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‘And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.’
Luk_3:3
I. Repentance is that change of mind which turns away with sorrow from anything that is wrong, which owns it, and amends it, and is willing to start afresh. So that repentance is the persistent enemy of a perpetual defect—viz. the contented acquiescence in old unworthy habits because they are old; habits which have ceased to move our indignation because we have got used to them; habits which we never own to God or man because it is best to say nothing about them; habits which we do not intend to alter, because we do not believe it possible that we ever should.
II. Repentance an excellent thing for others.—Is it not so, that we think repentance would be an excellent thing for many people—for those publicans and soldiers, for instance, for that common herd of useless men—but not for ourselves? No one is more ready than we are to lament the decadence of the times. But if we read the short account of John’s ministry in the Gospel, we find that nowhere were his denunciations more scathing, and his exhortations more earnest, than when he was addressing the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious world of his time. And our religious services, which we have received to use, are not meant for, or adapted to, the outcast and abandoned, but to such persons as ourselves that we may cry mercy, and protest penitence, and promise again and again an oft-renewed repentance—repentance that is for ourselves and not for other people. Surely, unless we realise this, we are in great danger of unreality, for there is nothing so numbing to all discipline as to use strong words which have lost all their meaning, and to promise actions which we never mean to perform.
III. It is so easy to be religious with a reservation.—It is so easy, with Ananias and Sapphira, to get the credit of renunciation while we keep back part of the price. Surely it is idle to believe in the omnipotence of God if we cannot trust Him to free us from the impotency of some hereditary taint. It is idle to trust in Christ the Liberator if we hug our chains and linger in captivity. It is melancholy to boast of freedom and to allow year after year to find us still in fetters. The divorce between faith and practice, between orthodoxy and morality, is always terribly easy. It is this more than anything else which brings in converts to the devil’s society for propagating infidelity, which is sometimes more successful than the society which propagates the Gospel. Is it not written, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’? And how shall I recognise the power of Christianity in a religion which cannot help a man to throw off even one bad habit? But with most of us repentance means a vigorous effort to combat the deterioration which sets in even in our best efforts. Why is it that the Church is making itself so little felt? Why are we not influencing the world around us more than we do? If a tenth of our prayers were answered the world would be a different place, and why are they not answered? ‘Ye ask and ye receive not because ye ask amiss.’
—
Rev. Canon Newbolt.