Roadblocks to God's Mercy, Part I--Counterfeit Repentance

Consider this simple illustration of the dynamic of repentance: Imagine a path with a length of a thousand steps, with Jesus at one end and a sin-laden soul at the other end. There are a thousand steps, so to speak, between a sin-laden soul and his merciful Savior. To initiate an encounter with such a soul in a grace-spawning embrace, the Lord will graciously and lovingly take all of those steps himself, except for the first step. Mercy is spilled out only after the sinner takes the one first step toward that encounter. That first step is called repentance.

That interior sincere act of sin-regret shows that the sinner has a true desire for this awesome God encounter that Jesus describes in John 14:23. He will wait for the sinner to take that single first step; then he will rush to embrace the sinner with a joyous divine love that is beyond human imagining. It is true that “it is the goodness of God that leads you to repentance,” as Paul teaches (Romans 2:4), but each person must take the initiative. Like the loving, grieving father of the prodigal son, the joyous embrace depends on the wayward son, not the grieving father, to make the critical decision himself: “I will go to my father, and say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and you” (Luke 15:18).

The choice of this God-encounter is left entirely to the free will of every human sinner—and that includes each and every one of us, whether our sins are serious or not so serious. Mortal sin “kills” grace in the soul; venial sin wounds but doesn’t “kill” the divine life of grace in the soul. 1 John 5:17 says, “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal.”

The idiocy of delaying repentance, especially when one’s conscience calls for it, will reflect the presence of a demonic intervention in the life of one’s soul, subtly anesthetizing its moral sensitivities, and eventually leading to a “hardening of the heart, ” when motivation for repentance can evaporate. How sensitive are we to sin and its cure—the healing power of repentance? Unrepented sin obtunds our entire spiritual life radically—and, in many cases, it determines our very destiny for all eternity!

If we put off repentance for another day, there is a double loss: we have added another day of possible sin to repent of, and we have a day less remaining in our life in which to repent of sins we have accumulated. In other words, postponing repentance by one day leaves us with a day more of possible sins to repent of, and a day less in which to repent; we will have missed a day of “soul hygiene”—far more important than bodily hygiene.

If you are tempted to delay repentance after you recognize the need for it, you can be sure that some very persuasive forces of evil are at work within you. Listen to God’s warning word: “Do not delay to turn back to the Lord, for suddenly the wrath of the Lord will come upon you, and at the time of punishment you will perish” (Sirach 5:7-8).

Delayed repentance has much in common with counterfeit (insincere) repentance. A punster once said that “many people, when ‘mending’ their ways, use mighty thin thread.’ Josh Billings re-phrased it cleverly: “It is much easier to repent of past sins than to repent of those we intend to commit.” Of course, it is impossible to repent of any sin while intending to commit that sin in the future. To intend to commit a future sin is itself an act of malice in God’s eyes, and hence that very intention is a sin that poisons the soul the moment it is intended or planned.

Likewise, confessing a sin while positively intending to commit it in the future would not only render that confession invalid, but it would also render that hypocritical confession itself to be sacrilegiously sinful. It parallels the Lord’s words (Jer. 3:10) complaining about Judah: “She did not return to me with all her heart, but only in pretense.”

In spite of very simple requirements for repentance, some persons’ “soul conversion” can be quite shallow, especially by a weak rather than firm purpose of amendment. In the act of contrition, one says, “I firmly resolve, with the help of your grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.” Thus, the human will must sincerely intend to avoid future sin, even though one’s intellect knows that his or her future may not remain entirely sinless. There may be future failures in fulfilling this presently sincere intention, but presently those possible future failures must not be intended or planned.

The Bible outlines the simple requirements for true repentance: it is essentially an inward act—a mental act of regret and remorse for having offended our God who loves us with an unimaginable divine love. It is simply telling him sincerely that you regret having offended his infinite majesty. You may put it into the simple but heartfelt expression: "Dear God, I’m sorry!” The authenticating sign that one is truly sincere is shown by external behavioral changes, like avoiding as much as possible all morally dangerous situations, and by confessing one’s sins (James 5:16; Sirach 38:10). (For sins of injustice, like slander, fraud, cheating, stealing, property destruction, etc., restitution is required, if and when it is possible).

Repentance is such an awesome phenomenon that it reaches beyond earth and reverberates in echoes of joy in the very terrain of heaven itself, as Jesus reminds us in Luke 15:7: “I tell you that there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”

To make all of heaven’s citizens rejoice--it’s hard to imagine anything more awesome!