ALPHA MAAMA (A.M.)

Saturday March 11, 2017

“Born again by FAITH in Christ”

1 Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord;

2 Lord, hear my voice!

Let Your ears be attentive

To the voice of my supplications.

3 If You, Lord, should mark iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

4 But there is forgiveness with You,

That You may be feared.  – Psalm 130:4

Faith in Christ

Regeneration, the implanting of a new life within us, is inseparable from the repentance and faith by which we enter the kingdom of God. When a man is born again he sees and enters the kingdom of God (John 3:3, 5), and he does so invariably by repentance towards God and faith in Jesus Christ.

We may tend to think, largely on this basis of the order in which the words appear, that Scripture teaches that repentance precedes faith in our experience. On occasion that position is outlined something like this: we will never come to trust in Christ until we feel sorry for sins, so repentance must always be first. That is mistaken and unhelpful thinking – mistaken, because it confuses repentance with conviction of sin; and unhelpful, because it tends to promote the view that a fixed degree of repentance is necessary as a kind of qualification for faith. But this is evidently not the position of the New Testament. Conviction is not repentance. And in any case the deepest levels of conviction may be experienced after rather than before conversion.

In fact, there is a sense in which we must think of the relationship between repentance and faith the other way around. Repentance can only be truly evangelical when it is based on faith in God and in his Word. This is the position of the writer of Psalm 130: “but with you there is forgiveness; that you may be feared” (Psalm 130:4). It was because he saw and trusted the forgiving grace of God that he feared him in his repentance. Similarly, on the day of Pentecost, Peter consults his hearers, “repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). The summons holds out the word of forgiveness to them in the expectation that, grasping the promise of faith, they will be drawn into Christ by the rope of repentance. So faith and repentance must be seen as marriage partners and never separated.

Challenge:

This idea of FAITH and REPENTANCE being part of one another, rather than one being a “condition” of the other is important. Re-read the above paragraphs and praise God that He has granted you faith for repentance in order to bring you in His Kingdom

This Day in Christian History:

March 11, 1812 - WILLIAM CAREY’S WORK WENT UP IN FLAMES

AT ABOUT SIX in the evening on this day. Fire broke out in a print shop at Serampore, India. The mission staff there were able to rescue a few deeds and financial records, but could salvage little more. Around midnight, the roof caved in, sending a pillar of fire high into the sky.

Twelve years of missionary toil went up with those flames. William Carey, pioneer Baptist missionary to India, had produced a polyglot dictionary of several Indian languages. It burned. The conflagration also consumed Scriptures already printed in Indian tongues, Bengali and Sanskrit grammars, and twelve thousand reams of paper. Melted by the fire were fourteen special fonts of Asian typefaces.

Memory Verse:

13 ‘a ‘ene ‘Afio na‘a ne hamusi kitautolu mei he pule ‘a Po‘uli, mo ne hiki kitautolu ki he pule‘anga ‘o hono ‘Alo ‘Ofa‘anga: 14 pea ‘i he‘etau tu‘u ‘iate ia kuo tau ma‘u ‘a e huhu‘i, ko e fakamolemole ‘etau ngaahi angahala; – Kolose 1:13-14

13 He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, 14 in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. – Colossians 1:13-14

Bible Reading Plan: (52 weeks; 5 days a week)

Week 10 – Numbers 8-25; Psalm 28, 113; Colossians 1-4; Luke 1