Repent and believe the good news! Those words and some ash on your forehead and you’ve got an Ash Wednesday service.
Before we get to that part, I want to take you back almost 3,500 years to the land of Egypt.
God’s Chosen People were enslaved. They entered the land with welcome. They were few in number and settled in the land of Goshen—hill country. But as they grew in number, they were perceived as a threat to Egypt and were made into slaves for over 400 years.
God sent Moses and some convincing plagues to deliver his people. They come out of Egypt with more than the clothes on their backs. They have what they need for the trip to the Promised Land.
The Pharaoh changes his mind and wants his slaves back. The Egyptian army has God’s Chosen People trapped against the Red Sea, but God performs a miracle and parts the waters and his people cross on dry land.
The Egyptians try to follow but God closed the Red Sea and destroyed the pursuing army.
So the people got out of Egypt and are on their way to the Promised Land and are so excited that they don’t even complain, right?
No, they complained. Many wanted to go back to the slavery that they had asked God to deliver them from. What?
God stopped the Egyptians from pursuing, but now some want to get back to slavery. It’s comfortable. They knew the life.
In the wilderness, they had to trust Moses and trust God.
There was a generation that did not make it to the Promised Land
But 40 years later—I’m skipping a lot from those 40 years—but want to get to the Promised Land, Joshua leads his people into the land.
They had to cross the Jordan—probably when it was at flood stage—but again God parted the waters.
To get to the Promised Land, these people had to leave Egypt—leave slavery behind completely and enter completely into the Promised Land.
Even if your tribe had some land before they crossed the Jordan, their warriors had to cross the Jordan.
Let’s move the clock ahead to where the most important thing in our life is a relationship with God through faith in Jesus.
How did I start?
Repent and believe the good news! Those words and some ash on your forehead and you’ve got an Ash Wednesday service.
Repent is an interesting word. In the Hebrew, it most often means to turn away from or to return to. So what that means to us is that we turn away from evil, from the world, from anything that rejects God.
We return to God. He wants us back.
In the Greek, the word that we translate as repent is to change your mind or to change your inner self. We are exchanging who we used to be prior to having Jesus as Lord for who we are now a new creation.
What should we know about repentance? We are to turn away from the world and return to God. That sounds like what I have heard all of my life, but that alone denies that what we turned away from isn’t following us everywhere we go.
The world does not want to give us up. The world wants us back.
Think about this. We say NO to drugs. Are people still getting hooked?
How about smoking? Tobacco ends with me, right? Kids are still getting hooked. Why?
Drug dealers and cigarette manufacturers want these new customers. Their old ones are dying.
So they become more clever. Cigarette packaging starts looking like juice packaging or something friendly. They still have the warning labels that say these things kill you.
Drug dealers and tobacco companies need a continuing supply of new customers.
The world wants a continuing supply of people who choose the ways of the world over God. We must turn away from the world.
When we turn away, we are to leave our old thinking, old paradigms, old models behind and receive and embrace the new. We receive the mind of Christ and we live as a new creation.
We have to completely let go of the old and completely receive the new.
We can’t be tethered to who we were.
We can’t let who we were hold on to us.
Who we were is not who we are and not who we will be.
We must truly repent. We must turn away from and give up who we were.
We must return to God and be who he wants us to be and living life his way is not a burden to us. It’s not something we have to do. It’s something we are glad to do because of his grace.
God forgave us when we didn’t deserve it.
It is time to die to who we were and live as who he made us to be.
It is time to repent and believe the good news.
Amen!
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