WHAT REPENTANCE REALLY IS: HEARING CHRIST, TURNING FROM SIN, LIVING IN RIGHTEOUSNESS
Scripture Reading: Matthew 4:12-25
Now when he heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew into Galilee. And leaving Nazareth he went and lived in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:
“The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali,
the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people dwelling in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death,
on them a light has dawned.”
From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
And he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought him all the sick, those afflicted with various diseases and pains, those oppressed by demons, those having seizures, and paralytics, and he healed them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee and the Decapolis, and from Jerusalem and Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.
Repent, For The Kingdom Of Heaven Is At Hand: A Sermon On Matthew 4:17
Pastor James Huenink
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God, our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus, Christ. Amen.
We see a story of Jesus, a very well known story of Jesus going out to the disciples, and He does his thing. He says, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Immediately, they drop their nets and follow Jesus. And similarly, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, do the same. And Jesus goes with his brand new disciples, and he begins his ministry. He goes out into the world, and Matthew gives us very simple understanding of what he preaches. The summary is in verse 17, Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That's what Jesus preaches. His whole ministry of preaching and teaching can be summed up with that repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Sounds relatively straightforward. In fact, it's just a single word, isn't it? Makes it easy, right? Of course, we have to define that word. Then what is repentance? And that's what I'd like to focus on today. Jesus says repent, so we need to know what it is. Today. I'd like to talk about it and say repentance is hearing the voice of Jesus turning from sin and following in righteousness.
REPENTANCE BEGINS WITH HEARING THE VOICE OF JESUS
This is how it works with Jesus' disciples. He comes to them and says, Follow me. It's the same thing that happens when he goes out and preaches. The people don't turn on their own. It begins with the word repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Wherever he goes, he preaches the gospel, proclaiming that the gospel of the kingdom followed with healing every disease and freeing them from every affliction and turning to follow Jesus, repentance always begins with hearing the voice of his call.
This is different for Jesus than it would have been for other people. When Jesus goes to his first disciples and says, Follow me. That's not the normal way of gathering people to you. If you were a famous teacher or an important rabbi, people came to you and they applied. You'd present your resume. He would run it through the AI to make sure it had all the right keywords, and then he would select the best candidates after a lengthy interview process, that's not what Jesus does. He goes and he finds the right people, and he says, Follow me.
This isn't just true for his very first disciples, who he later made into apostles. It's also true for every Christian, Christ comes to us first and calls us, whether it's through the word, for those who heard it for the first time as adults, or through your baptism, when you were called to follow Christ when the water was splashed upon you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Christ calls you to be his own.
He comes because he knows that we cannot turn on our own. We cannot repent on our own. You must hear the voice of Christ, because only he can bring light into our dark lives, only he can raise us from the death of sin to the life of Christ. It's only by his call that we can actually follow him. And so repentance always begins with the offer of life and Grace coming from the voice of Christ in His Word and Sacraments.
TURNING FROM SIN
So repentance begins with hearing the voice of Jesus, and then it proceeds to the second part, turning from sin for the men in our story today, James, John, Peter and Andrew, Jesus comes to them and changes their life immediately. He says, Follow me. And they drop their nets and follow him. They don't even give two weeks notice. Come on, guys, don't you know that's how it's supposed to go, like they gotta find replacements. Poor dad, he's like, what the Mets still the nets still need mending. When Jesus calls their life changes.
Now, of course, we know that their old life of fishing was not sin. This isn't about saying that normal life is evil and ministry is good. This is to help us see the sudden nature of the call of Christ, that when He comes to us with his voice, the old life is ended and the new life is begun. For these very men, it actually meant a real and total change. No longer are they fishermen, no longer do they get their earning from the sea. Now they follow Christ every single day and hear His voice and assist him in his ministry. And these men would later, like I said, become the apostles who he would send out into the world, doing his ministry.
But it's also a good example for us. When Christ calls life changes, we turn from the old ways of the world. We leave behind our sin and focus on Christ. It's no less dramatic. It is no less total. We Die with Christ and rise with him when we repent and turn from sin. The call of Christ is a call to say to our lives the old life that is gone, I am now new.
The challenge for many people is actually living in it, isn't it? We look at our lives filled with sin, and we ask ourselves, How can I continue to do the things that I do? I know each one of us has patterns and behaviors that we cling to. Each one of us has sins that we know we need to get rid of, and we have a hard time, sins of weakness, sins that just kind of come out of us and we wonder. And the repentance that we need is a thing that we have to do constantly to see our sin and turn from it.
