One of my favorite cartoon strips is “Frank and Earnest.” Frank is in the courtroom standing before the judge who says to him, “It’s ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty.’ You can’t plead ‘I gotta be me.’” The cartoon is humorous because it touches a reality in our culture which places the need for self-expression above the need for morality, integrity and honor. I often think about the fact that Jesus warned his followers to beware of the “wicked and adulterous generation” in which they lived. And then I wonder what he would call our generation which has long passed the simple immorality of his day into acts of violence, sexual addictions and perversions that had never been thought of then, and around which we have built many television programs and movies. And yet, we have an aversion to calling anything sin these days. How would Jesus go over today if he strode into New York or San Diego telling the people they were a part of a corrupt and perverted generation? What if he took 15 second spots during the evening news to call the nation to repentance, or as the Book of Common Prayer says, “lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness”? How would it go over? There would be calls for him to get out of people’s bedrooms and mind his own business. They would say he should not try to impose his personal morality on other people. That is, that’s what they would say before someone eventually assassinated him — as they did long ago.
What is repentance? Gordon MacDonald helps us to understand with these sobering words: “Repentance is not necessarily repentance for what I have done although it may necessitate that. Repentance is for, more significantly, what is in me as a sinner. I suggest to you that the Bible is teaching us over and over again that in the soul of every person in this room — even in the children — is a volcanic pocket of evil so virile and so full of potential that anyone in this world would probably be capable of destroying the world five times over if all of that evil got out.” We have a problem, and we need to be delivered. That deliverance comes through repentance. Repentance is how God works in our lives.
What is the truth that Jesus is trying to get across when he comes calling for repentance? Why do we need to repent? We need to repent first of all: Because we have a problem. This is the difficult part, because the hardest thing we have to do is to admit that we have a problem. Doctors experience this with patients. I used to have some relatives who would go to the doctor and purposely hide things from him and not tell him the truth, because they were afraid of what he would say. Then they would become angry with the doctor because he was not helping them. Financial counselors experience this also. People go for help and hide some of their debt or their financial practices. Counselors and psychotherapists encounter the same thing when people deliberately don’t tell them significant things that are necessary for the counselor to know in order to help them. So it is no surprise that when people come to Jesus they try to keep all kinds of things hidden. They cannot face the fact that they have a problem. They don’t want to face their sin. They are stuck, but they are afraid of moving away from their sickness.
In his book Waiting: Finding Hope Where God Seems Silent, Ben Patterson tells a story from his personal life: “In the summer of 1988, three friends and I climbed Mount Lyell, the highest peak in Yosemite National Park. Two of us were experienced mountaineers; two of us were not. I was not one of the experienced two. . . . The climb to the top and back was to take the better part of a day due, in large part, to the difficulty of the glacier that one must cross to get to the top. . . . As the hours passed, and we trudged up the glacier, the two mountaineers opened up a wide gap between me and my less-experienced companion. Being competitive by nature, I began to look for short cuts I might be able to take to beat them to the top. I thought I saw one to the right of an outcropping of rock — so I went up, deaf to the protests of my companions... Thirty minutes later I was trapped in a cul-de-sac of rock atop the Lyell Glacier, looking down several hundred feet of a sheer slope of ice, pitched at a forty-five degree angle. . . . I was only ten feet from the safety of a rock. But one little slip and I wouldn’t stop sliding until I had landed in the valley floor about fifty miles away! . . .I was stuck and I was scared.”
There are a lot of people today who are stuck. They have a problem. They know that they are in a dangerous place and they are scared, but they don’t see a way out. They got there by breaking boundaries and taking chances with their life that they shouldn’t have taken. They ignored the warnings and concerns of others. They need help, but they don’t want to ask for it. It’s time for a change, but they don’t know how to make it, and they are not sure it would work if they tried. Maybe it is easier to give up and stay where they are than to change, even though they are broken and their life is in pieces. But change is the meaning of repentance. Repentance is not just feeling sorry for your sin, or even just turning from your sin, it means that your whole life is turned around. You turn from what you were doing and who you were, and go a whole new direction. Going a new direction is sometimes more scary than the stuck place you are in, because as bad as it is, at least it is familiar.
When God delivered Israel from slavery it seemed wonderful until they began to face the reality of what it meant to be free. They were in trouble, but they did not want to turn to God, they wanted to go back to their old life — even though he had delivered them. Freedom meant hard work and responsibility and change. There were things back in Egypt they enjoyed, in spite of being slaves. So they rebelled and actually wanted to go back into slavery, in spite of what it would mean to be in bondage again. Instead of calling out to God, they blamed God.
A picture of someone who was in trouble and did what was right in the situation was Peter. Like Peterson on the cliff, he got stuck in a dangerous situation and didn’t know how to get out of it. It was the time Jesus came to the disciples while they were in their boat on the Sea of Galilee. They had gone before him in the boat, and he came to them walking on the water. They were so afraid when they saw him coming to them on that dark and stormy night that they screamed out in fear. But Jesus said to them, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” Peter said, “Lord, if it’s you, tell me to come to you on the water.” So Jesus invited him to come. Peter got out of the boat and began to walk toward Jesus, but when he saw the waves he became afraid and began to sink. Then he did something that was the secret to survival. He cried out: “Lord, save me!” (Matthew 14:25-33). That is the secret. It is the phrase Christ is waiting and wanting to hear. It means that we are not only broken and needy, but that we realize we are broken and needy and are finally ready to reach out to him. It also means that we understand what, or Who, the solution is, and we are calling out to him and willing to do anything he tells us. When Peter called out and placed his confidence in Christ, Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up. He will do the same for you.
