Repentance: A New Year’s Eve sermon
Last Sunday, I preached in church about repentance and what it really means. It’s a big expansion on my first blog post. In the absence of posting much over the break, I figured I’d post the manuscript from my sermon. My hope is that we who claim the name of Christ can learn not just to change the way we live, but to change the way we think. Here it is:
So the last time I saw most of you, it was in the middle of a big snowstorm. A big snowstorm on Christmas Eve, no less. Winter Storm Ethan, The Weather Channel called it. It was very picturesque. Finally, a really truly white Christmas. It was awesome. (Not so awesome for my brother-in-law who works for a snowplowing company, but otherwise pretty awesome.) It’s, like, supposed to happen, it’s supposed to be a White Christmas, but rarely does. Why is that?
Well, because as far as the weather is concerned, Christmas is just another day. It is just another day. The atmosphere treats it as such. It’s as likely to snow on December 24 as it is December 13 (which it also did), or January 20, or on Super Bowl Sunday like it did 3 years ago.
And today, New Year’s Eve, is also just another day. We’ve decided it means something. We’ve decided that this day, 10 days after the shortest day of the year, is the day where we mark the passage of one year to the next. But we celebrate it and make a big deal out of it, because we perceive it as a transition point. And one thing times of transition tend to be is good opportunities for change. So once all the New Year’s Eve stuff is done, everyone’s gone home, gone to bed, every clock and computer that shows the year reads 2018, the next thing many of us do is, well, first, sleepwalk through the next day. Then we get started on some New Year’s Resolutions.
☛ According to a Statistic Brain poll, 41% of American adults regularly make New Year’s Resolutions. Among the most common resolutions are losing weight (said by 1 in 5 people who made a resolution), some sort of life or self-improvement (12%), handling money better (8.5%), quitting smoking (7%), and doing more exciting things (6%). But by January 15, one-third of resolutions have failed, ☛ and ultimately only 9% of people actually keep their resolution.
That probably doesn’t surprise most of you, because we all know it’s very hard to break a habit, or form a new one. There’s no shortage of self-help books and tips out there that tell you the secrets to breaking a habit. Most people know all sorts of strategies, and yet still only 9% of people who make resolutions actually keep them. Because a lot of them require an everyday change in how we live, and it’s really hard to make that kind of change.
But the hardest habit of all to break is the habit that no one has ever been able to break, and that’s the habit of sin. There’s only one human who ever lived a sinless life, and it wasn’t any of us. And that’s because, according to the Bible, sin is deeper than a habit. Sin isn’t just something we do; it’s who we are. A common belief of our culture today is that all people are born basically good at heart, and are just corrupted by the world, or at least, that people are born neutral with an equal capacity to become good or evil. But the uncomfortable truth that the Bible tells us is that we are actually born bad. We are born selfish and sinful. ☛ King David says in Psalm 51:5, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” From the moment we begin our lives, we’re sinful by nature, separated from God, our relationship with God is broken, and as we grow up, that sinful nature inevitably always shows itself in our conscious choices to sin against God.
That’s why God sent his Son, the event that we celebrate at Christmas. And Jesus addressed this sin problem at the very start of his teaching ministry. Matthew 4:17 contains the very first words Jesus is recorded as speaking after he officially took on the role of a Jewish rabbi. And here they are: ☛ “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
That’s the first command Jesus gave. And I want to zero in on that first word there — ☛ repent — because for Jesus, it was extremely important. He talked about repentance all the time. He would later say — as he was eating a meal with some tax collectors, the liars and cheaters and thieves of his day — ☛ “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:32). His followers found it very important, too. Just fifty days after Jesus rose from the dead, when Peter and the other apostles for the first time preached publicly, to some holiday travelers, about how Jesus was the Messiah, the Anointed One from God that they’d been waiting for for so long, it says ☛ ‘they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’
Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.’” (Acts 2:37-38)
So to be forgiven for our sins, and have that relationship with God restored, we need to repent. It’s absolutely essential. It’s our only hope. Now, repentance alone isn’t enough. We also need to put our faith in Jesus, because he paid the price for our sins. If we give our lives to him, he offers to take our sins away and make us new. That’s the only way that can happen. But the first step, an absolutely necessary step, is repentance. So it’s vital, life-or-death vital, that we understand what that means.
