Repent
In Luke’s gospel Jesus said, “… Unless you repent, you too will all perish” (see Luke 13:2-9). That was Jesus’ word to the devout who wanted to know. We believe this is Jesus’ word to us in this generation. Unless we cultivate a deeply repentant spirit, we will not become the holy and loving people He calls us to be, and we will not reflect the beauty of Jesus to a broken and scarred world. Apart from such repentance, we will be of little use in the Father’s ongoing search for the cherished missing, and we will not participate in, nor be agents of, the kingdom Jesus brings wherever He is welcomed.
We conclude our address with an invitation to enter into the kind of repentance that will align us with what God wants to do in our churches and conferences across the nation. We have not been as faithful and fruitful as Jesus calls us to be. Therefore, we repent.
We repent for:
• Failing to take seriously the Word of God and, worse, taming that Word to fit our North American culture and thus too often conforming to the socio-economic status quo.
Here are two illustrative sets of questions:
First, why is it that as discretionary income has risen for most North Americans in general (not all but most), including many long-time members of the FMC, per member giving still has not risen, but has actually decreased so that often funds on hand for kingdom ministry are inadequate? How could this happen at the same time we strenuously insist that the Bible is our ultimate authority?
Second, if a group of FM folk were to discuss issues of war and peace, would it have anything different to say from what could be heard at a political party caucus? And would what is said and the way it is said, clearly reflect the spirit of Jesus? Wherever such domestication of God’s word happens, we repent!
We repent for:
• Embracing a form of godliness but denying its power, precisely at the point of our holiness message. Our legalism that professed a concern for holy living, but choked us into Pharisaic modes neither holy nor loving, hindered instead of helped people find their way home to God — such legalism we repudiate. We have professed to care deeply about what James calls pure and faultless religion that God our Father accepts, and have delighted in scrupulously protecting our selves from the pollution of the world, but failed to care for the orphans and widows with the same, or any, intensity. We have cared deeply about sins that can be seen—e.g., some of the more obvious addictions of the day, but have sometimes accommodated sins that cannot be seen (anger, pride and greed). We repent!
We repent for:
• Grieving the Holy Spirit by limiting His work among and through us. Out of fear we have disdained or rejected His mighty presence and power in any form that was uncomfortable and unconventional to us. Over the years our fearful responses to some people’s openness to the Spirit and to their honest experiences with the Spirit, have stifled them or driven them away. And, in the process, we have unwittingly sent away God’s blessings. We repent!
We repent for:
• Failing to focus on the priorities of the kingdom — seeking His kingdom first, reaching in love to those outside His family, championing His causes for the good of all — and instead focusing on other matters of personal and local congregational interest. Most of us know about churches that have hesitated to offer their facilities to assist drug recovery programs, provide shelter for the homeless or welcome the displaced — primarily or only because they might make a mess of our facilities.
We repent!
We repent for:
• Expressing impatience and arrogance by trying to make the church grow by human strategies and strength, and then taking pride in our own accomplishments. We have sometimes felt more frustration and impatience at being small, in decline and of little significance relative to other churches and ministries, than we have felt grief over the potential loss of people who are cherished by our Father in heaven and missing from His household. We repent!
We repent for:
• Turning from counting the cost to weighing the relative benefits of following Jesus, and thus failing to embrace Jesus’ way of self-sacrificing love. Some people have traded in a life of cross bearing — where one’s way of daily living reflected a radical yes to Jesus — for decals, bumper stickers and tee shirts that proudly display a fish with the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on it. Wherever such a trade occurs among us, we repent!
We repent for:
• Assuming the position of a privileged insider in the things of God, superior to outsiders, rather than offering ourselves as instruments (servants) of God’s rescuing reach toward others.
We repent for:
• Allowing fear to keep us from doing what God calls us to do, in particular, abandoning our heritage of a gospel for the poor. These things of which we repent are among the most grievous aspects of our status quo that impede a full appropriation of God’s grace for our time. Now, your list may not correspond exactly to ours; you may include things we have omitted or may delete things we have included. We could discuss or debate the list. But let’s not go there. Instead please discern the spirit behind the list. Why would we even compose it? Because we earnestly desire the fullness of grace and the fullness of the Spirit God has promised. We puzzle over the awesome demonstrations of God’s power in other branches of the Free Methodist family. We who have so many advantages, so many different kinds of resources readily available — and yet, the most abundant fruitfulness occurs in other places. Can we learn from our sisters and brothers? Could we follow their lead in repentance and faith, in profound turning toward, and dependence on, God? Not to produce something, or to prove something, but to please the One who loved us and gave Himself for us and for all, and who now wants to share His joy with us — the joy of loving people into a kingdom way of life (one more soul at a time, then another, and another and another)! And so, we invite you to join us in repentance and faith in obedient submission to God.
Revelation Repentance passages
Jesus calls the churches to repentance. 2:5 Ephesus – Left their first love – repent and do what you did at first. 2:16 Pergamum – Some held to false teaching. 2:21 Thyatira – Jezebel who refused to repent, 3:3 Sardis – Sleeping spiritually – need to wake up – remember what you have seen and heard and repent. Laodicea – thought they had need of nothing – false pride – be zealous and repent. Those the Lord loves he reproves and disciplines.
Those who do not repent reap horrific destruction