We All Need to Repent and Meet the Grace of God

Why do I need to say sorry? What have I ever done wrong? I’ve never hurt anyone. It’s all their fault. If only I had power I could do such a better job then them. I could fix everything if... Have you ever found yourself thinking any of these statements? This kind of thinking is voracious in today’s culture. Almost everyone thinks they are good, almost everyone thinks they can do better, almost everyone thinks they can judge others and determine what is wrong. Yet, we fail to see how wrong we are. If everyone thinks they are good, why is the world the way it is? If you never hurt anyone, why are there so many hurting people? If it is all someone else’s fault, and their wrong is so powerful, why hasn’t your good been able to make the difference? If you can do a better job, why have all the millions of people in leadership through history fallen short? If you can fix it, why hasn’t anyone fixed it? It is an ironic thing, our view of self. The enemy consistently convinces us that we are something we are not. Like the very first sin, we eat the fruit and suddenly we believe we know what is right and wrong, all the while, like Adam and Eve, we end up feeling shame, we hide, we tear at the trees and world to cover our shame, we deceive, we blame, and we lose control and purpose - this is literally what Adam and Eve do. The truth is that we all are in deep need of repentance. We all need to see where we fall short and we need God to forgive us and make us right.

Today, we come to the moment of confession or repentance in our service. Like everything else we do on a Sunday this is an essential thing that we need to do. Repentance very simply is the acknowledgment of something we have done wrong, and we turn away from that wrong towards God. We then believe that God will hear our repentance, forgive us and help to make it right - because we can’t do it on our own. 

The first problem is that without God’s help we can’t see our evil. And even if we can see our own evil, we can’t face it. Almost everyone would say that they aren’t perfect and yet most people would say that they are good. The problem with saying we are good, is that we don’t actually know what good means. As Jesus tells us, “Only God is good”. This means that God’s goodness is the definition of good, it is the measuring stick, it is the thing we need to look at if we are to know if we are good. Yet, for those that don’t know God and His character, how can they know what good is? Yet, the fact that people will say they aren’t perfect, is telling us that God is already showing them that something isn’t quite right. They know they have missed the mark. And that is what sin is. Sin is defined as missing the mark. People know that they have missed the mark of God’s perfection, they know that all people have fallen short of the glory of God, and yet because they define right and wrong for themselves, they can easily ignore this. Partially, because without meeting Jesus Christ, we can’t actually know what perfect is. 

We are also really good at telling ourselves that we are good, because we are very bad at seeing cause and effect. This is a bit of a funny thing to say, because so much of our culture is built on scientism, which is based on defining the world by cause and effect, yet even within science there are so many examples where a study has missed a very important variable or cause and found the drastically wrong conclusion. We do the same thing. We don’t see the consequences of our actions. We say, “it was just a little lie” or “no one is going to notice”. 

One of the problems is that community and relationships have broken down - so we don’t see the communal side effects. When you are really close with a person, you can begin to see how even the littlest things that you thought were nothing, suddenly become very destructive. Picking up a phone at the dinner table, suddenly shows someone that they are less important, it tells your brain that you need distractions rather than presence, it tells your child that they should want to look at the phone, in your own heart it makes people on the other end of the phone more important than the people that are beside you, it builds fake relationships with people that don’t know you, it gives you endorphins which convinces your body that this is the way to happiness and we could go on. This is just one small, unimportant act that most of us do everyday, yet it does so much. Yet, we could also look at the tone we use while speaking, even if unintentional and how that changes something. We could look at the words or practices that are just habits and how bad they are. We could talk about how we hold onto worry, or how we complain, or grab onto other people’s problems, and see the fairly drastic consequences. 

We have only looked at what this does to a person and family, but if we lived in a closer knit community, we would see the same evil spilling out into the people around us. Yet, it doesn’t matter if we aren’t in community, because we still experience evil spilling out on us from others. This tells us that we don’t need to be in community for evil to get its hold, for evil to spread and propagate. You may or may not be surprised, but strangers actually have a great influence on us and we do on them too. Our words, actions, even our thoughts carry with them great weight and sin is deadly. 

Yet if we can have such a devastating effect on family and on strangers, can we even begin to understand how much of a devastating effect we can have on the world and environment? There are some obvious things we can see: we can cut down a tree and that does something. We can till a field and it changes it. With better equipment, we can create and waste plastics and see how plastics get into everything. We can see that our emissions were destroying the O-zone layer - the thing that makes life possible. We can see how atomic fusion could lead to a nuclear explosion that destroys the potential for life in an area for generations. Yet, these are only the big things. If our spoken tone can change the feeling in someone’s heart, how might our tone, or words or actions, or relationships actually shape the world around us and propagate the sin we are living out. 

Let’s look at it another way. When we define for ourselves what is right, instead of listening to God our king’s wisdom, we become rebels in his Kingdom or world. We see creation, not to mention our children, duplicating this rebellion. It shouldn’t be surprising that we find rebel plants that go where we don’t want them to - which we call weeds. It shouldn’t be surprising that we have such difficulty with the bacteria that live in us or the racoons that live outside of us - which we call pests or sickness. It shouldn’t be surprising then that we find rebel cells in our bodies - which we call cancer. We are rebels to God’s Lordship and so we meet a rebellious world to our kingship. 

