From Pops' Workshop

Tag: Repentance

  • Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Extreme Makeover: Soul Edition

    Do you remember the TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?” Or perhaps you have seen the current revival. I am most familiar with the original version which ran back in the early 2000s. When the show first started, they would fix up and renovate some deserving person’s home, making it much more livable. After a few seasons, the “renovation” had escalated to tearing down the old home and building a completely new one. That reminds me of how Jesus deals with our run-down and barely livable souls.

    It is not a far stretch to imagine the carpenter Jesus being in the home renovation business. We might call him in for some much-needed repairs. But we don’t realize that he is not content to fix the one or two things we think are the problem; he will continue the work until the whole structure is perfect.1

    In response to our request for repairs, he says, “You do know that I will find other things that need correction and I will fix those as well, don’t you? We will likely end up touching everything from the top of the roof all the way down to the foundation. Okay?”

    With cavalier bravado, we respond, “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Listen, I just need the bathroom plumbing fixed and some new lighting in the family room. You can do that, can’t you?” We are certain that we know the extent of the repairs needed, even more than Jesus does.

    Jesus might caution us, “Of course I can do that, but you don’t really know what you are asking for.”

    If we do not stop him, our request for repaired plumbing and new lighting will lead to a new house, from the foundation up.

    New Life or Better Sin Management?

    Of course, Jesus is interested in us, not our homes. And he does not offer to improve us; he offers to make us new. We are in much worse shape than we know. He takes our wounded, damaged, malformed souls and makes them new. Not just improved, new. He said we must be born again,2 and we must start over from the beginning if we are to have a full and abundant life.3

    We don’t really know what we are asking for, especially when we first realize our brokenness and turn to God for help with our damaged natures. Jesus is in the new life business, not the life improvement business. But when we come to him, we are not looking for a new life; we are looking for an improved version of our current life. We don’t want the whole thing torn down and rebuilt from scratch; we just want him to improve the parts that are giving us trouble, or that we are starting to find odious.

    We may come to him saying, “Jesus, I get too angry too often, and I drink too much. Can you help me be less angry and get my drinking under control?”

    Knowing our deeper need, Jesus says, “Let’s work on that anger and the wounding that leads you to drink too much. Oh, hey! Here is something else I’ve noticed. You know, you’re kind of greedy and judgmental, too. That is part of what makes you angry. Let’s make you someone who loves and loves properly; someone who loves others even more than you love yourself. Then everything else resolves so much more easily.” He will make us into people for whom anger and drunkenness are simply unnatural and unattractive. We can become the kind of people for whom sin is not attractive.

    Jesus asks us to let him remake us in his image. He wants to make us perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect.4 We can say, “no.” God will not go where he is not welcome. He may well help us with the anger and the drinking, but if we don’t let him fix the deep roots of our sinfulness, the results will almost certainly be like someone who patches up gaping drywall cracks without addressing the foundation issues that caused the cracking — the cracks soon reappear.

    Many of us approach our sinfulness like someone who puts up wallpaper to cover cracked plaster. It may look better, at least for a while, but the real problem has not been addressed. We’ve prettied things up so that the problems are not obvious, but the problems are still there. We take scripture like the fruit of the spirit in Galatians 55 as a behavioral to-do list. If we exhibit those qualities, then we will have life in the spirit. The fruit of the spirit is fruit; it is the result of or sign of a spirit-filled life; it does not make us spirit-filled. It is a description of life that is aligned with and formed by God’s spirit.

    Repentance Means Turning Around

    The Fruit of the Spirit, along with other biblical descriptions of new life, is God’s promise to us – “Invite me in, let me do my work, and this is what you’ll get.” It is an invitation to take up our crosses, to die to the world, and to live in Christ and let Christ live in us. Yes, sin is important. It can block the work of God (not because he is not omnipotent, but because sin generates shame that causes us to withdraw from God). Feeling guilty or telling God we are sorry is important, but it is just the starting point; confession (and forgiveness) is the unlocking and opening of the door of our hearts to the Father. Repentance is turning around and going back to wherever we first got off track and starting anew. For most of us, that is a process we will repeat again and again and again. But as we position ourselves to allow the Holy Spirit to re-form us from the inside out, we can and will start to bear the good fruit. We can have an extreme soul makeover.

