Repent: Advent 2 reflection

Have you ever been remorseful for failure to follow the stipulated rules or guidelines? The best way to cure this remorsefulness is through repentance. Through repentance there is remission and forgiveness. Repentance stirs up the repairing of broken relationships. Repentance stipulates returning, facing up, acknowledging, and coming to terms with the wrong, in order to right it.

The Christian understanding of repentance is that it is the basis on which we turn to God. The transformation and renewal of a Christian towards God begins at repentance. We submit that we have failed our Creator and are not worthy of his unmerited Grace. Our ways in life have been faulty before God, and then change to a transformed new attitude towards God's law. We put away our old forms of life that is contrary to God's will and embrace a positive Godly life fulfilling His Law.

While it may seem as though all repentance is our reaction and realization, it is God's Love, His Grace, unmerited that we respond to. As if we were looking at a clean mirror and realizing how dirty we were. We love Him, because He first loved us, (1 John 4:19); died for us and gave up all to pay for us, again. We re-turn to Him in re-pentance because He's been seeking us, Standing at the door and knocking (Rev. 3:20). We come second (RE-) because He had already come first. We are responding to a prompting persistently beckoning us to turn, towards Him and away from everything else which is only evil, self and distracting from God's unfathomable love.

Once this change has happened, our Christian repentance is evident to all through our actions, behavior, choices and overall transformation; that focuses on Him and not our human frailty. It holds us to a higher standard while the world about us can use us as a benchmark and standard.

The Rev Agnes Kuria is a newcomer to St. Columba's. She was ordained to priesthood in the Anglican Church of Kenya, and now lives here with her fiance David, also a new member. Welcome Agnes and David!