I recently had someone ask me if I believed in repentance. It's funny because it feels like it should be such an easy answer, but for me it's not. For me the word repentance brings back nightmares I had as a child. Waking up at night to a silent house, straining to hear the slightest noise that would tell me I wasn't the only one left in the house. At 10 years old my fear wasn't that an ax murderer had broken in and killed everyone, it was that God had decided to take everyone who had proved they were sincere about their "repentance" to Heaven and I was the only one in our family who was left because I knew my heart. I knew as much as I might try I wasn't perfect and that I messed up a lot!
We would sing Jesus Loves the Little Children and I never believed it because I didn't feel worth loving much. I looked at myself even as a child and just saw all of the things I couldn't get right. I lived in fear of God rather than basking in the love and grace of God. I saw God as someone who wanted to punish me not bless me. Over the years I came to see blessings as things God gave you for performing as expected. Not the result of the overabundance of his love for me.
Over the weekend I came up against a piece of my past that I thought I had moved through. The heart wrenching fear that God didn't love me after all and that nothing I could do or say was good enough. The incident had me sitting in a chair begging God to show me the truth and counter the lie that inside I knew was wrong, but the message from my past of an unforgiving God was so strong that it triggered my panic attacks.
Earlier in the year I purchased a necklace that reads pre-approved and has the definition inside a pendant. I purchased it because somehow I knew I needed the physical reminder that God has pre-approved me. Others opinions of me do not matter and they do not define my relationship with Him. In this particular moment that message became the exact thing that God could use to speak the truth of who I am and who He is making me into. It reminded me that I'm his Beloved, he values me and loves me more than I can imagine.
Over the course of the next 24 hours it felt like God just began showering me with reminders of his love, grace and truth. He reminded me that David who failed so much was someone he called a man after God's own heart. David, who killed a man after sleeping with his wife. David, who didn't pay attention and tried to move God's ark in a way much different from God's directions. David who had multiple wives. This was a man who lived a really messy life, but the Psalms are filled with his searching for God. I was reminded that the simple definition to repentance is not a list of rules I have to keep up with. It's not penance when I've screwed something up. It's realizing I'm walking in a different direction from God and correcting course. It's changing my ways, not beating myself up over the fact I can't be perfect.
Grace is not something I can earn, but for repentance to be genuine it has to be something I can accept and live in. Love. Grace. Repentance. You can't separate them. Without love and grace, repentance is only judgement and humiliation. Without repentance, love and grace are only tools to excuse anything we might want to do. Separate they can be abused, but embraced together they become a thing of beauty and life change. Together they give us David's story that inspires us to strive to be called like he was "a man after God's own heart".
So do I believe in repentance? Absolutely! I've lived it. I experience it every day when I screw up. I experience it every time that I let the lies from the past overwhelm what God is doing in my present. But I also believe that it must be embraced with love and grace to have any effect in our lives. Repentance becomes the means to repair relationship with God, not the means for our brokenness to be held over our heads.
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