Thinking Twice

We are mistaken if we think repentance is feeling badly about what we have done.  The man or woman who wakes up demoralized by the resultant wreckage brought on by a drunken catastrophic act the night before is not repentant.  The teen, who angrily slams a fist into the dashboard after getting a speeding ticket, is not repentant.  The child who cries when punished by a parent for stealing is not repentant.  The New Testament take on repentance is resolute.  If there is repentance, holiness must be its outcome.  Otherwise, it is just wounded pride, disturbed ambition, natural pain response or petulance.  Judas was sorrowful over his betrayal of Jesus but never as far as we can tell repentant.  Korah and his family members may have screamed in panic when the ground began to swallow them but that did not make them repentant.  Repentance by definition requires a shift from an old way of being to operating from a converted will.  It was repentance that determined Zacchaeus’s course of action and Paul’s too.  The former paid his victims back four times what he stole and the later became the chief evangelist of the message he tried to destroy.  There may be a gloominess to the conviction of wrong but that is the shadow of repentance; transformation is the substance.  Biblical repentance requires a Savior and for repentance to take place, the Cross of Christ must work its way into the core of Sin.  Sin is the determination that I do as I see fit; the crucifying work of God kills that resolve and replaces it with the life of resurrected Christ working in and through my new personality.  It must never be the goal to stop doing wrong; rather we are to stop being wrong.  That can only happen as Christ lives in and through us.  When I see the Sin, then I am ready to be transformed by the power of the crucified Christ into a new personality who lives in the God who saves and sanctifies.  Repentance is the full turn into Christ for salvation and then in Him a resulting holiness.  If there is no holiness, there has been no repentance.

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Christ, who has been appointed for you — even Jesus.   Acts 3:19-20 NIV