The word “repent” is used a lot of different ways in the modern American church. And maybe for you, it conjures up certain images in your mind. If you have a Catholic background like me, maybe it’s something like confessing your sins to a priest. Or if you have another background, maybe it’s some preacher raving about the horrors of hellfire and brimstone. Maybe it’s responding to an altar call and praying to accept Jesus into your heart. The big idea behind it — the way we usually use the word today — is being sorry. ☛ [That’s what dictionary.com says: to feel sorry, self-reproachful, or contrite for past conduct; regret or be conscience-stricken about a past action, attitude, etc. or… to feel such sorrow for sin or fault as to be disposed to change one’s life for the better; be penitent.
And repentance does mean all of those things. But that’s not all repentance is. If that definition is complete, then basically that means that after we do something wrong, we feel bad about it, say we’re sorry, make a resolution to change, and that’s it. We move on and stop repenting. But that really does not capture the full meaning of the word as the Bible uses it; in fact, it completely leaves out something very important. In the original Greek language, the word in that verse is the word metanoia, ☛ which is actually a compound Greek word composed of two elements: meta (a prefix that means “after” or “across,” transitioning or changing from one thing to another, like in the word metamorphosis) and noia (the mind, like in the word paranoia). Together the word in Greek meant “to change your mind.” But it wasn’t, like, to say you want to go to Applebee’s for dinner, and then change your mind and say you want Chipotle. More precisely, it means to change your mindset, ☛ or to change the way you think.
Now, that’s a big thing. It’s one thing to be sorry for something you’ve done. It’s even one thing to try and do it differently next time. But it’s another thing to change the very way you think. That’s a constant change, a fundamental change not just on the outside, but on the inside. That’s not just something you can do one time. It’s not just a decision we can make one day in Sunday school or on a retreat or in any one moment, and then we’re done. That’s only the beginning of repentance. Repentance is something we have to do constantly. It’s a way of living, and it’s a way of thinking.
It’s almost impossible to change the way you live unless you change the way you think. That’s what none of the self-help books will tell you (and why would they? They’re supposed to tell you easy things to do!) But that’s the meaning here behind this command. ning and live the way God wants us to, we try to change our actions, without changing the way we think.
And Jesus tells us why we should do it too: ☛ For “the kingdom of heaven is near.”
A new kingdom is coming. A new world, a new society. The kingdom of heaven. If you want to be a functional member of any kingdom, any society, you need to learn its customs and values. So we know how to operate in this world. We know how we need to think and act to function in today’s world. But the way we need to think and act to function in the kingdom of heaven is totally different. A lot of the values of the kingdom of heaven clash directly with the values of this world. But there’s a takeover that’s about to take place — and in fact has already begun. This world is not going to last long. The skills and mindsets we master in this world are going to be good for a handful of decades at most. The mindset of the kingdom of heaven is what we need to learn for eternity. So we need to repent, first of all, so that we can be forgiven for our sins and made worthy to enter the kingdom of heaven, and second, so that we can get ready to live in that kingdom.
So what we need to do, then, is learn the way the King of heaven, Jesus, thinks, and we need to learn how to live by the values and principles that he, in his all-knowing wisdom, says are important, because those are the values and principles that run the kingdom of heaven. We need to change the way that we think so that it’s more like the way God thinks.
So okay, what is it exactly that we need to change? What do we need to change our mindset about? Well, I think there are primarily five changes we need to make. And we all probably struggle with some more than others. But if we want to be ready for the kingdom of heaven, we need to change these five things:
1. Change our mindset about sin: Don’t just avoid sin, but hate sin
We all know what it means to feel sorry for our sins. We know what it’s like to avoid sin, but do we actually hate sin? We hear all the time about how Christians are commanded to love, but we are also commanded to hate. Psalm 97:10 says, “O you who love the LORD, hate evil!”
Some of us might say, well, I can stop doing something, but I can’t make myself hate it. But if we don’t hate sin, it’s going to be impossible to repent of it.
