There was a painter by the name of Jock, who was very interested in making a penny where he could, so he often would thin his paint to make it go further. As it happened, he got away with this for some time, but eventually the Church decided to do a big restoration job that involved the painting of one of its biggest churches. Jock put in a bid, and because his price was so low, he got the job.
He went about erecting the trestles and setting up the planks, and buying the paint and, yes, thinning it down with the turpentine. Jock was up on the scaffolding, painting away with the job nearly completed, when suddenly there was a horrendous clap of thunder, and the sky opened.
The torrential rain washed the thinned paint off the church and knocked Jock off the scaffold and on to the lawn, among the gravestones, surrounded by telltale puddles of the thinned and useless paint. Jock was no fool. He knew this was a judgment from the Almighty, so he got on his knees and cried:
"Oh, God! Forgive me! What should I do?" And from the thunder, a mighty voice spoke... Repaint! Repaint! And thin no more!
This morning, as we continue on this journey from good to great, we’re going to deal with the subject of repentance.
By now, we should all be familiar with the first sentence of Thom Rainer’s book which we are using as the theme for this series of messages:
“It is a sin to be good if God has called us to be great.”
For the last four weeks we’ve been looking at the Book of Acts to see how God took the early church from good to great and to learn some principles that we can apply so that God can do the same thing with our church.
So far we’ve seen that sometimes God calls us to wait for Him to pour His power into our lives. We’ve also seen that we plug into that power through the filling of the Holy Spirit. And although we covered a lot of material over those first three weeks, we saw that we can really boil everything we learned down into just four things that we need to be doing in order to wait on God and to provide the right conditions for Him to fills us with His power through the Holy Spirit:
• Spend time in God’s Word
• Pray
• Obey what God reveals
• Confess any sin
And then last week, we saw the importance of keeping our focus in the right place. We saw that when Peter had a chance to preach on anything he wanted, God’s Holy Spirit had him focus on the same thing that needs to be the focus of our faith:
• The resurrection
Peter’s first sermon was powerful, indeed. In fact, as we’ll see this morning, God used Peter’s preaching to cut to the very heart of those who heard it that day. Let’s pick up our study in Acts with the reaction to Peter’s sermon:
Read Acts 2:37-41
When the people heard Peter’s message, when they focused on the resurrection, they immediately realized that they needed to respond to the resurrection. We talked a little about that last week. But this week we want to dig into their response even deeper. Nearly 3,000 people responded to the gospel message that day and were baptized as a symbol of the decision they made to follow Jesus Christ.
There’s a lot to cover in just these five verses, but I want us to focus this morning on Peter’s first command that he gave when the people asked what they needed to do: Repent. We often talk about repentance, but I’m not sure that we understand exactly what that means and how crucial it is to our faith. So that’s where we’re going to put our attention and focus this morning.
But before we do that, I need to briefly address one other issue. There are some people who have taken the position, based on Peter’s words in verse 38, that baptism is required for salvation. In reading most English translations of that verse, that is certainly the impression we would get. However, a careful analysis of the Greek gives us a different picture. Without going into a great deal of detail, let me just say that the command “Repent” and the phrase “for the forgiveness of your sins” are connected grammatically since they are both in the second person plural. However, the command “be baptized” is in the third person singular. So a better translation would be something like this:
“You all repent for the forgiveness of you all’s sins and let each one be baptized”
That translation would also be consistent with what we learn about baptism in the rest of the New Testament. Everywhere else it is presented as a symbolic act that follows a person’s decision to enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through faith. It’s also interesting to note that in the two other places in Acts where Peter commands his listeners to repent, there is absolutely no mention of baptism. It seems that if Peter was trying to teach that baptism was necessary for salvation, he would have taught that doctrine consistently, which he certainly does not.
So let’s spend the rest of our time this morning talking about this whole idea of repentance – what does it mean and how do I experience it in my life?
