Repent

In January 2024 a wave of violence and looting broke out in Port Moresby, the capital of the country of Papua New Guinea (north of Australia). An unconfirmed number of people were killed and dozens injured, as emergency services struggled to respond to the scale of the disturbance.

Video footage showed looters in the capital dashing into stores through smashed glass windows, stuffing stolen goods into cardboard boxes, plastic buckets, and shopping carts. One man was seen lugging an entire chest freezer away on his shoulders.

But then about five days after the looting started, a local pastor in Papua New Guinea gave the following report:

These days a curious phenomenon is taking place: the people who participated in the looting of recent days in Port Moresby are returning the looted goods. The appeals from the police and also from some [church leaders] are having a certain effect. Some parishes of Christian churches of different denominations got involved and declared: “Our doors are open for those who want to return stolen goods.” It is a kind of collective repentance, appealing to the Christian conscience of each citizen. I must say that something is moving, it is a sign of hope, a sign that the individual conscience is, in some way, illuminated by faith.

Editor’s Note: As you use this illustration keep in mind that although this story is true, there was not a massive movement to return looted items. The same is true in relationship with God, all have a conscience which at some point convicts them of sin, but only a few repent and turn to God.

A man driving a car suspected to be stolen was injured in a head-on collision on a local freeway. Authorities say that 30-year-old Kyle Voltz was driving an SUV when he crashed into a police cruiser and then sped out of a North Portland parking lot. Eventually the suspect was spotted driving south in the northbound lanes of Interstate 405, eventually crashing into another vehicle near an overpass.

Both the driver and a passenger in the suspected stolen vehicle suffered serious injuries; the occupants of the other vehicles were not injured as seriously. The sheriff’s deputies in the vehicle that was rammed were not injured.

Voltz faces several charges, including first degree assault, felony hit-and-run, and reckless driving. He has previous convictions for identity theft and possession of heroin and methamphetamines.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Those who sin are heading in the direction of consequences and punishment. The gospel calls all lawbreakers to repentance (literally “to change their minds”) about the direction of their lives.

In the days of the Russian revolution, the Soviet state tried to stamp out Christianity and convert everyone to atheism. A popular Russian comedian developed a stage act in which he played a drunken Orthodox priest. Dressed in wine-stained robes, he did a comic imitation of the ancient but beautiful liturgy.

Part of his performance was to chant the Beatitudes. But he used distorted words—such as “blessed are they who hunger and thirst for vodka” and “blessed are the cheese makers”—while struggling to remain more or less upright. He had done his act time and again and been rewarded by the authorities for his work in promoting atheism and in making worship seem ridiculous.

But on one occasion things didn’t go as planned. Instead of saying his garbled version of the Beatitudes in his well-rehearsed comic manner, he chanted the sentences as they are actually sung in a real Liturgy. His attention was focused not on the audience but on the life-giving words that were coming from the Bible, words he had learned and sung as a child. He listened to the memorized words and something happened in the depths of his soul.

After singing the final Beatitude, he fell to his knees weeping. He had to be led from the stage and never again parodied worship. Probably he was sent to a labor camp, but even so it’s a story of a happy moment in his life. He had begun a new life in a condition of spiritual freedom that no prison can take away. Whatever his fate, he brought the Beatitudes and his recovered faith with him. Truly, the Bible can change one’s life.

Dallas Willard writes:

As a child I lived in an area of southern Missouri where electricity was available only in the form of lightning. We had more of that than we could use. But in my senior year of high school the Rural Electrification Administration extended its lines into the area where we lived, and electrical power became available to households and farms.

When those lines came by our farm, a very different way of living presented itself. Our relationships to fundamental aspects of life—daylight and dark, clean and dirty, work and leisure, preparing food and preserving it—could then be vastly changed for the better. But we still had to believe in the electricity and its arrangements, understand them, and take the practical steps involved in relying on it.

You may think the comparison rather crude, and in some respects it is. But it will help us to understand Jesus’ basic message about the kingdom of the heavens if we pause to reflect on those farmers who, in effect, heard the message: “Repent, for electricity is at hand.” Repent, or turn from their kerosene lamps and lanterns, their iceboxes and cellars, their scrubboards and rug beaters, their woman-powered sewing machines and their radios with dry-cell batteries.

The power that could make their lives far better was right there near them where, by making relatively simple arrangements, they could utilize it. Strangely, a few did not accept it. They did not “enter the kingdom of electricity.” Some just didn’t want to change. Others could not afford it, or so they thought.

In his book, Timothy Jennings writes of the dangers of unrecognized heart issues:

Hypertension—high blood pressure—has been called the silent killer, but medical professionals didn't always realize this. In fact, some doctors argued that hypertension was a made-up disorder that didn't need to be treated at all. For instance, in 1931 Dr. J.H. Hay proclaimed, "The greatest danger to a man with high blood pressure lies in its discovery, because then some fool is certain to try and reduce it."

