A Turned and Turning Life

Acts 2:38-41

And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

This is, perhaps, the first beginning, the first small glimpse, of the church’s developing understanding of the purpose of the cross. . . .

You need to turn back. But the way to do that is to become part of the kingdom-movement that is identified with Jesus, part of the people who claim his life, death and resurrection as the center and foundation of their own. You need, in other words, to be baptized, to join the company marked out with the sign of the “new exodus,” coming through the water to leave behind slavery and sin and to find the way to freedom and life. You need to allow Jesus himself to grasp hold of you, to save you from the consequences of the way you were going (“forgiveness of sins”) and to give you new energy to go in the right way instead (“the gift of the holy spirit”). To do all that is to “turn back” from the way you were going, and to go in the other direction instead. That is what is meant by the word repent (42).

Aaron Orendorff

“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17),” reads the first of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, “he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” We ought to hear in Peter’s words a similar admonition. There is, of course, an aspect of repentance (particularly here where it is coupled with the initiating right of baptism) that is likewise initiating. We enter Jesus’ “kingdom-movement” (quite frankly) by turn from our own. We repent (to paraphrase the Lord’s Prayer) from hollowing our own names, from saying, “Our kingdom come. Our will be done.” But it is not as though, having turned “once for all” we then leave off the ugly and humbling work of repentance. To live a life of repentance means to live a turned and turning life. We are to be constantly about the work of feeling our hearts cut, recognizing our sin, acknowledging the reality of the gospel and turning again from our way of doing life to God’s. The beautiful truth of this lifestyle is that “forgiveness of sin” is never exhausted but is always new and always sufficient. We are never left to get by or get good on our own. Moreover, the work of the Spirit is meant not to fill us with sublime feelings and lofty thoughts but to ground us more and more in the grit of life, to reveal to us more and more who and what we are, to work in us the necessity of repentance and the freedom of life found therein.