WHO NEEDS REPENTANCE ANYWAYS? I CAN DO WHAT I WANT! ~ A Study in Jeremiah

I remember having a conversation with a woman in prison who had been raised in the church. I was explaining church discipline to her. She said, “You don’t believe in that, do you?” I said, “Well, of course I do. It is scriptural, isn’t it? I not only believe in it, I love it and wish more churches practiced it! If they did, we’d have stronger, healthier churches.” She said, “Well, there would be nobody left in the church! I think it’s a hateful thing used by the church to make people tow the line.” When I got done explaining to her the purpose of church discipline, she said, “Wow! I wish someone had explained that to me earlier because that is beautiful. I never saw it from that perspective.” The purpose of repentance is always to restore…first to restore fellowship with God that is broken when one is walking in rebellion, then with His body. The things we do and the things our brothers and sisters do that break God’s heart should break our own hearts as well. When someone forces us to view our sin from God’s perspective, we should be quick to return to the Lord seeking His forgiveness.

 

As I was preparing, pondering, and praying over this blog post, a couple things hit me even more forcefully than they have in the past few months. I am only into the third chapter of the book of Jeremiah, and the dominant theme of repentance cannot be missed. Nobody could miss it! But what must come with it is this idea of ‘returning’. Repentance is not just about turning from sin…it is turning from sin back to the Lord who loves us with an everlasting love. I have watched the numbers wildly fluctuate regarding the people who are checking out my blog since its inception, and I have noticed something. Before I tell you what that is, I want to make something clear: This blog is my way of staying in the Word and sharing with other ladies what I am learning, which has been my passion for a very long time. My other passion is writing. I started this blog because I wanted to fine-tune and sharpen my writing skills. Having said that, the numbers do not mean much to me either way. It has been interesting to see what matters to my readers. My most popular blog post was the first one I wrote which was meant to give encouragement in the light of Covid-19. Many posts after that one talking about fear and anxiety were also popular but not as popular as the posts about my personal life. Why do I say all this?

 The book of Jeremiah is a hard book. I seem to be living out some of its truths personally as I walk through its pages. (Funny how that often happens!) What I see literally everywhere is the message, “Repent!” Judah, God’s own people, were literally being called to ‘Repentance’ every time God’s prophet opened his mouth to speak for Him. The church in America is so much like Judah that it should cause us to…repent and return! I am extremely grateful and blessed that the Lord has drawn me to sound teachers and men whom I consider to be great men of the faith as they stand firm in their convictions not deviating from the message of the Gospel. But they are not the majority. Think with me for a moment. Today…in this crazy year of 2020, if there was a prophet walking throughout our land, visiting our churches, proclaiming this message of repentance, and hammering it home week after week, what do you think would happen? First, the message would empty most churches; and second, the man might just be executed to shut him up. In all my years growing up, that would have been a stretch (the part about being executed, at least), but not today. Jeremiah’s feet were firmly planted in obedience to his Lord and Master. He was not going anywhere. There was nowhere Judah could hide from him because it was God speaking through him, and God could see everything they were doing, even their very hearts.

Imagine a man with this sort of passion and drive to be found faithfully obedient. He is thundering out words of judgment and crying at the drop of a hat manifesting what was in God’s own heart. I am sure he looked and sounded crazy to the people. But he was not crazy! He was the Lord’s man of the hour.

And the LORD said to me, “Faithless Israel has proved herself more righteous than treacherous Judah.” (Jeremiah 3:11) This is literally, ‘backsliding Israel’ and ‘treacherous Judah’. The ten tribes of Israel had been in captivity for approximately 100 years. Judah had enjoyed God’s blessings after having witnessed what had happened to Israel. But that was the problem. She had it too good…just like us. Taking God for granted in her bountiful blessings, she betrayed her Husband. Judah was far more guilty than Israel. How does this apply to the church today?

Judah should have looked at the example of God’s dealings with Israel and learned from it. The church has the complete revelation of God’s Word and knows how God sees idolatry and its consequences. Yet idols abound even in the professing church. Judah had better access to the temple and center of true worship. The church in our country has experienced unfettered freedom to worship and be involved in the ministry of local church bodies for centuries. Christians have had the witness of Christ’s first coming, the benefit of having godly men preach to them from the completed canon of Scripture, not to mention the resident Holy Spirit, who is our teacher. And we have the gall to read about Israel and Judah and judge them? Oh, how deeply should be our repentance in the light of our great blessings! If we do not see ourselves in the face of these pages as much more culpable for our sin, we have missed the boat entirely! Heaven help the Church today.

Israel was guilty of severe idolatry. Judah, however, was treacherous in that she was guilty of idolatry and putting on a pretense of repentance. She was a hypocrite and had presumed upon the Lord’s mercy. (I can do whatever I want, the Lord will forgive me.) That was to thumb her nose at God’s holiness and His love. God was saying that Israel almost appeared as though she were innocent in comparison to Judah. So, the Lord turns again to Israel and pleads with her to turn back to Him.

