REPENTANCE

Repentance means to change our attitude and mind towards God and sin. It is turning from our sinful wrong ways to God. When we refuse to repent of our sin we remain bound to it and it will ultimately destroy us.

The Romans sometimes compelled a captive to be joined face-to-face with a dead body, and to carry it about until the horrible rotting decay putrefaction destroyed the life of the living victim. Virgil describes this cruel punishment: ‘The living and the dead at his command were joined face to face, and hand to hand; Till choked with stench, in loathed embraces tied, The lingering wretches pined away and died.

Unless we repent of everything that is godless, evil and wrong, we are shackled to a dead corpse — our sin. Only repentance frees us from certain death, for life and death cannot coexist indefinitely.

If we are to genuinely repent we need to see sin for what it really is; a deadly destroyer worse than cancer that is determined to completely ruin us and damn us to hell. When we see this we will hate it with all our heart and ruthlessly deal with it. There was an African woman who returned to her hut one day to find a huge snake about to grab her sleeping baby. She exploded with anger and without thinking of her own safety she attacked that snake with a piece of wood until it was hardly recognisable. Until we hate our sin as much as that woman hated that snake, we probably will not truly repent of it. We will allow it to remain and do its destructive work in our lives and relationships.