God’s justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws every day nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded. As responsible moral beings we dare not so trifle with our eternal future.
~A. W. Tozer (1897-1963)
I will bless the Lord at all times;
His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together! I sought the Lord, and He answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to Him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him! Oh, fear the Lord, you His saints, for those who fear Him have no lack! The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good? Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit. Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and His ears toward their cry. The face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keeps all His bones; not one of them is broken. Affliction will slay the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of His servants; none of those who take refuge in Him will be condemned.
~ David, prophesying in Psalm 34
Oh beloved, it is true. We speak about how good He is to us.
And then we kick it away.
The waves in our lives crash over our heads, and we panic like they are some sea change in our existence. And even though they are just the passage of turbulent energy, we somehow want to blame G_d, or even put Him on trial for getting us wet.
We take the queue from the slightest stressor in our lives, and dive into some mood or comfort or food or chemical or attitude to protect ourselves from the Divine character carving He is graciously doing with the circumstance. And we do this with the idea that somehow we deserve to bring some comfort to our lives.
We look into the future and cringe like we are standing on the edge of a cliff with a wind gusting behind us. And we do this, saying, that we believe that He has wonderful plans for our lives.
We see a situation, and we even see how He is at work. Yet we have the dazzling audacity to argue with Him about how He is handling the scene. And we do this with visibility to the situation that is comparable to the insights an infant might have on quantum physics.
Can we see it? We are setting ourselves up as god, and we are saying that we simply, abjectly, completely, absolutely have not, and will not put our trust in Him. This is a profound problem for each of us. We want to believe, but we simply cannot do it on our own.
And there is an answer. Hope. This is the fulcrum upon which repentance turns. In whom are we going to put our hope?
Oh beloved, we have been taught that the repentance in “repent and believe the Gospel,” is turning from our sin. And it is. But it is in defining sin, that we have totally missed the point in almost every sense. Sin, at its core, is the turning of one’s self inward, and putting one’s self in the position of preeminence in one’s life. Sin is about:
“I” can do it.
“I” want it.
“I” deserve it.
“I” will have.
“I” must have other’s worship.
“I” know what it right.
“I” want what I want – and will kill anything that gets in My way to full possession of it.
So, yeah, these deadly “I’s” will yield terrible and destructive behaviors. But, and this is a humongous BUT, we are not called to simply repent from doing bad things. We are called to repent from anything having to do with “I.” We are to lay down any hope in our own lives and cast all that hope onto Christ alone. As the passage above says, we are to taking refuge in Him. For refugees we are, and we must realize it.
And perhaps this is why we miss the point so often throughout so much of our days and lives. We simply have not repented in the sense that His Word has truly called us to repent. We have turned away from the transgressions, but we have not turned away from their root cause.
Repent and believe the Gospel tonight friend. He will deliver you.
To repent is to alter one’s way of looking at life; it is to take God’s point of view instead of one’s own.
~Vance Havner
