Living Repentance
Personal Matters
Two people attending a shared prayer time recently had been independently drawn to the same passage during the week; “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.” (1 Thess 2:13). Despite the usual Christian experience the words of Jesus which are “spirit and life” cannot lay dormant in our lives (John 6:63). The source of the disconnection between the continuing working of God’s Word in us and our feeling that the Lord is absent lies in the state of our hearts. Jesus described a sort of person who produces a hundred-fold fruitfulness, “those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patience.” (Luke 8:14-15). This describes a mature heart filled with the Holy Spirit as a state of life (Deut 34:9; Luke 4:1; Acts 6:3, 5; 11:24). The ongoing union between the Word and the Spirit is the Christian life as God intended it to be, however rare it may be amongst us. A key to overcoming our spiritual poverty lies in considering how the Thessalonians received the Christian message, “our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.” (1 Thess 1:4). The fruit of the ongoing energy of the Word is that “you turned from idols to serve the living and true God” (1:10). Central to consistent Christian growth is deep repentance; turning away from sin towards God (1 Ki 18:35; Isa 55:7; Luke 22:32; Acts 3:19; 14:15; 20:21). This seems clear enough, but to quote an exasperated pray-er, “The pastors today don’t preach repentance.” The current unpopularity of repentance is surely a sign that we have taken our eyes off Jesus as himself the ever active living Word of God.
At Work in Jesus
The unveiling of the deepest mystery of repentance comes when Jesus submits to John’s “baptism into repentance” in our place (Luke 3:3). From here on Christ was always turning away from our sin towards the Father on our behalf (Matt 4:1-11). His first public message pivoted on repentance, ““The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.””, because he considered turning back to God an action full of goodness, excellence and wisdom (Mark 1:15). Unlike so many believers whose consciences are not clear, the Lord spoke of the need to repent without any sense of self-consciousness (Luke 5:32; 13:1; 24:47). His very presence was powerful enough to provoke tears of repentance, but however profound such effects were they were limited in space and time (Luke 7:37-38; 22:61-62). With complete insight Jesus taught that the scattering abroad of repentance depended upon his death; ““The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:23-24). Jesus is the perfect penitent in our place and in his death the dynamic nature of godly repentance is fully revealed.
Hebrews explains that “through the eternal Spirit (Jesus) offered himself without blemish to God,” (Heb 9:14). This means that the Spirit was empowering Christ the Word through Gethsemane his trial and the cross. This union of Spirit and Word is most intensely reflected in the most powerful utterances of Christ in prayer, “Abba, Father…Father, forgive…” uttered during the passion (Mark 14:36; Luke 23:34). The Word was working powerfully in the suffering of Jesus even if no one believed it. (The cry of dereliction (Mark 15:34) is no exception, for this lament is exactly what sinful humanity should always have offered to God.) The action of the Spirit in the death-and-resurrection of Jesus means that a great work was happening even when it seemed God was absent. Jesus is the perfection of “the honest and good heart” that “bear fruit with patience” in one hundred fold fruitfulness (Luke 8:14-15). When repentance is viewed through the lens of the cross it is an alive, active, dynamic work of God.
At Work in Us
If you ever feel like there are “dead parts” of your life where God’s word is not working, in your marriage, family, finances, health, spirituality…then the therapy you need is repentance. There is nothing as living and active as the presence of the word of God in repentance because returning to God is a transition from death to life initiating the new creation through a share in the death and resurrection of Jesus (Heb 4:12-13). Where popular Christianity treats repentance as if it were a dead work marginal to praise and prosperity it is actually “the secret of the joy-filled life” (Schlink). Many of today’s pastors avoid preaching repentance do so because they refuse to believe that God wants us to die. But, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” (Bonhoeffer); not die alone, but die in fellowship with Jesus (Phil 3:10; Col 2:20)! The current crisis in the Church over repentance has come because we have separated turning to God from the life of Christ. Repentance has a bad press because it is treated as if it were something we do whereas in scripture repentance is a gift of union with Jesus’ saving life-work (Acts 5:31; 11:18; 2Tim 2:25). The shunning of repentance in language and action across much of today’s Christianity reflects a fear that by acts of repentance we will somehow lose out, have a death experience, without experiencing gain, have a resurrection experience. Yet Jesus promised, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” (Mark 8:35). Fears associated with repentance reflect a deep and serious deception because underlying them is a denial that the gospel of Christ is always at work in us.
Conclusion
Hebrews lists “repentance from dead works” as an “elementary teaching” on the path to maturity (6:1). This means that where repentance has become a stumbling block maturity in Christ- likeness impossible. This is exactly the state of Western Christianity as we know it. Deep down our hedonistic pleasure loving society has so corrupted the mainstream Christian conscience with the message of an easy life that we have lost faith that there is a “godly grief (that) produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret,” (2 Cor 7:10). We are lacking mature fathers/mothers with a deep experience of the faith who “rejoice” when their spiritual children are “grieved into repenting” (2 Cor 7:9). Those places in our lives where we feel that our lives are dull and dead have a purpose, that we might individually and together ask for the gift of repentance (2 Tim 2:25). Such things are always the first step in revival, and they come in only one way; ““And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.” (Zech 12:10; John 19:37; Rev 1:7). If a vision of Christ crucified cannot induce in us repentance, all hope for resurrection joy is lost from this generation (Luke 24:41).
How ironic and terrible that we live in an age in Western history when the world is calling on the Church to repent of her sins. May Jesus have mercy on us all. And soon please!