New Year, New You
Repent > Resolutions
“New Year, New You!”
Those words can be painful to read in May.
So many New Year’s resolutions die and decompose early enough to fertilize spring flowers.
Maybe you’ve had a sobering moment, like I have, of discovering goals from a decade ago that look shockingly like the places you need to grow today.
We still need to lose weight or get our spending in control or read more.
Our old unmet goals can haunt us. Despite what we said, and perhaps how we started, we didn’t see meaningful and enduring change.
A cancerous mutation of grace has infected many churches that expects less of repentance than it does of a New Year’s resolutions.
Stating a New Year’s resolution is not completing a resolution. Somehow believers are mistaking a declaration of repentance as complete biblical repentance.
Failing in a resolution is discouraging, failing to repent biblically is deadly.
It is vital that believers have firm grip on the importance of true repentance. The war against sin and the call to true repentance will take place in city parks and in pews, not just in pulpits.
If the church lets go of repentance, everyone will.
Biblical repentance involves turning from ourselves to Christ by embracing God’s thoughts of our sin, God’s hatred, and grief over our sin, and choosing obedience to God instead of sin.
The Spirit transforms our mind, emotions, and will toward sin in biblical repentance.
False repentance is often incomplete repentance.
A person agrees they “shouldn’t have” but they won’t use God’s words about their sin. A person might regret what’s happened or even show remorse over sin, but it remains hard to tell if they hate the sin or hate what has happened since sin was discovered. A person might say the right things and show accurate emotions, yet Spirit-empowered obedience is nowhere to be found.
Incomplete repentance may not always be false, it might just be immature.
One of the most loving things believers can do for each other is provide support in embracing complete, biblical repentance.
We don’t need to hold their sin over their head until they can learn how to repent better. We come alongside them with the Word of God and help them to follow.
· If a brother or sister isn’t using God’s Words to describe their sin, help them learn the applicable passages and embrace God’s language.
· If a brother or sister isn’t treating sin with the hatred of our God, walk with them in the Word to see God’s response to sin and help them see sin with God’s eyes.
· If a brother or sister isn’t taking diligent steps to leave sin’s patterns behind, bring accountability and guidance to help them kill the flesh and grow in righteousness.
This is uncomfortable and it won’t happen fast. Not only that, but we also fight insecurity in calling someone else to repentance. We all sin and not one of us feels righteous enough to press for full repentance.
We can’t shrink back from these acts of love.
Helping each other grow in repentance is a gift of love. We aren’t demanding agreement with our ideas, emotions, or choices–we’re urging them to continue in following Jesus. This very fabric of the Christian life!
Followers of Christ are constantly charting their course, and course correcting, by the Word.
We need to remind each other of our declarations of repentance and encourage each other in living it out!
Won’t it be amazing to see old confessions of sin and, instead of resolution remorse, we joyfully could say, “By grace I’ve left that behind!”
The battle with sin will continue till glory, but we can see progress in the fight till the Jesus Over Everything victory is clear in all of us!