"REPENTANCE: Begin Your Spiritual Fitness Program with This Exercise"

As we enter into the season of Lent, we begin this morning a series of messages entitled, "Forty Days to Spiritual Fitness." In our world today, we hear and see and read lots of marketing about the need for and benefits of physical fitness...yet it takes only a quick look around at our world - and at our lives - to see that what we are even more desperately in need of is spiritual fitness.

Lent is traditionally a time of spiritual discipline and spiritual exercises. Athletes tone up and train their bodies through a regimen of special exercises which not only discipline the body but the mind as well. Lent is a good time to get serious about a regular program of spiritual exercises.

Just as we are always cautioned to "see your physician before beginning any new program of exercise," this morning we seek advice from the Great Physician - Jesus - on how we are to begin our spiritual fitness program. And like most doctors, what He has to say may not be exactly what we want to hear. "Repent and believe the good news!"

"Repent!" Now there's a word that conjures up your worst nightmares of tent revival preachers and sanctimonious priests pontificating from on high! Yikes! "Repent!" is a word that has been used to bring fear and guilt into the open hearts of far too many. Lots of people in this room today have been on so many guilt trips in church that you should have been getting frequent crier miles! But Jesus came to bring life, and guilt is nothing but a spiritual killer.

Some sociologists report that there are tribes in Africa where, ifa member does something wrong, the witch doctor performs a Death Dance. He carries a death bone and points it at the guilty person. The person falls over as if dead from the shock of having the death bone pointed at them. Leaders isolate the person and the entire tribe is forbidden to speak to them again. Their physical needs are met but that's all, and they usually die in less than six weeks from the guilt and hopelessness.

How many people have died spiritually from misuse and misunderstanding of the word, "repent?" How many so-called "spiritual leaders" - sometimes our cultural equivalent of the witch doctor - have pointed the "death bone" at people, banishing them to the isolation of guilt and hopelessness? Far too many from what I have seen. Far too many from what all of us know.

Fortunately, Jesus Christ is in the business of resurrection! In Christ, what was dead can yet live. What was lost can still be found. What was stolen and destroyed can be returned and made new in all of us! Hear, in full, what Jesus said: "Repent and believe the good news!"

The most frequently used Hebrew word for "repent" literally means "to turn." Most of us have seen those bumper stickers that say, "God allows U-turns." In fact, God encourages them! If we are traveling in a direction that is moving us away from God's presence and purposes in our lives, we can turn around.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel awoke one morning to read his own obituary in the local newspaper: "Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died yesterday, devised a way for more people to be killed in a war than ever before, and he died a very rich man." Actually, it was Alfred's older brother who had died; a reporter had bungled the announcement.

But seeing those words in print had a profound effect on Nobel. He decided he wanted to be known for something other than developing the means to kill people efficiently and amassing a fortune in the process. So he initiated the Nobel Prize, the award for scientists and writers who foster peace. Nobel said, "Every person ought to have the chance to correct their epitaph in midstream and write a new one."

In Jesus Christ, God offers us the chance to turn the course of our lives in a new direction. And I'm not talking about our sexual orientation. That's like being told to "repent" from being left-handed or brown-eyed! (Some people have tried to enforce that in history, too...and that never worked either!) I'm talking about "turning around" from our self-loathing...from our selfishness...from our fear and denial and escapism. I'm talking about turning around from our love of things and shallow satisfactions and turning toward the face of God found in Jesus Christ. To "re-turn" to the One who first loved us and who still loves us and wants us to know that love and to understand that love and to live out that love in our own lives.

There is a difficulty in repentance. Really looking into the face of Christ forces us to look into a truth-telling mirror that reflects our genuine selves and will show us what we have allowed ourselves to become. But that mirror does not represent a "death bone" pointed at us but an invitation placed before us to find healing and renewal and the promise that we can be better than we have ever been before.

A couple of weeks ago on a T.V. news show, I saw a segment about some police officers in Vancouver, Canada who have done something really miraculous with some drug addicts living on the streets in that city. Changes in drug laws there had focused law enforcement on seeking out and arresting primarily drug dealers and had taken much of the emphasis off arresting someone simply for being under the influence of drugs. In a particularly seedy area of the city there were many, many homeless addicts who simply "hung out" all the time, living from fix to fix. Many of the police officers patrolling that area on foot came to know these people on a first name basis.

A group of these officers decided that, rather than ignoring or harassing these people, they would try to use their terrible stories to help others. They began interviewing some of these addicts and filming the interviews and some of their daily activities on video-tape. The idea was to use the films in lectures to young people for education on prevention. A bit ot`a "scare" tactic to show the realities that can follow the initial glamour of drug use.

The films showed people in their 30s and 40s who had been on the streets for years. Dirty. Sick. Exhibiting the most bizarre behaviors and, in coherent moments, lamenting their situations and making empty promises about getting clean "soon." But several of the addicts wanted to know more about what the officers were doing. They wanted to see the tapes ofthemselves. When they saw, from the objective eye of the camera, what their lives had become, some of them were actually shocked into asking for help. They entered re-hab. The segment included interviews with these people after they had "gotten clean."

The change was incredible. They were clean, well-groomed, articulate, feeling people with the capacity for self-esteem and for moral standards. They were not human garbage. Even when they were on the streets they had not been human garbage. But they needed to encounter their own deepest realities in order to pull their lives out of the garbage can into which they had been mistakenly thrown.

When we turn and look into the face of Jesus, we will be asked to see ourselves in truth and we may experience the pain of remorse for some of what our lives have brought us. But we can "get clean" - we can turn back and experience a renewal. Not a renewal in who we love but a renewal of knowing Who really loves us! And in the truth of that love we can find transformation and resurrection for our lives.

"Repent and believe the good news!" The Greek word for "repent" - metanoia - literally means "a change of mind." Jesus came proclaiming "good news" that encouraged all people to "change their minds" about God. The ancient God that people had always known - and that many religions still proclaim today - was an impersonal, demanding, judging, punishing god. In Christ we experience a "change of mind" that reveals God to be closer to us than the beating of our hearts...not demanding but giving freely of God's own self...offering forgiveness and securing eternal life. That's the God Christ is calling us to accept. When we accept and get to know that God, our minds and hearts and lives will naturally change. C.S. Lewis wrote, "Repentance is not something God demands of you before God will take you back and which God could let you off of if God chose; it is simply a description ofwhat going back is like."

"Repent" doesn't have to be a death bone of guilt and hopelessness. Hear all of what Jesus says, "Repent and believe the good news!" Letting Christ lead us gently into a place of change can be the most freeing and life-giving experience we've ever had. As one quote I read said, "When the soul has laid down its faults at the feet of God, it feels as though it had wings."

Remember...what Jesus wants us to do is not just turn away from the bad things in our lives but turn toward the good news of God. Jesus came preaching good news of truth...and hope...and peace...and promise - of immortality and salvation. For us to really achieve spiritual fitness this lenten season we must be willing to begin with this first and most important exercise: "repent and believe the good news!" Amen.

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