[Machine transcription]
In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea saying,
Repent, you may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, this is the first word and perhaps the best summary of the preaching
of John the Baptist.
Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And then Matthew tells us, Mark and Luke too, that when Jesus comes he starts preaching
And this is how his sermon starts as well, repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
And then when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles at Pentecost and Peter stands
up in the middle of Jerusalem, he begins to preach and he says, repent, repent.
Repent.
This is the constant call of the prophets into the greatest prophet, John, of all the
Apostles and of our Lord Jesus Himself.
He calls us, the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit therein call us all to repent.
What does that mean?
I want to think about repentance this morning and maybe compare repentance to four wrong
ideas about repentance to see if we can get it right.
The Hebrew word behind repent is the word shuv, it’s there all over the Old Testament
and it basically means to turn.
And here’s the first maybe wrong idea of repentance that I remember hearing before we were in
the Lutheran Church and we would hear the preachers say repent and they would say what
repentance means is it means to change the direction of your life, to do a U-turn.
You’re going this way, doing this kind of stuff and you turn around and you go that
way and do other kind of stuff.
Now this is half right because repentance does mean to turn but the thing that’s turning
Repenting is not your life or your actions, but in fact your mind and your heart.
The Greek word is helpful then.
The Greek word is metanoia, which just means to change your mind, to change your heart,
to change your inside, especially to change your thinking.
And then what happens after your thinking is changed is your life is changed.
In fact, the first error is mistaking repentance with the fruit of repentance.
Remember how John the Baptist says to the people who came down to listen to him, he
says, you brood of vipers, ooh, John was a fiery preacher, you brood of vipers, who warned
you to flee from the wrath to come, bear fruit in keeping with repentance.
So first the Lord changes our mind and then the Lord changes our words and our deeds and
our lives.
And it’s a specific thing that he changes.
It’s kind of weird that to change your mind is given to us as a virtue in scripture because
we normally just don’t think of it that way.
It’s like if I was telling you about someone, I said, oh, they’re really nice, they’re happy,
they’re very trustworthy, and they’re always changing their mind.
They’re great.
You would say, wait, now, wait, what?
We think of that as a negative, always changing your mind.
And yet it’s very specific, the changed mind that is repentance.
I maybe can hone it down to this point, is that the Lord wants to change our mind about
two things.
He wants to change our mind about ourselves and he wants to change our mind about him.
First of ourselves, and this is because we are all naturally inclined to think of ourselves
as good people.
We’re naturally inclined to a spiritual pride.
side.
We all have, remember that little Pharisee that lives inside of us that Luther talks
about, the little monk that lives in the heart, that’s always making the case for our own
goodness, our own self-worth, it’s always making excuses for the things that we do wrong
and it’s always lifting up the things that we do right so that if you ask someone who’s
not baptized, if you just go ask a person who’s not a Christian, are you a good person?
Then almost always the answer is yes, or at least I try, or better than most, hopefully
the judgment day is on a curve, or something like that.
In other words, we think of ourselves as good people.
And this is the first thing that has to be changed.
This is the work of the law, which holds up God’s perfect standard before you like a mirror
and lets you see in the light of his glory
and lets me see too that we are sinners.
That all have sinned, and what does that mean?
Paul says it right there.
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
None of us have lived as we should have lived.
None of us have loved the Lord our God
with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
And none of us have loved our neighbor as ourselves.
All of us are guilty.
and all of us, as we confessed together just a few seconds ago, all of us deserve
God’s wrath and punishment. That, by the way, dear saints, is the first part
of repentance. It’s contrition. And it’s a little bit more.
It’s not just to recognize that we’ve broken God’s law, but it’s to know that
our breaking of God’s law in fact matters to God. The Lord is not sitting on
his throne in heaven and when we break the commandments saying, ah, whatever, do
of what makes you happy, no.
The Lord is truly upset when his law is transgressed.
The Lord has wrath from heaven against all manner
of ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
And so we first recognize that we are rightly condemned
by God as sinners and deserving his punishment.
But then the second part of repentance,
the second part of our mind that needs to be changed
is how we think of God.
And when we realize that what we deserve from the Lord is His wrath and His anger,
but that instead of giving us those things, He sends His Son into our flesh and blood to be our Savior and to carry our sin on the cross,
now we know that the way the Lord thinks of us is not with anger, not with wrath, not even with justice, but with mercy.
He smiles at you. He loves you. He delights in you. He forgives all of your
sins. He has clothed you, covered you with the blood and the righteousness of
Jesus so that there is no more condemnation for those who are in
Christ Jesus. None. That means for you. There’s not a single sin. Can you imagine?
There’s not a single sin that you’ve committed that is not died for by Jesus.
There’s not a single sin that you’ve accomplished that’s not covered by His blood, not a single
one.
He is that Savior.
And this is the second part of repentance.
If you want to just have it real clean, repentance is contrition in faith.
Repentance is knowing we’re sinners and knowing that Jesus is the Savior of sinners.
That is the Lord’s gift of repentance.
