Cow Digestion v. Repentance

Looking at the snippets of sermons that we have from both John the Baptist and Jesus, they have one thing in common: the pronouncement of God's kingdom demands a response. They called that response "repentance," which literally means to turn around, move the other way.

Talking with a fellow IV staffer the other day about what we expect people to do with our teaching. We more or less expect people to consider, ponder, muse, ruminate.

But repentance is not ruminating. Cows ruminate. They chew grass, it goes down to one stomach to churn around for a bit, then they spit it back up, and chew it up some more.

This is roughly what most of us do when we hear the gospel/when hear something spoken to us as the truth...if we give it any thought at all.

But repentance is life change. Not thinking about life change, not regurgitating half-digested truths occasionally for further consideration. Repentance is doing life change.

Jesus' radical message was not intended as another item on the buffet-line of ideas or possible ways to live your life. It was something that demanded a response.

Repentance or rejection are demanded of us when confronted with the ultimate truth-claims of Jesus. Certainly we must consider carefully. Much is at stake.

But Jesus invitation was not a soft-pitched one. He comes strong: "Repent!" Not "Think about repenting when it's convenient for you!

Hosea's Prayer

I just finished the Old Testament book of Hosea. The first couple chapters are most famous--that's where God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute as a metaphor for how his relationship with his people has degenerated.

Over the next several chapters, God lays out his case against his people with warnings as to the consequences to come should they not repent.

But in the final chapter (Hosea 14), God through Hosea gives the people of Israel (who have forgotten him and hence have forgotten how to pray) a great prayer of repentance to pray:

Return, Israel, to the LORD your God.
Your sins have been your downfall!

Take words with you
and return to the LORD.
Say to him:
"Forgive all our sins
and receive us graciously,
that we may offer the fruit of our lips.

Assyria cannot save us;
we will not mount warhorses.
We will never again say 'Our gods'
to what our own hands have made,
for in you the fatherless find compassion."

This is a tremendous prayer, worth making your own. First, the invitation: to return to God and recognize that our sins have been our downfall.

Secondly, for those of us who have a hard time speaking honestly about what we've done and where we've been wrong, the Scripture here generously offers us some words, a scaffolding to build a prayer around.

We ask for forgiveness. We ask to be welcomed back into his family, into his presence. We offer to him our mis-spent worship--this re-routing of our worship away from all the wrong things towards the God we were made to worship.

And in the final stanza, a tremendous chance for us to get specific. Assyria cannot save us; we will not mount war horses. We will never again say 'Our gods' to what our hands have made.

Here, you might insert what you look to for importance, significance, salvation: your financial situation (many are recently realizing the impossibility of salvation found in Wall Street), your GPA, your gifts or abilities or intelligence or friendships or rabid independence or whatever. We don't build wooden idols with our hands in our culture, but we certainly have no shortage of attempts at creating our own gods.

And lastly, all of this is offered up to the God who's character is affirmed in the final line: in you the fatherless find compassion. This is the God who's family we're being grafted into through this prayer. In a world full of broken families, God has compassion on the fatherless, the motherless, the ones who come from dysfunction, abuse, brokenness. We are invited into a community, a family, that is whole and wholly good and wholly for our good.

This is repentance: re-aligning ourselves with the realities of who we are, who God is, and being honest about where and how we have turned away from him; all of this for the purpose of being restored into his family, into the Relationship we were made for.

Soundbytes for Repentance

I'm speaking tonight on how God invites us to share in the final reality that Hope Wins by inviting us to repent of sin. I'm trying to talk about repentance and obedience without sounding like a freakish, angry Pharisee. Here are a few soundbytes:

Temptation: the lie that life outside of being with God is qualitatively better than life with God.

Sin: breaking relationship with God in order to act in faith on those lies.

Repentance: to turn away from beliefs, motives, or actions that are outside of God’s character and to turn towards God for life and ultimate satisfaction and fulfillment.

Obedience: to live a life in faith on the promises of God that life with him is qualitatively better, more in line with reality than any other thing offered to us.

Repentance and obedience are the relentless campaigns of those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.

All sin is war against God’s peace

God is eager to unleash all the forces of heaven against all the forces of sin and hell to undo sin that has caused death and destruction and disfigurement of men and women whom he created to be image-bearers, to be ones who showed forth God’s glory and beauty and goodness

Sin is thin, the payoff is weak, the returns get smaller and smaller, it gets more and more hollow the further down into it you get; one person's testimony about struggles with pornography: “I was thirsty for real intimacy and my involvement with pornography was like drinking salt water.”

All sin is like this—it promises much and delivers only very little.

Sin is boring, there’s only 5 plot lines in the arsenal of sin: sex, power, money, escape, fame. It’s like a bad soap opera with recycled plot lines over and over again throughout history.

Sin and evil is on a short leash and one day will be done away with, and so there are only a finite number of ways sin can express itself because sin is itself finite and one day will no longer be.

Sin barely exists in and of itself—it only exists as a parasite to the good. Sex is good, sin distorts it. Money and power and recreation and applause are all good, sin just distorts it.

Sin is actually foreign to our humanity. Humanity was not made to live in sin, we were made to be sinless--it is a cancer, a corruption of our human nature

Sin and death and brokenness are all on a leash, the clock is ticking and there will come a day when they will exist no longer.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, how monotonously similar are all the tyrants and famous sinners of the world! How gloriously different and diverse are all the saints.

There are, in fact, billions of ways to delight in the freedom and wonder of holiness, and really only a handful of ways to really revel in sin.

God is infinite and he is holy—therefore, there are an infinite ways to experience the joy and wonder and freedom of holiness.