INTRODUCTION

In the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Lord’s almost constant problem was what to do with human leadership. King after king led the people into apostasy until the two nations were devastated and had to go into captivity under pagan rule.

But never has the Lord had a more difficult problem to solve than the lukewarmness of “the angel of the church of the Laodiceans,” the human leadership of His last-day remnant church. The solution Christ proposes is to “repent.”

Our “historic” understanding has been that such repentance is personal, or individual. This sounds simple enough, but after nearly a century and a half that experience seems to have eluded us. We still need myriads of personal repentances, but could it be that He is addressing a corporate body, and therefore He is calling for corporate repentance?

The One who gave Himself on His cross to redeem us has every right to call us to repentance, for it was He who died our corporate second death in our stead. But the vast proportion of the world still understands little or nothing of that divine sacrifice. We haven’t yet told them clearly enough.

How can the Lord solve the problem? Will it help to let punitive judgments and disasters and more terrorism come upon us? More terrible world wars? More lethal epidemics? More storms and earthquakes? Or could it be that understanding a still small voice calling us to denominational repentance will be effective?

Hopefully this modest contribution may help to demonstrate that such repentance makes very good sense and is indeed a gift of God not to be refused.