Skip to main content

Sorry Enough?


            Wednesday, February 22, is Ash Wednesday.  It marks the beginning of the season of Lent, which will climax on Easter Sunday.  Lent is comprised of the forty days (minus Sundays) before Easter. During this time the church fathers suggest believers prepare themselves for Easter in a way similar to Hebrew preparation for Passover.  It is suggested that Christians take on a Lenten fast.  The church colors change to purple which signifies repentance.
            What does it mean to repent?  God blessed me on my recent trip to Israel by seating me beside a religious Jewish woman who taught me a lot about my faith by sharing about hers.  She explained how she had been instructed about repentance.  She said there are three levels of confession before you experience true repentance. 
1.       Confess your sin.  She confesses her sins against God to God and her sins against people to people.  What if after brainstorming a list of your sins, you identify the sins against people and then call these same people to confess how you sinned?  She said that when we sin against another person we are sinning against God because people bear the image of God.
2.       Feel regret for your sin.  I easily do the first two levels of confession—except the confessing of my sins against my brother—I’m weaker on that point in level one of confession.  I do feel bad for the effect of my sin on others.  I don’t like this feeling.  I want to feel God’s forgiveness.  I’m eager for that.  This is often why I miss true repentance.  I don’t go to the third level of confession that leads to true repentance.
3.       Promise not to do it again.  Ok, well, I feel bad about my sin, but not to do it again?  Is that really necessary?  After all, I’ve got my sins narrowed down to the reasonably accepted by most Christians these days list.  And by the way, most of my repeat sins are against my husband, and really, can you expect me not to get mad at him again? 
TRUE REPENTANCE:  When God gives you the same situation or similar situation and you do not do it again—then you have experienced true repentance.
True repentance, that’s the place I rarely get to, but what repentance is actually about.  I do feel sorry for my sins, yet that is not enough.  I can feel as sorry as sorry can be but not really repent. 
As I enter into a new Lenten season, I want to bring my deeper understanding of the three levels of confession with me.  I want to move to that spiritual breakthrough of true repentance.  I want to realize what a spiritual victory it is to actually be empowered by God to not only confess my sin, not only feel sorry for my sin, not only promise not to do it again, but also to actually not do it again and praise and glorify God for that experience!

Copyright © 2012.  Deborah R. Newman www.teatimeforyoursoul.com   All Rights Reserved.   

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th

Lenten Devotions

First Monday in Lent: Lent—Winter/Spring I took a weekend Silent Lenten Retreat and learned how special the season of Lent (which means Spring) really is. Being in the lovely setting where winter-spring becomes its own season; I discovered that the transformation from winter to spring reveals the transformation of our souls in Lent. We had an absolutely gorgeous weekend to enjoy solitude with God. Lent is a perfect season to see in nature what God is drawing out of us through the spiritual disciplines we focus on through penitence and preparation for Easter. It is the in-between season that shows us a lot about what we are doing spiritually through our focus on confession. From a distance winter can seem stark and ugly. I feel the same way about confession. But if you take the time to see the winter you can see that the winter season reveals realities that get masked over by the growth of summer. In winter you become aware of what needs to be cleared away. In the same way the con

The Troubled Christian Life

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness.  I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit