to finish. The good news is you don’t have to be a Bible scholar or a missionary to Africa or make a pledge of poverty to qualify as a follower of Jesus. You only need the faith of a child to experience the Kingdom. And you repent and you believe and you experience the Kingdom in ways you’ve never known it before.
This is Dave Scherrer, this is Kingdom Offerings. Thanks for checking in.
We’ll talk some more soon.