Tragic results followed from this idea. Consider the true case of Frank. Frank was diagnosed with hypertension in 1937 at the age of fifty-four. His blood pressure was 162/98 and was considered by physicians at the time to be "mild hypertension." No treatment was initiated. By 1940, his blood pressure was running 180/88. In 1941, his pressure was 188/105. He was encouraged to cut back on smoking and work. But his condition didn't improve.

By 1944, his pressure was running higher, and he suffered a series of small strokes. This was followed by classic symptoms of heart failure, so he was placed on a low-salt diet with hydrotherapy and experienced some improvement.

But by February 1945, his pressure was 260/145, and on April 12, 1945, he complained of a severe headache with his blood pressure measuring at 300/190. He lost consciousness and died later that day at the age of sixty-three. Perhaps you know him better as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second president of the United States.

Unrecognized problems (like sin, for instance) can cause devastating results. But it is much worse when the professionals who are supposed to identify and treat the problem deny it even exists.

In his article titled "Professional Soccer Was My God," former pro soccer player Gavin Peacock writes:

I was never going to be tall, so my dad (who was also a pro soccer player) would take me into our backyard in Southeast London and teach me how to quickly switch directions with the soccer ball at my feet. "The big guys won't be able to catch you!" he said. For hours I would practice turning to the left and right, dribbling in and out of cones, spinning this way and that. My dad was right: the art of turning served me well. Many of the goals I scored in the years to come were a result of that lesson.

At age 16, I left school and signed a professional contract with [English] Premier League Queens Park Rangers (QPR). I had achieved the goal—and I wasn't really happy. I was playing for the England Youth National Team, and it wasn't long before I broke into the starting eleven at QPR. But I was an insecure young man in the cutthroat world of professional sport. Soccer was my god. If I played well on a Saturday I was high, if I played poorly I was low. My sense of well-being depended entirely on my performance. I soon realized that achieving the goal wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Then, when I was 18, God intervened in my life. I was still struggling to find purpose, so I decided to attend a local church. I don't remember what the minister preached on, but afterward he invited me to his house, where he and his wife hosted a weekly youth Bible study. I rolled up in the car I had bought, a 1980s icon, the Ford Escort XR3i. Yet when they spoke about Jesus, they displayed a life and joy that I did not have. They talked about sin as if it had consequence and about God as if they knew him.

I decided to return to the Bible study the following week and the next, and I began to hear the gospel for the first time. I realized that my biggest problem wasn't whether I met the disapproval of a 20,000-strong crowd on Saturday; my biggest problem was my sin and the disapproval of almighty God. I realized that the biggest obstacle to happiness was that soccer was king instead of Jesus, who provided a perfect righteousness for me. Over time, my eyes were opened through that Sunday meeting, and I turned, repented, and believed the gospel. My heart still burned for soccer, but it burned for Christ more.

At the age of 35, Peacock retired after playing for QPR, Chelsea, and Newcastle United, but the schoolboy dream was over. He currently serves as a pastor in Canada. He concludes, "All those years ago, my earthly father taught me the art of turning, but it was my heavenly Father who turned me first to Christ and then helped me turn others to Christ by preaching his gospel."

Bible scholar N.T. Wright uses the analogy of waking up in the morning for how some people come to Christ through a dramatic, instant conversion and others come to Christ through a gradual conversion:

Waking up offers one of the most basic pictures of what can happen when God takes a hand in someone's life. There are classic alarm-clock stories, Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by a sudden light, stunned and speechless, discovered that the God he had worshipped had revealed himself in the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. John Wesley found his heart becoming strangely warm and he never looked back. They and a few others are the famous ones, but there are millions more.

And there are many stories, thought they don't hit the headlines in the same way, of the half-awake and half-asleep variety. Some people take months, years, maybe even decades, during which they aren't sure whether they're on the outside of Christian faith looking in, or on the inside looking around to see if it's real.

As with ordinary waking up, there are many people who are somewhere in between. But the point is that there's such a thing as being asleep, and there's such a thing as being awake. And it's important to tell the difference, and to be sure you're awake by the time you have to be up and ready for action, whatever that action may be.

The Fox TV show Kitchen Nightmares features the host Gordon Ramsay, a world-class chef, who steps into restaurants that are—you guessed it—living nightmares. The restaurants are typically on the verge of closing and in desperate need of help. What's interesting is that sometimes the restaurants look appealing from the outside. Often, large amounts of time and money have been spent finding the right location and creating a welcoming atmosphere. But in every episode, the real problem is the same: the food is nasty.

One of the painfully entertaining parts of every show is how Gordon Ramsay tries over and over to get the restaurant workers to realize they are in an "Oh no! situation." The owners have typically already had a sudden awakening, because the business is in trouble, but what they need is some brutal honesty. And Chef Ramsay is brutal. He'll usually order about a half-dozen items off the menu and with great passion and clarity explain how horrible each one tastes. The restaurant owners are in denial about the quality of their food because they are distracted by everything else going on. They're managing food orders, overseeing wait staff, stepping out of the kitchen to shake hands with customers—basically anything but actually making good food. The show is half over before any of them get honest about reality.