Because why do we sin in the first place? Usually because it’s enjoyable or convenient. We all have our struggles — maybe stuff like being lazy, gossiping, illegally downloading other people’s property, being irresponsible with alcohol, pornography, lying or cheating or something else. If we’re all honest with ourselves, we can all think of something, probably many things, that we struggle with. Because on some level, we like it. Gossiping often makes us feel better about ourselves. Some sins satisfy our physical desires. Lying can get help us get away with something we’ve done wrong. Cheating can get us easy gain. That doesn’t change just because we give our lives to Christ; it doesn’t mean they magically stop being enjoyable or convenient.
So when we try to just not sin, but don’t change the way we think about it, what happens is that we see our sin as an enjoyable, convenient thing that we’re depriving ourselves of. “I can no longer satisfy my desires or feel good about myself or get away with stuff or have fun.” We just see what we are missing out on. A list of thou shalt nots. And if that’s the way we think, then of course trying to change is gonna be miserable.
So we’ve got to learn to hate it. We’ve got to see it the way God sees it. And one way we can learn to hate sin is to learn to love God. The best way to turn away from something that’s enjoyable is to find something you love more. If we learn to love God more than we love sin, then we can see just how giving in to that struggle damages our relationship with God and deprives us of the opportunity to experience God to the fullest— and how deeply it offends God, who sent his Son to die so we could be free of it. And then we can think, how terrible this is! How horrible is it to offend the God who saved me, and how horrible it is to do this thing and deprive myself of something so much better? Sin is a mud pie trying to masquerade as a gourmet meal. It’s a placebo masquerading as lifesaving medicine. It keeps us from moving toward the kingdom of heaven; in the kingdom of heaven, those things that we struggle with don’t exist. They come from the kingdom of hell. So then, when we say no to temptation, we don’t need to think of it as suppressing something we like because we just have to — we can think of it as throwing aside a cheap and inferior experience for a better one.
When it comes to repentance, that’s often the thing we think of most — repenting from sin. But there are some other ways we also need to change our way of thinking to totally embrace the kingdom of heaven.
2. Change our mindset about one another: Understand heaven’s hierarchy
Second, we need to change the way that we think about each other. Think of the ways that we evaluate each other, the traits that we find desirable in other people. Think of the traits that the most important and influential people in this world have. Charisma. Intelligence. Confidence. Wisdom. Charm. Those traits tend to determine how much influence a person has on other people. On a more personal level, we tend to evaluate people based on how attractive their personality is, their skills and abilities, their physical appearance, their social and economic status, and their personal character. That’s how we often determine whether someone is worth getting to know.
That’s not how God determines whether people are worth getting to know. God doesn’t look down and say, “That guy’s so smart; I want him on my side … That woman’s got so many friends; I want to get know her … That guy’s got a charming personality, he’ll be fun to hang out with.” God doesn’t do that! God isn’t up there evaluating us based on what we bring to the table, because none of us bring anything to the table. Everything is from God. Here’s what the apostle Paul says about how God chooses who he wants to get to know: ☛ “Brothers, consider the time of your calling. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were powerful; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly and despised things of the world, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast in his presence.”
So it seems like God looks at people quite the opposite way we do. It looks like God sometimes intentionally chooses those who are weak and timid and poor and outcasts. Those are the people that God saw as important. They’re the people God decided he wanted to make an impact through, because the traits God values are, in many cases, different from the traits we value. Jesus didn’t say, “Blessed are the rich; blessed are the happy; blessed are the ambitious; blessed are the influential; blessed are the talented; blessed are the intelligent; blessed are the strong; blessed are the popular” ☛ Those are traits that we tend to want, the kinds of traits we see in other people that we want to imitate. But Jesus said, ☛ “Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are those who mourn … Blessed are the meek … Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness … Blessed are the merciful … Blessed are the pure in heart … Blessed are the peacemakers … Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness …” These are often characteristics that we either don’t really want or don’t get you very far in life, but they are golden in the kingdom of heaven.
