“Dennis Harland” was an owner of a successful business in Reno, Nevada. Since he had arrived early for my workshop, I struck up a conversation with him. Soon Dennis was eagerly telling me the story of the day he came back to the Lord after years of living a carnal life.
He said he was sitting in the grandstands at the Daytona 500, enjoying the race and minding his own business when a complete stranger walked up to him and asked, “Are you Dennis Harland?”
“Yes,” he answered, puzzled at how this man knew his name.
“I have a message to you from the Lord,” he told Dennis. Then, looking him straight in the eye, he boldly declared, “The Lord says, ‘This is your last chance. If you don’t repent, you’re going to die.'” Then this complete stranger began to list the exact sins Dennis had committed.
“He told me, ‘You’ve done this and this and this and this,'” Dennis said in an animated voice, “And it was exactly what I had done.”
Then this man said to Dennis, who was a landscape architect from south Florida, “If you don’t repent, you’re going to lose your business, your wife, your kids and your home. You’ll live in a cardboard box under a bridge and then you’ll die!”
“Suddenly,” Dennis said, “my hand that was holding my beer began to shake uncontrollably and I realized right then that I had to make a decision.”
And the decision Dennis made was to indeed repent.
Realizing that God had been merciful to him, Dennis wanted to do something to show that his repentance was genuine. That’s when he heard about our ministry working with the widowed and single parents.
“I figured this was something I could do,” Dennis said.
Good works do not save us. But they are an indication by which we understand that we have been saved “by the skin of our teeth,” so to speak. A deep and profound understanding that we truly deserve God’s judgment and have been let off scott free naturally results in a desire to serve and please Him.
Genuine repentance never occurs alone. It is always followed by performing “deeds appropriate to repentance” (Acts 26:20).
This post first appeared in Doing Good Well: Thirty Daily Meditations on Developing a Biblical and Focused Discipline of Good Works, by Herb Reese, and in NewCommandment.org.
Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North American and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt their widowed and single parents in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry
Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church here.
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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