Let’s begin with the word itself. The Greek word metanoeo comes from two Greek words – meta, which means to move or change and noeo, which refers to the mind and its thoughts and perceptions. So in a very simple sense, the word “repent” means to change the thoughts of one’s mind. But as it’s used in the Bible in general and specifically by Peter here in this passage, I’d like to suggest that there is a lot more involved in repentance than just changing one’s mind. If that’s all there was to it, then every woman in here would automatically “repent” all the time.
The idea of repentance was not new to Peter’s listeners. In fact, in just a moment we’re going to go back to an Old Testament passage that gives us a really great picture of the process of repentance. We also know that John the Baptist and Jesus had also commanded their audiences to repent. In fact, both Mark and Matthew record that Jesus’ very first sermon began with the command to repent. And in the Book of Revelation, Jesus commands the people in the churches at Sardis and Laodicea to repent as well.
When Peter’s listeners asked him what they should do, Peter responded with the command to repent. That command is in what is know as the aorist tense, which means that it was basically a command for them to repent right then and there. However, when Jesus gave the command to repent during His earthly ministry the command to repent was always given in the present tense, which, as we’ve all learned, indicates a continuing action. We could translate His command “Keep on repenting.” So it appears that there are two aspects of repentance. There is the sense in which we make a one-time decision to repent when we accept Jesus as our Forgiver and Master. But there is also the sense in which we need to continually live a lifestyle of repentance.
This morning, we’ll look at repentance in the broader sense of a lifestyle. We’ll look at repentance as a process that we need to constantly be a part of in our lives.
On January 1, 1929, the California Bears faced the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Midway through the second quarter, Roy Riegels, who played center, picked up a fumble by Tech’s Jack "Stumpy" Thomason. Just 30 yards away from the Yellow Jackets’ end zone, Riegels was hit by several players near the sideline and was somehow turned around and ran 65 yards in the wrong direction.
Teammate and quarterback Benny Lom chased Riegels, screaming at him to stop. Known for his speed, Lom finally caught up with Riegels at California’s 3-yard line and tried to turn him around, but he was immediately hit by a wave of Tech players and tackled back to the 1-yard line. The Bears chose to punt rather than risk a play so close to their own end zone, but Tech’s Vance Maree blocked Lom’s punt and Georgia Tech scored a safety, giving them a 2-0 lead. Those 2 points turned out to be the difference in the game that California lost 8-7.
At halftime of that game Riegels told his coach, “Coach, I can’t do it. I’ve ruined you, I’ve ruined myself, I’ve ruined the University of California. I couldn’t face that crowd to save my life." Head coach Nibs Price responded: "Roy, get up and go back out there — the game is only half over.”
And that’s exactly what Roy Riegels did. In the second half he went out and played a great half of football, even blocking a Georgia Tech punt. In spite of the California loss and the unrelenting ridicule that followed, Riegels went on to live a productive and successful life. The following year he was the team captain and earned All-American honors. He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II and went on to a successful high school and college coaching career and ran his own chemical company.
That’s a pretty good picture of repentance. It’s the process of taking a life that going the wrong way and turning it around. Roy Riegels didn’t do all that in one afternoon, but he did take the first step to turn things around that day.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re going to take a look at an Old Testament passage that provides us with a pretty comprehensive picture of the process of repentance. This particular passage is repeated almost word for word in both 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles, but we’ll look at the account in 2 Chronicles this morning.
This passage is part of Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the Temple.
"When they sin against you - for there is no one who does not sin - and you become angry with them and give them over to the enemy, who takes them captive to a land far away or near; and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their captivity and say, ’We have sinned, we have done wrong and acted wickedly’; and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their captivity where they were taken, and pray toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you have chosen and toward the temple I have built for your Name; then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their pleas, and uphold their cause. And forgive your people, who have sinned against you.
2 Chronicles 6:36-39 (NIV)
There is no doubt that this is a passage about repentance. In fact, the Hebrew word for repent is actually used three different times in this passage. You shouldn’t have any problem spotting one of the occurrences because it is translated “repent”. You might want to go ahead and underline that word in your sermon outline. The same word is also translated “change of heart” in one place and “turn” back” in another. Again you might want to underline those phrases.
