A Misunderstood Word

When John the Baptist started preaching, his message was a simple one.  "Repent!"  The same can be said of Jesus.  His first recorded sermon called those who listened to repent as well.  It would seem that with such an example, preachers would get the idea that being cute with words is not nearly as important as saying what needs to be said with simple understandable language.  I have often remembered one of the lessons taught by my preaching professor at Candler School of Theology.  He told us to preach as if we were preaching to sixth graders.  Now, he was not saying anything negative about the congregation's ability to understand, he was cautioning us would-be-preacher about getting carried away with our own eloquence.

 

There was nothing eloquent about the preaching of John the Baptist.  He spoke about the necessity of looking at self and God in a different way since God was about to do a new thing through His Son, Jesus.  Repentance was the word he used to speak of this change.  When he used it, he was not speaking about some outward lifestyle change such as ceasing to use profanity, or stopping some bad habit, but instead, he was calling those who listened to a heart change.  A heart change has to do with motivation.  It does not have to do with the outward expression of what is in the heart, but the inner working of the heart which cause the outward behavior.

It is not a common thing anymore to hear preaching that is repentance oriented.  To preach about repentance means taking sin seriously which is not something done today.  The sinful heart is not seen as something to be crucified, but as something to be tolerated.  People are not so interested in doing away with the sin in their lives as they are learning to live with it.   These are not the responses John the Baptist sought as he called them to come into the river for  baptism of repentance. "Father God, keep me away from being content with the easy to live with response.  Amen."