Obviously, I'm leading prayer today, and I was talking to the Lord, and I was asking Him,
just in passing, what He wanted me to talk about. And this phrase ran through me.
It said, Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. And it scared me.
Because obviously, that means something. I got to repent about something I'm not doing right.
And sometimes, I know when I looked at pastors or men or women of God,
ever since I was younger, I thought, oh, they've reached.
You know, like, they're not struggling with some of the things I'm struggling with.
Or, you know, they've overcome some things.
And the interesting thing about the heart is it can trick us into believing something,
to deceive us into believing something that is not right.
And so, as I'm growing in the Lord, and as God gives me opportunities
and puts me in positions and places, I realize, wow, I did not make it
like I thought these men and women of God made it.
There's things in my heart that I still need to repent of.
There's things in my heart that I still need to get rid of.
And so, when that thought ran through me, my thought was like, oh, man, Lord,
what is hidden that you see that I need repenting of?
So then when I looked up that phrase in the Bible, it's only written a couple of times.
There are some of them that are written in different ways, but it's the same context.
But there's only two times, if I'm not mistaken, there's two times it's actually
repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.
Once it's by John the Baptist, and once it's by Jesus.
And so I started digging and started reading what the Lord was trying to ask me to
to say and to do and to repent of.
And it brought me to Matthew chapter three.
So let's read Matthew chapter three verses one through three.
It says, in those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea
and saying, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
For this is he who says, who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah,
saying the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
So it's interesting because this is such a powerful message, a very short message.
Just a couple of words, not a big sermon.
But this powerful message started a revolution that is still continuing to this day.
And I think that's so powerful.
And I think that's one of the reasons why Jesus says that he is the greatest prophet.
And this message not only did people repent, but there was deeper things happening.
It prepared everything, everyone for Jesus and what he was going to do
and what he was going to fulfill.
Because before, if we've noticed in our lives, before we take the next step,
there's certain things that we need to get rid of in ourselves in order to take that next step.
Or else that seed won't go into the ground, it'll be stuck by all the thorns and the garbage
and all the birds, it'll be eaten up.
So there's certain things that we need to get rid of first
before we can step into what the next step is.
So John the Baptist was preaching this to everyone to say,
hey, repent for the kingdom of heaven, I think he says, is at hand.
Where he was already starting to clean them out.
Hey, come and repent. These things that the Lord has placed in you,
these sins that you have willingly done, come and repent of them
because the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And we're going to break down some of those words,
but it's a clean slate for Jesus to work with to pour into and to plant seeds
in order for this next phase to be fulfilled.
So it's interesting as we are reading it says,
in those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea.
And I think we've heard the word wilderness
maybe the last probably five years more consistently.
You know, we talk about the wilderness.
Oh, the Lord has me in a place of wilderness.
But as humans, we tend to take something and devalue it
because we say it often or we take it out of context
or we apply it to something that actually is not it, right?
And so in strong wilderness, some words I'm just going to take out of strong.
It's lonesome waste, which means unused, uncultivated,
unproductive. It is a desert. It is desolate and it's solitary.
And I think we've all been in that kind of place where it's lonesome.
We may be surrounded by people, but we're lonesome.
We feel desolate. We feel robbed. We feel empty.
There's waste. We have a bunch of, we have things that are uncultivated
in our lives, unproductive.
And lonesome means depressed, sad, or lack of friends, companionship, lonely.
And you know, sometimes in my walk with the Lord, not sometimes,
most of the time when I'm in this wilderness, I feel so lonely.
But the beauty is the Lord is with me.
In these wildernesses, we feel desolate.
We feel deprived, deserted, inhabited.
We feel like, I don't, we don't feel like we feel the Lord.
We feel like everyone in the room is feeling the Lord.
Except to me, why do I feel so desolate?
Why do I feel deprived, Lord? Your presence is here, but I feel deprived.
Or solitary, where you're alone.
You're going through something that most people don't understand.
And you're alone, you're without companions, you're unattended.
That's the wilderness.
And I think we all have experienced this in our lives,
and we will continue to experience this in our lives.
It's because in those wilderness moments, when we're the lowest,
the weakest, he comes in and he makes us strong.
He replaces our strength with his strength.
And in order to go closer and to know him more and more,
we're going to go through these wildernesses that for our human flesh
and for our soul are so draining.
