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Repenting at Advent

Peter F. Whyte, 14 Dec 2008

What is at the heart of Christmas? Is it presents, turkey, tinsel, or carols? Could it be something more serious altogether? Like sin? Yes, sin!

Does that strike you as bizarre? Or extreme? Or just a bit too much like Scrooge, wanting to spoil the enjoyment of Christmas?

But isn't it true that at the heart of Christmas is a baby boy called Jesus. He wasn't called Jesus for nothing. His mother was told what to call him by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:31). And when Mary and Joseph came to give him a name a week after he was born, they called him Jesus (Luke 2:21). But they knew the reason why the angel had given them that name. Joseph was told plainly in a dream that Mary “will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21).

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So you see, Christmas is all about sin after all — your sin, and mine. Jesus came to do something about our sin, he came to die for it. God had declared sin a capital crime, so an execution was required (Ezekiel 18:4). Because Jesus was completely without sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), since he was God incarnate (God become truly and totally human), he was able to die on our behalf for our sin. And God is prepared to accept Jesus' death as ours, that we might live.

But the benefits of Christ's death do not come automatically to each of us. We need to do exactly what Jesus himself announced at the start of his public teaching ministry — “Repent!” (Matthew 4:17). Repent is not a word we use much today, but it's an important Christmas word if we are ever to make sense of Christmas.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer explained it this way: “Repentance is ultimate honesty.” And Irish author C. S. Lewis declared, “Repentance is no fun at all. It is something harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years.” According to Al Martin, it is nothing less than “the soul's divorce from sin”.

We need to recognize we have sinned against God, admit that sin to him, and, with his help, forsake it completely, trusting only in the death of Christ to deal with our sin. Yes, repentance has a positive aspect. The Apostle Paul told the new Christians at Salonika that they had “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9). Our own selfish, sinful desires are to be replaced by a new wholesome desire to serve God, and him alone.

Jesus' message to you this Christmas is, “Repent!” It is an urgent command. “You cannot repent too soon, because you do not know how soon it may be too late.” (Thomas Fuller)

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