Is Repentance Necessary for Forgiveness?

Forgiveness is not about forgiving someone who has wronged you because he comes to you and repents. Forgiveness is knowing the forgiving heart of our loving Father and forgiving the person who has wronged you realizing it was because of his ignorance and lack of understanding that he wronged you.

Why could Jesus forgive the people who crucified Him?

Jesus, at the Cross, forgave the men who crucified Him, yet, they did not repent, He said..."Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." Now I am sure that everyone reading this realizes that the people who crucified Jesus were of "sound mind and body", meaning that they were well aware of the act they were committing. They were not so mindless that they performed the act in a robotic state with know knowledge of what they did.  So what did Jesus mean? Jesus new that humans were a carnal race living influenced by the Adamic nature. He knew that they were only doing what they could not help doing, because they were identified with their carnal nature. That’s why He could say, "Father, they really don’t know. So, forgive them." My question now is...Did God answer the prayer of Jesus and FORGIVE them? I believe that He did! Do you think that in some future judgement that they will ever be held accountable for nailing Jesus to a cross and be cast into the torture chamber of hell? If God answered the prayer of His Son they won’t. It will be as if they had never crucified Him. That’s forgiveness!

Look at the account of Stephen and Paul. Paul stood and watched while Stephen was being stoned, and Stephen said, "Father, lay not this sin to their charge." Stephen understood that the nature of Christ was the rule of the Kingdom of God on earth. He understood that if the very men who were stoning him had the same vision and understanding that of the Kingdom he had, if their eyes were opened as his had been, they would not be stoning him, they would be cheering him. That is why he could say with meaning, "Father, forgive them."

God is is doing a work today. It is the growing of the Seed Christ in our lives. But man can’t experience that until carnality begins to die. Paul says, "We die daily." Daily we die to the wants and needs of the Adamic nature, to what we want our spouse or our children to be. 

If I am living by the nature of Christ I will never judge, condemn or criticize people, Why?. Because I am actually saying that I am unibetter than that the people I judge, condemn and criticize. I fail to understand that we are not all cut from the same mold, that we all have the carnal nature, we all have that horrible, ugly disease called sin, and it’s going to manifest in all of us. We look at sin in degrees. We look at homosexuality as being a BIG sin but obeying man instead of God as a insignificant sin, in doing so we fail to understand that the root is the same. There is no degrees to sin. The knowledge of both good and evil come from exactly the same tree. So the homosexual, in the eyes of God, is no different than the good religious person who is dependent on obeying man to get to God. 

Good can be a natural characteristic of humans. Adam partook of one tree, the tree of "Good and Evil", but we need to feed from the "Tree of Life"...Jesus Himself. Jesus said, "If you eat me, you will live by me." What does it mean to eat Jesus? We need to allow His Seed within us to grow and mature. We need to feed upon the principles and teachings of Jesus and forsake man-made teachings. We need to meditate upon them and have them consume us until we become what they are. And that only happens through death, but it is not you trying to put your carnal nature to death...But if we, through the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the flesh, we will live.

How does that happen? Paul says in Romans that if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. Not by our actions or conduct, not by our trying to walk in a certain way or use certain methods or the keeping of the Law or the do's and dont's of religion. We are only saved by His life.

That is why Jesus said, He came that we might have life, not a new set of rules and regulations. He didn’t come to raise the standard of the 10 Commandments to the Sermon on the Mount. He didn't come to empower religion to be the mediator in my place. He came that we might have life, so that we would walk in the fullness of His nature. That is the Spirit doing, not our doing. The life of Christ we are to live has absolutely nothing to do with the natural makeup of Adam.

I do believe in repentance, but not the way religion teaches it.

The Seed of Christ reproduces in us the God-kind of life and kills the seed of Antichrist...the carnal nature...and it ceases to have dominion over us. Peter said that we have received His divine life and nature (2 Peter 1:3), and we do that through the promises of God, not through self-effort. You may be a "good" person, but unless your goodness have is a product of the Christ life within, that goodness is evil and you need to let the fire of God's purification to purge you to understand that it is only through grace and by the power of God that you will be kept as a Christ living life believer.  

I believe in repentance, but not the religious way I was taught.