repentance on Rejection

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed ...

Contempt is so painful To be dismissed, disregarded Questioning instead of dignity Accusation instead of personhood I have felt its sting and hollowness As have you, my Jesus Help me hear the needed m...

Our gracious God, you repeatedly move towards us, even when we pull away. You are not deterred by our rejection of you nor our running from you. Your love is persistent. We confess our distrust of you...

History records the Battle of Cannae as perhaps Rome's most devastating military defeat, orchestrated by the tactical genius of Hannibal of Carthage. In the aftermath of this crushing victory, the...

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds o...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? What Have You Done for Me Lately? If only the people of God in the pages of the Old Testament were unique. We could then comfortably read their for...

Lent 2024: Do This in Remembrance Look to the Cross AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? What Have You Done for Me Lately? If only the people of God in the pages...

Preaching Angle: John Arrested, Jesus Preaches the Kingdom The major event in redemptive history which immediately precedes this passage is Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. I can’t imagine a 40 d...

Preaching Commentary Preaching Angle: John Arrested, Jesus Preaches the Kingdom The major event in redemptive history which immediately precedes this passage is Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness....

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision.

Gracious God, you are quick to show us your love. yet we soon forget. We live as if we have to earn your love, perform in order to receive your approval, and succeed in order to receive a smile. These...

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

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 ...

In Eugene Peterson’s excellent book, Run with Horses, he tells the story of his frustration trying to remove the blade from his lawnmower. He had tried everything and finally his neighbor came over an...

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...

Repentance is a change of willing, of feeling and of living, in respect to God.

Repentance isn't only sorrow for past sins, it's also a determination to now do the will of God as He reveals it to us.

The Christian who has stopped repenting has stopped growing.

When you turn to Christ, you don't have a repentance apart from Christ, you just have Christ. Therefore, don't seek repentance or faith as such but seek Christ. When you have Christ you have r...

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...

Repentance, not proper behavior or even holiness, is the doorway to grace. And the opposite of sin is grace, not virtue.

Lack of repentance is the root cause of powerlessness in the church, in this materialistic, self-indulgent age. There can be no spiritual power in a non-repentant church.

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...

The recognition of sin is the beginning of salvation.

Father, we thank you that you are a God who provides second chances. You called us to go and we ran. We ran as far from your presence as possible. You pursued us in our abandonment of your call. Like ...

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.

As soon as we know that we are wrong, we aren’t wrong anymore, since to recognize a belief as false is to stop believing it. Thus we can only say “I was wrong.” Call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Prin...

My God, my God, please don’t forsake me. I confess that I feel so far from you; your voice is almost out of earshot. I feel like I’m facing life all on my own, because I’ve chosen to do it my way. A...

Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.

Lesslie Newbigin, the great missiologist and missionary, shares a powerful analogy of repentance from his days serving as a missionary in India. I remember once visiting a village in the Madras di...