This is the greatest hour to follow Jesus.

Our text tonight is from Matthew chapter 4 and verse 17.

It says from that time, Jesus began to preach saying,

repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Now this word repent in Greek is metanoia.

It literally means change the way you're thinking.

That's what it literally means.

Before we can repent, we have to change the way we're thinking about sin.

God, the Holy Spirit, has to convince us of sin, righteous, and judgment to come.

That change in our thinking, now we are

seeing our need and our need to repent as a grace of God. But it started before the repentance.

I used to be a, I was a Baptist pastor for 14 years, and I would say in some of the means I do,

say, what is repentance means?

You're going this way and all of a sudden you realize you're going in the wrong direction,

and so you turn, and that turning is repentance.

Anybody ever heard that?

Anybody ever heard, anybody say that?

Wait at me?

It's wrong. It's not true. That's a misleading, and I did it all

the time. I found out as I studied more that this is the fruit of repentance. The repentance, when I realized I was going the wrong direction,

changed the way I was thinking about where I was going,

and as a result of the change in thinking, there was the term.

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