The word originates from Latin and has a meaning of being sorry. In a Christian context, this means being sorry for our sin and turning back to God.
But in a practical sense, what does this actually mean? Paul says we all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God (Romans 3:23). As Christians, we continue to sin (usually unintentionally, but sometimes knowingly). And yet, the Christian message is that if we have faith in Jesus, we will be saved. There is no weighing of scales to compare our hearts to the weight of a feather. There is no pass mark for our actions that allow a certain percentage of sins to get through.
When we give our lives to Jesus as his followers, we are told that God comes and makes his home in us (John 14). The Holy Spirit comes into us and we become temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6). A process of renewal begins and our lives start to transform.
Yet we continue to sin.
The hypocrisy of many Christians is to present ourselves as sin-free. Only when our sin is revealed publicly does our witness come crashing down about us as we are exposed as liars and hypocrites. Nor does God want us to constantly look down in shame, unable to get out of bed in the morning because of our awareness of our fallen nature.
So what analogy would be useful to help understand what repentance truly means? There is no perfect image, but the one I find helpful is as follows:
Our lives are like sailing a small boat on the sea. When we go with the current, we find ourselves drifting away from God. When we repent, we set our course back to God and we seek God's strength to help on that journey. There is a lovely proverb that says "in his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps." (Proverbs 16:9)
This proverb could be used to suggest that what we try to achieve is meaningless, as ultimately God decides what happens. I prefer to read this as an affirmation of our relationship with God. When we set our course to follow God (repenting of our previous course that is away from God) then God looks after the details and provides for our needs on the journey.
As believers, we also travel in community, so other boats come alongside us and we share this journey together, helping one another.
The danger with some concepts of repentance is that they give an image of an angry God, waiting to punish us for every mistake we make along the way. That is not the self sacrificing God who allowed his own son to die on a cross that we might be reunited with him for eternity.
I hope this new metaphor helps some of you as you read this. May the wind blow in your sails as we journey on a new course together.
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