Think Again

Jeremiah 8:4-7; Luke 5:27-32

It is an old joke. I am sure you have heard it. I have told it several times, but I don’t think I have told it here in Sandwich since I have been back. And one can’t preach a sermon about repentance without it.

Two men contracted to paint a church. Being very frugal (cheap) and trying to earn the most profit, they spent the absolute minimum on materials, including paint. Cheap paint and not too much of it. When they were only partway through the job, they saw that they would not have enough paint to complete the job. But instead of buying more paint, they decided they would just dilute the water-based paint they were using so that it would last longer. They did this a couple more times before they finished, which caused the paint to get thinner and thinner and lighter each time it was thinned. The painters had just about gotten to the top of the steeple, when, all of a sudden, the sky darkened, and the rain started to pour down. And a voice boomed from the heavens: "Repaint, you thinners! Repaint, and thin no more!"

This sermon is on repentance. It was a sermon suggestion by someone in the congregation along with confession. Because this topic is not usually considered fun, I would expect it only from someone serious about their faith. Repentance necessarily involves serious self-examination, which is one of the reasons I have chosen to preach it on Communion Sunday, since the Lord’s Supper is an occasion for self-examination. Repentance is an important part of the mature Christian life. And for that reason I am glad to speak about it this morning.

As I studied this topic in preparation for this message, I dusted off my Hebrew and Greek resources and went back into the original languages in which our Scriptures were written. There are two words in Hebrew translated repentance, one word in Greek, and then there is our English word. The etymology of these words reveal to us that there are four dimensions to repentance.

1. The first is Intellectual. We see this in the Greek word used in the NT and also reflected in our English word. The English word “repent” literally means to rethink, to think again. The Greek word also means that. It shows that repentance involves a change of mind. We change the way we think about ourselves, our actions and God.

The Christian life is a new way of seeing the world. It is a new way of thinking about things. A lot of people don’t really think about God. That is my conclusion after being a pastor for all these years. Most people are not anti-God or anti-religion. Some people are anti-religion, but they are the ones who have thought long and hard and seriously about God. That is why I don’t mind talking to atheists. In fact I enjoy it. At least they have thought about God enough to take a stand – even if that stand is that God does not exist.

But most people don’t really think about God. I am not saying they have never thought about God. They will voice an opinion about God and church if you ask them. But they just have not given the whole matter much thought. It is just not on their mental radar.  They think more about the Bruins or the Red Sox or the Patriots than they have ever thought about God! They think more about money than God. More about maintaining their automobile than maintaining their spiritual life. More about what to buy at the grocery store than about spiritual food. I am convinced that most people in our society do not think very much about God. And when they do think about God, they are borrowed thoughts - repeating the clichés of our culture heard on TV, movies, and rather than original personal grappling with their own relationship with God.

Repentance means to think again and again and again. To dig down deep. To think often and deeply, to ponder, to meditate upon God and our relationship with God. The end result is a new way of viewing life. It is so new and so unlike the surface living of ordinary living, that I would even call it an awakening to the presence of God. I think most people are asleep spiritually. That is why both Jesus told parables of people sleeping and needing to wake up, like the bridesmaids. And the apostle Paul so often said “Wake up!” Paul says, “now it is high time to awake out of sleep.” “Awake, you who sleep, Arise from the dead, And Christ will give you light.”

Most people are sleepwalking through life. It appears to me that many people are living unconscious of God. They sleepwalk through life without even noticing God. How can one not notice God? But I think that is exactly the state of many people.

To repent means that one wakes up and becomes aware of God, and that awareness changes everything. Then our life ceases to be just about us and our desires, our likes and dislikes, our emotions and possessions, and activities. Those things suddenly become secondary. They are of little or no importance compared to God. That is the first part of repentance. Rethink.

2. A second dimension of repentance is emotional. One of the Hebrew words for repentance means to grieve or to feel sorrow. It is a strongly emotional word. When one rethinks things and becomes aware of God, then one’s first reaction is emotional – strongly emotional. How can one meet God and not be emotional? I always think of the prophet Isaiah in this regard. He was a priest and one day he was in the temple and he became aware of the presence of God. He had a vision in which he saw God. Listen to his account of his encounter in Isaiah 6:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple. ² Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. ³ And one cried to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory!” ⁴ And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. ⁵ So I said: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The Lord of hosts.”

Isaiah’s reaction to personally seeing God and his glory filling the earth is one of deep emotion, “Woe is me!” When we become conscious of God, we become conscious of how glorious God is and at the same time how far we fall short of God and his glory. That is the literal meaning of the word sin – to fall short. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” scripture says.

I know that sin is a dirty word these days. People don’t like to use the word sin; it sounds too negative, and people seem to be phobic about possibly feeling guilt or shame or injuring our delicate sense of self-esteem. Well, it needs injuring! If meeting God does not shake us to our foundation, something is amiss. How can we become aware of God and not have a strong emotional reaction? – all sorts of emotions, joy, peace, love, but today I am talking about repentance, and the dominant emotion of repentance is sorrow over sin.

