Harry Emerson Fosdick once suggested that there are three kinds of people in the world. First are the proud and self-satisfied, the impenitent (feeling no sorrow or regret) who do not even realize the mess they are in. Second, there are the penitint who are so crushed by their contrite self-reproach that they wallow in their self-pity. Thirdly, there are people like the prodigal son (Luke 15) who hate themselves for their failure, but who find in that shame the stimulation to say, “I will rise up and go to my Father.”

You have not known the fullness of the experience of repentance until you have moved from

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