Tony Evans - The Key to Your Reversal (03/21/2018)
In Ezekiel 18 and related passages, the preacher presents repentance—a lifestyle of recognizing sin as violation of God's perfect standard, feeling godly sorrow for offending Him, and resolving to turn from it—as the master key unlocking hope for reversal, limitation, or empowerment amid consequences of sin, restoring fellowship and opening God's prerogative to intervene.
The Master Key: Repentance
It is unfortunate today that many of us as believers live in spiritual poverty, when the grace of God offers spiritual riches. I like the way he concluded verse 8 of our Scripture. He called it the unfathomable riches of Christ. The fundamental feature of grace that you need to understand is that grace is always free. Grace is always free. Today, I want you to make sure you have relocated to the grace location from your old address.
When a person has a master key to a facility, that means that they can unlock any door. All doors are subject to this one key. I want to launch our time together today by giving you the master key, because the key I am getting ready to give you will unlock every door. You are not an exception to this key. It is a master key for whatever the circumstance or consequence is you are dealing with.
What is the master key that can give you hope about a reversal in your circumstances? Simply stated, the master key for the reversal of consequences brought on by sin is developing a lifestyle of repentance. Repentance is necessary because of the existence of sin. Sin may be defined as any violation of the divine standard, any violation of the divine standard.
The biblical word for it is "sin." The biblical word is not "mistake." The biblical word is not "bad habit." The biblical word is not "my bad." The biblical word for the violation of a divine standard is the word "sin." Let me hear you say, "Sin." The reason why I want you to say it is because it is not, like, a popular word, but it is the only word God recognizes when it comes to the need for the repentance that gives hope for the reversal of circumstances.
So, whenever we violate, transgress the standard of God, God says that is sin. Now, the reason it is a sin has to do with the nature of God. The Bible describes God as perfect and righteous in all of his ways. He is a perfect being. In the same way that you do not like trash or garbage, God does not like sin, so God cannot have any relationship with sin and maintain his holy integrity, so that means sin has to be addressed before consequences can be addressed.
What many people want is God to change their consequence without them facing their sin. "Leave my sin alone, but get rid of the problems caused by it. Do not ask me to adjust my sin. Make me feel better, look better, be better. Help a brother out. Help a sister out." There can be no dealing with the consequence unless we deal with the cause, and the cause is sin, which is an affront to a holy God and a violation of his divine standard.
Sin and Death
Sin, in the Bible, violating God's revealed righteous standard is associated normatively with death. You saw it over and over again in this Ezekiel 18 passage. Why will you die? Repent so that you do not die. Romans 6:23, "The wages of sin is death." James 1:15, "When sin is completed, it brings forth death." Over and over again. Hosea 14:1, your downfall is because of your sin, so death is associated with sin.
In the Bible, death means separation, a separation occurs. When we sin, a death occurs because a separation occurs. What is the separation? Fellowship with God is lost when sin is introduced. God must separate from sin. Since we are sinning, he has to separate from us in terms of our personal relationship, which I will explain in a moment. A distance occurs when sin is introduced into a scenario.
When that gap occurs because sin has been introduced, that space, due to the gap caused by sin, then becomes filled with consequences. There is a spacing issue where consequences fill in the gap where the sin created the separation, because God is no longer there to block it. You remember when God told Adam, "The day you eat the fruit, that same day you will die," but he did not fall down dead that day. He did not physically die that day, oh, but he died, because the Bible says that God removed him from the garden and from intimate fellowship with him. So there was a spiritual death. There was an emotional death.
It says fear took over and controlled him. Emotional death is when you cannot live with you. Relational death, we hear couples say, when they are getting a divorce, the death of a marriage. There is a relational death that can occur. There is economic death, where your bills are controlling you and you are not controlling them, and so there is a death economically that can occur. So, there are all these kinds of deaths, and they are all death in the Bible because the biblical meaning of death is an illegitimate separation.
So then, what is life? Life is the coming together of things that should not be separate. It is the spirit in the body, it is the relationship on track, it is the economics in harmony. Life, or what the Bible calls eternal life, is not a place. That is heaven. It is an experience. That is, life in the Bible is experiencing God's reality in harmony with you and in the various scenarios of your life.