 

Go and proclaim these words toward the north and say, ‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the LORD; ‘I will not look upon you in anger. For I am gracious,’ declares the LORD; ‘I will not be angry forever.’ (Jeremiah 3:12)

 

The ultimate loving Husband pleads with His wife to return to Him. He will restore her. Why? Not because He can overlook her sin, not because He needs her in some pathetic way, and not because He has just succumbed to giving in to her ways. He is not saying, “You can live anyway you want; just come back to Me.” Never! This is holy, holy, holy God Almighty! He is pleading for her to come back to Him based on His character. He can restore her because He is a gracious God. She may be faithless, but He is faithful. And He will be faithful to forgive her. He is kind, excellent, merciful, and gracious. Psalm 145:17—The LORD is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His deeds. Gracious in Jeremiah 3:12 is the same word as kind in Psalm 145. Though Israel had not been kind in all her deeds, God is faithful to His character. We can always count on God to be true to how He has revealed Himself to us in His Word. Micah 7:18—Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love. The anchor of God’s love on the restless sea of our lives is steady and sure, able to hold us firmly secure in any storms of life. Unchanging love is goodness, kindness, faithfulness. It is sometimes called lovingkindness, a covenant word.

 

Christians sin. Yet, how great a percentage of the modern church will pass over teaching regarding repentance? Either they think they don’t need it (been there done that!) or they hate the idea of what it means for them to repent from their sin (they like their lives just fine, thank you very much!). If we truly knew our own hearts, we would savor these passages and teaching about the lovingkindness of God towards us in repentance as much as we do the love of God! This is about offending God. But we’re all about the passages that reveal God’s blessings to us! We’re always about what pleases us instead of what pleases God. How many will see a title of a message having to do with sin or repentance and think, “Oh, that doesn’t pertain to me; I repented back in 1979. I’m good. But I should show this to so and so who really needs it!” I question that sort of profession of faith. We sin. We live in a wicked world in a body of flesh. We sin in our thoughts, our motives, and our actions. Therefore, we need to repent and return often. I should be able to quickly recognize when my heart is not right. Sometimes, though, it has been such a slow drift into a sinful pattern, that my sin can be only revealed through a faithful brother or sister in Christ who does see it for what it is. Does the Lord require we just offer up a quick, ‘I’m sorry, Lord,’ then go on our merry way? No. The Lord has not changed. He is unchanging love.

 

Here is the promise we all know: 1 John 1:9—"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” A couple of verses earlier, John had said, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if we walk in the Light as He Himself is in the Light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Anyone who habitually (as a pattern or lifestyle) walks in darkness (falsehood and sin), they do not have fellowship with Him, no matter what they believe or say. We were all born with a sin nature. Remnants of our flesh remain until we are glorified. To say we have no sin is deception coming from the fact that the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins…is a present active subjunctive verb. It is used of that which the subject of the verb expects us or wants us to do. It has the idea of continuation or repetition, as ongoing or repeated.

 

What does it mean to confess our sin? It means to say the same thing about sin as God does or to acknowledge His perspective about it. What is the promise for those who confess their sin? God is continually cleansing those who are confessing. There must be a general attitude of understanding our own wretched state before Him and the grace and kindness that was shown to us in our great salvation. We must know that we have a dire need for God’s cleansing and forgiveness always. The recognition of our sorry state should be growing as we grow in maturity—not diminishing. The longer we walk with Christ we should become more like Him in meekness and humility—not smug, arrogant, and proud. Sanctification is the growth process whereby we become more like Christ. What does maturity look like? Christ, the mature man, God who became flesh and dwelt among us. As we mature, we are quick to forgive, but that also does not mean that we do not seek to restore by holding sin accountable. God said He would restore faithless Israel…

 

 ‘Only acknowledge your iniquity, that you have transgressed against the LORD your God and have scattered your favors to the strangers under every green tree, and you have not obeyed My voice,’ declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 3:12-13) God wanted them to confess their sin naming it for what it was so they would understand its gravity. When we say, “Lord, I have sinned against You. I was disobedient to Your Word when I…”, we are acknowledging that He is Lord of our lives. Nothing reveals the heart of someone quicker than their reaction to a call for repentance. We need the body of Christ to hold us accountable to things in our lives that are not honoring or pleasing to God. Why? Because our flesh tends to rationalize our desires and our lusts, and we end up calling evil good and good evil. The next time someone comes to you, out of love for God and for you, asking you to examine some sort of behavior in your life that is not pleasing to God, how will you respond? Will you be quick to hear, turn from your sin, and return to the Lord in repentance? Or will you be like faithless Israel and treacherous Judah who dug in their heels in their rebellion and turned on the messenger because they hated the message and the One from whose heart of love it originated?