Fruit in Keeping with Repentance

Father, we’ve already sung these words. We offer them to you again as our prayer. Show us Christ. So simple, and yet from our hearts, we ask that through this word, you would show us Christ, you would reveal your glory through the preaching of your word, that every heart in this room within the sound of my voice would confess that Christ is Lord. We pray in his name. Amen.

We come this morning to the end of our series on the book of Ezra. I’ll be gone next week, and then we’ll have the Faithful Conference. Then we’ll have a series in Advent, and Lord willing, the plan is to start Romans in the beginning of 2026. I’ve never preached through the book of Romans, and so buckle up. We’ll be in together. But this morning, we come to Ezra chapter 10. Follow along as I read.

“While Ezra prayed and made confession, weeping and casting himself down before the house of God, a very great assembly of men, women, and children gathered to him out of Israel, for the people wept bitterly. And Shecaniah the son of Jehiel, of the sons of Elam, addressed Ezra: ‘We have broken faith with our God and have married foreign women from the peoples of the land. But even now there is hope for Israel in spite of this. Therefore, let us make a covenant with our God to put away all these wives and their children according to the counsel of my Lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God. And let it be done according to the Law. Arise, for it is your task and we are with you. Be strong and do it.’ Then Ezra arose and made the leading priests and Levites and all Israel take an oath that they would do as had been said. So they took the oath.

Then Ezra withdrew from before the house of God and went to the chamber of Jehohanan the son of Eliashib, where he spent the night, neither eating bread nor drinking water, for he was mourning over the faithlessness of the exiles. And a proclamation was made throughout Judah and Jerusalem to all the returned exiles that they should assemble at Jerusalem, and that if anyone did not come within three days by order of the officials and the elders, all his property should be forfeited, and he himself banned from the congregation of the exiles. Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem within the three days. It was the ninth month on the 20th day of the month. And all the people sat in the open square before the house of God trembling because of this matter and because of the heavy rain. And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, ‘You have broken faith and married foreign women, and so increase the guilt of Israel. Now then, make confession to the Lord, the God of your fathers, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives.’

Then all the assembly answered with a loud voice, “It is so. We must do as you have said. But the people are many, and it is a time of heavy rain. We cannot stand in the open, nor is this a task for one day or for two. For we have greatly transgressed in this matter. Let our officials stand for the whole assembly. Let all in our cities who have taken foreign wives come at appointed times, and with them the elders and judges of every city, until the fierce wrath of our God over this matter is turned away from us. Only Jonathan the son of Asahel and Jahzeiah the son of Tikvah opposed this, and Meshullam and Shabbethai the Levite supported them. Then the returned exiles did so. Ezra the priest selected men, heads of fathers’ houses according to their fathers’ houses, each of them designated by name. On the first day of the tenth month, they sat down to examine the matter. And by the first day of the first month, they had come to the end of all the men who had married foreign women. Now there were found some of the sons of the priests who had married foreign women: Maaseiah, Eliezar, Jarib, and Gedaliah, some of the sons of Jeshua, son of Jozadak, and his brothers. They pledged themselves to put away their wives, and their guilt offering was a ram of the flock for their guilt.”

Then you see verse 20: the sons of Immer, the sons of Harim. Verse 23: a list of the Levites. Verse 25: then a list of all of Israel. And look at the very last verse, the end of the book, 44:

“And all these had married foreign women, and some of the women had even borne children.”

Two days ago was Reformation Day. We remember that on October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther with those famous 95 theses on the church door at Wittenburg. I did like the one meme that I saw that has a very decked-out Luther standing at the door with the writing on it, holding a mallet, and it just says “nailed it.” Here’s how the document began: “Out of love for the truth and from desire to elucidate it, the Reverend Father Martin Luther, master of arts and sacred theology and ordinary lecturer therein at Wittenburg, intends to defend the following statements and to dispute on them in that place. Therefore, he asks that those who cannot be present in dispute with him orally shall do so in their absence by letter in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.” It’s a very common practice to initiate an academic dispute. And he posts these 95 statements – propositions, theses. Here is number one: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “repent,” he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. He was, without realizing it, nailing the first nail in the coffin of an entire system of sacramental piety. Not that he was against the sacraments – far from it. But this system whereby you do certain things, and grace is conferred upon you, and you start, and then you continue by the sacraments as they minister to you – this justifying grace and baptism and then continuing with penance and on. And we still celebrate the sacraments. We will this morning, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. We believe that God ministers to us in it. But Luther was saying something that would in time prove to be profound – that repentance was not something you did merely at the beginning of your life or on certain occasions marked by the sacrament of penance, but that the whole life of the Christian was one of repentance before the face of God. Remember John the Baptist, as he called the Pharisees and the Sadducees a brood of vipers, then exhorted them to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. We see in Mark 1 the summary statement when Jesus bursts onto the scene – his preaching message was summarized “repent and believe in the gospel.”

Repent and believe. We turn to Christ, but we also turn from sin. You cannot do one without the other. Last week, as Tom preached, was confession. The people – Ezra, their representative – expressed, “We’re ashamed. We’re guilty. We’ve forsaken your law. We have not stood fast before you.” And that was good, to confess their sins. But they needed more than words. They needed to make it right. They needed to take steps of repentance. They weren’t just bewailing their wrongs. You’ve perhaps had this experience or if you’ve seen it in other people – it’s one thing to get caught in sin. Somebody sees what you did on your phone. Someone knows what you’ve been looking at. Your email – you hit reply all when you meant reply, and everybody sees, and you feel embarrassed, ashamed, you regret. And you pour out, maybe you even shed some tears. You say you’re sorry, you have a good cry, and now you want to move on. But the question remains: what is different in your life because of this confession of sin? What fruit? Now, on the one hand, we don’t want to be such picky fruit pickers that someone can repent and we say, “Well, I guess I’ll check back in 50 years and I’ll see if it’s really good enough fruit.” And yet, on the other hand, the Bible tells us it isn’t enough that somebody simply weeps and wails and says they’re sorry. We have to see, has anything changed in your life? This becomes very difficult sometimes in counseling situations or with a conflict in husband or wife, and maybe one is continually saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It’s never enough, but you have to ask what looks different? That’s what this passage is about.

Confession in chapter 9, repentance in chapter 10. Now, before we can look at what this repentance entails, you may be thinking – you should be thinking – well, isn’t there a ginormous, to use the technical word, problem in this passage, namely that the book ends with a mass divorce ceremony? The foreign wives, remember, was not a racial thing or an ethnic thing. It was a religious thing. We saw earlier in the book that those people of the land who came in repentance and they wanted to be worshippers of Yahweh and they separated themselves from the corruptions of the world, they were welcomed into the camp. So foreign, here, is not someone outside of your nationality or looks different than you. We see instances – Moses married Tzipporah, Kushite woman. Now, foreign here means these are women of the land who have the corrupting influences of the surrounding pagan culture. These are non-Yahweh followers. So they get married. And now the thing to do to make it right is divorce. And you say, “How can that be the right thing to do?” