About four years ago, I read a story in the paper about a couple who were about 45 years old. They were fortunate enough to have picked the correct six numbers in the lottery the year before the story appeared and they were featured in the same paper at that time when they said that the win would not change anything at all in their lives. Because of that statement, the paper did a follow up story the year afterwards to see if what they said was true. Much to the reporter’s surprise, he discovered that it was.
They were living in the same three-bedroom house, working at the same jobs, driving the same second hand car, still going to the pub once or twice a week for a drink; it appeared that nothing had changed apart from their bank balance. It was only after further questioning that they admitted that one thing had changed – they now went abroad for two weeks holiday a year instead of staying in this country.
Some of my friends had read the same story and they all admired the couple for being able to do this, for being so content with their lives that they didn’t want to change anything. They were somewhat shocked by my reaction to this story when I told them “What a sad couple!”
Here they were with nearly a million pounds in their bank, and they were not willing to change anything. My friends were wishing that they could be like this couple, but I was thinking, “God, please never let me get like that!”
It was shortly after reading that account that God began showing me that I and many other Christians are exactly like that couple. Ok, we don’t have a million pounds in our bank accounts, instead we have something much more valuable. When we gave our lives to Christ each of us were given the gift of eternal life, and I know which of these two gifts I would prefer. The problem is that for most of us, that gift of eternal life, for much of the time since then has been making little difference to our lives apart from sitting there in God’s heavenly bank account.
You only have to look at all the empty spaces in our churches to see that this is true of many Christians today. Yes, we are grateful for God’s gift to us, we thank him every Sunday for all that Christ did to make that gift possible. But for most of us, there has been little change in our lives between the time that we didn’t have this gift, and now, when we do. This is why others find it so hard to see Christ in us, and so aren’t really interested in getting to know him for themselves.
How could this be? How could we have such a wonderful gift as this, and not let it make a difference to us? I think that one of the main answers to this question can be found in what the early believers went through when they became Christians.
Before Jesus began his ministry, we heard in our reading that John the Baptist came with his warning to God’s people telling them to repent. The first words that we hear from Jesus’ lips after his forty days in the wilderness are the words “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” On the Day of Pentecost when Peter preached to thousands in Jerusalem, what was his message to them – “Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins.” A little later, Peter is again preaching to the crowds “ Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, so that times of refreshing may come from the Lord,” When Paul stood up and spoke to the very religious people in the city of Athens. He told them “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”
Could it be that one of the reasons why our churches are so empty, why our lives do not display the love of God, as they should, is because we have forgotten or do not understand God’s command to repent. Could it be that the reason why God’s gift of eternal life makes little difference to our lives here and now is because we have not repented fully of our old life without God and so we cannot live fully in our new lives with God.
To give some examples of what it means not to understand repentance. Charles Finney told of a woman who came to him and said “I sin and repent all of the time.” Then told her that if this was so, she was not repenting. To repent means to stop doing what we used to do, and start doing what God wants us to do. A young male Christian once told me that they repent in their heart all the time. Again, this is not repentance; repentance is not an act of the heart. The heart is involved, but is not central to the act of repentance.
So what does it mean to repent? It is first of all an act of the mind and will. A conscious decision that we make to stop doing something. When Paul told the Romans “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” he was describing repentance. The word repent itself means ‘to change the mind’ and doesn’t involve feelings but a thinking process.
Charles Price tells a story of a lady he met in Scotland, she had left home when she was eighteen and gone to college, then went to join a commune for a time. She was not happy with this way of life and eventually left and returned home. Her parents had been Christians for as long as she could remember and she decided to try this. She invited Jesus into her life to be her saviour and she felt that there had been a change in her heart when she did this; but after a time, she found that this was not making much difference. She read the bible, but it did not come alive for her. She prayed, but in her own words “My prayers fell flat on the floor.” Does this sound familiar to many of us?
She and Charles Price eventually discovered that the reason why she was like this was because she had never repented. She had asked Jesus into our life, but she had never made the decision to turn her back on all that stopped him working in her life. This Scottish lady later became a teacher in a missionary school in South East Asia, so she obviously she discovered that her act of repentance meant that her prayers no longer fell flat on the ground.
Repentance is not a once only experience. It is likely that when you first came to know Jesus as Lord and Saviour, you did repent of all the sin that you knew about in your life. But have you continued to do this? I know this seems to contradict what I said earlier about the lady who met Charles Finney and said “I sin and repent all the time” but it doesn’t. It is a fact of the Christian life that the closer we come to God, the more His light shows what is wrong in our lives. This means that we are not repenting for the same sin all the time, but we are finding different and deeper things within us that God wants to deal with. An example of this from another person’s life is somebody I know who before he became a Christian, found it impossible to have a constant relationship with a girlfriend. As soon as he had one girlfriend, he was looking for the next. He repented of this when he became a Christian, and stopped doing it, although the only way he could do this was by not even looking at girls. It was only after he had grown in his relationship with God that he discovered the reason why he acted like this with girls. The Holy Spirit showed him that he had never forgiven his first girlfriend for two-timing him. It was only after he had forgiven her, and repented of his un-forgiveness that he met the young lady who became his wife. For this man, as for many of us, repentance was not something he needed to do just once.
How do we repent? We have seen that it is an act of the mind and will, rather than the heart and feelings, but what do we need to do. Is it enough simply to say sorry for what we have done, or is it more than this? The answer is that being sorry for what we have done is involved and it is necessary, but it is not enough. We have to be sorry enough to make the first move towards changing. Repentance involves a decision to stop whatever we have been doing, and to start whatever God is telling us to do.
Think of a husband and wife in a car, the wife tells her husband to turn right at the next junction and by mistake, he turns left. When he realises what he has done, he says to his wife “I’m sorry love, I went the wrong way.” But if that is all he does, it isn’t enough. His saying sorry isn’t getting them any closer to where they want to be; it isn’t even stopping them getting further away. To get where they want to be, he needs to stop the car, turn it around and go back on to the correct road that his wife told him to take in the first place. That is repentance.
The surprising thing is that when we decide that we do want to repent and we start to turn in the right direction, we find that it is not as hard to do this as we thought it would be. Once we have made the decision to repent, and started to do so, the Holy Spirit gives us the strength we need to carry out this repentance. But He cannot do so until we make that decision and begin the process ourselves. He can show us the things we need to repent of, but he cannot make us repent, that is entirely up to us.
So what do we need to repent of? After all, we believe in God, we have accepted Jesus as Lord; we do our best to follow Him. It is not as if we were drug addicts or thieves and have just come to believe in God and so we have to repent of things like this. For those of you with Bibles, I want you to turn to Matthew Chapter 5 and look at some famous words that Jesus spoke from halfway up a hill:
Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
Blessed are the sorrowful; they shall find consolation.
Blessed are the gentle; they shall have the earth for their possession.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to see right prevail; they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are those who show mercy; mercy shall be shown to them.
Blessed are those whose hearts are pure; they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called God’s children.
Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of right; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
`Blessed are you, when you suffer insults and persecution and calumnies of every kind for my sake.
Exult and be glad, for you have a rich reward in heaven; in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you.
Those words describe what a Christian should be, and I don’t think any of us can say that we have reached that stage yet. Or look at Leviticus 11, verse 44 and 45: “For I am the Lord your God; you are to make yourselves holy and keep yourselves holy, because I am holy. I am the Lord who brought you up from Egypt to become your God. You are to keep yourselves holy, because I am holy.” The only time we can think that we have nothing to repent of is when these verses are true in our lives. Until that time, repentance needs to be a regular part of our lives.
It isn’t just our own lives that we need to repent for either. We need to repent on behalf of our Churches that have failed to be the body of Christ. Churches that have so often failed to show the unity and love that the Church should reveal to the world.
And lastly, we need to repent for our country. We live in a country that for a long time has had a reputation for being Christian, yet for just as long has failed to live up that reputation. We live in a country that has supported governments that murder their people, solely because that government is right wing, rather than communist. Of course, it is also a country that also has a lot right, but not enough yet.
So what would you do if you won the lottery next Wednesday or Saturday, would you live your life as if nothing had changed? What will you do today with a gift that is so much more than the biggest win on the lottery; will you live your life as though nothing has changed?
