I heard a story once about two teachers who applied for the same job. One of them had been teaching in another school district for 20 years and was sure that she deserved the job. The other had just graduated from college, so she really had no classroom experience other than what she got as a student teacher. But, after interviewing both of them, the principle decided to hire the recent graduate. The first woman, the one with teaching experience, was indignant. She stormed into the principal’s office and demanded an explanation: “What do you think you’re doing? I have 20 years of experience!” And the principle replied, “no, you don’t have 20 years of experience; you have one year of teaching experience repeated 19 times.” She hadn’t grown over the past 20 years and had continued making the same mistakes over and over. Her experience wasn’t worth much.
I’ve known many Christians who have a similar problem with repentance. They attend revival meetings or spiritual life conferences and see that something is wrong in their spiritual lives. They become convicted of their lukewarmness, or nominalism, or persistent unfaithfulness and disobedience, so they respond by crying out to God for mercy. They’re very sincere in their prayers for help, and, while they’re in that setting, they genuinely desire to follow Jesus Christ. But then they go home and, because they don’t follow up on their repentance with concrete acts of obedience, they drift back into the same habits as before. This thing that happened to them hasn’t made any discernable difference in their lives. So, the next year they attend another set of revival meetings, or another conference. They think, “maybe it didn’t take last time; I’d better try again.” So they go through the whole thing again, with the same results. Year after year, they go forward at meetings and cry out for mercy and weep, asking God to change their hearts. But it never seems to make any difference.
The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, is a series of letters written by a senior demon to his nephew, giving advice on how to destroy the soul of his human victim. In one of the letters, the human victim has just had some sort of spiritual experience, so Screwtape gives this advice: “It remains to consider how we can retrieve this disaster. The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it. Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilising the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul. Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel” (pp. 60-61). As long as he doesn’t act on it, his repentance will do him no good. And, as he continues, year after year, thinking and feeling without acting, he’ll become increasingly dull and unable to act, and even unable to feel that there’s something wrong.
In chapter 9 we saw the Israelites crying out for mercy, repenting of their sins. But they’re not content with just feeling sorry for their sins and crying out for mercy. They’re determined to follow up now with a definite plan for obedience. They don’t want to get caught in the endless cycle persistent disobedience followed by shallow, inactive repentance. They recognize that repentance involves more than confession and sorrow over our sins.
Our picture of repentance tends to focus on the moment when we cry out for mercy and express sorrow for our sins. Repentance, from this perspective, is what we’re doing when we go forward in a revival meeting or when we get on our knees and ask God to forgive us and help us get our lives in order. Here’s a better description of repentance: “Repentance marks the starting-point of our journey. The Greek term metanoia... signifies primarily a ‘change of mind’. Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means not self-pity or remorse but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look not backward with regret but forward with hope – not downwards at our own shortcomings but upwards at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life” (Bishop Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, pp. 113-14).
The Israelites realize that they’ve embarked on a journey. Their confession in chapter 9 is not an end in itself; through confession they’ve entered the right path, and now they need to walk on it. Having confessed their sins and cried out for mercy, they now take some concrete steps that will help them grow in obedience.
The first thing is that they recognize their own weakness. They recognize their fickleness and they know that unless they do something to counteract their natural tendencies they’ll fall back into the same sins as soon as their religious fervor dies out (and their religious fervor is going to die out sooner or later, no matter what they do). So they write out a binding agreement, to commit themselves to obedience in a tangible way. They recognize that it’s going to take more than a vague idea of “getting their lives in order” to enable them to live out their repentance. They write it out: “In view of all this, [the things they’ve been saying in God’s presence in the previous chapter] we are making a binding agreement, putting it in writing, and our leaders, our Levites and our priests are affixing their seals to it.” In a few weeks, when the immediate sense of urgency has passed, this binding agreement will still be there, calling them to obedience.
One of the things they’re counteracting here is the tendency to compartmentalize our faith. A man I knew who worked in the business department of a mission organization told me once about the difficulty of working with his supervisor. He had known this man in church before he came to work as business manager, and when he heard who’d been hired he thought, “it will be great to work for such a wonderful, godly man.” But it hadn’t turned out that way. This business manager, when he arrived on the job, had turned out to be demanding, critical, impossible to please, and difficult to work with. He seemed like a different person from the man he’d known at church. He’d compartmentalized his life. He was gracious and kind to people on Sunday morning, but at work, even doing work that revolved around the preaching of the gospel, he functioned with a different set of assumptions. The Israelites, by writing out this binding agreement, are fighting against this tendency to compartmentalize. They’re saying, “these things need to be translated into our daily lives; here are some concrete steps of obedience we plan to take.”
The second thing is that they recognize the power of bad habits. They realize their weakness, but they also realize that their conduct in the past is going to work against them. In verses 28-29, they state in general what their intention is: “all these now join their brothers the nobles, and bind themselves with a curse and an oath to follow the Law of God... and to obey carefully all the commands, regulations and decrees of the Lord our Lord.” But they don’t end with this general statement. They need to go further, because up till now they’ve allowed certain kinds of sins to flourish in the community. These bad habits that they’ve cultivated need to be addressed directly or they’ll be likely to slip back into them. So they enumerate these things in the rest of the chapter, verses 30-39. Verses 30&31 address the sins they’re going to stop committing: intermarrying with unbelieving nations and breaking the Sabbath; then, in verses 32-39, they list the things they’re going to start doing to avoid the sin of neglecting the house of God.
Our prayers of confession and repentance need to be translated into reality, and part of the process is thinking about how we’re going to resist the temptation to fall into the same sins we’ve cultivated in the past. Remember what Screwtape said: “Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will.” So we address those areas where we’ve allowed the weeds of sin to grow in our lives.
It begins with the negative: there are certain things that we need to stop doing. We confess our sin and cry out to God for help, then we begin taking steps to eliminate these things from our lives. Some of this is little more than common sense. Avoid those places that tend to draw you into sin; avoid relationships that pull you away from God and into sinful behavior; get rid of anything in your house that is causing you to sin. If cable TV is part of the problem, get rid of it. If the Internet is drawing you into sin, take some concrete steps to eliminate the temptation: move the computer into a public area, or, if necessary, cancel your internet service. Sometimes we need to be severe in eliminating things from our lives that are dragging us into sin. Jesus said: “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29). He’s saying that we’ll often have to go to drastic lengths in our repentance. There’s too much at stake here for us to quibble with God about the things we’re not willing to give up.
But the process is not only negative. We need to eliminate certain things from our lives, but the idea is not to create a vacuum. We say “no” to certain things, to make room for other things that God wants in our lives. For example, if sporting events are causing you to neglect your spiritual life, lay them aside for a while and use the time for prayer instead. If recreation has become an idol in your life, lay some of your activities aside and spend the time helping someone in the church, or visiting people who are sick. If you’ve become captivated by the sin of greed, begin giving more money away as a spiritual discipline and an act of repentance. Turn off the TV a little earlier in the evening, so that you can get out of bed in time for prayer in the morning. The point is that we’re not just eliminating sinful habits; we’re cultivating positive obedience. We begin with the general: “we’re going to begin ordering our lives in obedience to God;” but then we go on to spell out what this means: “we’re going to stop doing these things, and here are some things we’re going to do, some concrete acts of obedience.”
The third thing is that the Israelites here recognize their need for community. By entering into this binding agreement together, they’re recognizing that this isn’t something they’re able to do on their own. We saw, in chapter 9, that their confession is corporate in the largest sense, including the whole community and stretching even into the past. In the same way, they, as a body, are entering into this agreement. This obedience that they’re agreeing to is going to be worked out in the life of the community. None of them have to figure it out on their own. They’re committing themselves to support and encourage one another in cultivating a life of obedience.
We work out the details of our repentance and discipleship in the context of the Church. The author of Hebrews says: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching” (10:24-25). We support one another and pray for one another and encourage one another to keep going when things are difficult. In the New Testament, the body of Christ is central to our discipleship. We live out our lives as followers of Jesus Christ in the context of the Church, where we find support, encouragement, prayer, and instruction from God’s Word.
When John the Baptist said to the Pharisees and Sadducees, “bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8), he was thinking of repentance as more than a momentary feeling of remorse. He was thinking of repentance in the way we read earlier: “conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity.... It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see.”
In living out our repentance, we’re conscious of our own weakness and fickleness. We realize that we’ll very quickly turn away if we try to depend on how we feel at the moment. We need to bind ourselves to obedience, like the Israelites did. We decide in advance that we’re going to gather for worship on Sunday morning, and then when we wake up and don’t feel like getting out of bed, we get up anyway. The decision has already been made, so we don’t lay in bed and deliberate about whether or not we’re going to give in to the temptation. We decide in advance that we’re going to cultivate a life of prayer and that we’re going to spend time meditating on God’s Word, and then we order our lives to make prayer and God’s Word a priority. We don’t wait until we feel like it; we make plans to bind ourselves to obedience. We do this because we’re weak, and because we know that unless we make a binding commitment in advance, we won’t follow through.
We’re also aware of the power of our bad habits, so we take account of these in planning for obedience. It’s easy to fall into a trap here. We determine that we’re going to be obedient, and we try with all our might. But we very quickly fail, so we cry out for mercy and then try again. And it doesn’t seem to matter how hard we try or how sincere we are. What we need is not a stronger effort. We need to train ourselves in obedience. We need to have a strategy for cultivating a life of obedience in the areas where we’ve failed in the past. We need a series of small steps that get us from where we are to where God is calling us to be.
And for that, we need the Church. We need the support and prayers of one another. We need fellow believers who will hold us accountable. We need the regular experience of corporate worship and prayer to nurture our faith. And we need the wisdom of the larger Church in developing a strategy for training ourselves in godliness; we can read books on Christian spirituality and prayer, or meet with a spiritual director who is able to give us guidance in cultivating a life of prayer and obedience. Or we can spend time talking to people we know who are serious about following the Lord. We need one another in this process, because we’re weak and fickle, and because it’s difficult to have a clear perspective about our own spiritual condition. We don’t want to repent of the same sins over and over for a lifetime without making any progress toward maturity, so we need to expend some effort and time in coming up with a concrete plan for cultivating a life of obedience. May God strengthen us to do this and to follow through on our plan until that day when we stand in His presence.
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