Repentance and Transformation

Published on January 04, 2010 by Stephen Leung

Do you remember Kurt quoting from Steve Brown in a recent sermon this following proposal: http://stevebrownetc.com/blogs/the-old-white-guy-blog/what-do-you-think-about-my-proposal/? Do you not think it would be helpful?  I have found that being able to be honest with “hurts, habits, and hang-ups” in our Celebrate Recovery large group meetings to be tremendously helpful.  But, I have to add one clarification.  Steve Brown reported how the group responded to each person’s introduction with “God loves you anyway.”  At the G&P CR, we start off by stating who we are (in Christ) before talking about our struggles (with various sins).  It’s important to recognize both.  So, are you a saint or a sinner?  Are you merely a sinner saved by grace?  Are you a sinner whom God loves anyway – is that the gospel?  If you are a saint, are you without sin?

I realize that to pick up the Gospel Transformation material in the middle of the workbook (in unit 3 without first covering unit 2) could give us the impression that we are denying that we are sinners or that we sin.  I trust that we realize that living in the “cycle of faith” with an emphasis on understanding our true identity in Christ (as a saint and a child of the Father because of Christ’s righteousness and the Father’s delight in him), does not mean that we deny that we still sin.  We are already free from the culpability and penalty of sin, but we are still being freed from the power of sin.  We have been made over from old creatures to new creations (2 Cor 5:17), but we still mortify continuously our sinful nature through Jesus Christ (Rom 7:21ff.)  We are saints who still sin, but our sin and our sinning is not our identity! 

Still, God loves us just the way we are and loves us too much to let us stay that way.  We really are his, and God doesn’t treat that lightly.  Yes, we are glorious ruins.  But, God is not just in the business of retrieving.  He’s in the business of restoring.  That is why repentance is so important.  In God’s economy, genuine repentance accompanying faith sets us up to live as we were meant to live.  It would be good for us to really get into the importance of turning to God as God regularly invited his people to do in the Old Testament (in places like Psalm 147:6, Prov 28:13, Isa 57:15, and Jer 15:19).  But, I know some who will ask: “what about the New Testament” and “doesn’t repentance and faith in Jesus change things?”  Well, if the idea is: “I repented once and believed once, so that should take care of it ‘once for all’” that actually misses the point.  First of all, it was God’s people in the OT (justified by faith – looking forward to the promised Messiah) who were regularly called to repentance.  Second, God’s people (justified by faith) are called to regular repentance in the New Testament.  1 John 1:9, James 4:6, and Rev 2:5 were written to believers like you and me.  Remember also what we are told in 1 John 1:8: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”  We are saints who sin regularly, and so we repent regularly – agreeing with God about who we are and what we do. 

(Theological) postscript:  John Calvin, of whom you may have heard, described early in his Institutes how knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves are joined together.  (In other words, you do not begin to understand God rightly until you rightly understand yourself.  Conversely, you do not rightly understand yourself, until you rightly understand God.  It has also been pointed out that in Books I and II of the Institutes, Calvin methodically writes about God as creator and us as created, and then God as redeemer and us as redeemed.  Books III and IV flow out of what is established in the first two books.  It is of interest then, if you go to Book III, chapter 3, parts 9 through 20 that Calvin details the place and primacy of repentance throughout our lives as believers.  Repentance is essentially the renewal of God’s image in us.