Reflection: reLENT Series - rePENT (April 9, 2104)

Lent Midweek 6

Isaiah 1:21-28; Hebrews 6:1-9; Luke 13:1-9

The first of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses states, “When our Lord and Master Jesus
said, ‘Repent,’ He willed that the whole life of believers should be that of repentance.” Our whole lives as lives of repentance? How can this be? After all, didn't Jesus also tell us that He wanted our lives to be filled with peace, joy, abundance, etc.? These are not the things that we associate with repentance. But, interestingly, Jesus does. Since He does, we probably need to take a look at how our ideas about repentance compare to His.

We tend to see repentance as burdensome and oppressive. We rightly recognize that repentance involves a change in our lives, but we often view such changes as losses. While it’s true that genuine repentance does result in ridding our lives of some things, what we leave behind through repentance can hardly be considered a loss of anything good, valuable, or important. Instead, repentance frees us from what has weighed us down, has kept us from maturing in the Faith, and has focused us on ourselves instead of Christ. Only when these burdens are lifted from our lives can we begin to take hold of the joy, peace, and hope that the Lord desires for us. The starting point of letting go of these things is repentance.
Repentance is not only the key to letting go of the worldly things which offer us joy, peace, hope, security, etc. but invariably fail to provide them, it is the key to overcoming the temptations to go back to these things once we have let go of them — and the key to letting go of them again after we've given into those temptations.  Over and over we find ourselves back where we started our spiritual lives in Christ: trapped in the slavery of sin and unable to free ourselves from the chains of our guilt and shame. As long as we are in the flesh, we can have no hope, no peace, and no joy apart from repenting repeatedly … even continuously. This is what Luther was driving at when he said that our whole lives are lives of repentance.

This understanding of repentance gives us a new perspective on our Savior’s call, “Repent!”. We now see that repentance is the path to maturing in Christ and being “sure of better things.” It’s not an accusing and condemning call to unworthy sinners, but a gracious invitation to take hold of the joy, peace, and hope that Christ has won for us.

Click here to listen to the sermon "rePENT" (or right-click to download the MP3 file).