When speaking of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said that the hierarchy of this world is going to be turned upside down. ☛ “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” So if we really want to make ourselves fit for God’s kingdom, we have to learn to see other people in a whole new way. We have to change the way we evaluate people. We have to look at them based on who they are to God. Many who are poor now are raking in spiritual riches. The humble and meek servants, unnoticed in this life, are exalted like presidents and nobles in the kingdom of heaven. The ones who suffer and die for Christ are crowned as if they were high princes. Those who trust in God with an unshakable, childlike faith, as far as heaven is concerned, have more wisdom than the greatest geniuses who’ve ever lived.
Those are the role models and leaders of the kingdom of heaven. That’s who we should aspire to be like. To fully function as part of the kingdom of God, we need to learn its hierarchy, and appropriately recognize the heavenly honor of the poor and humble and meek and those with childlike faith. We have to repent of the world-centered ways that we think about other people and learn to think of them the way God does.
3. Change our mindset about ourselves: A Declaration of Dependence
We value our independence. We value being our own person and not conforming to what anyone else says we should be. We really hate the idea of being owned or controlled by somebody else.
But that’s exactly what we are. We are owned by something. Jesus said, ☛ “Everyone who sins is a slave to sin.” Everyone is owned by their sin. Sin keeps us under a spiritual death sentence. And no one can escape that on their own. Slaves of sin can’t help but obey their master and continue to sin, and be deprived of an experience and a relationship with God. The only way to be free from sin is to be set free by Jesus, who paid the price with his own life to buy our freedom.
But that doesn’t mean we get to do whatever we want. That’d be very bad. Because sin isn’t just what we do; it’s who we are. It’s innate. If we were to be set free to do anything, we’d sin. And we’d become slaves of sin all over again. The only way to really be free is to become a servant of Christ. Because what that enables us to do is to choose the best possible existence for ourselves, which is eternal life. When we are servants of Christ, we are free to enter the kingdom of heaven. But that means accepting we’re not independent. We can’t be independent. We belong to God; we don’t belong to ourselves. So we should act as people who belong to God. As Paul tells us:
☛ “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
We need to change our selfish ways of thinking and learn to think of ourselves as belonging to God. And we need to change our way of thinking so we see belonging to God for what it is — a far, far, infinitely better thing than belonging to ourselves. Because … ☛
4. Change our mindset about God: God is the greatest possible being
The archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, who held that office from 1093 to 1109, defined God as ☛ “not only that than which nothing greater can be thought, but something greater than can be thought.” Or in other words, God is greater than the greatest thing we can think of. God is the greatest possible being. Anything we can think of that’s good, enjoyable, satisfying, God is that, and more. The greatest feeling of love you’ve ever felt, the greatest feeling of happiness you’ve ever felt, the most powerful thing you’ve ever experienced, the most generous gift you’ve ever received, the greatest sights and sounds you’ve ever seen and heard, God can — and in the kingdom of heaven will — give you something even better. The greatest feeling of happiness you’ve ever felt, God is better.
But it’s very hard for us to see God that way. Sometimes spending time with God feels like a duty and not a delight. Sometimes we sit here in church and all we want to do is take a nap. We’ve all thought it. Maybe for some of us, our Bibles sit idle for so long they start gaining a small coating of dust. And maybe we force ourselves to do it anyway, but sometimes we can’t possibly understand how King David could write in Psalm 37:4 that we need to ☛ “Delight yourself in the LORD…”
And I think a lot of us are in the mindset that obeying God means sacrificing our own happiness. When I was in high school and college, and my friends and I would talk about what we were gonna do with our lives, a few times something would be said like, “I like doing this, I’m good at it, and it’s a good thing, but I’m not sure what God wants me to do.” “Why not?” “Well, it just seems too easy. Maybe I should go and be a missionary or take a vow of poverty or something.” “Or maybe God made you good at something you liked doing so you could do it for his glory!”
