My Take On Repentance

Life is short. That is why I am glad we have been shown by God what repentance is.

See, if it were left up to us sinful humans, we’d be in trouble, wouldn’t we? Life is short, and we only have so much time on this earth. How much time each of us has, we do not know.

Ever think about time, and how we measure it? We measure our age in years. Think about that. We call a 70-year lifespan a good long time to be alive. 70 years. Wow. Wanna get really deep and introspective? Each year is a mere 365 ¼ days long. That’s it. Not all that long a time, now really, is it? Times that by 70 – that is twenty five thousand, 5 hundred and sixty-seven and a half days. Suddenly, once you start thinking about how quickly a day passes, how they just blur from one into another, suddenly that seems like a really short time to live, doesn’t it?

If left up to ourselves, we’d be in trouble. Oh, we might be lucky enough to recognize mistakes that we make…but would we be smart enough to be able to change, or would we keep making the same mistake over and over and over, wasting our entire lives away?

That is why I am glad that God has introduced us to the foundational principle of repentance.

Repentance is more than just thinking that we have done wrong. And repentance is also more than saying we are sorry for doing wrong.

No, repentance goes where we as humans never would; repentance tells us that we have sinned, that we are wrong, and that we need to change.

A few examples of how this benefits us. Let’s say that I screw up in my job. I can admit that I have screwed up. I can be sorry that I have screwed up. But, what happens if I refuse to change my ways, and go on screwing up, for a lifetime? Remember, life is short! Why waste it doing the wrong thing? What if I partner up in life with somebody that I have nothing in common with, somebody who has no common goals with me, someone whom I cannot agree on anything with (even the fundamental important issues of life)? What do I do? Left on my own, I am likely to recognize my mistake, but go on making it anyways. Again, a wasted life. Time is precious.

But here is where repentance makes a difference. Repenting is powerful, and it comes from God as a gift to us; made even more important to us, because we are bound by the constraints of time.

See, if I repent of making a horrible mess of my job, then I not only recognize what I have done, but I make the necessary changes to make sure that this does not keep happening, then I become a better employee. If I am trapped in a relationship with somebody whose core values differ greatly from my own, then I can make the choice, through repentance, to not go on compounding my mistakes by continuing on in something that wastes my valuable time and steals the life out of me.
I used to work with a man who was a compulsive liar. Eventually, nobody believed a single word he said. See, this man did not know the freeing power of repentance. When he would get caught in a lie, he would try to be good for a while, but he would always return all too quickly to his bad habit of lying about everything. He continued in his sin.

Some people will say, “Whoa there, Dredd Sweet! I can understand not lying, and I can understand trying harder in your job; these are all good things that most decent folk can agree on!” [It helps at this point if you imagine the man speaking to spit a spray of tobacco juice into the dirt at his feet, I find]. “But when it comes to talking of leaving relationships, well, that just ain’t scriptural!”

Yeah, you would have a point there. God is in the relationship business, after all. And He is the Author and Creator of marriage; He said that it was good.

Here is my take on this, though. Life is short. Perhaps if we treated life as a truly sacred thing, as a gift from the Divine, then maybe we would understand God and His plan for us a little better. As Christians, who are we to think that we can hook-up with any old person that we choose to, without first counting the cost? I think far too many people on this earth, Christians included, commit themselves to people they have no business committing themselves to. Sometimes it is for passion, sometimes it is because of loneliness, and sometimes because love is just blind. Mostly though, we do not know who we are, so we are unable to truly love ourselves, or to love others.

Look…breaking up any relationship, whether it is a friendship or a marriage, is a horrible thing to go through. But I have watched too many people waste their lives, living in misery because they have no respect for the person they are with, they have no love for them, and they wish the other person were dead. But they go on, staying in that relationship anyways, and causing emotional death and pain to everybody involved. And I ask you; is this what God wants for us? Should we compound our mistakes? If we can get to the place where we admit that it was a mistake to hook up with the person we are in relationship with…then should we not also change our ways, change our patterns, change what we are doing and who we are doing it with? Isn’t it a sin to go on in misery, unbearably unhappy, unable to please the other person?

Life is short, very short. How much of it will you waste, all because you do not understand or accept God’s gift of repentance?

Repentance is the act of seeing you are wrong, admitting the mistake(s) you have made, and determining to change your situation, to change your actions and reactions, to make changes to ensure that the mistakes do not go on or continue.

Life is short; too short to compound mistakes by refusing to fix them. Too short to defeat yourself and your joy and peace in life by refusing to take responsibility for your own sins. Life is too short to not work hard to make sure that you and those around you can enjoy it. After all, chances are, if you are not enjoying your life, then chances are that you are the only one who can change things so that you do enjoy it.