If we were really able to see the consequences of all our evil, we would ask, how has this world not been destroyed a million times. The only reason that we haven’t been consumed by our evil and others, is because God holds back the floodgates, just as he did before the flood of Noah’s Ark, just as he did when he ordered the chaos at creation to create dry land, just as he did for centuries before us. The wars and greed we see are just the tip of the iceberg of the consequences we should be experiencing.

Yet, this is just looking at the lows, our evil and how truly destructive our sin can be and we haven’t even looked at what God created us for - the highs we were meant for. God never made us to be just neutral creatures, at the very beginning he meant us to tend the garden, to be divine helpers, to rule like him, to bear fruit and help all others bear the fruit of the spirit which is love, joy, peace, faith, long suffering, etc. And we were meant to live into this God given purpose all the time, not just sometimes, all the time. “We have all fallen short of the glory of God”, which we were meant to live all the time. We were meant for so much and yet we have become drastically less. 

As we reflect on this purpose and how little we live it out with loved ones, strangers, and even nature, we begin to see how terribly we have fallen short and we need something more. And we should be left with one common question: “what can we ever do?” and we are faced with an equally terrible response: “Nothing”. Outside of faith, there is nothing any of us can do to make this world better, because we don’t even know what good is. We might be able to make something new, like social media that bridges the large distances between us, yet in our brokenness social media creates just as many if not larger distances than it ever solved. Most of this sermon I have looked at things from a very worldly perspective and yet it all points us to our need for God. We need outside help. We need someone who does know what is right. We need someone who is above sin and yet is willing to enter in and fix it. Otherwise, this life is just a torture, a hell of our own making. 

This setting right starts with recognizing God in our midst. It comes with recognizing that there is a good far greater than ourselves. There are many things that are good in this world that point us towards the ultimate good, but even the devoted and self-sacrificial love of a mother only serves as a first step towards the love, power and goodness that we truly need. So, we need to see the goodness of God that surrounds us and thankfully it does at all times. If we can really even begin to see how great God’s goodness is, it would immediately put us on our knees. In the gospel of Luke, when Simon Peter saw the goodness of God made evident in the miraculous catching of the fish, he knelt down and said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord”. This should be all of our responses. 

Yet, what does Jesus do? He says, “Don’t be afraid, for I will make you fishers of people”. Confronting our own sin and evil should make us very afraid. It is terrifying. The news is full of it. Yet, Jesus enters into it and says, “Let go of that fear”. Don’t let that evil control you, belittle you, or imprison you, trust in me instead, trust in the goodness of God which is far bigger than any of that evil. Don’t be afraid of my goodness either. Yes, God’s goodness is far bigger than us and beyond us, yet, the amazing thing is that God’s goodness can and will overwhelm us if we let it. Wouldn’t we rather be overwhelmed by the love and goodness of God, then the evil of this world and that which is our own hearts. 

But Jesus doesn’t just save us from evil with his goodness, he invites us to live in his goodness and calls us to invite others in too. This is truly good news in this broken world and when coming to face the evil and wrong in our own hearts. We may not always realize it, but we need saving. We can’t do it on our own and this goes for everyone else in the world too. 

I wish I had more time to talk through how the character of God shows us the contrast in our own hearts and lives. I wish I had the time to talk about how God works through our repentance. I wish I had more time to talk to you about the shape of God’s forgiveness and the redemption that comes hand in hand with it. I wish I had more time to talk to you about what repentance does in us, through us and for the world. I wish I could talk about how taking out the plank from your own eye helps you take the sliver out of another’s eye. I wish I had more time to talk to you about how forgiving others shapes our hearts and offers them a taste of God’s goodness and love. I wish I had more time to talk to you about how God’s forgiveness leads to peace, a peace we can live in and share - as we do in the peace. But another time.

In the meantime, let us look upon the goodness of God. This will show us the truth of the evil in our hearts, how we have too often missed the mark. And as a result let us go to our knees asking for the forgiveness and redemption that only God can provide. Then let us watch and step into the redemption and love of God that surrounds us as we humble ourselves before his goodness and not our own. AMEN

Why do I need to say sorry? What have I ever done wrong? I’ve never hurt anyone. It’s all their fault. If only I had power I could do such a better job then them. I could fix everything if... 

We, all people, think we are very good at judging right from wrong. We are also very good at convincing ourselves that we are right and that others are wrong. We are also very good at deceiving ourselves into thinking that we are actually able to do what is right. Yet, we couldn’t be more wrong. The world with its wars, greed, pride and arrogance is the way it is because all of those people have convinced themselves of the same thing. In many ways, we are no different, we just don’t have the same means or situation. 

This Sunday we discuss the act of confession and repentance. How do we come to see and come to terms with the evil in our hearts and world? How do we have eyes to see the consequences of every little thing we do? And how can we ever make the world into what it needs to be, when we have no power unto ourselves to do it? Join us Sunday when we see our hope, the good news that far outweighs the worst news.