Repentance

It’s not a popular word, repentance, even in Christian circles.  All kinds of images come to mind when you think of it: a grown woman crawling on hands and knees on cold pavement for hundreds of yards as she approaches the steps of a Bolivian cathedral; loud and embarrassing wailing from overly-dramatic congregates during the invitational at a “Spirit-filled” church; guilt- and shame-ridden self-flagellation.  None of it sounds appealing, that’s for sure.

But the repentance I want to mention here is more of a fainting than anything else.  It’s a collapsing, a kind of falling down, under the weight of things.  But it’s falling down before the God who catches us.  It has to do with rest, with quietness, with trust (Isaiah 30:15), an coming-to-the-senses and embracing the reality that all these things we do apart from Christ, we really can’t do (John 15:4).  Even if they are good things for the Kingdom.

Over the last few months, I’ve been there, coming back to the heart of God and the salvation offered through Jesus.  (Once again, all kinds of things come to mind with the word salvation.  Here, I mean a rescue, a shouldering of burdens, a kind of brother-like sharing in the experience of living, and at the same time a restoration in the heart of reality — of my place with God and my role alongside Him.)  Back in April of this year, I wrote

Over the last couple of months, I have been in a journey of repentance, of returning back to the heart of God and His life in subtle ways, of re-orienting my heart back to Him. A re-consecration of my whole being to Him.

So, I guess it’s been more than just a couple of months that I’ve been on this journey back deeper into the heart of my Father.  And maybe it’s just an ongoing process.  Maybe our journey to God is better described as a constant return back to God.  I think this is how C.S. Lewis thought of it.

Lately, I have recognized areas where I have tried to go it on my own, resulting in three primary effects in my life: pride, unbelief, and idolatry.  Man, even laying them out there like that is painful.  It’s hard to see those thrown out there like that.  But there they are.

And here’s what I mean, in brief… When I am really burdened with something, I rarely go to God and lay down my burden fully and abandon it to Him and expecting in return for the exchange an increased intimacy with Him.  Instead, I hide from Him, and hide my burden from Him, ashamed that I am not strong enough to carry it… or, I will go to Him with my burden, pray about them, and then leave shouldering the same heavy loads (not having laid them down radically at his feet), still thinking I am supposed to be strong enough to shoulder them on my own:

Pride.

I am fearful that Jesus will not meet me where I am and bring me into intimacy with Himself, will not bring me to life:

Unbelief.

And so I choose instead to find some sense of strength in something else, typically for me a false idea that I am more spiritual than I really am.  And I have to portray that to others because instead of being able to find my identity and sense of validity in Jesus’ present and immediate love for me, I have to find it in what others think of me:

Idolatry.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  -Matthew 11:28-30

This is what I’m returning back to.  I’ve come to think that the invitation Jesus offers is radically different than what we often do.  It’s not enough for us to come to Him, hold up our weakness and weariness, and ask for Him to help us with it.  He’s asking more of that.  He’s asking that we completely abandon it, lay it down totally, so that we are free to enter into discipleship with Him (take His yoke).   We can’t demand that God do something about your burden.  We can’t even fret about it at all anymore, even to look at it.  We must instead fix your eyes on Him.  This is the command of Scripture, repeatedly (Hebrews 12:2, 12:3; Philippians 4:8; Psalm 34:5; Colossians 3:1; 1 Chronicles 16:11; Psalm 105:4; Psalm 123:2; Matthew 6:33; Psalm 37:4).  Only then will we understand that the truer story of our lives was never really about the burden to begin with, but rather about the intimate relationship between God and us.

Michael Warden, in The Transformed Heart, has written about this process.  We abandon our heart to His strength and to His life.  That’s repentance.  That’s rest.  That’s trust.  And in that act is our salvation.  It’s not about doing more; it’s not about doing at all.  It’s about collapsing into the strength and love of Christ.  Once we are free to join with Jesus in who He is and what He is about (taking His yoke, becoming His disciple), He will teach us not how to shoulder the burdens better (remember, we have completely forgotten about them), but rather He will teach us about Himself, and about where real life is found — the life we have been looking for all our lives and only mistakenly thought was somehow tied to our shouldering the weight of the world.

None of this is easy.  Man, I know that full well.  That’s why it’s taken me some time for God to pierce through my fear and defenses to bring me into this journey.  Like everyone, I have a host of burdens — hopes and dreams that I still strive for, pains and hurts I still run and hide from, a life I worry will collapse around me, day-to-day details I fear won’t go well, and the list goes on.  How is it that Jesus could possibly ask of me to abandon these things to Him?!  Abandon them?! Meaning, no longer even think of them?  Yet this is what Jesus is talking about when He says that if we seek to save our lives, we will lose them, but if we lose them for His sake, we will find them (Matthew 10:39).

And I think it’s a harder thing for many of us Christians who have been walking with God for some time, not because we don’t have experiences where He has come through on His word and shown Himself good — for certainly He has — but because we think we are supposed to be doing all this good stuff we have going on and that surely God has expected that we shoulder it.  I mean, He has given us all kinds of opportunities and ministries and we see all kinds of needs, so surely we are meant to carry it.

But to take His yoke upon ourselves is to enter into the kind of life Jesus lives and live it the way He lives it.  It’s to come alongside of Him and walk in step with Him in the same direction as Him.  And He is always about intimacy with the Father and the ransom of our hearts back to His.  Always, every time.  That’s His singular stance.

There’s been a shift in my own heart through the course of even the last few days.  Even the way I’m seeing things has changed.  I’d say things feel lighter, and that my orbit is changing a bit as I am gravitating back to Jesus as the source of my strength and joy.  I’m learning again to seek Him first and to delight in Him — meaning that all my attention and affection that would have otherwise been spent securing what I need to continue on is now spent on Him.  It’s only in that place of truly abiding in Him will we have life.  Only.  He says that, very explicitly.

for more, see The 12 Most Profound Ideas I Ever Had, George MacDonald’s Self Denial , and the last paragraph of Mere Christianity.