NPR (National Public Radio) reported on a new deli in rural Maine with a hotshot chef behind the counter. "Foodies" may recognize the chef's name—Matthew Secich, the chef for famous restaurants across the country, including The Oval Room in Washington, D.C. Secich shocked the foodie world when he became a Christian and moved his family and his kitchen off the grid. (Editor's Note: He also joined the local Amish community.)

As NPR reports,

His new spot, Charcuterie, is a converted cabin tucked away in a pine forest in Unity, Maine, population 2,000. You have to drive down a long, snowy track to get there, and you can smell the smokehouse before you can see it. … There are no Slim Jims here, but rather handmade meat sticks, fat as cigars, sitting in a jar by a hand-cranked register.

Even as a hotshot chef something was missing in Secich's life. According to the Portland (ME) Press-Herald:

[Secich's] perfectionist streak ruled his actions. "I burned people," he said. As in, held a line cook's hand to a hot fire for making a mistake at Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago, where Secich was a chef from 2006 to 2008. "Four stars, that's all that matters." Then he grew disgusted.

"I went home one night and got on my knees and asked for forgiveness," he said. For his lack of compassion for others, his nights with restaurant friends and a fifth of Jim Beam with a side of Pabst Blue Ribbon, for that overactive ego. "I gave my life to the Lord, which I never would have imagined in the heyday of my chaos."

A study by a couple of researchers at the University of Toronto and at James Madison University in Virginia proved something that we may already know. The study, provocatively called "Cognitive Sophistication Does Not Attenuate the Bias Blind Spot," concluded that we cut ourselves more slack than we give to others. No surprise there, right. But writing about this study in the New Yorker, Jonah Lehrer explains why we do this. He claims that we all have "bias blind spots" because there's a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves. Lehrer writes:

When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on [how they behave]; we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their [errors]. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We [study] our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray.

As an example, if we drive crazy through traffic it's because we have an important meeting or we don't do it that often, and so forth. But if someone else cuts us off in traffic there's one simple, observable explanation: he's a jerk. Lehrer concludes "[our bias blind spots] are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and [resistant] to intelligence." In other words, being smarter won't help you see your own junk. As a matter of fact, more intelligence may add to the problem.

At her rental house, which she named "The Critter Café," Christine Bishop was a well-intentioned rescuer of stray cats, dogs, and lost ducks. Then someone dropped off a cage of pet rats. Soon neighbors were complaining of a stench from the house, and could see rats running outdoors.

When officials entered the house, they found the rats had totally over-run the house. They initially removed 1,500, and estimated that at least a 1,000 remained. The property-owner, Dale Carr, says the rats are feral, so "they'll bite, carry ticks and fleas, and are susceptible to rabies and disease." Township Supervisor Brian Werschem says this number of rats "… can breed 1,500 rats every three weeks, so if they're not removing them at a rate of 100 per week, they're not making progress."

The next step in the plan is to wrap the house and fumigate it, which "could cost the owner nearly $30,000, not including cleanup and disposal cost."

A 2009 report from Edinburgh University found that a third of scientific medical researchers admitted anonymously to scientific fraud, with nearly three-fourths saying they had witnessed deliberate warping of data to achieve desired results. Daniele Fanelli, the report's author, wrote, "I had naively assumed that scientists would be principled [but scientists] are human beings driven by their interests, hopes, and beliefs. Given opportunities to cut corners by falsifying data, they may well do so." Furthermore, the science journal Nature estimates that around a thousand incidents of falsification or plagiarism [of scientific studies] go unreported in the U.S. every year.

Possible Preaching Angles: Sin; Original Sin; Depravity—Even scientific research, which should be completely objective, can be warped by the researchers (the scientists), who like us, are sinful.

Attorney A.M. "Marty" Stroud III, of Shreveport, Louisiana was the lead prosecutor in the December 1984 first-degree murder trial of Glenn Ford, who was sentenced to death for the death of a Shreveport jeweler. Ford was released from prison March 11, 2014, after the state admitted new evidence proving Ford was not the killer. A year later (March 2015), Stroud wrote a brutally honest apology for The Shreveport Times.

In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning. To borrow a phrase from Al Pacino in the movie "And Justice for All," "Winning became everything." … [As a result], Mr. Ford spent 30 years of his life in a small, dingy cell …. Lighting was poor, heating and cooling were almost non-existent, food bordered on the uneatable

After the death verdict [was handed down], I went out with others and celebrated with a few rounds of drinks. That's sick. I had been entrusted with the duty to seek the death of a fellow human being, a very solemn task that certainly did not warrant any "celebration."

In my rebuttal argument during the penalty phase of the trial, I mocked Mr. Ford, stating that this man wanted to stay alive so he could be given the opportunity to prove his innocence. … How totally wrong I was. … I apologize to Glenn Ford for all the misery I have caused him and his family. I apologize to the [victim's family] for giving them the false hope of some closure. I apologize to the members of the jury for not having all of the story that should have been disclosed to them. I apologize to the court in not having been more diligent in my duty …

Possible Preaching Angles: This is a great example of confession, confessing sin, repentance, and so forth. Stroud's admission of wrongdoing is so clear and honest. He makes no excuses for his behavior and fully understands the consequences of his sin.