During the last few months... or 12 hours, more specifically... I've been thinking a lot about repentance. Those who have found themselves warming church seats for any considerable amount of time have heard the word "repentance" and its associated analogies. It's "turning to God, away from sin," "a 180 degree shift," and -- in perhaps its 'churchiest' incarnation -- a Sunday school felt board character doing a backflip and skipping away from the clutches of sin as children watch on in bewilderment.
These incarnations, however, can be fairly cheap. They can be fairly impotent. When you're addicted to smoking and want to quit, holding a carrot between your first and middle fingers is a poor substitute for a cigarette. It doesn't fit the subtle curvature of your hand. It doesn't know the intimate rhythm of your breath. It certainly isn't soothing. (Unless you really like carrots. I mean, really like them.)
When it comes to the addiction of sin, the addiction of self, we certainly do not need carrots. We don't need to exchange the temporal for the temporal. We need to exchange the seen for the unseen. Turn laterally all you want -- but what you really need to do is seek up.
During the last few months, the Lord has had the mercy and kindness to lead me to repentance. When I find myself scrambling, turning in circles to find a source of relief from the onslaughts of life, personal wounds, the waging war of sin and self, He intervenes with a simple truth: "Nothing is going to come and save you." Over and over, he says this. Literally. And He's right -- because He already did. There is complete and utter sufficiency in the cross of Christ -- past, present, future, forever. It is a fight to believe this unseen truth in our often contrary experience, but it is a fight worth fighting. If you fight to be the exception, thinking that "this" struggle is not covered by the cross, you fight battle already lost.
The verse I mentioned at the beginning -- in Hosea -- goes on to describe the people of Israel as "a deceitful bow" since their repentance is not genuine and oriented toward God. Yet, as Martin Luther puts it, "God makes straight lines with crooked sticks." What a hopeful promise. No matter how deceitful the bow, it will be a straight shooter when wielded by Jesus. I hope we can all bank on this today.
"And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12
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