[Friday's Devotional] - "Repent therefore..."

“Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out,”
Acts 3:19 ESV

So, the man has been healed and God’s glory revealed and now Peter lays out the gospel before the listeners.  He then asks them to respond to what God has done for them on the cross and the request is simple: repent.  You need to repent and turn back to God so that your sins can be blotted out.  Hang on, didn’t Peter point out to the crowd that they had killed the author of life?  Yes he did, and even that sin can be washed away by the person’s repentance.  This term “blotted out” may well refer to the ancient method of reusing papyrus (early paper) that had been written on.  To re-use a piece of papyrus, it was possible to simply wash the ink off the page.  Peter is telling his listeners that God can do that for them, even though you had a part in killing the Christ, the anointed, holy one of God.  Wow!  That is forgiveness.  As we saw yesterday, what is true for the crowd of on-lookers as Peter preached is true for us too.

Too often my repentance is Lukewarm.  Too often I seem to say “sorry God I sinned again.” “Ok” says God, or so it seems.  But if I read Isaiah 6, about the angel taking the burning coal and touching it to the lips of the man of unclean lips who lives among a people of unclean lips, I start to get an idea.  This isn’t God shrugging his shoulders and saying “Ok”.  This is burning cauterisation that doesn’t wound the sinner.  This is sin being radically dealt with, and sin has to be radically dealt with.  God cannot shrug it off, he would be untrue to his own perfection if he did.  If I look at the cross of Jesus, I know that sin has been radically dealt with.  So radically, that it has no more hold over my eternal future.

When I come to God in repentance he doesn’t shrug his shoulders and say ‘Ok then John’. The truth is more like this:

John: Sorry Lord, I have sinned.
God:  John, I paid for it so you don’t have to; it’s gone.
John: But Lord, what about the other thing that I have done and I find it hard not to…
God: Oh yes John, I’ve paid for that one too; it’s gone.

“Repent therefore, and turn back (today), that your sins may be blotted out,”

Thank you God for your radical mercy.

John Martin-Jones