Repent therefore and return that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.

Acts 3: 19

 

Peter was a man who understood in the most personal of ways why it matters to change direction in life. He had done this more than once. He had walked out of the calling that Christ had led him into, and he had returned to the life that he had lived before that miraculous moment by the sea when he had been summoned out of the fishing trade and into the business of serving God. Jesus had asked Peter to leave behind the safety and the comfort of the known to journey with Him through the wilderness of people’s lives. They had encountered the extraordinary pain that sin brings about, and they had been faced with fierce opposition from humans whose anger was fueled by the fires of Hell. The wandering led them to the very entrance to the promised land of restoration, but Peter ran away in a panicked human response to Jesus’ request that he stay with Him in His suffering and pain.

 

This story has an all too familiar ring to it for me. Christ came to me in all of His glory and with all of His understanding. He called to me, and He has led me into the presence of God’s Promised Land. Still, I wander off. There are those deeply rooted and hard to surrender elements in my personality that I don’t want to yield to Him, and there are those ways of thinking and of acting that lead me away from Christ’s righteousness; yet, I find some form of comfort in their familiarity. Peter’s denial, his selfish acts, and his return to his old way of life may seem to be more dramatic and they are a better story than anything that is happening in my life, but there is almost no difference in true effect. I am just as capable of wandering every step as far away from Christ’s living restoration as was Peter.

 

Christ does for me exactly what He did for Peter. He comes to me in the place where I have gone, He reveals His truth to me in a manner that is clear and undeniable, and Christ sets me back on the road where His journey is found. The lands of wandering that are located on the outside of God’s will are harsh and the water that comes from their wells is bitter with tears of futility and shame. Christ tells us that there is nothing that we need to do other than recognize our need for Him. There is no change that we need to make beyond being willing to change direction so that we are walking in Christ’s way. This is what repentance and returning are all about, and this attitude and action bring us back to a place of residence that is located in the center of God’s garden of restoration and that is infused with the glory of His presence.