This entire passage describes the process of how the people could turn their lives around. So let’s see what we can learn that will help us do the same thing:
HOW TO TURN MY LIFE AROUND:
You know how much I like to keep things simple, so I’ve developed an acrostic for the word “repent” to help us remember these six principles we’ll discover today:
Recognize my sin
The first step in repentance is always to recognize our sin. That’s one of the works that the Holy Spirit does in the lives of unbelievers. He convicts people of the sin in their lives:
When he [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment
John 16:8 (NIV)
When Peter preached his message that day, the Holy Spirit convicted the people of their sin. That’s why they were cut to the heart. And here in this passage in 2 Chronicles, we also see that recognizing that we are sinners is the first step in this process of repentance. Notice that the first indication of a change of heart was that the people recognized that they were sinners and admitted their sin.
For most people, this first step is not usually all that hard. I think that deep down inside that most people recognize that no matter how good they are, there is sin in their lives. We may not be ax murderers or adulterers, but how about things like lying, deception, lust, being disrespectful of parents or others in authority, bitterness? Anyone here that can honestly say they’ve never done any of those things? And that list doesn’t even include all the things that we know we should do and don’t – that’s sin, too.
Experience godly sorrow
True repentance affects our hearts. When we sin, we realize how much we have grieved God and we grieve as well. The idea of godly sorrow is certainly present in this passage in 2 Chronicles. Once the people recognize their sin, they plead with God for forgiveness because they recognize how their sin grieves God.
Here’s what Paul wrote about the connection between godly sorrow and repentance:
Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
2 Corinthians 7:10 (NIV)
Sorrow is not repentance in itself, but godly sorrow is part of the process – it leads to or results in the kind of repentance that brings salvation. But not all sorrow leads to repentance. Paul writes here about two kinds of sorrow – godly sorrow and worldly sorrow.
Worldly sorrow is the kind of sorrow we see quite often in the world around us. It is the kind of sorrow that focuses on me, rather than on God. It’s being sorry that I got caught. It’s being sorry for the consequences that I suffer as a result of my sin. We’ve seen a lot of that in just the last few weeks:
• Representative Mark Foley is caught sending indecent emails and instant messages to a former House page and his response is to check into rehab and blame his conduct on the fact that he was molested in his youth. And then he issued this apology:
I am deeply sorry, and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent,"
In my opinion, that so-called apology is nothing but a bunch of political psycho-babble. It’s all about him and his family and his constituents. No even anything to indicate he’s sorry for what he did to the young men.
• A week ago on Friday, Indiana Pacers guard Stephen Jackson fired his gun in a confrontation outside a strip club. On Tuesday, he issued this apology:
"I want to apologize to my teammates, to the fans and to this organization. It was a very unfortunate incident. I definitely take responsibility for my action and everything I’ve done."
Jackson may have claimed to take responsibility for his actions, but everything about his apology is all about him. An unfortunate incident? He’s hanging out at a strip club with some other teammates. Marijuana is found in their car and he’s firing off shots from a gun. And it’s just an unfortunate incident? Right.
• In an interview with Diane Sawyer this week, Mel Gibson referred to his well-documented anti-Semitic comments he made this summer as the "stupid rambling of a drunkard." And then he gave what seems to be his version of an apology:
"What I need to do [is] to heal myself and to be assuring and allay the fears of others and to heal them if they had any heart wounds from something I may have said."
All those so-called apologies contain is a whole bunch of worldly sorrow. And as a result, there’s no evidence of any kind of repentance, either.
If we really want to move toward real repentance then we need to have the kind of godly sorrow that recognizes just how badly our sin grieves God. We need to see how our sin damages our relationship with God and grieve over that ourselves.
Pray and confess my sin
I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this point – it’s pretty self-explanatory. Certainly the people in the passage in 2 Chronicles did just that. The word confess, just means to agree with God that my sin is in fact sin. It means that I don’t justify it, I don’t rationalize it, I don’t call it a mistake, or a lapse in judgment or and unfortunate incident. I admit that it is sin and a pray and confess that to God.
