Idea & Reality

Gabrielle has a short little post on repentance. I thought I would throw in my thoughts on the matter. There certainly is much confusion about the subject of repentance today. Probably the biggest mistake is thinking that if you stop smoking the ceasing of the smoking itself is repentance. In other words, repentance is the external actions that we perform.  This does not coincide with what John the Baptist says to the crowds in Luke 3: bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance. Paul in Acts 26:20 expresses the same idea, that converts should bring forth deeds that are consistent with repentance. My Greek lexicon defines repentance as "a change of mind." What should be noticed then is that stopping smoking in the example above might be the fruit of repentance. A person might read the information on smoking, have a complete change of mind regarding it, and then his actions would change. Thus, in a similar way we distinguish between a true faith and a false faith by whether the faith has works along with it. The point does not seem to be how much works of faith or repentance we have, but whether in our lives there is any evidence at all that we have in our hearts repented and exercised faith. How we think (and feel) does effect our actions; indeed, believe that a persons beliefs do not effect their actions is little more than silly. If I really believed that eating an apple would kill me, unless I wanted to commit suicide I would not eat it. If I had a genuine desire to play golf like Tiger Woods, and not simply some wish completely disconnected from reality, then I would be at the golf course practicing all the time.  Two dangers seem apparent to me. First, we may claim repentance without having any fruit of it in our lives. Some one who claims to have had a complete change of mind about proper eating habits but then makes no changes whatsoever to their diet cannot be said to have repented. Simply put, they then have not really changed their mind. Second, we may become worried and start to wonder how much "repentance" is needed before we have actually repented. I would not want to say that if a person has repented of bad eating habits and then occasionally has a piece of cake that they have not repented.

I think this understanding of repentance lets us say that repentance is a gift of God, but this gift is to be worked out in our everyday actions. Otherwise, how can we say we have it?