Repentance

Just this afternoon, a friend of mine emailed me and asked what repentance is... I felt so encouraged as I wrote out some thoughts for him, that I decided I would share them with you. Enjoy!

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Contrary to popular thinking, repentance is not an angry or judgmental word (picture the angry dude on the street corner yelling at people to "REPENT!"). It's God's promise that life can be different (and better) than it is right now. To "repent" simply means to have a change of mind, to turn around, to go another direction from where we were headed.

The essence of what repentance is all about is saying to God, "My way hasn't worked, I've tried as hard as I can, and I've come up short, so I'm going to stop what I'm doing and ask for Your help." Even our most noble and honorable efforts fall insanely short of how God thinks and acts (Isaiah 64:6, 55:9), so there is room for repentance all the time. That's why repentance isn't a sporadic event driven by guilt and shame, but an ongoing process of being instructed by God in how to live, think, and feel.

Religion twists repentance into a shameful ritual -- it's the “price” we must pay to earn favor with God. It’s often portrayed as a cowering, squirming admission of how bad we are, as if God would be happy if we would admit what miserable creatures we are. But God doesn’t need anything from us; it's for our sake, not His, that He offers us this incredible invitation into repentance (Psalm 50:9-15). Not because He’s angry, but because He wants to rescue us from where our natural thinking / living leads us, and teach us on a daily (and hourly) basis a better way.

Once we understand the power of His grace, we become hungry to confess and repent all the time! No longer are we driven by guilt and shame to prove our worth and defend ourselves, but we get to let our guard down with God and other people. We get to confess our faults freely because we don't need to fear punishment (1 John 4:18). Where we previously feared that opening up to God and others would cause them to push us away, we find that it actually opens the door for deeper, more intimate relationship than we had ever dreamed possible. In that love and grace we finally find the freedom to become the people God made us to be.