It’s not just enough to recognize my sin and experience godly sorrow. God wants me to pray and to confess my sin to Him. Now God doesn’t need me to confess my sin for His sake. He already knows all about my sin – not just the outward manifestation but also the inward motivation. But when I confess my sin to God, I do it so that I admit to myself that what I have done is in fact sin and that it has grieved God and damaged my relationship with Him.
Exchange my heart for God’s heart
Here’s the essence of repentance. Like Roy Riegels, I realize that I’m going in the wrong direction and I turn around. Probably the most often used picture of repentance is a U-turn. I’m going one way in my life and realize I’m going the wrong way and I make a U-turn and go in the opposite direction.
But how do I actually do that? I know I’ve tried to do that hundreds of times in my life, but often with no success. I sin. I know it and I’m sorry over it. I confess it to God and then I try to make that U-turn only to find I’m headed in the wrong direction again after a while. But the problem is that I try to do all that with my own heart. And my heart, my mind, is terribly corrupted. It is deceitfully wicked. So if I want to be able to really repent, I need to change my mind. I need the mind of Christ.
That’s why the passage in 2 Chronicles stresses the importance of a change of heart and of turning back to God with all of our heart and soul.
Paul used the metaphor of getting dressed to describe that process:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:22-24 (NIV)
The process of exchanging my heart involves two steps. First, I have to take off the old. And only once I’ve taken off the old can I put on the new.
When we were working on our yard, I had to go to Home Depot to buy a new wheel for our wheelbarrow. But after we used that new wheel for a while, we realized there was something wrong with the seal on the tire and it wouldn’t hold air. So I had to take off the old wheel, take it back to Home Depot, exchange it for a new one and then come home and put on the new wheel. That’s what I need to do with my mind if I want to experience true repentance.
Now I’m obviously not suggesting that we go physically have a brain transplant, But we do need a spiritual brain transplant. As Paul writes:
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…
Romans 12:2 (NIV)
So I protect my mind from those things that might pollute it and then I fill it with the mind of Christ. And that leads us directly to the next step in the process:
Nurture my relationship with God
The way that I make sure that I exchange my heart for God’s heart is by spending time with Him.
I’m constantly amazed how much married people tend to become more and more like each other the longer they are married. After nearly 30 years of marriage I can usually predict what Mary will order when we go out to dinner. We often finish each other’s sentences or come up with the very same thought at the very same time. That didn’t happen nearly as much when we were first married, but as we spend more time together nurturing that relationship, our minds become more and more alike.
That’s the way it should be with God. But with one huge difference. When we spend time with God, his heart isn’t changed at all. But ours certainly is.
I’ve got more good news for you this morning. The way we nurture our relationship with God is by applying the very same principles we’ve been talking about for the last four weeks:
• Spending time in God’s Word
• Praying
• Obeying what God has already revealed
• Confessing my sin
Turn from my sinful behavior
Notice that this is the last step in the process. In fact, there is a sense in which it is more a result of our repentance than part of the process. It’s clear from the passage in 2 Chronicles that the result of the process of repentance is that the people changed their behavior. But they couldn’t do that until they went through the rest of the process.
Here’s what Jesus said about that principle:
Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.
Matthew 3:8 (NIV)
In other words, changed behavior, what Jesus calls the fruit, is a product of our repentance.
I’m convinced that the main reason we struggle so much with trying to turn our behavior around is that we try to short circuit the process. We live in a world where we want instant results right now, so we ignore the rest of the process. We don’t take time to grieve over our sin. And we certainly won’t put in the effort required to get a new heart, God’s heart. Until we experience that inward change, we’ll never be able to make the permanent changes we need to make in our outward behavior.
This morning, if you’ve never followed Peter’s command to repent and give your life to Jesus Christ, then you need to do that right now. You need to confess your sin to God and ask Him to forgive you based on the finished work of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection. You need to acknowledge Jesus as your master and give control of your life to Him.
And if you’ve already made that important decision, then you still need to heed the words of Jesus and live a life that is characterized by constant repentance. I need to:
Recognize my sin
Experience godly sorrow
Pray and confess my sin
Exchange my heart for God’s heart
Nurture my relationship with God
Turn from my sinful behavior
“It is a sin to be good if God has called us to be great.”
