The Beginning of Empowerment

The last two Sunday's messages have been a re-examination of the foundational teaching of repentance. We have learned about how many believers never live a healthy Christian lifestyle because repentance isn't fundamental to their conversion experience.

I made a personal commitment to Jesus after hearing the gospel preached in the eighties, and I often testify how I sinned more after my conversion than before. It seems as though the gospel had been reduced to a humanistic: "Just accept Jesus" before I darkened the door of the church that night. As young Christians, we were taught that if we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, He will progressively change our mind about sin and make us want to do good instead. As much as the Spirit plays a huge role in purifying our hearts, God cannot force us to repent from sin. The Spirit convicts, but we have to make up our mind to repent, and to follow through on that.

Why did repentance become so unpopular? In a world drenched with feel-good, popular psychology, the diagnosis of sinful practices requiring a humble acceptance of error and a radical course correction just didn't sit well with a generation hooked on self-expression. Caricatures of heavy-browed, finger-wagging preachers chastising their cowering flocks caused image conscious churches to wade into the swamp of democratically demanded affirmation.

While the church was softening it's message, society urgently attended to the empowerment of disadvantaged and oppressed people groups. Those seeking empowerment ranged from disadvantaged race groups, to women, the unskilled, to those pursuing alternative lifestyles. Few of these groups looked to the church for a pathway to empowerment. The irony is that the key to empowerment was lying fallow in the church.

Empowerment achieved can look suspiciously like the oppressed attaining the lifestyle of the oppressor. Those lacking self-determination looked over the fence of injustice and resolved to somehow obtain what the privileged had. The African-American wanted the respect and rights of the Caucasian, the women wanted the male privileges of high paying careers and freedom from the burden of homemaking, the unskilled worker wanted the wage and opportunity to relax that only the successful few enjoyed. The battle for equal rights for alternative lifestyles continues till today.

Just one question: Who said that a lifestyle equal to the privileged oppressor equates to freedom and empowerment? In my experience of apartheid South Africa, the oppressors were as disfigured and trapped as the oppressed. The oppressor has the further disadvantage of being blind to the golden cage. Most importantly, the oppressor has increased wrath stored up for the final day of judgment.

This gives rise to my premise. Empowerment cannot be achieved without God. Equality to a more privileged sinner might feather your nest, but how will that help if the whole tree is on fire?

You see, I believe that freedom isn't the absence of all authority. In fact, careful observation of history reinforces that freedom requires fences or boundaries to secure it. Without some final authority we are left with anarchy and without the rule of law, no-one is safe. It therefore stands to reason that empowerment can only occur through adherence to ultimate authority. In other words, if I comply with God's requirements, I escape all other oppressors and experience the freedom of having to bow only to my Creator.

I begin to comply with God's requirements by repenting from a sinful lifestyle. Therefore repentance is the beginning of empowerment. Forget the march to city hall, rather get a change of mind about the life God wants you to live.