Hope is a giant-size project. It could be like building a run-way to land a 747 in your backyard.
Sometimes finding hope can seem like that. Job felt like that. “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle and come to their end without hope” (Job 7:6). Where do you start with a project like that?
Throughout Scripture there are vivid descriptions of God’s chosen people and other unwise people making terrible decisions, acting in ways that were unashamedly disobedient and immoral, yet God continued to hold out a rope of hope. “‘In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.’ But you were unwilling … Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you (Isaiah 30:15, 18).
The key to such hope, even in indignant rebellion, is found in the words “returning and rest.” The Bible’s runway for hope is repentance. The word sounds old-fashioned, but it is a critical word in God’s vocabulary.
The final words Jesus spoke on earth before returning to Heaven were these: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46-47).
When I presented the Gospel to children and teens as a youth minister many years ago, I taught them that repentance is pictured like traveling down a road in one direction and making a u-turn to go in the opposite direction. The word means “to change one’s mind,” which leads to a change of direction.
You prove repentance by life change. It’s not just words. It is evidence, and it requires time to prove, at least to others.
I can think of some other runways that lead to hope along with repentance. Faith, or trust; still another is the confession of sin.
All of these are part of God’s grace to us. Grace is God giving us the opportunity to turn from sin and turn to Him that we might have hope.
It has been my observation that many believers who fall or are deceived into sinful choices want to take a bypass around repentance. Repentance requires time. How much time? I don’t know. For the prodigal it required a long trip back home, where his father had been watching for him for awhile. Repentance was reflected in the humility of the son saying, “… make me one of your slaves … I don’t deserve to be a son.” It takes time enough to prove genuineness.
Doesn’t God know the heart immediately? Yes. But the repentant and others traveling the same road to hope, do not know immediately. Life change requires time.
The certainty of hope requires the repentance runway.
David Woods is a teaching pastor at Park Chapel Christian Church in Greenfield. This weekly column is written by local clergy members.
