Rending the Heart

We are considering what it feels like to repent of your sins and come to Christ. Last week we saw that repenting involves the strong emotion of loss or mourning. The second emotion is closely related – the tearing or rending of the heart.

Our text is Joel 2:1-11. It speaks of a coming terrible day of Yahweh when God gives the Jews over to Antichrist for 42 months in what Jesus called the Great Tribulation, a.k.a. the time of Jacob’s trouble. In v.11 God says, “The day of the LORD is indeed great and very awesome, and who can endure it?”

Yet within this time of judgment and chastening, undeserved grace abounds. God continues speaking in v.12, “Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “Return to Me with all your heart, and with fasting, weeping, and mourning; and rend your heart and not your garments. Now return to the LORD your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness and relenting of evil.”

In their culture, tearing garments was a sign of great anger or grief, but in Israel’s apostasy it had become only an outward religious show. So God says to them, “tear your hearts and not your garments.” This means we come to see our sin against God, feel deeply sorry and remorseful that we would break His commandments and spurn His grace and to renounce it because our hearts are broken by our sin.

I’ve witnessed a circumcision of our first born. It was not pleasant. He cried, no he screamed. It was much louder than his crying at birth. Repentance is the circumcision of the heart by the knife of God’s Word in the hand of the Holy Spirit. It is a cutting away of the sinful flesh in the central command center of man that leaves him permanently altered, yes, a new creature. “… We are the true circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh …” Paul reminded the Philippian believers.

He speaks of the gospel wound deep in the heart, wrought by the Spirit of God that alone brings forth a new creature and a changed life. No longer dependent on your good works to save you, having seen the filth of your sin, you can only glory in Christ Jesus and His cross.

A gospel wound happens when the message of the gospel strikes home, pierces the soul, wounds the conscience and cuts you to the very core of your being. This is where the feathers of our pride are laid in the dust and our sin is brought to light and made to be disgusting and despicable in our sight. It’s the wound that heals.

Rending the heart involves hard heads resistant to truth being broken by the hammer of God’s Word. It involves hard hearts being melted by God’s grace, like the melting of iron ore. It doesn’t happen without pain, yet always a pain that anticipates gain, because repentance is never without its soul mate faith.
A third feeling found in the Bible associated with repenting is deep sadness.
Second Corinthians 7:5-11 is perhaps the key NT text on the subject of repentance. Here we find that sorrow is mentioned eight times and leads to repentance.

Paul had to severely rebuke these professing Christians. By the time he writes this letter, he’s received the report of their response to his rebuke. “I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God … For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation; but the sorrow of the world produces death.”

There’s the sorrow of getting caught, the sorrow of embarrassment, the sorrow of the undesirable consequences of one’s actions. Tiger Woods comes to mind. And then there’s the true sorrow of renouncing sin and turning to Christ.

However, we must never forget, beloved, the sorrow of repentance must be mixed with the joy of faith. Puritan Thomas Watson wrote: “spiritual sorrow will sink the heart if the pulley of faith does not raise it.” Self-loathing is good unless it becomes despair without hope in Christ. We examine ourselves and consider our ways, but we fix our eyes on Jesus, not our sin.

Just as there is no true faith without repentance, so there is no true repentance without faith. As Watson said, “It is not enough that we leave the devil’s house, but we must get under Christ’s banner and wear His colors.”

We repent and repent and repent because we have found Someone and something infinitely better than sin! We leave the devil’s house because we have found a better place to live. Yes there are the feelings of loss, shame, rending the heart and deep sorrow over sin and guilt, yet true repentance always has commingled with it hope of forgiveness.

Sorrow for sin will differ among the repentant, depending on many factors, such as the degree and depths of sin and the years spent sinning. I would guess that Timothy’s conversion and emotions of repentance were very different from the Philippian jailer’s; Paul’s very different than Lydia’s.

Next time we will consider examples of counterfeit repentance found in the Bible.