Repentance: Turning to the Light
“I’m not ready to follow Jesus. Everybody says I have to ‘repent,’ and I can’t. I’m not ... good enough.”
If you’ve ever thought this, you’re not alone. Many people see this thing called repentance as a huge hurdle they cannot overcome.
But what is repentance, exactly? Is it a series of good works? A certain level of “feeling sorry”?
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word repent simply means turn. The picture in view is one of walking along a pathway, and doing an “about-face.” The one running away from God now turns and runs toward him. That turnaround is repentance.
Seen in this way, repentance and faith are not two different things, but two ways of describing one movement. Faith refers to what—or rather, whom—we are leaning toward, believing, trusting. Repentance stresses that when we first come to faith, such trust and belief involves a turnaround.
And so too, any other time that we find ourselves facing away from God, turned toward that which is wrong and destructive—then too, what we need is repentance, a turning.
Left to ourselves, we run headlong into destructive things: sin, alienation, making gods of ourselves ... all of which deals death and harm, both to ourselves and to others. Repentance is not about us suddenly becoming perfect. Repentance simply means we are no longer running headlong into death; instead, we have turned toward God and the hope he brings in Jesus.
Paul tells the Ephesians the character of his proclamation of the good news of Jesus: he declared “repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). In other words, he called upon people to turn to face God, and in so doing to place their hope and belief in Jesus his Son.
The difficulty in repentance is not that you have to become especially “good.” The challenge is simply whether you are ready to turn around, to value the life that God gives in Jesus rather than the false life and the hollow promises offered by any and every alternative.
So repentance is not to be mistaken for “good works” or “becoming a good person.”
But make no mistake. That turnaround will have a practical impact on your life. You will surely become“a better person,” if you will—you will be altered. But that alteration is a result of the direction you are facing, and who now stands before you.
Think of two people. One of them walks toward a dark pit, with his back to the sun, never facing the light, keeping his face always in shadow. The other walks toward the sun. Which one do you suppose will be pale, and which one will glow with vitality?
When we have our backs turned to God, we cannot be what we were meant to be. But when we are facing him, following him, the goodness of his light alters our hearts and lives.
As Paul again puts it, as we look upon the “glory” of the Lord, we ourselves are transformed into a likeness of that beauty and significance, from one degree to another, as the Holy Spirit works the pattern of Jesus into us (see 2 Corinthians 3:18).
The good news is that God is calling us out of the darkness that can only end in despair and death. Jesus himself has taken that death upon himself on the cross and been raised to new life, overcoming it. When we turn to God, we face, not only the cross of Jesus, but the powerful life that has defeated death and which will lead us too into life without limit and without end.