But it's needed in order if we want to get closer to him.
It's these hardships that bring us the draws closer to him.
So it's interesting that John was preaching in the wilderness.
But the beauty of the Scripture that I love is that it's alive.
There's depth upon depth to every dot, to every punctuation, to every word.
I think he was preaching to the wilderness,
to those people who were in the wilderness.
That's why they were drawing out into the wilderness physically.
Because these people were lonesome. They were deprived.
They were desolate. They were alone. They were in solitary.
And so they came out to John the Baptist who was preaching this message.
And it's not a message of encouragement of,
oh, hey, you're doing great. You know, the Lord is with you. Praise God.
No, he said, repent.
And us as humans, that's not, you know,
let me speak for myself as myself as human.
When I hear repent, I feel the opposite of encouraged.
Because my flesh wants to be pampered.
My flesh wants to be enjoyed.
My flesh wants someone to be like, oh, you're doing a great job.
But the Lord's like, no, you need to repent.
Repent and strong.
So as we were going, he was preaching in the wilderness to the wilderness.
And he said, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Repent is to think differently, to reconsider.
And I love this word. It's a new word I learned yesterday.
To feel compunction. I think that's correct, saying compunction.
And we've all felt this.
It's the uneasiness or anxiety of conscious caused by regret of doing wrong.
That's happened to us.
It's happened to me with more blatant sins that I've chosen to do
where I did and I'm like, oh, why did I do that?
I start to get anxiety. I start to feel so uneasy.
And then also for other things that are technically not considered sin,
but the Lord said, hey, I don't want you to do that.
And because I'm disobeying him, it's sin.
And it could be something very small, but he said, hey, I told you not to.
And it's, oh, this anxiety.
And it overwhelms us.
Repent is being sorry. It's sorrowful, grieved or sad.
Repent is contrite.
Pastor Igor is going to preach this today.
Contrite.
And what that means is filled with a sense of guilt and a desire for atonement.
And I love that because it's twofold.
It's first, oh, I have this anxiety and guilt.
I have this uneasiness for what I did.
However, I want atonement for it.
I want to be reconciled.
It also means to be, to have regret, to think with a sense of loss.
And repent, there's certain, there's so many definitions to every word out there.
And repentance had a couple that were above this,
but I love this because I don't think we talk about this when we regret something.
We feel the loss of what happened.
We did a decision that will never get back.
And we now have to grieve the loss of our decision.
And I think that right there is covered up by the enemy.
He wants us to not think about the loss.
Oh, but that's okay. Keep going forward.
But sometimes we can't go forward until we grieve the loss that we caused.
The loss that we caused to our Lord, the loss that we caused to ourselves,
the opportunity, the mistakes.
And we have to grieve that.
So to repent is a 180.
It's going this direction, stopping and turning the other way and going the other direction.
It's to stop and turn away.
So he said repent.
For the kingdom of heaven, kingdom, means rule or realm.
So if we think about the kingdom of heaven, it's the rule.
It's the realm of this kingdom.
And actually the word king in Strong's means foundation of power.
So if we're thinking of kingdom, the Lord is the foundation of this power of this kingdom.
And heaven means an extension of heaven.
In other words, an extension of the dwelling place of the Lord.
And the beauty of the kingdom of heaven is it's coming from heaven and he's extending it out now to us.
So this king who is the source of power, this king who is the foundation of power,
that John the Baptist was preaching, that even Jesus preached, he said, hey, the kingdom of heaven,
this God who is the foundation of power, he's extending it now to us and it's here.
And now when we look at hand and Strong's, it means to make near or approach, to come and draw, to be near.
So when we're looking at this message, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,
we kind of now have a little of understanding of what it actually meant.
The kingdom of heaven, when we think of a kingdom,
if we think of the Roman kingdom, the first person that comes into our mind is Caesar.
There's a foundation of power for that kingdom.
So the kingdom of heaven is the Lord, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
It is their kingdom that we are to walk out.
And he's saying repent because this kingdom is here for you to take, for you to live out,
but you can't do it unless you repent.
You cannot walk this, you cannot walk the rules and the regulations,
not that we're walking in rules and regulations, there's commands that we have to fulfill.
But there's, there, you can't fulfill them until you repent.
And then later it says, for this was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah saying,
the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.
And that's actually out of Isaiah chapter 40.
