- REPENT
rə'pent verb. Turn away from one’s current, usually sinful, behavior. - 2. Feel regret or express remorse about wrongdoing or sin.
Our culture has used the word repent to mean feeling bad. For centuries. For so long, you’re not gonna find the definition “turn away from one’s behavior” in most dictionaries. Even the Latin word repent is based on, re-paenitere, gets defined as “feel great penitence or sorrow.” When people repent, they feel bad for what they’ve done. Sometimes they bother to make amends, or try to. (Penitentiaries, annoyingly, have little about them anymore which involves making amends, community service, or good deeds in general.)
But the Christian definition comes from the Greek words we translate as “repent,” namely
So when Jesus first began to preach the gospel—
Mark 1.14-15 KWL - 14 After John’s arrest, Jesus went into the Galilee preaching God’s gospel, 15 saying this:
- “The time has been fulfilled. God’s kingdom has come near. Repent! Believe in the gospel!”
—he wasn’t telling the Galileans, “Feel really bad about what you’ve done, and believe in the gospel!” He was ordering them to stop what they were doing—good or bad—and come
Problem is, when Christians don’t understand the proper definition of repentance, we try to obey Jesus’s command by psyching ourselves into feeling bad.
Well we do suck big time sometimes. Sinfest
But after we’ve whipped ourselves into a lather (not literally, although you know Christians throughout history actually have done so literally) and got all the self-pity and self-condemnation out of our system, are we following Jesus any better? Or at all? Not usually. Nope; we go right back to
Because we gotta actually repent. We gotta quit doing as we’ve been doing, and follow Jesus into his kingdom.