We need to repent because we have a problem and we need to change. But there is a second reason that we need to repent: Because something better has come. We were walking in darkness, but we have seen a great light. Jesus said, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.” This is the reason for the need for change: the kingdom of God is here. When God shows up things have to change. Something new has come and we need to be new people. When something this good comes along, we have to let go of everything that is holding us back. The Bible puts it like this: “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2). You can’t carry the burden and bondage of your sin into the kingdom of God. It just doesn’t belong there. God wants you to be free of it and have a whole new life.
When John the Baptist began to preach, the Bible says, “In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea and saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’ This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: ‘A voice of one calling in the desert, “Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him”’” (Matthew 3:1-3). John was referring to a scene that was familiar to the people of that culture. When a king came to Jerusalem it was not done in secret or without preparation. Roads were repaired, holes were filled, low places were raised up and hills were dug through to make the way of the king worthy of a king. John was saying, “Someone important and something better is coming and you need to be prepared for it.” The same is true for us. The King is coming. We can’t just keep going in the same direction, doing the same things. We have to prepare the way for the King. We have to make our hearts free of obstacles and road blocks. We have to clear the way for his coming. It’s too good for us not to be willing to give up something — to give up everything. We have to be willing to do whatever it takes for the King and the fullness of his kingdom to come into our lives.
It is important that right after Matthew reports that Jesus came calling everyone to repentance and announcing that the kingdom of God was near, that he gives the account of Jesus calling his disciples. They are simple fishermen. Fishing was their living, and it was also their identity. They were not just men who fished; they were fishermen. It was a part of who they were and it bonded them to the community. Their fathers were fishermen, and their fathers before them. It was a family business, and the family depended on them. But Jesus was calling them to give that up for something else — something better. He said, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Their response was immediate: “At once they left their nets and followed him” (Matthew 4:19-20). They knew a good deal when they heard it. They had a good business, but something better had come along, and their lives headed in a totally new direction.
One of the great nineteenth-century preachers was a Scottish Presbyterian named Alexander Whyte. I have a set of his commentaries in my office that I treasure. He was a great man, but he also had an awareness of the potential for evil that was never far from the surface. After one of his services a young woman came to him and said that she loved being in his presence because he was so saintly. A bit surprised Alexander Whyte looked at her with a sense of solemnity and said, “Madam, if you could look into my soul, what you would see would make you spit in my face.” I have the feeling that the closer we come to God the more we understand our need to repent. You don’t really understand how awful it is to live on a garbage dump until you have been to a palace. The more you understand who God is and what his kingdom is like, the more you understand your need to change. But the greater truth is that the more you know God, the more you understand that what you are giving up is nothing and that what you are gaining is everything. What you give up are those things which are destroying you. What you gain is life and eternity. Something better has come and you are going for it.
The third reason we need to repent is: Because the kingdom is here. We need to get ready because the time to be ready is not in the distant future, it is now. We need to repent. We need to change. There is a time when it is everlastingly too late. Jeremiah lamented the condition of the people of his day saying, “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved” (Jeremiah 8:20). Don’t put this off, because it needs to be done now. The tidal wave is coming and we need to be in a place of safety.
We like to fool ourselves and think that we can go on living this way forever and it will never catch up with us. That was the feeling of the men living and working in the Nixon Administration before Watergate. There was a feeling of power and indestructibility. They would never believe that anything could shake their kingdom. But men of wealth, power and prestige were toppled by moral and ethical carelessness. Jeb Magruder relates what it was like in his book An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate: “I think most of us who were involved in Watergate were unprepared for the pressures and temptations that await you at the highest levels of the political world. We had private morality but not a sense of public morality. Instead of applying our private morality to public affairs, we accepted the President’s standards of political behavior, and the results were tragic for him and for us.” The Bible consistently warns that the time of Jesus’ coming will be unexpected and find many unprepared. He said, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour” (Matthew 25:13). Jesus’ words in the book of Revelation are important here as well: “Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you” (Revelation 3:3).
You don’t have to wait for a better time, because God is ready to do something in your life now. A.W. Tozer wrote: “Anything God has ever done, he can do now. Anything God has ever done anywhere, he can do here. Anything God has ever done for anyone, he can do for you.”
Back to Ben Patterson, who was stuck and scared on the side of a mountain: “It took an hour for my experienced climbing friends to find me. Standing on the rock I wanted to reach, one of them leaned out and used an ice axe to chip two little footsteps in the glacier. Then he gave me the following instructions: ‘Ben, you must step out from where you are and put your foot where the first foothold is. . . . Without a moment’s hesitation swing your other foot across and land it in the next step. Reach out and I will take your hand, and I will pull you to safety. . . . But listen carefully: As you step across, don’t lean into the mountain! If anything, lean out a bit. Otherwise, your feet could fly out from under you, and you will start sliding down.’” Patterson says, “When I’m on the edge of a cliff, my instinct is to lie down and hug the mountain, to become one with it, not lean away from it! But that was what my good friend was telling me to do as I stood trembling on that glacier. I looked at him real hard. . . . For a moment, based solely on what I believed to be true about the good will and good sense of my friend, I decided to say no to what I felt. . . to lean out, step out, and traverse the ice to safety. It took less than two seconds to find out if my faith was well founded. It was.”
That is the same discovery that countless people through the years have made — that when they get stuck in a dangerous place and Jesus calls them to give him their hand, if they lean away from where they are, step out and reach out to him, he will pull them to safety. They will be rescued and delivered. They went the wrong way in spite of the warnings, but he came to their rescue anyway. That’s what repentance is all about. Don’t miss the opportunity for real repentance and deny yourself the incredible power of it.
Rodney J. Buchanan
February 26, 2012
Amity United Methodist Church
rodbuchanan2000@yahoo.com
