Turn again
The break of repentance
The most ordinary and most necessary break in the whole Christian life is the one we call repentance, and the word itself is plainer than our solemn feelings about it. To repent is to turn: to break off the direction you were walking and face the other way. Peter stands at Solomon's porch and tells the crowd that this turning is not a punishment but a doorway. Repent, he says, and turn again, so that your sins may be blotted out and times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. The turning opens onto refreshing; it is the way back into the presence, not the price of admission to it. And the invitation reaches all the way back through the prophet Joel, flung wide and urgent: even now, says the LORD, turn to me with all your heart. Even now. Not once you have cleaned yourself up, not after you have earned the right, but now, in the middle of the wrong direction, the turn is open. The break of repentance is the one break that is never too late to make.
“Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that so there may come times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.”
— Peter, at Solomon's porch — Acts 3:19 (WEB)
“Even now, says the LORD, turn to me with all your heart, with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning.”
This is Disconnect in its daily, homely form: the break of repentance, turning around. The phase does not always arrive as upheaval; here it is the small, constant turn away from a wrong direction and back toward God. It asks the one thing it always asks, that you let go of where you were headed.
The break you most need may not be dramatic at all. It may simply be to turn around. We make repentance heavier than God does, picturing it as groveling, as a long sentence of self-punishment we have to serve before we are allowed back. It is nothing of the kind. Repentance is the clean disconnect from a direction that was quietly killing you and the turn back toward the One who was there the whole time. And notice, every time, what it opens onto: not condemnation but refreshing, the cool relief of the presence you had wandered out of. The word even now is the most important word in it.
Whatever you have done, however long you have walked the wrong way, however many times you have walked it before, the turn is still open to you this minute. You do not have to arrive somewhere first. That is the whole of it, and it is never, ever too late.
The Church is renewed not by strategy first but by repentance, by turning back together from the wrongs it has learned to excuse. The call through the prophet Joel was flung to a whole people, to rend the heart and not the garments and return to the LORD, the language of a corporate turning and not merely a private one. Whenever the wider Body has owned its compromises and turned again, times of refreshing have come from the presence of the LORD, and renewal has followed the repentance rather than the program. The recurring upheavals of Church history are, at their healthiest, exactly this: not first a reinvention but a turning, the whole Church facing back toward the God it had drifted from. The invitation stands open even now. It is never too late for the Church to turn.
What cannot be shaken is the mercy that meets every turning. Our wrong directions, our long detours, our repeated failures are all shakable and can all be blotted out. The God who waits at the end of the turn, ready with refreshing rather than reproach, is unshakable, and His invitation stands open even now.
- What direction am I walking that I already know I need to turn from?
- Have I made repentance heavier than God does, treating it as punishment rather than a doorway to refreshing?
- What is the even now in my life, the wrong way I have assumed is too long or too late to leave?
Lord, I have made repentance heavier than You ever did and stayed on a wrong road because turning felt like too much. Thank You that the turn is open even now. I turn back to You with all my heart. Meet me, as You promised, with refreshing. Amen.