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See also Forgiveness
C.H.Spurgeon
"No one can be so foolish as to imagine that the Judge of all the earth will put away our sins if we refuse to put them away ourselves."
"What a dreadful thing to go to hell with a sound head and a rotten heart."
"Though God will forgive Sin repented of, He will not condone Sin persisted in."
Louis Palau, used this illustration to answer a question from Bill Clinton who asked "Will God still forgive you if you leave saying sorry till the very last moment?"
A Rabbi once told his students to repent on the day before they die. The students asked "How do we know when we are going to die?". "You don't!" answered the Rabbi, "So you better repent today! As you don't play games with your soul!"
Life turned upside down:
Robert Oppenheimer was the one man responsible for the development for the atomic bomb the United States used against Japan at the close of World War II. He was born in 1904 in New York City, and showed an early interest in science. He entered Harvard at 18 and graduated 3 years later with honors. He continued his studies in theoretical physics at various universities in Europe prior to teaching at the California Institute of Technology. He was considered one of the top tem theoretical physicists in the world, and specialized in the study of sub-atomic particles and gamma rays. From 1943 he began directing 4500 men and women at Los Alamos, New Mexico, whose sole purpose was to build an atomic bomb. Two years and two billion dollars later, they had successfully detonated the first atomic bomb. When he saw what he had made, Robert Oppenheimer underwent a radical revaluation of his values; a value inversion. Upon seeing the first fireball and mushroom cloud, he quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita, "I am become death." Two months later he resigned his position at Los Alamos and spent much of the remainder of his life trying to undo the damage, trying to get the genie of atomic weapons back in the bottle. There are certain individuals who, in a flash so to speak, like Oppenheimer, see that all they once valued is really of no lasting value at all. Their entire life has been turned on its head, everything is upside down. They see with painful clarity that the very things they prized most in life are in reality worthless baubles.
Louis Smedes, "Forgiving People Who Do Not Care."
Confession is different from spilling the beans to the public. Celebrities are not confessing when they hire writers to tell a prurient public their boring stories of sexual trysts; they are not after forgiveness, they are after publicity with royalties attached. Nor do you and I confess when we tell all to an understanding psychiatrist; we don't want forgiveness, we want to feel good. We confess when we cannot stand the hurt we caused another. We confess when we put ourselves in the hands of the person we wronged and trust him or her with our souls. We confess when, naked in the eyes of the person we unfairly wounded, we plead nothing but the hope of grace.
In 1966, about a year before he died, the brilliant physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "I am a complete failure!" This man had been the director of the Los Alamos Project, a research team that produced the atomic bomb, and he had also served as the head of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Yet, in looking back, he saw his achievements as meaningless. When asked about them, he replied, "They leave on the tongue only the taste of ashes."
Childrens Illustrations
Water in a Jar (Stuart Davis)
Place an arrow behind an empty glass jar pointing to the left of the jar. Place a sign to the left of the jar saying "World, My Way, Sin, Hell etc.". When you then fill the jar with water, the arrow now points to the right. Place a sign right of the jar saying "Christian, Gods way, Holiness, Heaven etc.". Then place above the jar the word "Repentance".
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