This post is a follow-up message from Pastor Chris's sermon entitled "Fatherhood". [Watch video]
Repentance is a humbling concept, especially for men. If repentance could be taken in pill form, it would come in a brightly colored jar with all sorts of wonderful benefits printed on the label. But inside that jar would be gigantic capsules of a suspicious color that were seemingly too large to swallow. Is this necessary?
Those pills seem to grow even larger, for many a man, when taken in front of his wife, and in front of his children.
Some of this is because we misconceive repentance. The English word repent comes from to us from French via Latin. It is an intensified form of the verb “make sorry.” It means to feel really, intensely bad about something. I think this notion is part of what makes some men recoil at the concept. It seems to involve an awful lot of blubbering, hand-wringing, and affecting a suitably miserable countenance until sufficient penitence has been demonstrated. True, there are times when these emotions come naturally, perhaps – especially when we’ve really blown it. Many times, however, this isn’t how we feel, and it feels weird to feel that we need to intensely feel something we aren’t feeling. Especially with my wife. Especially with my children. Is this truly what God is calling us to do as men? Can we rate our repentance by the volume of our tears?
Not exactly.
French and Latin are well and good, but if we want to get our heads and our hearts around God’s prescribed response to sin, we need to look at another language, the one God wrote to us in – Greek. Here we find the word metanoeo, typically translated as repent in our English bibles. It can involve a sense of remorse, but its primary meaning is to experience a change of one’s mind. It means to convert from one state to another. In its simplest terms, it means to turn around and head in the opposite direction. This about-face is what God calls us as men and fathers to make a regular part of our lives, and we need to learn how to repent like a man.
Repent as a Son
In Christ we experience adoption as sons of God. That ought to be the first and dominant motivation for our repentance. We aren’t mustering up misery on demand, we are acknowledging that our actions have been an affront to the God who is our Father. In 2 Corinthians 7 we see that sorrow can be part of the process that leads us to repentance, but it isn’t repentance. That is a second step. We have not begun to repent until we have changed our minds and made the decision to abandon our sinful actions and replace them with righteous actions. That’s why confession is the first step in true repentance, not sorrow. We can feel bad about all sorts of things, but until we are willing to call our sin what God calls it, to confess it as wrong, to declare our intention to abandon that sin and do what is right – we haven’t repented.
Like a noble son who loves a good father, we need to repent quickly and humbly of our sin before God so that we may align ourselves to his good will.
Oh, and our children need to see us do this. Especially when our sin has been against them. Why? Because our sin affects them as well and we need to confess that reality not only to God, but to our children. Also, because it is in our manner of repentance, more than almost any other way, that our children will see the sincerity of our love for God. Repentance is the mortal enemy of hypocrisy. Do you see a hard-hearted resistance to repentance in your children against you? Do they squirm away from fully admitting their guilt and justify their actions? Maybe they are learning to deal with their earthly father the way we deal with our heavenly Father.
Repent as a Soldier
Repentance is a matter of relationship, but it is also a matter of honor. We are duty-bound to Christ as our King. This means that, like a good soldier, we must be quick to fall back in step if ever we break ranks.
A soldier doesn’t always cry when confronted with his failures, but woe to the soldier who does not admit his guilt clearly and immediately and accept the consequences of his actions so that he can retake his dutiful place. This is true of a low level private; this is true of a full bird colonel. Repentance before a superior is never unbecoming a soldier. It does not diminish the authority of the one who repents, but rather establishes that authority as being greater than himself and to which both he and his men are accountable.
So it is as a father. To sit your children down and explain to them that their father has sinned against them by a harsh tone, a dismissive attitude, ungodly language, or any other breach of Christian moral standards, does not undermine your authority as a father, it fortifies it. It is to hold up the source and content of your authority as a transcendent standard to which all must yield. If we teach our children that standards are arbitrary, established by the father, and do not apply to the father – then what will we suspect our children’s attitudes to be when they come of age and begin to exert adult independence from us?
If, on the other hand, we have modeled fidelity to our King, then they will have the foundation for respecting our authority as a father, and for respecting God’s authority when they serve Him directly.
Repent as a Steward
One does not have to look far to find colossal examples of those in power who have grossly abused the resources entrusted to them. We look on such people with contempt as terrible stewards of things which are not theirs. We wonder at their pride. Unwilling to admit their failures, they doom themselves to continued scandal.
Fathers – what do we have that we have not been given, and which does not belong to God? What do we have that is not an entrusted stewardship? Not our jobs, our homes, our toys, our talents, our wives, our children. A good steward labors to hear the blessing pronounced, well done, good and faithful servant. Such a steward is quick to remedy any failure of being either good or faithful. He is quick to turn from the aberrant course of action and reestablish a pattern of sound responsibility.
This is how we must also act. This is how we must also repent. We should never communicate to our children that our power is absolute and our actions towards them are above criticism. They must see in us a deep desire to be faithful in our parenting before God. They must see that we raise them not according to our dictates, but according to God’s. Since we all fail in this at times, we must reaffirm the goodness of our master by acknowledging our sin and turning back from it to do what is right. And our children must see this happen.
In short, we must learn to repent like a man. This isn’t taking a giant pill of emotional excess whenever we’ve sinned so profoundly we can’t ignore it anymore. This is developing a spiritual immune system that immediately attacks and reverses the course of sin in our lives on contact. God cherishes this as a Father, He demands it as our King, and He requires it as our Master.
Do real men cry? Sometimes.
Do real men repent? Always.
By God’s grace, may our allegiance to Him be the catalyst for the allegiance of our children.