Good morning. I want to talk this morning about a word in Scripture. It’s. The word is repent. And there’s a phrase in Scripture that I think is so interesting. It says unless you repent, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.

You can’t enter the kingdom that God has created for you, which is the life with him that he wants you to have. And as a younger person, I used to think repent just meant, you know, stop sinning. You know, when you went to confession as a Catholic, you were supposed to make this act of contrition that said, I will not ever do this sin again. But I realized repent has much more nuanced meaning, and it goes something like this. When you sin and everybody sins, let’s face it, when you make a mistake, when you miss the mark, I don’t care how serious it is or how insignificant it might be, we still have a sense that we did something wrong. Okay, well, then what are you supposed to do when you do something wrong?

Are you supposed to just stop doing it or are you supposed to learn from it? And that’s where repentance comes in. Because the word repent means to regret. And you can’t regret something you’ve done unless you reflect upon it. Unless you take time to sit back and say, what was I doing? Why did I say that?

Why did I act that way? That’s the work of working with sin. And repentance is the key to moving from sin and the mistakes that are in those sins to a motivation that is within you that says, I’m not going to do this again because I regret that I did it, because I see it for what it is. So I hope that helps. It’s just thinking about repentance is not just stopping sinning because I am told to, but because I’ve reflected on it. I realize how stupid or how selfish or how that’s not really me.

So reflection over our mistakes is essential if you want to enter into the kingdom of God, which is a place of acceptance, support, and patient love.