Finding Freedom From Regret

Are you a story repeater?  You tell your friends and loved ones the same stories again and again.  You don’t mean to.    You just forgot that you told them.  If so, I sympathize.   I’m a story repeater too.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind when Jack would tell the same story again and again.  But I’m not sure it was because he forgot that he shared it.  I just think it was something he couldn’t get past.  I worked with Jack back when I lived in New York City.  And every month or so, he’d tell me about the sweet penthouse apartment he used to own right off of Central Park.  He might even show me an old picture of it.   Then he’d come to the tragic heart of the story, how in a moment of weakness and financial stress, he sold it.  At the time, New York City wasn’t doing so great.  And he was happy to get what he got for the place, a few hundred thousand as I remember it.   But five years later, how things had changed.  If he had held on, he could have sold it for ten times that, maybe even twenty times.   But alas he hadn’t and the rest was history. 

But actually, it wasn’t history.  Twenty years later, he still grieved the mistake.  I don’t think it affected his life too badly.  If anything, it just meant anyone who knew him had to hear that story a lot.  But our past mistakes can affect our present far more deeply than simply repeating a story.  Instead, that past moves us to make those same mistakes again and again.   Or it haunts our present so powerfully, it paralyzes us.   The writer William Faulkner said it well.  “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”   

Our past can hold us back.   It can prevent us from moving forward.  It can shackle us to hurt and pain, to harmful patterns that we desperately need to let go.  It can capture us with the regret we feel, with the guilt we carry, with the resentments we find so hard to release.  But it doesn’t need to be that way.  Our past, even our worst failings and mistakes can empower us.   They can make us wiser and better than we were before.   Our past doesn’t need to hold us back.  It can propel us into exactly the places we need to be.  

But how does that happen?  How can our past failings become a resource for our future?   How can our past regrets lead to present healing?  In this story, one of Jesus’ most famous, he shows us the way.  Let’s listen and hear what he has to say.

Luke 15:11-24

In this story, one of the many that Jesus created to describe our relationship with God, we encounter a son whose mistakes have destroyed pretty much every relationship in his life.  By demanding his inheritance, he blew apart his family.   Making this request was like wishing his father dead.   Then what does he do with this legacy that came at such a cost?  He squanders it in the most reckless ways imaginable.  Then when it’s all gone, he falls even further away, taking a job that shames not just his family but his whole nation.  But then in just a few sentences, he begins to turn it all around.   In these few moments, this man takes his past, and uses it to propel himself towards healing everything he has destroyed, including himself.   How does he do it?  He repents.  

For many, this word has terrible connotations.   It doesn’t convey freedom from guilt but a deeper sinking into it.   It doesn’t mean healing, it just means a deeper wounding than before.  Repenting doesn’t mean freedom from your past, but something that imprisons you there.  And in truth, they’re right.

One way to grieve our past frees us, but another way actually kills us.  St. Paul put it thisway.  “For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret, but worldly grief produces death.”    Now what is the difference? 

The first key to understanding the difference lies in this particular phrase in the story. Here the son is feeding the pigs, and something happens.   Jesus tells us…”But when he came to himself he said…” When he came to himself?   How do you come to yourself?    Jesus is describing the first step in what repentance actually is.   The word repentance doesn’t mean that you feel badly for what you’ve done.   It doesn’t describe any feeling at all.    The word actually means a change of mind, a change of how you perceive everything, including yourself.

In our lives the flaws and failings that really hurt us and those around us aren’t the ones we know about.   They’re the ones we don’t.    That’s why they’re so dangerous.  But seeing these flaws doesn’t just happen.  You don’t decide to wake up from a delusion.  This sort of self-knowledge doesn’t come at our command.   So how do we see them?      The pain of consequences does it.  At some point, our failings catch up with us, and jolt us awake.   Now some folks when consequences wake them up just go back to sleep.  But if we really wake up, than we come to ourselves.  We come to see ourselves more clearly than before.   And that is a picture we desperately need to see.   

That’s what happens here, the son sees himself, really sees himself.   We know that because of what he says next.   He not only talks about going home, but what he will need to say.  He talks about he will tell his father the following.  “I have sinned against heaven, and before you.”  This son’s words cut right to the heart of the matter.  He doesn’t take any time to make any excuses for his mistakes, to talk about how his dad could have done things differently.  He takes on the full weight of the failure. Part of seeing yourself means facing up to the full weight of your failings.  Self-excusal is really a form of self-destruction.  And it will get you nowhere. 

And taking on that full weight means focusing on how you injured the relationships around you, including your relationship with God.   But here’s the problem.  We can think that we’re doing this, when, in reality all we’re doing is focusing even more on ourselves.    