Sin is the problem and Christ is the solution. Christ came to deal with sin and guilt. If you don’t have any sense of sin or guilt, then Christ is not for you. Christ said in our gospel lesson for today: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” People who thought they were fine just the way they were – that they were right in their thinking and alright with God – (the biblical word for that I righteous) people who considered themselves righteous criticized Jesus for talking about sin and hanging out with sinners. Jesus said he did not come to earth for the righteous. He came for those who knew sin and he came to call sinners to repentance. This leads me to the next aspect of repentance.  

3. The third aspect of repentance is volitional. It is moral. It has to do with our behavior. One of the Hebrew words for repentance means to turn or to turn around. Like so many words it is a picture word. It pictures a person walking down a path and stopping, changing his mind (rethinking) and deciding to turn around and head in a different direction. The idea is that we have been walking apart from God, walking away from God. At some point we realize this fact and know we need to turn our lives around before it is too late. It is time to turn around and head home.

Jesus parable of the Prodigal Son contains a lot of these different aspects of repentance. The wayward son leaves home and travels to a far country where he loses everything, his whole inheritance. He falls into poverty and deep depression, as I read the story. He is down in the dumps in every way we can imagine. Then the story says that he “came to himself.” He rethinks. He sees his situation in a new light. He is standing there slopping hogs in a distant land, when all of a sudden he wakes up. He thinks to himself, ‘What am I doing here?” I need to go home. He repents. He thinks about what he has done to himself and to his Father. He rehearses in his mind the words he is going to say to his Father. He says, “I have sinned against heaven and against you and am no longer worthy to be called your Son.” I detect here real godly sorrow. So he turns around and goes back the way he came until he arrives at his Father’s house.

The apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians in his second letter: “8 For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it; though I did regret it. For I perceive that the same epistle made you sorry, though only for a while. 9 Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. 10 For godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation….”

There is nothing wrong with feeling bad when it is godly sorrow. We live in a society where people think feeling sorrow is pathological and needs to be treated with medication. Sometimes it does need medication when it is clinical depression. But sometimes it is right to feel bad. We ought to feel bad when we have done wrong. That emotion means God is excavating our soul, digging down to the core of our being, and getting rid of the garbage in our lives. Sometimes you have to go to the dump. What if we never went to the dump? Our homes or barns or sheds (or wherever you keep your trash) would get pretty smelly and unhealthy real quick. The same with our lives. They can get pretty smelly with the stench of sin. Confession and repentance is the moral equivalence of taking out the trash and going to the dump. Forgiveness is being cleansed in the living water of God.

When we do something wrong we can handle it different ways. We can deny it to ourselves and others, and live in a self-esteem fantasy world of denial. Or we can admit we messed up and say we are sorry – to God and to whomever else we sinned against. It is a wonderful to be able to say we are sorry, to admit that we were wrong. It is freeing. I love the feeling of it; it is liberating. Our sorrow over sin turns to joy very quickly when we admit to ourselves, to others, and to God that we are wrong. The burden of living a lie is lifted. Why can’t we admit this more? Why do we always feel like we have to justify ourselves and defend our behaviors? This society would be a lot better off if people could admit their sin and not cover it up or deny it.

 

4. The fourth dimension of repentance is spiritual. The Greek word for repentance is metanoia. It means literally “after the mind” or “beyond the mind.” Just like the word metaphysics means beyond the physical world, so does metanoia means “beyond the mind.” Beyond the mind is the spiritual. Human beings are made up of the intellectual, emotional and the volitional – mind, heart and will. That is the biblical understanding of the self. Then there is something beyond the self – beyond the mind and body. That is the spirit. That is the essence of who we are. That is the core of our being.

Repentance catapults us beyond ourselves, beyond our minds and hearts, into the very heart of God. Repentance might feel bad, but it is good. It is our salvation. Life is difficult. Life hurts. It hurts physically. It hurts emotionally. It hurts in relationships. Most of us see this pain as a problem most of the time. People look for a way out of the suffering. So we take pills, or drink alcohol, or we lose ourselves in our work, or in sports, or in activities, or in relationships. We lose ourselves so we don’t have to think about it or rethink our lives. But what if the suffering of life is not a problem? What if this is part of the plan of God? What if the purpose of hard times in our lives is to push us beyond our normal way of thinking into the very presence of God. To see who we really are when we are not self-absorbed and preoccupied with ourselves.

Paul says to the Thessalonians, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Repentance takes us beyond the mind, beyond the psyche to the spirit. We see who we really are - created in the image of God, designed to reflect God back to himself and to others. When we repent, we move beyond mind to spirit, where there is found complete forgiveness and cleansing and liberation. This is the truth of who we are in Christ, and when we know the truth the truth shall set us free.

When we repent, we experience freedom from sin. Repentance is acknowledging sin to ourselves and God, But when we do this we are not left in our sin. We are freed from sin. This is experienced in the Spirit because Jesus Christ has taken care of sin through the Cross. The way to forgiveness, the way to eternal life has been opened up through the Cross, which is a powerful symbol of the death of the old self and resurrection to new life beyond self – life of the Spirit.

Think about this, and then think again.