Jesus called us to: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand”. Some of us try to make something super spiritual of the words in the Bible. For example: Many have heard repentance explained as: grabbing on to the pulpit and crying bitterly over the sins we’ve committed. Yet, how many times do we do this, only to go right back to the very thing that brought us to the pulpit in the first place! No, my friend, repentance means nothing more than: ‘to change your mind’. Jesus is telling us to change our mind from the sinful, earth cursed way of believing and living.
Since the fall of man sin and everything evil came into the world. People became selfish, vulgar, concerned more about their own affairs than that of others. They started lying and doing all kind of things that did not please God. Things that would ultimately bring destruction to their own life.
When Jesus came on the scene he called us to repent, to change our mind. He calls us to see that we have been acting, believing and giving our life to things that do not please him and do not bring us life. He wants us to realize that that is not who we were created and called to be. He calls us to repent unto the Kingdom of Heaven. This Kingdom suggests a whole new way of life! So Jesus calls us to change our mind from the way we have gotten used to doing things. He is calling us to do life the Kingdom way so that we will HAVE life!
Let’s decide to do life according to the Kingdom of Heaven that we belong to. How do we find out how the Kingdom of Heaven wants us to do things? By simply reading God’s Word and looking up the scripture verses that apply to our situation and deciding to live accordingly. There’s nothing super spiritual about this! And this life of the Kingdom is fairly simple. The only thing that makes it hard is when we want to go our own way and when we want to hold on to this sinful, fallen and limited world, rather than grabbing on to the better and higher life that God presents to us.
When you see yourself doing things, acting or believing in ways that you know are not according to the Kingdom of Heaven, just choose to repent. Change your mind about it. Find out what God says about it and just decide to go that way! That is the call of repentance!