Repentance is not a topic most of us naturally enjoy talking about. In fact, most of us – me included – would rather talk about almost anything else. Yet, repentance is an essential part of the Christian life. Repentance involves the personal recognition of our sins and failures and a striving with God’s help to live differently. Our natural inclination to shy away from repentance and its requirements (confessing our sins and changing our behavior) is similar to the hesitancy that some demonstrate to the idea of having an annual physical.
By avoiding the physical one can avoid the bad news about weight gain, high blood pressure, or looming diseases on the horizon. Of course, the comfort provided by avoiding the physical is only short-term; eventually our physical condition will catch up with us. The same is true of our spiritual condition. It is for this reason that the call for repentance is always timely – especially during those seasons of our lives when we are particularly busy and overwhelmed.
It is for this reason, as well as others, that Christians should be seeking to live lives of continual repentance. It isn’t about holding ourselves to impossible standards; it’s about keeping ourselves healthy and whole (holy) so that we might have life and have it more abundantly (John 10:10).
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