And the joy of this is only Christ can empower us to do that when He offers us His grace in his word and Sacraments. Not only does he call us to do this, but he also gives us the strength that we need by the power of the Holy Spirit when He comes to us in His Word and Sacraments. Here, this is the amazing joy of being a Christian, that even the things that God demands of us, he also gives to us. He gives you the Spirit, so that every day, every day that you repent, you can turn just a little bit more so that you can work on your sin just a little bit more. This is the gift of repentance, and not just the demand that our Savior comes and gives us what we need to daily, weekly, every day, turn to Christ just a little bit more.
FOLLOWING IN RIGHTEOUSNESS
And so then we don't just turn from our sin, but we live in this beautiful and wonderful righteousness that Christ gives us. The disciples didn't just drop their nets, but they followed. They turned toward Christ and lived in His Word. We are similar to that. Though we don't actually get to follow Jesus on a daily basis hearing his voice. We, who are made alive in Christ, get to follow and hear His word as well, and this is what helps us understand what it means to live in righteousness once we have turned from our sin and said No, how now do we live? We're guided by the word. We're guided by the wisdom that God gives us.
After he fills us with His Spirit and gives us the desire to change. He actually tells us what to do. The apostles, they heard it straight from the mouth of Jesus. They got to follow him all three years of his ministry. Hear his parables, hear his teaching. Probably he taught a lot of the same stuff. Had the stump speech that he did so much so that maybe the disciples were like this one again. Aren't we reading the same passage we read last year and the year before that and the year before that, but just like them, we need to hear it over and over again, don't we, because the wisdom of God's word never ceases and never apply. It always applies in new and normal ways, and never gets old. There is always something new to learn from it, because it's really not about the word, but about us. Our lives are always different. Our hearts are always changing. We always need new things and come to new understandings, and the word is constantly there to give us direction to serve in the righteousness that he calls us to. Because being a disciple of Christ is not just about salvation, but it's also about our behavior and our obedience and our love. So when we repent, we serve in righteousness.
JESUS CHRIST IS MY LORD
I think the way Martin Luther explains the second article of the Apostles Creed really helps us to see what it means to live like this, to hear the voice of Christ turn from our sin and then follow in righteousness. Martin Luther focuses in on the word Lord. He says that Jesus Christ is my Lord who has redeemed me a lost and condemned person, purchased and won me from all sins, from death and the power of devil, not with gold or silver, but with his holy, precious blood and his innocent suffering and death, that I may be his own and live under Him in His Kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence and blessedness, just as He has risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.
I think when we hear those words, we kind of skip over that word Lord. Sometimes in the Bible, the word Lord is just used as if it's a name, especially in the Old Testament, it replaces the name of God. We use the word Lord, and so we miss what Luther meant when he says that, because the word Lord in luther's day was not just a title. Everybody had a lord. It was someone who lived in the big house that you had to pay taxes to, and when his army came out, they were scary, and you were always supposed to do what he said.
And Luther takes that explanation and gives it to the Christian, except this kind of Lord, the Jesus as Lord, is a Lord who, when he calls, doesn't just demand obedience, but saves you spent his holy, precious blood and his innocent suffering and death to make you a part of His kingdom. The Redemption is about taking you from the kingdom of Satan, the old world of sin, and making you a part of the Kingdom of Christ, the new world of life, and this repentance process is how we go from serving Satan to serving Christ, and so we live in this righteousness, because we're no longer under this king. Now we're under this king, not Satan as Lord, but Jesus as Lord. And so luther's explanation here helps us to see that as we are called to Christ through repentance, we focus on the righteousness of serving our Savior.
THE ONGOING NATURE OF REPENTANCE
It would be nice if repentance was a process that only happened once in the life of a Christian, wouldn't it? You get your baptism, you're raised to new life, and everything is good. After that, you hear the voice of Christ, and you say, now I'm a Christian, and I'm awesome at it, but it's not like that. This process of repentance, hearing the voice of Christ, turning from sin, and living and serving in righteousness. It's ongoing. Every one of us needs to do it all the time, something that never ends, because sin is always there to pull at us try to get us to leave behind our Christ and go back to the Old Kingdom.
And so we continue doing it, hearing the voice of Christ, turning from our sin and following in righteousness every day, because the voice of Christ continues to go out to preserve and protect us and call us to follow him in Jesus name, Amen.
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