Repentance: Changing the way we think about sin
I don’t think anyone needs to be convinced that humans tend to be selfish creatures. We tend to do what benefits us and makes us feel good, even at the expense of others. Sure, we can be selfless and do great things, but it’s hard. Whenever we’re faced with a decision to do something good for someone that does not also benefit us in some way (even if the benefit is just the other person’s gratitude), it’s a hard thing to do. We may do it anyway, but we have to overcome that natural inclination toward selfishness, preferring ourselves over other people and over God. Some explain this as a mindset selected for and ingrained by evolution. The Bible explains that we have a sinful nature.
That’s why Jesus calls us to repent. The kingdom of God is coming, a kingdom where God is at the center of it all. If we want to find joy in being part of that kingdom, we need to learn to center our lives around God, not ourselves. This involves more than just changing what we do — it means changing the way we think. In particular, it means changing the way we think about sin, that thing that separates us from God.
A lot of Christians merely try to avoid sin. And obviously, we should. For example, Paul tells us to flee from sexual immorality (1 Cor 6:18) and John tells us to flee from idolatry (1 John 5:21). But mere avoidance is not enough.
If we just try to avoid sin, then it’s basically like a recovering alcoholic leaving a can of beer right in the middle of his kitchen table. He may resist the temptation to pick it up and drink it. He may even avoid going into the kitchen entirely because it’s just too enticing. But he’ll constantly be thinking about that beer and how good it would be to just have one drink. Under those circumstances, it’s almost impossible to resist forever. Something else has to change.
So we need to change the way we think about sin. We need to not just avoid sin, but we need to learn to hate it. This is actually a command given in the Psalms: “Let those who love the LORD hate evil!” (Psalm 97:10).
But it’s not quite so simple. You can’t just start hating something that you used to like. Those who struggle with things like illegally downloading torrents, looking at pornography, being lazy, gossiping, partying, getting drunk, lying or cheating, do it because it feels good at the time; it’s enjoyable and/or convenient. Becoming a Christian doesn’t mean it magically stops being enjoyable. So how do we do that? How do we learn to hate what used to be so pleasurable?
We need to learn to love God more than sin.
This is a really hard thing to do. It takes a lot more than church attendance and memorizing Bible verses to instill this kind of way of thinking in ourselves. But it is essential. In fact, hating sin is useless unless we love God more. Even if you hate sin, if you don’t enjoy spending time with God either, you’ll be miserable. And indeed, this is probably exactly why so many perceive Christianity as a miserable system of rules and restrictions — because it’s easy to understand hating sin, but takes a lot more effort to understand loving God.
So we need to learn to love experiencing God. To do that, we need to spend lots of time with God and God’s people. We need to find ways to spend time with God that we love, and make a practice of them.
This will be different for everyone; everyone has different ways of connecting with God, and they might not be the expected typical church-taught ways. For me, congregational worship doesn’t always help me connect with God. Far too many distractions. Even listening to worship music on my own, while a little better, still doesn’t seem to produce the same sense of connection in me. But talking with other people about God, or communicating with others about God via mediums like this, and reading the Bible do help me connect to God. I enjoy that. When I fully experience God, I know it’s much better than anything else — even if I don’t always feel it in the moment — and that satisfies me. And I know that giving in to a sinful act will compromise that sense of connection.
So if we want to have any success at changing the way we think so that we hate sin, we need to find a way that we love to connect with God, whether through the Bible, being with God’s people, service to others, music, or something else. And we need to diligently pursue that.
When we love spending time with God, and we know that sinning robs us of that experience with God, then resisting the temptation to sin will no longer be gritting our teeth and saying no to what we really want to do. It will be casting aside an inferior experience so we can have a superior one — throwing away an experience with the world’s pleasures so we can experience God.
Hopefully this is inspiring and challenging. In the next few days I’ll post what I think are a few more ways we need to change our way of thinking to follow Jesus’ command to repent. Feel free to leave a like or comment or share!
