Double Whammy (rerun)
Repent, therefore, and return, that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. Acts 3:19 NASB
Return – We know the word for repent. It is a word that means to change your direction. In Hebrew, it means distress that causes us to act in an effort to receive benevolence on behalf of a superior. Repentance is the first step toward obedience.
But there is another word. It is epistrepho. Here it is translated “return.” Often it is translated “convert.” The ideas are the same because this word, just like repent, is filled with Hebrew thought. This is the equivalent to the Hebrew word shuv – to return to the Lord. When Peter spoke to those gathered in Jerusalem, he used a word that they would all have known. Come back to God. Return. This is the other side of the repentance coin. When I reach the limit of my disobedience and fall on my face in abject humiliation, I am seeking a way back. I want to come home. On the other side of my repentance is the offer of grace as a return to the God that I have abandoned. He is still there, waiting for me. Epistrepho is the positive side of the act of contrition. It is the completion of God’s offer of forgiveness.
Did you notice that Peter uses both of these words, the negative and the positive? You get the full package when you arrive at this place. The goal is simple—that your sins might be wiped away so you will experience times of refreshing. Isn’t that what we really want? What good is life filled with my agendas and desires if there are no times of refreshing? And how can I have times of refreshing in a world that is always vulnerable to instant disaster unless I am refreshed by the One Who controls the universe? How many people have discovered upon attainment of life-long goals that the end does not satisfy? How many more have learned, too late, that success does not guarantee happiness, nor even, it seems, life itself. The Grim Reaper arrives unannounced for nearly all of us. If we knew the time of his appointment, we might think and act differently, but we don’t. God suggests that times of refreshing are, in fact, entirely within your control. It is only a matter of repenting and returning. But, of course, that implies giving up my right to my own agenda. The simplest of requirements usually becomes the biggest of impediments. The truth is that I want my agenda and refreshing time from the Author of life. The double whammy is that I can’t have it both ways. Repent and return go hand-in-hand. Both entail denial of self and submission to God.
There are plenty of days when I am seduced into thinking that I can have the universe remodeled to fit me. Those days end with the realization that God designed the way things are and He is not open to my suggestions. When Peter challenged the audience to repent and return, he pointed to the final product of life well-lived. In the end, I want to be in the presence of the Lord. The secret is to keep that end in mind with each step along the road. I am heading somewhere. The direction is up to me. Following the R&R track will take me to rest and safety. No other way will. You can count on that!
Topical Index: repent, return, epistrepho, Acts 3:19
“Repentance is the first step toward obedience.” Contrition opens the door to the efficaciousness of grace. Grace does me no good if I am not sorry. Sorry does me no good if I do not know what I am supposed to be sorry about. Oh. I just stubbed my toe on the Law. Here goes.
The Law gives me the picture of where I should be. Every moment I should be looking into that image of G-d’s character, and asking myself where I am (or am not) in reference to reproducing that image. In all the places where I am not, then I am to be contrite. Contrition is where I lay down my arms, wave the white flag of surrender, and wait for the transport truck called Grace. Grace delivers (literally) me back to the point of freedom, because all my locks are on the inside of my doors, and I hold myself prisoner, so I have to be rescued from the oppression of Me. Once freed, once delivered, I get my choices back. Paul says in Galatians 5:1 “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” Do not choose my choices away again; do not return to the slough and the vomit.
Once free, then, from that sin in that moment, I choose again. What do I choose? If I am already looking into that Law to see what I am to repent for, then I am already seeing what I should be doing instead. The focus of repentance, then, is also the correct focus for obedience; I can already see what to choose instead. The Law delivers me to sanity because I am interrupting the insanity of yesterday’s choices that kept delivering(!) me to the tormentors of the insanity of fear, guilt and shame over and over again. Sanity is where I can see how to avoid the chaos of those choices – that all began with Me as the focus – by choosing obedience to the only Way I have to return to relationship in all those dimensions I have been fractured from. I was reflecting again this morning on that long list of Self-focused spiritual realities, and that ALL of them were squarely in the realm of the Unloving. Directly opposed to love, the Kingdom of Self could just be called Unloving.
To return, then, is the action of choosing obedience to the Law this time, as soon as repentance frees me up to choose. I have no freedom of choice without grace, but grace is only efficacious in my life when I have signed the release papers for it to operate. The only correct choice available to me when I am in disobedience, of course, is the choice to repent. All other ‘choices’ will be wrong. Grace can keep the breath in my body until I repent, but that breath will not be able to provide me with the peace, the homeostasis of correct relationship, unless I am walking in the contrition that is my request for the freedom that peace must have to be able to operate in. I can stick peace decals on my bumper and meditate and chant myself blue in the face, but there is no way to ‘choose’ peace, for peace can only exist in the freedom that the correct choices of obedience to the Law provides. The Law, not grace, is what keeps me free, for grace can get me back to where I can keep the Law, but I can only retain the freedom of choice if I continue to stay in obedience to that Law. Only obedience restores me to relationship, for through disobedience I rebelled against my relationship with all else. This is why there is no peace for the wicked, for you only get the stuff when you are relating properly, but only the Law shows us how to do that. Obedience to the Law, then, is how I return, shuv, to Him, and then the rebellion is over.
Refreshing, it seems so far even with repentance in these days. My heart feels faint in these Times. I’m reminded of the verse in proverbs, it says, if you falter in the day of distress your strength is small. 24:10 So refreshing I suppose will come as I fall on my face and cry out yet again for not only me and mine but those who haven’t heeded the call.