And I'm going to read it, it's verse three and four and five.
And it says, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God,
every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low,
the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places smooth,
the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Sometimes I haven't been doing this much public speaking,
but so far this year, every single time I'm asked to speak.
And I go into the Word and I start reading the Word.
I'm like, do I need to speak? Can I just read the Bible?
Because that on itself is a message that like, let me just read it and let it sink.
But the beauty of this really touched me because it gave me an understanding
of this way of the Lord.
So to prepare means to provide or to make ready.
And this way is a progress or journey.
So it's not instance, not okay, you're done, you're graduated, you're good to go.
It's a progress and it's a journey.
It's tilling the ground every year, year after year.
Reassessing your life every year, year after year.
So it says the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
prepare the way of the Lord.
So how does this look like?
Let's read.
Make straight in the desert wilderness a highway for the Lord.
So how do we prepare the way of the Lord?
We make straight in the desert wilderness,
or in the desert, which I labeled wilderness, that's what it is.
Make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.
So how do we make a straight, how do we make it straight?
Number one, every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill brought low.
That's one we can make the road straight.
Now, what is valley?
When I think of valley, I think of lowliness.
When you look at a valley, you see all these mountains,
or these hills, or these cliffs around it.
But the valley is so low.
Everything that happens at the top always goes down low.
So the valley is lowliness. It's humbleness.
It's weakness.
It's things that we did not get on our own.
It's Jesus in us.
So every valley, what's supposed to happen to those valleys?
Be exalted.
That humbleness, be exalted.
Now that doesn't mean the Lord gave me a vision,
and then all of a sudden, oh, I'm exalted now
before men and women for this vision,
and doing, fulfilling this vision.
No, that means those character traits that the Lord gave you
of integrity, of patience, kindness, long-suffering,
all of those qualities exalt them up.
That's what it means.
Those things that you can't attain on your own, bring them up.
That's what we need more of.
We need to make them high so that the Lord can have a straight path to walk.
And then it says in every mountain, which is big,
mountains are big, and hills, which are smaller,
but they're still elevated,
it says every mountain and hill brought low.
So it's interesting, mountain in Strong's says promotion.
And I found that interesting, because when there's this promotion,
we as humans get a certain persona where I got elevated.
I got a promotion.
People are looking at me now.
And it's an air of arrogance and pride.
And so it says the mountains, those big things in your life,
your accomplishments.
It's the big things of our flesh.
It's the big things of myself.
It's me. I got this.
I grew the church.
I healed that person.
I preach in this place.
These millions of people knew Jesus because of me.
The Lord says, no, no, no, let's bring them low.
We don't need that.
If you want me to walk, if you want to walk in the kingdom of heaven,
you need to bring that low, because you're not going to get far.
So what's the next thing?
What's another way we can make straight in the desert
or in the wilderness, a highway to God?
It says, the crooked places shall be made straight
and the rough places smooth.
So not only are we bringing up valleys
and tearing down mountains and hills,
now we're taking the crooked roads
and we're making them straight
and we're making the rough roads
and we're making them smooth.
And so crooked means swelling,
swelled up,
fraudulent, deceitful.
These places which are flesh,
these places is resulting in our flesh.
These crooked places, this crookedness in our flesh
it needs to be made straight.
It can be the actions that we take.
Because when you're building a road,
it's not already made it, you're building it
as you're building it.
And then when we look at Minnesota,
because we have roads redone all the time,
they don't just, sometimes they just put a layer on top
but that doesn't do anything, right?
Covering the potholes doesn't do anything.
That's why we have so much construction now
because they realize that doesn't do anything.
So what do you have to do?
You gotta bring it all up.
It's hard work.
It's painful.
You're trying to pick it up
and then you fall.
You're trying to bring up that rock,
that piece of road
and you're like, ah, I'm just...
I'm gonna come tomorrow. I can't do this.
Why does it take all summer?
Because it's hard.
And then there's people flying past you.
Your life is endangered.
So these crooked roads, we need to make them straight
and it's not easy.
So much easier for me to speak this out into your life
and be like, hey, make your crooked road straight
and then I can go home.
But it's so much harder
to be like, oh, the Lord wants me to redo this.
And it may take weeks, months,
even sometimes years
if we're really stubborn,
if we really don't want to work on ourselves
and we're lazy.
It reminds me of the Scripture.
