The Call to Repentance and Conversion

The Advent message is of repentance and conversion, a call to turn away from sin and self-will and turn toward God. It is an ongoing call. I can point to the day, even the hour, when I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. Christ has made me His own. And yet, each day – each hour – still calls all of us to a new conversion.

Accepting Christ is a serious thing. It means allowing Him to do His work – stripping away the layers of sin, rebellion, resentment, resistance, fear, all the things that stand between ourselves and God. Even when I want to let go of these things, it is hard. It hurts when God peels off a layer, strips away what seems to be my very self, revealing the vulnerable self beneath.

What will be left of me, if I let Him do that? Can I trust Him to leave me something of myself? I can trust Him, yes, but not to leave me myself. It is precisely myself that I cannot hold back. I must give Him all. He will not leave me alone; He will remake me, in the refiner’s fire if necessary.

It is a process, like the art restorer patiently working away at an old masterpiece, removing the dulling varnish, the soot and grime of the centuries that obscure its beauty. Is it pride to say that I am that masterpiece? Only if I think that I am the creator of myself – one more layer to strip away. In truth, God is the artist, God is the Author of my being.

I understand now that the mature Christians whom I admire and emulate are not so different from me – they are simply further along in the process. God has peeled off more of the obscuring layers of their selves, so that the person God made them to be shines through more clearly.

The process of restoration and renewal will not be complete until I stand before His face. But even now, the process has already begun and indeed continues. As He strips away each layer of sin and rebellion, His light shines more clearly through me. The curious thing is that when I feel most transparent – when I feel most fully that it is Christ who works in and through me, and that I am simply the lens through which His light shines – that I also feel most fully and completely myself.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-5, 14)

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