Repentance

Take a look at the picture in today's blog.  it's not photoshopped or edited in any way. It's a picture of a common table fork. The fork is not bent, it simply appears to be bent because of the angle at which I took the picture.  With this in mind I tackle today's topic of repentance. 

Repentance is the reframing of your thought process and this is my main point today that I want you to take away from this. Repentance has absolutely nothing to do with your behaviour. Read that over once again and let it sink in. Repentance has nothing to do with your behaviour. 

The reason this is so critical is because the church has made such a career of trying to get people to change their behaviour that we have missed the entire point of Grace. Jesus didn't die so you could spend your life trying to resist your flesh. Be delivered of that mess. Jesus died because His deep, real love for you drove Him to pay your price in your place. He gave His life in exchange for yours. To think you now have to somehow add to that by living in perpetual self denial is a mockery. (Gal 2:21)

I'm not a fan of using ancient words that have lost their meaning today. I try hard to pick and choose words that are relevant and make sense to my contemporaries. I would submit to you that the word repent has completely lost it's original meaning to us today in 2015.  The original word "repent" would be much better translated today to "rethink", "reconsider" or to "factor in some new information".

Every time in scripture you see the word "repent" use my above definitions and watch what an amazing difference it makes in how the passage reads and in your overall opinion of God.

For many, the word repent represents the crazy street preacher standing on the corner screaming "Repent!" at the top of his lungs to everyone followed by the usual "the world is going to end" message.  To most others the word "repent" is tied into a person's behaviour.  For example, if you steal a candy bar from a store and you confess that to a leader in your life, they will often tell you to "repent" of being a thief. While that sounds all good and religious, what they are really telling you to do is to stop stealing. Of course that is sound council, but it is a misapplied usage of the word repent.

Back to our fork picture above for a moment. The angle I took the picture at makes the fork look like it is bent outwardly. Yet when you look at the fork from the exact same angle you see it as straight. Why does the camera and the human mind capture the exact same image differently?  Because the camera is taking the image without the filtering process of the human mind. The human mind "repents" the image to our understanding and this is appears to our mind to be a normal, straight fork. The camera has not "repented" in the way it sees the fork. So it is when Jesus comes into our lives and the Holy Spirit begins to reveal Himself to us. In the 1600s that transforming process was best known as "repentance" but as I mentioned earlier, today that process would be better known as "reconsidering" or "rethinking" or "factoring in some new information".

My message to a lost and dying world is not that they should "repent", it's that they should take a moment and reconsider their fallen state in the light of the new information that Jesus represents. To the modern believer struggling with sin, my message is not to repent, my message is to rethink their own actions and reconsider their behaviour through a different lens. 

Over the years I have been trapped in various sins. No one had to tell me it was wrong, I already knew it was wrong. I either just enjoyed it too much to stop or was demonized into not seeing my choices to stop.  In either case, freedom didn't come when people told me to correct my behaviour. Freedom came to me when the Lord closed the mouths of those giving me grief about it all and then He Himself spoke to me asking me where my accusers were. Just like the woman caught in adultery I said "nowhere to be found".  Once the accusers were gone.. and ONLY AFTER the accusers were gone... was I able to hear the quiet and gentle voice of the spirit nudge me to go and sin no more.  Jesus wasn't trying to clean me up, He was trying to get me to reframe my own perception to see that I was always cleaned up because if what He had done in my place for me.  Armed with that incredible revelation, I was free to walk away from what bound me previously.  

I pray you reading today will not stop and settle for anything less.  Stop trying to "repent" and instead see that you simply need to take a fresh look at it from a different perspective, free of the accusing voices, free of the condemnation. It's a personal invitation from God Himself to embrace who you really are.  Come on up, higher and higher. Your fork really isn't bent, you have only thought it was.

More soon,

Mark

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