You know, one time I was down in another city at meetings and we had the pastor that I was working with there, he lined up a dinner time with another pastor. And this other pastor, he was the pastor of the biggest church, it was an evangelical church, in that city. And this matter of optional Lordship, optional holiness, optional repentance, came up. And it was going back and forth, back and forth, and I said: “Well, let me put it like this.” “Let’s say that you have in your church somebody who has been a member, he’s been baptized, and so on, but he habitually commits adultery. Are you saying that he’s on the way to Heaven?” And he said, “We cannot judge.” “Can’t judge.” You know, the thing of it is that God has already judged it. You know, it’s just a flagrant denial of the Word of God. And he realizes, I’m sure, that if he blows the whistle on these things in his church, he won’t have much church left. Don’t be deceived! I pointed that out to him. In each one of those places where it lists… where it gives a listing of Heaven-disqualifying sins, in each one of those places it says: “Don’t be deceived.” You wouldn’t be deceived about a worldling. They don’t even profess, they don’t even attend church and so on. It’s obviously those who make a profession Those are the ones you’d be deceived about. And so don’t be deceived. And he says in Ephesians 5: “This we know with certainty, that those who do these things will not inherit the Kingdom of Christ and of God.” And then a fourth place, I forgot to mention, was 1 John chapter 3. There again, the children of God and the children of the Devil are obvious. And He mentions deception there too.
A relationship between faith and repentance: it’s like the two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. It’s like they’re just sisters. You can’t really repent without believing, and you can’t say you got true faith without repenting. One is a turning from, and the other is a turning to. And so they’re really tied together. “You’ve turned from idols to serve the true and living God.”
