Repent and Be Converted Does Not Mean Be a Different Man by Friday

I have watched a particular kind of good man give up, and it is never the way you would expect.

He does not walk away in anger. He does not decide it is all nonsense. What happens is quieter and sadder: he sets himself a picture of the man he is going to be, and he genuinely means it, and then a month later he is not that man, and he concludes from that fact that the whole thing did not take.

I did this myself in the first year. I had a picture. It involved being calm and being early and reading the Bible in a chair with a cup of coffee like the men on the covers of certain books. It also involved not being the man who had ruined a great deal by being exactly who he was.

And about six weeks in I lost my temper in a parking lot over nothing at all, and I sat in the car and thought: well, that answers that.

That was the closest I came to quitting, and it was nothing to do with doubt. It was a deadline I set myself that God had not agreed to.

What Peter's sentence actually ends with

Here it is.

Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. (Acts 3:19, King James Version)

Read the destination of that sentence. It ends at times of refreshing, and those come from the presence of the Lord.

Not: repent, and be a substantially better man within a reasonable timeframe. Not: repent, and produce evidence. The clause that closes it is about something arriving from somewhere else.

Refreshing is a word for what happens to a tired person, not a word for what happens to a lazy one. Peter is talking to a crowd who had recently been part of something terrible, and what he offers at the end of the sentence is relief.

You are promised refreshing from His presence, and that is where Peter's own sentence lands. Acts 3:19 ends at times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord rather than at a change deadline. It is the Holy Spirit, John 14:16 given as another Comforter to abide, who is named as the presence that stays.

Whose project it is

The single most freeing sentence in the New Testament on this subject is one line of Paul's, and everything depends on the subject of the verb.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

He which hath begun. Not you. Paul is confident about a work that somebody else started and somebody else will finish, and the person it is happening in is the location rather than the contractor.

Which changes the meaning of a bad week entirely. A bad week is a bad week in a project. It is not a resignation letter, because nobody here was ever holding the pen on the schedule.

And the timescale in that verse is worth reading slowly: until the day of Jesus Christ. That is the deadline Paul gives. Not Friday. Not a year from Tuesday. He is describing a work that runs the length of a life and finishes somewhere else.

You are the site of the work rather than the contractor on it. Philippians 1:6 makes God the subject of both verbs, begun and perform, and it is the same Spirit, 2 Corinthians 3:18 by whom we are changed from glory to glory, who does the changing that a schedule never delivered.

The pace Scripture actually describes

There is a phrase in Corinthians that describes the speed, and people skip past it because it sounds like a decoration.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

From glory to glory. That is a series. It is not one event. It is a sequence of stages, each one better than the last and none of them final, and the whole thing is credited to the Spirit at the end of the verse.

And then there is my favorite piece of honesty in the gospels, which nobody preaches and which I think about constantly. Jesus heals a blind man and asks him what he can see, and the man says this:

I see men as trees, walking. (Mark 8:24)

Halfway. He can see, and it is not right yet, and Jesus is not offended by the report. He puts His hands on him again.

That is the only place in the gospels where a healing happens in two stages, and I do not think it is an accident that it is the one about seeing.

You are allowed to be halfway and to say so out loud. Mark 8:24 records a man reporting a partial result to Jesus without being rebuked for it. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who does not require a person to overstate where they have got to.

And if the failed fresh starts have piled up to the point where they are doing real damage, say it out loud to somebody: a doctor, a counselor, a sponsor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A man alone with a list of his own broken promises is in a worse room than he thinks he is.

What is asked, and what is not

There is one instruction in Romans that describes the mechanism, and it does not ask a person to produce a new self.

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:2)

Be ye transformed. It is passive, which people miss because English hides it. He is not saying transform yourself. He is saying be transformed, and then names the mechanism: by the renewing of your mind, which is a slow thing that happens to somebody who keeps putting true things in front of themselves.

So the actual assignment is small and repeatable. Keep coming. Keep putting the word in front of your mind. That is the whole of it, and the transformation is described as something that happens to a person who does that, on a timeline that belongs to somebody else.

You are asked to keep coming rather than to arrive finished. Romans 12:2 puts the transforming in the passive and names the renewing of the mind as the means. It is His Spirit, Titus 3:5 naming the renewing of the Holy Ghost, who supplies the renewing itself.