Early Wednesday morning is a special day for me. Every Wednesday morning for the past 15 years or so I attend a Bible study with some godly leaders in our community. I know this might be shocking, but I’m the youngest in the group. Despite that fact, they have allowed me to serve as a co-leader over the years, a position I take very seriously. It has been a privilege to watch these men lead their organizations with grace and the truth of God’s Word, and I have learned so much from them.
This morning we were studying Nehemiah 7 through 9. Through the strong, Spirit-led leadership of Nehemiah, the people of Israel returning from Babylonian captivity have rebuilt the walls surrounding their city. Ezra the priest has discovered the long-lost Law of Moses, the Pentateuch, and he is reading it to the people, who have never heard it before. God uses this moment of revelation to revive the hearts of the Israelites, and revival brings with it repentance, as it almost always does.
- W. Tozer said that “When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation. The fear of consequences is no deterrent when the fear of God is gone.” Throughout Scripture, the people of Israel fall into a recurring pattern, one that characterizes God’s dealings with them. They face prosperity, and they forget Him. They no longer fear Him, meaning respecting His holiness to the extent that they live lives of obedience to Him. They therefore fall into disobedience and lawlessness. God disciplines them, typically through economic failure or other nations, like, in this case, the Babylonians conquering and taking them captive. The Israelites repent, and God, in His mercy and goodness, relents, bringing them back to Him. Where the cycle repeats itself again.
The same thing that happens to the Israelites happens to us. God sheds His grace on us continually, His special grace through the saving blood of Jesus, but also His general grace to all people, whether they know Him or not. We may enjoy seasons of prosperity. Generally, however, in those seasons of prosperity we tend to forget about God. It would be so great if we would just continually give Him praise when He gives us good things, continually staying faithful to Him, continually holding Him in reverent fear and being holy. But we typically don’t.
I don’t really know fully why we don’t generally remain steadfast in prosperity, except for the fact that we live in a sinful world, and that, even for followers of Jesus, the “old man” of our sinful natures makes us complacent. But it’s most likely the reason why Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are those who mourn.” It’s most likely why the Preacher tells us that “sorrow is better than laughter” in Ecclesiastes: we just remain closer to the Lord and press into Him more when we’re struggling through a trial than when things are generally going well. Closer to the Lord and pressing into Him is where He wants us to be, where we most find joy.
Yet, when we stray, when we are “prone to wander” as the old hymn says, God is always good and gracious enough to bring us to our knees again, even when the mechanism by which we’re brought there doesn’t always feel like goodness and grace. It may be illness, or a lost job, or an election that doesn’t go “our” way, or the passing of a loved one, or marital or other relational difficulties. In that moment, we have a choice. We can blame God and others. We can find some way to self-medicate the pain. Or, we can look in the mirror and say, “What did I do to get myself here? In what ways have I fallen short of God’s heart? What have I turned a blind eye toward? What have I said that was okay was not okay?”
This is the heart of repentance. We have an amazing propensity for self-deception, denying the Holy Spirit when He pricks our conscience through life’s circumstances. But if we do deny Him, the next time we won’t feel the prick as quickly and intensely. After long enough, we won’t feel it at all.
Repentance is confessing to God our sin, our denial, our failure to see what we should have seen. It’s turning back to God, falling upon the grace of Jesus, and realizing that we can’t just “do better next time.” Doing better next time means falling into the same cycle of stupidity that befell the Israelites. Instead, it means trusting that through the power of the grace of Jesus’ blood and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, the Lord will give me a new heart and a new mind, that He’ll use this moment and all the ones that follow after that to change me, not to make me perfect, but to make me closer to it, to that day when all of these struggles will be no more. To make me a little more holy and a little more obedient.
If and when God brings these moments into my life, I never want to waste them. I want to see them for what they are: opportunities for holiness. And I want to pray for humility, not to blame others, but to examine myself. How can I develop a heart inclined toward repentance so that when (not if) I deviate from God’s plans and purposes for me, He only has to gently nudge me, not hit me with a train, to drive me toward confession and turning back to Him?
I’m grateful that my Father loves me enough to bring challenges and trials into my life as opportunities for repentance. The worst thing He could do would be to give me all the prosperity I wanted. I pray I won’t waste the opportunities He so lovingly provides.
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