It says, don't look at your...
the speck in your brother's eyes
in your brother's eye.
Look at the log at your own
and I'm rephrasing that into my own words.
But I find that interesting because
if I look over there to Abby,
whatever she has in her eye is a speck.
I can't see it.
But the log in my eye, the speck that's in my eye
looks like a log to me
because I can see it.
And the beauty of that Scripture is,
hey, don't focus on them
because they probably have a log in their eye too.
Focus at the log that you have in your eye.
Start working on yourself with the Lord.
Ask in the Lord to humble you,
to bring you into that wilderness
as hard as it is.
So it says, make those places
straight.
Straight means aligned,
disciplined, broken down
and built back up.
And then the rough places.
The rough places in your life,
your personality,
your character,
that word that keeps slipping up.
The gossip that keeps seeping in.
Those habits in your life
that are specifically, not assigned,
specifically that you do,
that you walk out.
Those are the things the Lord says
that we're supposed to make smooth.
And there's something...
I don't remember where this came from.
Igor probably know. He's like my memory.
But there's, I remember someone telling me,
or we were talking in a discussion
about marriage.
And I saw it in my parents' life,
that the spouses will cover each other.
So for an example, I'm going to give you
an example from my parents,
because that was like, whoa, for me.
My dad was a humble man.
He loved the Lord.
He was so patient and so kind.
And my mom, she's feisty.
She's feisty.
And after my dad died,
I remember seeing qualities in my mom
come up that I've never seen before.
My mom will share her opinion.
She'll be bold about it.
She'll be sometimes forceful.
And I remember talking to Igor.
I'm like, I did not grow up with this mother.
I don't know who she is.
But my father roughed out her edges.
He made her smooth.
And that's what the Lord wants to do with us.
There's certain things where he's like,
someone else can do it.
It doesn't bother me, but you,
I don't want you doing that.
Let me rough out your edges.
And I love that.
So the result, we talked about
how to make the straight
highway for the Lord in our wilderness.
It's making valleys high
and mountains and hills low.
It's making crooked places
straight and rough places smooth.
And what is the result?
The glory of God shall be revealed.
We always talk about,
Lord, show me your glory.
But I don't really think we understand
what that word means.
We've heard this saying before.
I know I've heard it.
Where we're not ready to experience
the glory of God.
Why? Because if he came down,
we'd be toast.
We have things that we have not
repented of.
But the glory of the Lord
shall be revealed.
And then what?
And all flesh shall see it
together.
How beautiful
that we get to see the glory
of the Lord together,
His bride.
It reminds me of
children when they see their
parents.
They get to experience the love
that the mother and the father
or the husband and the wife
have towards each other.
Our children get to experience
that.
And that will set their waves
for them in the future
with their spouse.
And we as parents
are so focused on making our
children so much better than
us.
Making our children to be
that our ceiling would be their
floor.
And we're trying to pour into
them and we're trying to love
them and to teach them and we
want them to go higher.
But we don't realize that
they're looking at us for that.
If we don't walk that out,
trust me, they're not going to
walk that out.
I've tried.
Especially with James.
The Lord humbled me really
low there.
That was my valley for sure.
So we get to see it together.
We get to see the love of the
father, the love of the son,
the love of the Holy Spirit
together in unity.
And we as their children
and their bride,
we get to see that love.
But we get to see it together.
What a unity.
But we won't get there unless
we repent.
This series that Pastor
Yegor is doing,
I think for all of us we
realize it's way more
important than we thought it
was going to be.
It's some serious, serious
stuff that we're going through.
It says, for the mouth of the
Lord has spoken.
What a beautiful thing
to see the mouth of the Lord.
To hear the words
that are like honey.
But are also bittersweet.
So we're going to go into prayer.
We're going to come before
the Lord and we're going to repent.
We're going to repent
of sins of attitude.
Sins of attitude include
false pride, unjust anger,
bitter envy, malicious hatred.
For example, there's that one
person that you just don't like.
Let me tell you,
that's a sin of attitude.
Feeling jealous
towards somebody else.
Oh man, I wish I could be like that person.
I wish I could be as skinny
as her.
I wish I had as much
style as her.
I wish I had this like her.
Sorry, guys.
I wish I had
muscles like him.
I don't know what you guys think.
Thank God.
But those are sins of attitude.
You got to check your heart.
Sins of action.
