Proverbs 24.27
“Prepare your work outside; get everything ready for yourself in the field, and after that build your house.”
Receiving God’s grace in Christ requires us to give up our old self-oriented life and receive new life in Christ. Scripture is clear. We must die to the old life. We must turn away from those things that are not pleasing to God, which is what scripture calls repentance.
Jesus clearly communicated the message of repentance to his disciples: “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Mt.16.24-26)
In his classic book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned against what he called cheap grace. He wrote: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
What we need, Bonhoeffer said, is costly grace. “Costly grace confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.'”
Repentance is not something you do only at the time of salvation; it should be an ongoing mental discipline for every Christian. Pay attention to your pattern of thinking and patterns of behavior. If your thinking or action is off-path, repent. Trust God and turn away from wrong thoughts. Turn away from wrong behavior.
“Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” (Isaiah 55.6-7)
“Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.” (Acts 3.19)