    1. I am standing on the shoulders of giants. C. S. Lewis used this analogy in Mere Christianity, and tells us he borrowed it from George MacDonald. ↩︎
    2. John 3:3 ↩︎
    3. See John 10:10 ↩︎
    4. Matthew 5:48. ↩︎
    5. “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
      Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV) ↩︎
  • Thinking About Repentance

    Thinking About Repentance

    Thinking about repentance seems natural during Lent. In liturgical traditions, the Lenten season is forty days preceding Easter. It commemorates Jesus’ forty-day fast in the wilderness before he began his public. It is a time of reflection and introspection. A discipline of self-denial during Lent can drive our introspection as we learn just how weak our wills really are.

    As we come to grip with the weakness of our wills, our thoughts often turn to repentance. Jesus begins his ministry by declaring: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” How do you hear that declaration? We may hear it as a veiled threat: “You better shape up and fly right because God is coming. You don’t want him to be mad at you.” I heard it that way for many years. But perhaps, rather than imagining Jesus scolding us, we could hear him offering us an invitation: “God is doing something great; his kingdom is here! Pay attention so you don’t miss out!”

    Our common understanding is that repentance means being sorry for our sins and determining to “do better.” That fits the mindset of hearing “repent!” as a warning. Here our experience of repentance can be embarrassingly bad. We find ourselves repenting over and over and over again, often repenting of the same sin. Or, if we manage to get a particular sin “under control,” we find that five more have popped up to take its place.

    A perpetual struggle to make ourselves better cannot be all God has in mind for us. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is confronted by the religious leaders about his disciple’s lack of adherence to ritual practices. In Jesus’ response, he tells us that it is what comes from inside us that defiles us (Mark 17:18-23). Our outward behavior, while it may be quite awful, flows out of an inner, corrupted heart. To stop the sinful behavior, we need to address our inner life.

    When we look at the language used in the New Testament for “repent” or “repentance,” we see that it means something much deeper. It means turning around and heading in a new direction. It means taking a higher mind or a new decision. This understanding of repentance points us back to addressing our inner life. In his book “A Long Obedience in the Same Direction,” Eugene Peterson put it like this:

    “Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sin. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god;”

    Peterson, Eugene. A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. 2nd ed., Intervarsity, 2000. p. 23.

    This understanding aligns with Jesus’ teaching in Mark’s gospel. It also aligns with the message of scripture from Genesis to Revelation. The root of our problem is our surrender to our sinful natures (Gal. 5:19); God wants us to be cured and remade from the inside out:

    • He will write his law on our hearts. (Jer 31-33-34)
    • He delights in truth in our inward being (Ps 51:6)
    • He tells us to take up our crosses daily, denying our sinful natures so that we are not enslaved to sin. (Lk 9:23, Rom 6:6)

    Jesus does not want you to have a life that looks okay, even though it is not; he wants you to have a great life, a better life than you can imagine. He wants to give us new life, kingdom life; not our old life with the ugly parts better managed. He wants you to take up your cross and let go of your life as you have been trying to manage it.

    On Ash Wednesday, we are reminded: “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.” We are created and sustained by God; We depend on him utterly. We really do need to get over ourselves. We are not God; our desire to be God is THE sin that leads us into all sin.

    The root of our problem is that we are rebels, and God is not looking for better-behaved rebels; We are called to surrender to the loving God who stands waiting for us, wanting to give us the best life possible.

    Now we can see the call, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand,” not as a warning of impending doom but as a grace-filled invitation to lay down our rebel arms in favor of the loving arms of the Father.