Pastor: God sent the prophet Ezekiel to the Israelites in exile to preach repentance and deliverance. They were an unfaithful, hard-hearted, rebellious nation who refused to obey the Lord or submit...
In his insightful work, Beyond Racial Gridlock, George Yancey provides a multi-faceted picture of both the brokenness of American race-relations, as well as a response couched in the gospel. In this e...
Repentance resulting from self-examination is a lifelong endeavor, occasionally surfacing in the public or private act of confession as an act of “courageous memory” in recalling one’s past.
The history of repentance is as old as humankind. We each carry the remembrance of wrongdoing in burdensome satchels, hoping that eventually someone will ease them off our back. We each know the feeli...
Genuine confession and repentance can be costly, as I have discovered in dealing with offenders. Take the case of the young man in the Washington area, deeply involved with his church and solidly conv...
Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision ...
Matthew 25:35-40, James 2:15-17, 1 Peter 5:2-3, Galatians 6:2, Matthew 7:12, Deuteronomy 15:11, Galatians 2:10, James 1:27
For the times when we fail to notice others’ needs, we repent. For our apathy for those you’ve entrusted to us, we repent. For the amount of time we spend focused on ourselves, we repent. For fa...
Luke 15:11-32, Acts 16:22-26, Genesis 39:41, 1 Peter 4:16, Psalm 34:18, Romans 5:3-5, 2 Corinthians 12:9
I spent a considerable amount of time with a guy I’ll call Martin. As a brand-new follower of Christ, Martin felt guilty for having previously embezzled a lot of money from his employer. After discuss...
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...
Public confession requires several conditions. First, a person who has acted against the integrity of the Body, the integrity of its faith, must be prepared to expose himself because what matters is h...
2 Chronicles 7:14, Luke 19:1-10, Luke 15:11-32, Isaiah 1:18, James 5:16
The Celebrant and People together, all kneeling Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another, and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinne...
Locked into captivity by an airplane seat, a kindly disposition of keeping a friend company, or a telephone connection, we become ex officio confessors to those with troubled consciences and traces, o...
In his devotional guide on preparing for the rite of confession in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says that true repentance from the persp...
Repenting is a gift God gives us for our own sake, not his. Repenting does not increase God’s desire to be with us. It increases our capacity to be with him.
There is an interesting history of the word repentance. The word in Hebrew means originally “to take a deep breath and sigh.” A deep feeling of sorrow, of remorse. Repentance at the root, at the very ...
Repentance is a very unpopular word. But the first sermon Jesus ever preached was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). This was God speaking through His Son. Jesus had come w...
I greeted repentance like a ship on the horizon of the future and believed I could sovereignly determine its anchoring. But the prodigal return came earlier than projected.
If you could reduce the gospel to one word, most scholars would choose metanoia—the Greek word translated “repentance” in the New Testament… Most of the time we translate both “meta-noeo” and “meta-no...
It is the greatest and dearest blessing that ever God gave to men, that they may repent; and therefore to deny or to delay it is to refuse health when brought by the skill of the physician - to refuse...