Most of the time when Christians call people to repent, they / we are talking to someone else. While there is a place for that, God also calls his people to turn from their own sins first.
“Repent” doesn’t mean, “Fall on the floor, have convulsions, and get a religious experience.” It means ‘turn around,’ and emotions aren’t necessary. If you’re going east, start going west, that sort of thing. If you steal, stop stealing.
And the most important part of repentance is not so much what we’re turning from, but WHO we are turning to. We’re turning from our way, from destroying ourselves with short lived, trinket sized delights, and turning to Jesus, where the larger, enduring pleasures never quit.
Fear is my big sin right now. Some kinds of fear are ok. I’m afraid of my kids getting hit by a car if they play in the street. Sometimes anxiety is caused by brain chemistry, and there’s no shame in that. But sometimes it’s plain old sin.
God says, “Trust me,” and I don’t. He says:
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.” Proverbs 3:5
I try, but my actions say that I do not trust him with all my heart, only just a bit of it. I try to control things I need to let go of. My stomach gets in knots when things aren’t going how I want.
If I trusted him a tenth as much as I claim to, I would be a different man. If he tells me to be still in the middle of crisis and wait quietly for his deliverance, I would. I’d be like Jesus in the storm. Mark 4. “And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion.” The disciples thought they were about to die. They were experienced people of the sea, so they would know. Yet, Jesus was snoozing. (Try to picture that.) He might have been drooling.
I want my spirit to be at rest like that, and if I trusted him implicitly, it would be. “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.” Isaiah 26:3
I’m responsible to keep trying, yet I can’t fix my heart. He must fix me. Jesus is the only one who can fix any of us.
Ezekiel 36, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.” So I ask him for that a lot.
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