OUR NEED FOR REPENTANCE

“Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me… The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.”  (Psalm 51:11,17)

Several qualities are no doubt missing from a good deal of religious experience as it is commonly known in our day, but perhaps nothing is more serious than our failure to see our need for repentance. I think this is partly because we don’t understand the nature of sin. If, as some contemporaries say, other generations were guilt obsessed, our generation today is expert in avoiding the sense of guilt. This is because we have so limited a theology of sin. We define sin by tabloid headlines, which give most of us a degree of comfort, since our sins are only occasionally dramatic. We don’t realize that sin, even as we experience it in its most pedestrian forms, is a violation of the very nature of our universe, a universe whose original core is utterly right because it is of God. We have a further handicap in that our theology of God is inadequate. Popular theology has made God so cozy and so accessible that we can’t understand why the Eternal One should be troubled by our erratic ways.

But above all, we fail at repentance because our friendship with God has so little passion. The Scriptures say that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s the language of passion, the language we generally reserve for moments of compelling romance or consuming friendship. It is only when God becomes such a friend -- yes, and far more, because the element of eternity enters into our friendship -- that we are struck with terror at the thought of losing this friendship. It is in such a mood that godly repentance is born. 

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas (1923-2015) in “Longing to Pray: How the Psalms Teach Us to Talk with God”

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