* A WATCHMAN WARNING: A PERSON CANNOT REPENT FOR SOMEONE ELSE!

We are hearing too much confusing stuff lately from various sources on the idea of national repentance.  Some are seeking to follow after the nation of Malawi that has been big in national repentance.

Certainly there is nothing wrong in people praying for the country.  But there needs to be some truth spoken here.  People must have an understanding of Biblical truths.  They can’t just create their own worlds.  We live in a physical, secular world that has various characteristics, some terrible to be sure, but this is the world we live in.  And as partial spirit beings we must strive to understand the spiritual world we were created by and will live in again, while we live in part in that world and in part visibly in this physical realm.

Here are some truths that cannot be ignored:

• A person cannot repent for another person. That very word repent means to change what a person is doing.  In the Christian sense it means to turn from the sinful life they have been living to a life of following the Lord.  A person who comes to Christ repents of their sinful life and asks Jesus to be the Lord of their life.  They change what they have been doing.

• In the Bible no one repents for another person. But it is possible as shown there to intercede for another.  A great example is Moses and his intercession for the millions he was leading around the wilderness on the way eventually to the Promised Land.  When the people behaved terribly, if Moses had not stepped in, God would have eliminated them or punished them some other way.  But Moses interceded.  In essence, he asked for God’s mercy, for God to forgive the people for their transgression.  By his very actions, he kept the Israelites going for forty years.

• So when we hear talk about repenting for our nation, we really can’t do that by ourselves. We can ask for God’s mercy.  We can also ask him to forgive our nation.  But the great majority of the people are not true believers in the Lord.   They are the ones approving of all the aspects of falling away from God today, such as endorsing and backing all the LGBTQ moves and actions and backing wholesale abortion and so on.  Those are the people who absolutely have to repent.  [When God sent Jonah to Ninevah, he was about to destroy the city.  But Jonah preached to the city and the leaders and the people repented.  It wasn’t Jonah who repented.  The people of the place repented.  The bad or lost people, to put it in modern terms.  And God let the city continue for a hundred years.]

• Some believers love to quote the wonderful scripture from II Chronicles 7:14 where God says if the people will humble themselves and pray and seek his face and turn from their wicked ways, then he will hear from heaven, and he will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Well, if we are talking about repentance here as it appears to be, the massive numbers of nonbelievers in the land must humble themselves and pray.  All we believers can do is ask for God’s mercy on the land.  And we can ask him to draw the nonbelieving people to a saving knowledge of Jesus!  That would certainly lead them to repent.

The United States has fallen greatly from God.  II Thessalonians 2:3 makes the point that the Day of the Lord will not come until there is a falling away from God (apostasy) and until the man of lawlessness (the antichrist) is identified.  I just read in the last few days a piece by a Christian writer making the point the first half of this has already happened – the falling away from God half.  It is difficult to argue that is not true in the US today as well as much of the world.

My guidance to you based on all the Lord has shown me over the years is to do all you can and all you are led to by the Holy Spirit to get the truths of who Jesus is and that he is returning soon out to more and more.  Pray for God to lead all those you pray about to a saving knowledge of Jesus.  Talk about Jesus and the gospel to others as you can.  Give them material to help, like our book WAKE UP AMERICA.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       May 2020
                                                                                               Copyright © 2020 by John Newlin
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