True Repentance

Seek me and live.

Amos 5.4

Roy Clements (from When God's Patience Runs Out):

Amos is telling you how to find the mercy of God. If God stopped in to judge the nation of Israel because of the moral decay in her, why should he spare us?

Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

What is repentance?

1. It is God-centred. Seek me. True repentance is taken up with thoughts not of my wounded ego or of the judgments to come, but with thoughts of the  personal God whom I have offended and with whom I am now face to face.

Seek good and not evil (5.14).

2. It is active. It does not sit wallowing in self-pity. It gets up and starts living a new type of life.

Part of that seeking good is: Maintain justice in the courts (5.14). There is an emphasis on a social dimension to doing good. We are part of a world that has gone wrong and we share in its guilt. A religion that is obsessed with personal holiness, but which is content to let society go to the dogs, is not based on true repentance; it is just self-indulgent pietism. True repentance makes people into the salt of the earth and the light of the world: the sort of people who work for justice in the courts.There has to be that social dimension to our repentance.

Hate evil, love good. (5.15)
Amos is demanding that we reflect that moral passion that God feels: hating evil and loving goodness. Repentance involves a radical new beginning to our whole thinking and feeling about life.

Perhaps the LORD God Almighty will have mercy. (5.15)
There is no record in the history of the world of any humble and repentant sinner ever seeking God's mercy in vain.
Jesus: Whoever comes to me, I will never drive away (John 6.37).