“In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30)
In 1991 the consequences of wrong choices finally caught up with me. I had nowhere to go and no one to whom I could turn. I actually began to think about killing myself.
I’m not sure if I had enough courage to take my life, but it bothered me that suicide made any sense at all. In desperation, I got down on my knees one night and made a promise to God that I had made so many times before. “Lord, if you’ll just get me out of this mess, I promise you, I’ll change.”
Several nights later I was visiting with a friend. It was after midnight and we were sitting outside on the steps talking about my problems when a voice shouted, “Repent…Repent…The kingdom of God is at hand.” We laugh now, but we didn’t laugh then. In fact, neither of us mentioned it for some time in fear that the other may not have heard it. Where in the world did that voice come from?
Ironically, that voice offered the answer to my problems. Indeed, God was beginning to hold up His part of the bargain. You see I came to know Christ several days later, and even though my problems did not disappear, they no longer seemed insurmountable. I finally understood what the Apostle Paul meant when be said, “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7)
Now it was my turn to live up to my end of the bargain. Remember that I promised God that I would change. But you know what? Christians often confuse repentance with salvation. They are not the same thing. Salvation is a decision that God makes, but repentance is a decision that the Christian must make. It means to change and it represents more than a change in attitude. Repentance doesn’t just mean that a person must change his ways. To repent means to change the direction that his life is taking. Oh sure, we all are going to continue to sin, but when we repent, we decide to run away from sin instead of towards it.
While the Christian can never lose his salvation, he can stop repenting. The Bible refers to the unrepentant Christian as a “backslider”, which means to fall away. In other words, the backslider has again changed his direction and resumed some of his old ways. So repentance is an outward and visible sign of whether the Christian continues to be oriented towards God. Again, the repenting Christian realizes that his relationship to God reaches much farther than his salvation experience.
The decision to repent, and the daily sacrifices that go with it, are yardsticks by which we learn who God really is. We may not have to repent to be saved, but we can never know God unless we strive to act like Him. And God takes great delight when we repent. “I tell you, them is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (Luke 15: 10)
By the way, I can’t leave you hanging. There really was a voice in the wilderness that night. You see, two young boys who had recently been saved were driving through the countryside that night and shouting through a loud speaker from the back of a pickup truck. It was their way of evangelizing. Little did they know that their decision to repent would change the direction of my life, too. Repentance was God’s answer to my prayer.
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