Thepreacher Tim Keller tells of how early in his ministry, he got a call from a man desperate to save his marriage.   He had gotten his wife, who was about to leave him, to give the marriage another chance if they met with a pastor.    When they met, it became clear that this man had been an extraordinarily selfish and thoughtless husband.   But whenever his wife brought up a behavior he needed to change, he did.   Well, he did for a while.   For several months, he became a new man. But then when it became clear that the crisis had passed, what happened?   He went back not only to his old ways, but became worse than before.   So when he was crying in the pastor’s office, were those tears real?  Sure.  But he wasn’t really crying over how his selfishness had hurt his wife.   He was crying over how his selfishness had hurt him, threatening the end of his marriage.   He wasn’t becoming less selfish.  He was becoming more!  

We can feel badly about mistakes we’ve made, but not experience a change of mind at all.  Why?  Our pain is really about how our mistakes have hurt us.   And while we might change as result, our changes aren’t about ending the pain we have caused others.  It is only about easing the pain our mistakes have caused us.   And once the pain lessens, we fall right back into the same selfish patterns again. 

In the same way, we can grieve over how we have injured our relationship with God, but not really be concerned about God at all.   What are we concerned about?  We don’t want God to get us.   Now beyond the fact that this shows a false picture of God, our fears show not a liberation from selfishness, but a deeper sinking into it.  We’re not focused on God.  We’re focused on us.  This sort of repentance doesn’t transform our minds.  It doesn’t transform anything.  

So what sort of repentance does?   A repentance that realizes this.  Repentance can never find strength in your goodness.   It has to find strength in God’s goodness to you.   And that is where the son misses the point.   He says:   ^“I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”   A hired hand described a particular type of worker, one who lived not on the estate but in town and came in to work.  The son is planning to tell his father.   “Give me a chance to pay it back.   I’ll work for you, but I don’t want to even live here.  I’ll live in town.  And if it takes me my whole life, I’ll pay back what I took from you.”   He is saying.  Yes, Dad, I’ve been bad, but give me a chance to make it good.   Now, if Jesus was talking about a human relationship here, this approach has its merits.   But Jesus isn’t talking about that.  Jesus is talking about our relationship with God.  And in that relationship, this approach doesn’t liberate us from our failings, it imprisons us in them.  Why is that?

When you find your strength in your goodness, as if that is what keeps you in a right relationship with God, then when you fail (as you inevitably will) you lose your strength.   Acknowledging failings doesn’t make you stronger, it makes you weaker.   And this sort of repentance doesn’t bring self-knowledge just self-punishment.  Why?  Well, you figure if I feel this badly about doing something wrong, it must mean that I’m really a good person.  A bad person wouldn’t feel this terrible.  But this self-punishment doesn’t lead to any change in your thinking.   You don’t become better.  You become worse.   Self-punishing doesn’t inspire you to change.  It immobilizes you from making any real change at all.   At worst, you just become a self-hating, self-righteous prig, whose supposed goodness is no real goodness at all.  Next week, when we look at the second half of this story, we’ll see that more clearly.      

But this is not the repentance that Jesus is talking about.   That becomes clear as the son journeys home.  Do you see where the father is?  Is he sitting in the living room, stewing at how badly his son has treated him?  Is he thinking?   If that no good son of mine knocks on that door, I’m going to wait a long time before I open it, and when I do, he better have something good to say.  No.  The father is on the porch scanning the horizon.   And when he sees his son, he doesn’t wait.  He runs.  Now, middle-eastern patriarchs don’t run ever.   And if you think about it, you’ll realize why.  To run would mean lifting up your robes, which well, looks ridiculous.   But this man runs.  He falls on his son’s neck and kisses him.   He places beautiful robes over his dirty rags, and the family ring on his finger.   He kills the fatted calf so that the family might celebrate his return. 

In the end, it is not the son’s goodness that restores him to the family.  It is the father’s goodness, the father’s love that does that.   But this goodness and love of the Father isn’t some Hallmark card sentiment.  It costs him.   In the story, it costs him his dignity, no small thing in a culture where everything is about honor.   But let’s remember who is telling the story; Jesus, who is telling it as an answer to his religious critics, who is already sensing the end of his story.   He knows that when his end comes, no one will be there for him, but those calling for his death.   And instead of beautiful robes, they will place on him a crown of thorns.   And there will be no fatted calf slain.   Instead he will become the sacrificial lamb slain for us.    Yet even there, on that cross, in the face of human evil, what will Jesus pray?  “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do.”   

The cross proclaims even as this story does. It is never our goodness that saves us.  It is instead God’s goodness and love towards us, a goodness and love that came at infinite cost.    And as you grasp this, you will discover.   Repentance doesn’t weaken you.  It renews you.   It gives you power to change, to grow, to become the very person you yearn to be.  Why? Acknowledging your failings doesn’t separate you from your strength.  It draws you more deeply into it, the strength of a God whose goodness and love knows no bounds.   In that strength, you find the courage to face your faults, and become free from them.    In that strength, you find a repentance that doesn’t imprison you.  You find a repentance that sets you free.  

Where today do you need that freedom?   Where today do you need that change of mind that only this repentance can bring?    Let Jesus free you.   Let Jesus free you as only Jesus’ goodness and love can.