This brings us to the second error and I think the last three are going to be shorter than
in the first one, so don’t worry too much about it.
The second error of repentance is the idea
that repentance is a one-time thing.
That I come to church, and I get excited by the preacher,
and I repent, I believe in Jesus, and that’s it.
Jesus was there for me at the beginning,
but now it’s all Moses after that or something.
That once I’ve repented, I don’t need to go back to it.
No, repentance is a daily thing.
Repentance is a minute by minute thing.
Our whole lives are to be lives of repentance.
That was the first of the 95 theses and maybe the best.
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he intended that the entire life of
the believer is a life of repentance.
So we’re called to daily change our mind.
In fact, that’s why we come to church.
That’s why we read the Bible.
That’s why we listen to the preaching because in it the Lord is changing our mind about
ourselves and about God, always readjusting it because our lives in the
world are always getting it off track. I think of it like this, when I was a kid I
had a dirt bike, just a little BMX thing we rode around and the nut that
connected the wheel to the handlebars was loose and so you know it’s supposed
to be the wheel goes this way while the handlebars are this way but it would get
it would get further and further off so to go straight I would have to steer
like 45 degrees to the right, you know, and I thought that was kind of cool
because it, you know, is like an optical illusion. I’m steering, but it would get
worse and worse and worse to where I couldn’t actually turn this way, so if I
wanted to go to the right, I’d have to do a circle back to the left all the way
around. And so, and I, you know, hit a rock and it get all cattywampus, and so I’d
have to stop and get off and hold the tire and straighten out the handlebars
so it’s facing the right direction. That’s what the Lord does to us with His
with his word, with his law and his gospel.
He straightens out our mind.
What’s right and wrong?
What’s good and evil?
What’s light and dark?
He straightens out our mind so that we know what it is.
But then when we see what’s truly good and right,
we recognize that we’re on the guilty end of that.
And so then he has to straighten it out like this
and show us his love in Christ.
And show us his mercy.
And so the law and the gospel are constantly
straightening out the way we think about these things, and it happens throughout our lives.
It happens now, it’ll happen this afternoon, it’ll happen tomorrow when you’re studying
the Scriptures.
Whenever the Lord is working in His Holy Spirit and law and gospel, this is what He’s
doing.
He’s giving us the gift of repentance, and that’s the third error.
That is that repentance is something that we do ourselves, no?
Repentance is what God gives to us.
David says it like this in Psalm 80, he says,
Turn us, O Lord, and we will be turned.
Give us repentance, and we will be repentant.
The church in Acts is rejoicing.
Remember how Peter says, we rejoice now that the Lord
has even granted repentance to the Gentiles. That the Lord is the one who
gives the gift of repentance. He’s the one that straightens out our mind
through his law and his gospel.
And this gets to the fourth error,
and that is that we think that not only
that repentance is our work and not God’s,
but that we think that repentance is impossible.
Now, I don’t think if I were to ask you,
hey, is it possible to repent?
You would say, well, yeah, it’s possible.
The Lord grants repentance.
But we act like it’s impossible.
This is a problem of Christians.
I think it’s especially a problem of Lutherans
That we have lost the expectation of repentance, or to say it another way, we’ve lost the expectation
of conversion.
That the Lord in fact changes people.
We think that once, or maybe we think that the only way that people change is they go
from being Christian to being non-Christian, but they never come back the other direction.
We think that once someone is a pagan, they’re always a pagan, or once an unbeliever, always
unbeliever or once an enemy of Christ, always an enemy of Christ. This, dear
saints, is not true. The Lord’s call to repentance is a true and genuine call
and He does this work. I promise you that the hearts that John the Baptist
preached to from his watery pulpit in the Jordan River are no harder than the
hearts of all the world around us, are no softer either. That the Lord always is
preaching repentance into an unbelieving world,
and he’s giving that gift.
I want us to think about this,
because not only do we have hope in ourselves
and in our own salvation,
but we have hope in the salvation of those people
that we’re praying for and longing
that the Lord will bring his word to,
so that it’ll break through and that they too will believe,
and know that they’re sinners forgiven by Christ.
Now here’s maybe to conclude,
maybe the biggest surprise that the Bible tells us
about repentance, and it is this,
not only does the Lord require that we would repent,
but that the Bible says that the Lord himself repents.
It’s kind of weird for us to think about,
but it’s all over, the Old Testament especially,
and in the New Testament as well.
And let’s just say it like this,
the Lord changes his mind, and you wanna know why?
Because Jesus died for sinners.
The Lord’s mind toward us is a mind of wrath
and anger until Christ dies and now his mind is one of kindness and love and peace.
Now the thoughts that he has toward you are thoughts of peace.
The way that he thinks about you is full of love and kindness and mercy because all of
your sins are forgiven.
All of them.
All of your sins are forgiven because Christ died for sinners.
So, dear saints, we rejoice in the Lord’s gift of repentance, not only that he
gives us this knowledge of our sin and of Christ, but that he delights in us and
that he loves us. May God grant us this gift in the name of Jesus. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and
minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
