Rethinking Repentance: Transforming Habits for God's Kingdom

Repentance is not mostly a feeling word; it's mostly a thinking word. It is the Greek word "metanoia," which means "after" and is related to the word for mind, "nous." So it's like second thoughts, think again, think again. Dallas Willard talked about it as reconsider your strategy for living or we might think about your design for life. [00:01:31]

To be a follower of Jesus means to be enthralled with God in our minds, to come to love him dearly and believe there is no limit, no catch to his goodness or God's power to carry out his goodness. But then the other part of the curriculum to become like Jesus, to follow Jesus, is to be transformed at the level of our habits because we are a mass of habits. [00:02:18]

Repentance is redesign your life, the systems of your life, so that the habits, the thoughts, the intentions, the desires, the beliefs that are flowing inside of you, the inside of the tree, becomes changed and reflect God's goodness and God's presence with us so that becoming a person of love and truth and courage and encouragement and generosity become second nature habitual. [00:02:43]

Champions don't do extraordinary things, Dungy would explain. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they have learned. The mark of a mature disciple is somebody who effortlessly does what Jesus would do in his place because it has gotten into us by the power of God's grace at the level of habit. [00:04:07]

The Bible, starting with the Old Testament, is the most brilliant plan for habit formation or Reformation in history. I mentioned the basic text of the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 6, was called the Shema. Notice this: think for a minute about cue, response, reward. Moses says, "Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength." [00:05:05]

These Commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Now the idea of that is they're not something that we just give rote habitual obedience to in that sense, but something that changed my mind and my way of thoughts and what it is that I desire. So that's the response that God wants: love. That's love. [00:05:31]

When you see your kids, you'll think about them, talk about them when you sit at home, when you walk, sinning and walking, going in, coming out. Write them down on your hands and your foreheads, door frames, and gates. So the cue, you put the cue all over the place. And then Moses says this is actually in verse 3: hear and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you. [00:06:01]

You may flourish in a land flowing with milk and honey as the Lord your God has promised. You will become a great people. God will do a great work in your midst. There is a great reward. There is a great life. It doesn't always mean that it will be prosperous or pain-free, but it will be life with God. [00:06:22]

The invitation for you today is repent, and what you can do right now is just do a quick habit audit. You may want to spend some more time with this. That's what I've done, and a lot of times in the morning when we first get up, there's just a whole bunch of habits. I wake up, what I'm doing now is to stand and say, "This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it." [00:08:25]

I always go to the bathroom. I always have to take a little strip off my mouth. I wear this little thing to keep me from snoring, hopefully, at night, and when I do that, I can remember that my mouth can bless God. And I brush my teeth, and I shave my face. I weigh myself. I get on a scale, and each of those are moments when I can attach to it if I want to in any particular way. [00:08:55]

A friend of mine was telling me how he would wake up in the morning reaching for the phone as one of the first things he did, and there was an app on there, and he was always curious. It created a cue, creates this craving: I want my curiosity satisfied, but it would feed his mind junk that's just not real good, not what he wanted his mind to be filled with first thing in the day. [00:10:43]

The simplest way to stop doing that wasn't by trying to use more willpower. It was simply to remove the cue, to get rid of the app, and then he would have to try to relocate it or find it, and just simply not having the app there meant that that old routine was gone. That's what repentance looks like. [00:11:12]