Genuine repentance always ends in renewal of worship. God created us to worship, and we are always worshiping something or someone. Repentant people have concluded that only God is worthy of worship, and they will long to gather with other likeminded worshipers to ascribe glory to Christ alone.
It’s not always easy to tell the difference between appearance and reality.
The other week I decided to change the oil in our cars. After tuning my headphones to a long Grateful Dead jam, I drove the first car up onto the ramps and began the process. The first step requires draining the old oil into an oil pan underneath the car—a process that takes several minutes to complete. As I laid in the grass underneath the front of my car jamming out to a classic Jerry Garcia guitar solo, I entered a state of motionless relaxation as I watched the oil drain slowly into the pan.
I had no idea my daughter was watching me out the window of our house. She saw motionless legs protruding from underneath the front of a three-ton vehicle and a father who would not respond to her calling my name because I couldn’t hear her due to my headphones. She thought I was dead. The brief saga ended with my wife walking out to get my attention.
We misinterpret reality more than we care to admit. However, as hard as it is to interpret accurately what’s going on with other people, it may be even more challenging to interpret what’s going on within ourselves. As the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed over 2600 years ago, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17:9)?
When it comes to following Christ, believers often make the mistake of confusing feeling bad with actual change, falsely concluding that being emotionally moved by the word of God is sufficient. We accept remorse but stop short of repentance. We tell ourselves that if we agree with the sentiment of the preached word, we have obeyed without anything changing in our lives. The Bible warns against this. To be a hearer of the word but not a doer, James says, is to deceive ourselves (James 1:22).