I get to sit in on meetings with lots of pastors and other church folks. This isn’t a criticism of something that I come across everyday, but recently met some people who would continually talk about “needing to repent”, but used the word so lightly that I am not sure if they really meant what they said. There was a big event to take place and things didn’t turn out as we had all hoped. And so we needed to repent. And that might be true. It is good to examine ourselves, it is good to see if there had been sinful tendencies within us, and if so, to really turn away from those. But my impression is that when things don’t go according to our plans, it is because God didn’t answer us. And God didn’t answer us because we had sin. And our sin happened to be something like “didn’t try hard enough” or “didn’t pray enough”. I think they will use other phrases, such as, “not stewarding our time well”…but the fault and blame lies with us. But here is where I have a few worries. This treatment of sin and repentance along with defeat and success…seems to put us in charge of all outcomes. If we are blameless enough, we will succeed. If we are sinful, we will fail. In other words, God will do what we want Him to do if we are good enough. We can get God to do our bidding through our righteousness. If things don’t turn out as we hoped, again, that is in our hands as well. if we had been more faithful, then we could have gotten what we had wanted.
All in all, this way of thinking seems to push God out of the experience all together. Everything depends upon us. And repentance loses its meaning as well. Because it no longer means to be pained over one’s sin and how it hurts the living God…there is no turning away from that sin and changing into someone who is more Christ-like. Repentance generally means that one should have put more effort in. Taken less days off. Sacrificed something else. And the evidence of the need for repentance is simply that you didn’t get what you want.
Here, repentance loses its weight. I think that is why it is better to be careful how we use it. We can use it so lightly and trivially so as to drain it of its importance. And this keeps us from true repentance. It also has the tendency to drain the Christian life of any joy. Because “God only helps those who help themselves” (Agnostic Ben Franklin). Words like “I repent” seem spiritual and noble, but wrongly used, they become destructive, towards both those around us, and even to our own hearts and modes of thinking.
Quinby 