I mean, us being happy now isn’t God’s top priority. Our eternity is a much bigger concern of his. But still, his goal is not to make life hard and miserable for us. There’s a pastor in Minnesota named John Piper who calls the philosophy he lives by “Christian Hedonism.” (Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure.) He wrote a very good book called Desiring God, and in it he makes the case that we are designed, created, wired to find true happiness in God. I think we can see hints of that in our lives already — like how some of us find a lot of happiness in sacrificing for people we love, or even for strangers. But that’s not always the case, and we’ve got to change our mindset so we can see that happiness for what it is instead of settling for the temporary happiness we get by doing whatever it is we want to do. We’re often like my baby nephew, who is perfectly happy eating his plastic toys because he can’t possibly perceive or comprehend the greatness of a Thanksgiving dinner. But eventually, he will have to learn to stop settling for plastic and change his tastes so he can recognize what real food is, and how much better it is. In the same way, we have to learn to stop settling for temporary happiness, and even be willing to sacrifice temporary happiness, to find the happiness that comes from serving God.
Following Jesus means finding happiness that’s greater than what’s in front of us. It means sacrificing a cheap, earthbound, temporary happiness for a valuable, transcendent, heavenly happiness, and pursuing that happiness relentlessly until we find it. We need to change the way we think so we see that chasing temporary happiness at the expense of eternal happiness is insane compared to chasing eternal happiness at the expense of temporary happiness. God wants us to find ultimate happiness in living for him. And that brings us to the last point:
5. Change our mindset about heaven: Heaven is reality
We come back to the reason we’re supposed to repent, and that is that ☛ “the kingdom of heaven is near.” We’re used to thinking of the here and now. We’re used to thinking of God as a Being far off, and we’re used to thinking of heaven as some alternate realm where God lives, apart from us here and earth — it’s a place we go when we die, not a place that’s here.
So naturally, we do what’s best for us in the realm we can see, the one that’s right in front of us. We take care of business for ourselves now, and put on the back burner what we’ll experience in (hopefully) some decades in a realm that we know almost nothing about and that we’ve never seen. And if that’s what we think — that earth is real and present and heaven is obscure and distant — why wouldn’t we? Who would turn their back on what’s right in front of them for a mysterious otherworldly realm?
And that’s the way of thinking that needs to change. We need to change our way of thinking so that we see the exact opposite. Heaven is far more real than anything on this earth. Heaven is not the strange and shadowy realm; this world is. Heaven is the ultimate reality; the hopes and dreams of this world are a shadow, and a cheap and inferior imitation of that reality. But until we change our way of thinking so that we understand that, it will be nearly impossible to change the way we live. If we think of heaven as the obscure and mysterious distant realm and earth as the reality, then if we try to live for heaven we will always feel like we are living for a shadow rather than reality. I mean, we can try — and we should try — but unless we change our way of thinking, we’ll be very frustrated.
That takes a lot of work to understand that. And this, I think, is why it’s so important that we really immerse ourselves in God’s word, with God in prayer and worship, and in community with God’s people. Repentance doesn’t stop when we make the decision to give our lives to Christ, and it doesn’t stop when we’ve asked for forgiveness for our most recent sins. The only way we’re really going to practice repentance, every day, is if we saturate ourselves with as much of God’s wisdom and love and majesty as we can. A lot of times, we’re satisfied with just getting a sort of dose of spirituality for the week. We come here and we sing and hear God’s word and go back to our lives. But how can we expect to think more like God does if we spend 1 or 2 hours a week with him and then don’t think much about him in the other 166? We might not need to do much more than that to feel good about our relationship with God, or to live a fairly outwardly Christ-like life, but that’s not going to change us from the inside out. We really need to connect with God, and not stop at a temporary rush of euphoria from a God experience, or at having learned something new, but learn to really perceive God as reality. Only then will we really, truly see how desperately we need Christ to save us, how much we can trust Christ with our lives, and how, even in our darkest moments of temptation, it will make sense to us why we live for the next world more than this one.
Change is what we need. Change is what God intends for us, both in the way we live and starting with the way we think. So what about the way that you think is changing? What are you learning? What are you coming to understand about God? And how is that affecting your life? What will Christ find you doing if the kingdom of heaven comes today? Are you ready for the kingdom of heaven coming? These are questions I think we should be asking ourselves regularly. We won’t get it completely right until the kingdom of heaven comes, but what we can do is be a better and better representative of the kingdom of heaven — our real and permanent home — here on earth. And we can be ready to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven when it comes.