It's like getting drunk.
Committing adultery.
It's stealing line.
It's insults.
It's actually a reacting sin.
When something happens
in my life, like let's say
my children are not obeying me,
I'm reacting and yelling.
And every single time, guys,
every single time I'm cut
to the core.
Why did I yell at my children?
Every single time.
And sometimes I try to teach
my boys to do something,
and it feels like I'm telling them
years and years and years,
and I say, Lord,
why aren't they doing what I asked them?
It's been years that they hear
every single day,
at least 10 times a day,
for years,
and they're still not doing it.
He's like, look at yourself.
And I've been on the earth
so much longer than them.
And there's still things that I go to.
And it's true.
I'm like, Lord, why?
I can't wait to be with you
so that I don't have to be
drugged down by this wretched flesh.
So the sins of action,
a reacting sin,
sins of neglect,
and it comes out of James 4.17.
So whoever knows
the right thing to do
and fails to do it,
for him it is sin.
Now that can be
the Lord saying,
do not lie.
And you told a little white lie,
or you didn't tell the whole truth,
that is the sin of neglect.
Or it can be,
the Lord said,
hey, I want you to stop,
turn around,
drive back to that gas station,
and tell the attendant
that Jesus loves them,
and you failed to do that?
The sin of neglect.
You're neglecting what God
is asking you to do.
That one kind of hits hard.
The sin of intent,
it's simply a sin committed
in wish, but not reality.
A good example that is brought up
of that is when Jesus talks about
how it's adultery,
where he says,
even if you think,
if you have lustful thoughts
in your mind,
you've already committed sin.
You haven't physically acted on it.
It's not the sin of action,
but it's the intent.
I wanted to do that.
And that,
I think for all of us,
happens a lot in our minds.
More often than we want to admit to.
Somebody cut us off.
Oh, Lord.
I hope they get a ticket.
Right?
Just share my thoughts.
I'm sorry.
Forgive me.
I've asked multiple times
as soon as those words escaped my head.
But it's the sin of intent
wanting those things to happen.
The sin against brethren.
There are brothers and sisters in Christ.
These are flesh.
And blood.
And I'm not talking about the biological.
I'm talking about us.
We're brothers and sisters in Christ.
Now, you can remember back when you were younger
and you were living at home with your parents
and your sisters and brothers
or whoever was living with you.
You know, it's not easy to live with a sibling.
More often than not,
you're getting into fights.
You're causing harm.
You're trying to provoke them into anger.
And that's one of the things
I've been trying to teach my boys for years
and it still doesn't click.
The Lord showed me and I'm like,
oh man.
Sin against brethren.
Sin against God.
I think that one's pretty self-explanatory.
Sin against our body.
That one's a hard one.
Obviously, there's sexual sin.
And there's sin of like,
smoking and causing harm to your body
is what I'm trying to say.
But there's also other sin of like, gluttony.
Right?
And there's also a sin of starving.
There's a temple that God gave us
and it's our responsibility to take care of it.
That's something I learned with my walk
with the Lord right in the beginning.
I remember a pastor preaching
and he said,
I can tell you your relationship with the Lord
by going into your room and seeing how your room is.
I'm like, what?
That doesn't define me.
Uh-huh.
Once I started living, I realized
my house is a mess.
When was the last time I spent time with the Lord?
Huh.
My car isn't clean.
When was the last time I spent time with the Lord?
Am I over scheduling myself
that I can't even spend time with the Lord
and that's why my car is a mess and my house is a mess?
Sins against the body.
And then sins of omission,
which kind of goes back to sins of neglect.
So these are some of the things
that we're going to be praying and repenting for.
That I will be praying and repenting for.
I will be inter-
I will be an intercession for myself
and for you guys as I pray.
And even if some of these sins,
which I'm sure I have already committed all of them,
even if some of these sins I have not done,
I'm going to take it as if I have done
because I know someone out here has done it.
That's what intercession is.
Taking what you have and putting it on me
and I'm speaking to the Lord on behalf of you.
That's why some of the prophets,
they asked God for repentance.
Even though they were the prophets of the Lord.
They heard the Lord.
They were walking righteously with the Lord.
But why did they repent?
Because they took on the sins.
Maybe they didn't take on the sins.
But they were on behalf of Israel
going before the Lord.
As if they were the ones that did it.
That's what intercession is.