Spirituality Column #814

June 21, 2022

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Change for the Better

By Bob Walters

“Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” – Peter, Christianity’s first sermon, Acts 2:38

Newly empowered by the Holy Spirit on the first “Christian” Pentecost, the Apostle Peter outlined in no uncertain terms the good news / bad news dynamic of recent events regarding Jesus Christ.

The Good News Peter declared back in verse 21, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

The bad news, Peter recites in verse 36: Israel had had the true Lord and Savior Messiah sent by God, i.e., Jesus, crucified.

Ancient scripture, prophecy, and the very teaching of the Lord and human Jesus notwithstanding, many in Israel hearing Peter speak that day suddenly realized they had been party to the mistake of all mistakes: they had killed God.

Now, we needn’t panic, because the perfect sacrifice of Jesus at Passover was God’s necessary vehicle for sinful man’s salvation into heaven and restoration to eternal relationship with God; Jesus died and came back.  Jesus was the light of truth for mankind; He came from God, for God, and as God and man to renew our hearts and minds in this life.  His sacrifice freed us from the despair of death and shackles of sin.

By His resurrection, Jesus assured us our lives would go on … with God.

Jesus ascended to the right hand of God 40 days after His resurrection.  Fifty days after the fateful Passover that saw Jesus crucified, came the great festival of Pentecost commemorating messenger Moses bringing God’s Law down from Mount Sinai.  This time, just as Jesus promised, God sent another, divine, game-changing and now final messenger to earth: the Holy Spirit, to indwell and lead believers like Peter.

Pentecost often drew larger crowds than Passover anyway, and recent events gave the newly indwelt Peter an especially huge audience. Imagine the buzz.  All knew of the crucifixion; many had seen Jesus alive and days earlier rise to heaven. Peter’s charge to the assembled believers, semi-believers, and non-believers who – now realizing fully what they had done in killing Jesus – pled with Peter, “What shall we do?”

Full of the Holy Spirit, Peter commanded, “Repent, and be baptized.”

Our modern knee-jerk reaction upon hearing the word “repent” is to apologize for our sin.  We consider “repent” to be an expression of regret and a promise to “do better.”  Hence, we make Christianity all about our behavior.  But Jesus tells us plainly and often that our life in Christ requires the re-wiring of our thoughts to understand, identify, and love Jesus Christ as the Son of God. God wants our hearts and minds.

“Repent,” when you look at the Aramaic and Greek, doesn’t mean, “Change your behavior.”  “Repent,” in Greek metanoia actually means, “Change your thinking.”

Unhelpfully, every modern dictionary search I found cites “repent” tightly linked to sin, regret, guilt, shame, apology, and an intent to shape up.  What Peter was preaching in the Holy Spirit was that mankind needed to “repent” by changing how it viewed the Old Covenant, the Jewish Law, pagan gods, and man’s own sin, pride, lusts, power, treachery … all the horrendous negatives of fallen human nature. “What shall we do?”

We repent; we continually accept Jesus as the Son of God and adjust our minds toward Christ.  As our worldly circumstances change, we keep Jesus first.  In baptism we declare, “Jesus is Lord, and I am a Christian.” There is no better change than that.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) offers this true equation: Less Sin = More Joy.