Grow in love through prayer and repentance
“God has given . . . the repentance that leads to life.” —Acts 11:18
There isn’t a lot of grunting and groaning at the gym where I work out. The guys and gals generally sweat through even the toughest workouts in determined silence. But there is one exercise that elicits “ughs” and “arghs”—a routine called “Bring Sally Up.” It involves loading an Olympic bar with as much weight as you can manage, getting it on your shoulders, and then standing or squatting with it—“Bring Sally up” or “Bring Sally down”—in accompaniment to music in which those two lines keep alternating. The tricky part is that the lines repeat irregularly, making the intervals between Sally’s upping and downing unequal. At some points, you have to stay in the squat for quite a while. That’s where the groaning occurs.
The Effective Treatment for Sin. You know the kind of pamphlet sometimes found in doctor’s waiting rooms—the kind with titles such as Now That You Have Diabetes? Pamphlets like that tend to follow a formula. In the past, they say, not much could be done for people with your condition. But today, with medical advances, the condition you have is often treatable; many people who have it go on to live long and active lives. The gospel is like those pamphlets, only much more so. Now that you’ve discovered you are a sinner, what can you expect? Left to itself, the condition is fatal. But now there is an entirely effective treatment: Jesus’ death and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit. So today it can be said with assurance that people who have your condition—and mine—can, by God’s grace, live productive lives. But not only that: we can go on to live forever!
So it is with hope that we pay attention to the awareness within ourselves that we have sinned.
At one time or another, all of us find ourselves in a different uncomfortable position: weighed down by our sins. We become aware of how far we have fallen short of what God and other people reasonably expect of us—and of what we expect of ourselves. We have let people down or have hurt them, and we feel regret, disappointment with ourselves, sorrow, and maybe even a tinge of despair
One way we hear God speaking to us in our conscience is through listening to his word in Scripture. “The Word of God alone can profoundly change man’s heart,” Pope Benedict XVI said. Thus, it is important that we “enter into ever increasing intimacy with his word.” To draw nourishment from the word of God, Benedict said, is our “first and fundamental task.”
Paying Attention to Our Conscience. Conscience is where we look ahead to assess our options as good or bad and look back to evaluate our behavior. It is the place inside us where we are alone with God. This is why we do well to pay attention when our conscience is disturbed. The disturbance may be God trying to communicate with us. Obviously, consciousness of our sins is uncomfortable, but it is cause for hope. In those feelings of guilt, God is calling us to return to him
That’s where this Bible study can help. While we have, so to speak, “brought Sally down,” we can ponder six passages from the Bible. The first two are accounts of people going through a process of repentance (Genesis 44:18-45:15; Luke 15:1-3, 11-32). The third, a prayer (Psalm 51), brings us inside the experience. Then there are three passages focused on Jesus: on his call to a change of heart and life (Matthew 5:21-30, 38-48), on his death and resurrection as the way for us to experience this change (Romans 6:13; 5:1-2, 5-10), and on his friendship with us (John 21:9-22).
If we stay with our disturbance over our sins, we will find that God has more to say to us than “You messed up.” He wants to help us see ourselves more realistically, to recognize—and repudiate—the motives that lead us into sin, to grasp his saving love, to see the way toward living according to his goodness and grace. It’s not an easy process.
The first three readings spur us to reflect on our own experience of recognizing our sins, taking action against them, and beginning the journey of return to God. The second three direct our attention to Jesus as teacher, healer, and Savior. Jesus calls us to grow in love beyond anything that is easy or comfortable for us—and enables us to do it by nourishing us with himself. As you read—and pray—through these texts, God is speaking to you.
This does not mean that we should get depressed about ourselves—quite the opposite. Depression is useless since almost, by definition, it means giving up. The sorrow over our sins that initiates the process of repentance leads not to losing heart but to a change of heart. Paul had this distinction in mind when he wrote, “Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Repentance may not clear away depression—which has many causes, some of them biological— but it is a step toward dealing with depression to the degree that our depression is fed by guilt and anger at ourselves.
Coming to a realization of ourselves as sinners puts us within range of hearing the gospel. The gospel—the good news—that Jesus announced is that God’s reign over us is ready to break into our lives, to penetrate the deepest parts of our being. The good news that his apostles preached after Jesus’ death and resurrection is that God’s reign is now breaking into our lives through Jesus. We can experience it by faith in him and by Baptism.
Author
Fr. Mirapakayala Melchizedek Kennedy