So, if you are a dead man walking or a dead woman walking in some category, there has been an illegitimate separation that needs to be harmonized again, and the word that God uses to bring the illegitimate to the legitimate is the word "repent." That is his word of turning death into life. "Sin" is the word for taking life and turning it into death, so that is why repentance is the master key for whatever the scenarios are today, opening the door based on God's prerogative to reversing, limiting, canceling, or giving you the capacity to handle consequences. It is his prerogative, but you do not even get position for that prerogative without the word "repent."
Ingredients of True Repentance
Repentance is defined as an internal resolve and determination to turn from your sin. Repentance is an internal resolve and determination to turn from your sin. Without that internal resolve and determination, thus no real repentance, then you and your consequences must learn to live together the best way you can because you are stuck with them.
Let me tell you the ingredients that you need to stir together to get a real repentance. Number one, to repent starts off with a recognition of sin. There is a recognition of sin, because, see, if you do not believe it is sin, then you do not need to repent of it. It is sin because there is a violation of a divine standard. That is what makes something sin, so you must recognize it to be so.
1 John 1:9 says, "And if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." The Greek word "confess" means "to say the same thing." It is what the Greek "homologia" means, to say the same thing. You must say about that thing what God says about it.
Secondly, there must be remorse over what you now recognize, what the Bible calls in 2 Corinthians 7, verses 10 and 11, godly sorrow. Godly sorrow is I have hurt God. Now, you may have hurt your neighbors, you may have hurt yourself, but the one sin has offended the most is God, so he says godly sorrow leads to repentance. That this thing, whatever the thing is, has hurt the heart of God. He says it must be godly sorrow, not the world's sorrow. Worldly sorrow is you got caught. Godly sorrow is I have hurt the heart of God. Godly sorrow, guilt and shame over sin, must be the reaction to the recognition of sin.
Then, once recognizing it and being remorseful over it, there must be the decision to reverse it, the decision to reverse it. How do you know that this thing is real, that you really want to deal with it? Fruit. In other words, you are doing something that demonstrates you want a reversal. He uses the word over and over in Scripture "return," "return." Zechariah chapter 1, verses 3 and 4, "Return to me so I can return to you." Malachi chapter 3, verse 7, "Return to me so I can return to you."
I want to come back to you, but you keep dying on me by refusal to address the sin. Having the sin is one thing, not addressing it is another. In James chapter 4, the people were concerned that their prayers were not being answered. They were praying and nothing was happening. He says, "You have not because you ask not," in verse 2.
Verse 3 says, "You ask, but you still do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your own pleasures. You adulteresses, do not you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." God has enemies in his own camp, because he is writing to Christians. "Or do you not think that the Scripture says to no purpose: 'He jealously desires the Spirit which he has made to dwell in you'?"
Why is this a big deal to God? Because he is a jealous person. He saved you for himself. "But he gives greater grace." Uh oh, he is giving you divine favor. "Therefore it says, 'God is opposed to the proud," you can do it without him, "but gives grace to the humble.'" So, what should you do? "Submit yourself therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." Do not misread that. He did not tell you resist the devil. He said submit to God.
A lot of people say, "Oh, I cannot get rid of this devil," and you will not because he has got space to work in. So, he first says submit to God. "Submit" means to place yourself underneath the authority of someone. Place yourself under the authority of God and then resist the devil. Why? Because once you get God on your side, you got help with the devil.
So, if the devil is bringing these consequences and you want to get the devil off of your back, you have got to first come underneath God so God can work with you in getting the devil off of you, because the devil can handle you, he cannot handle God working with you. And how do you do that? Verse 8 says, "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you."
Repentance is a lifestyle of acknowledging to God our sin, with the remorse that I have hurt God, with the request that he intervenes in not only my forgiveness, but in my circumstances, and repentance opens the door for him to limit, postpone, avoid, reverse, cancel, or empower in the midst of dealing with the circumstance. It is his prerogative, but you have opened the door for one, many, or all of the above. That is why whenever you see or almost every time you see repent connected with the word "return," he tells you what he is going to do for you if you do it. He says you will establish now the grounds for God to deal with your consequences.