DailyDevotion Rend Your Heart With Repentance
Joel 2 12“Right now,” says the LORD, “return to Me with all your hearts, with fasting, weeping, and mourning.” 13Tear your hearts and not your clothes, and turn to the LORD your God because He is gracious, merciful, slow to. get angry, full of kindness, and relents from disaster.
“Right now,” has echoes of, “Today if you hear His voice.” there is an immediacy to the situation. Don’t delay. We should take this to heart. We should not wait for Sunday to confess our sins and repent of them. You never know when you will breathe your last and then it will be too late.
The LORD wants them to return, to repent, the Hebrew word is shuv. When we repent we turn from our false gods and sins and turn to, we return to the LORD our God. And how does the LORD want us to return to Him? With all our hearts, with fasting, weeping and mourning. Even in the Torah, the LORD always wanted His people’s hearts first and then the outward action. You could have outward actions without the heart. We can feign repentance to our fellows, but not with the LORD. I get a little worried when I hear people say they repent of their sins but never have any emotional content to that repentance. We aren’t as a society very open with these sorts of feelings, particularly in Church.
Now when He says, “Tear your hearts and not your clothes,” Dr. Nass says the grammar really dictates it is an idiom which means, tear your hearts and “not just” your clothes. Another example is when the LORD tells the Israelites He doesn’t want their sacrifices. It should be understood as, “not just” your sacrifices. (Hosea 6:6) If the heart, the center of our being, is not involved then the outward actions are worthless. So Paul can say in Romans 14, “Anything that is not an act of faith is sin.” Hebrews tells us in ch. 11, “6But it is impossible to please God without faith.” Faith is born in the heart. Faith repents and turns to the LORD.
Faith can turn to the LORD, we can turn to the LORD with our hearts because of the promise, “He is gracious, merciful, slow to get angry, full of kindness, and relents from disaster.” The LORD is referring back to the Name He revealed to Moses in Ex. 34:6, “the LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, slow to get angry, rich in love and faithfulness, 7continuing to show mercy to thousands, forgiving wrong, rebellion, and sin, without treating it as innocent, but disciplining children and children’s children to the third and fourth generation for the sins of their fathers.” We see here the primary attitude and character of the LORD of Israel and our God. He’d rather have mercy, kindness, steadfast love, grace and forgiveness toward us rather than punish us and condemn us eternally to hell. We see this in Jesus Christ on the cross. There Jesus is glorified because the LORD is chiefly glorified when showing these positive characteristics. Jesus’ death on the cross exemplifies the name of the LORD. Given the promise our Father in heaven desires to be this way toward us, we are then able to turn to Him and be the object of His grace, mercy, kindness, steadfast love and forgiveness. We can be assured we shall experience this when we turn to the LORD with all our heart, soul, mind in strength with faith in His promise.
Merciful, gracious, kind, loving and forgiving Father, give us hearts that trust in Your promise as assured to us by Christ on the cross, so we may turn to You with all our hearts. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.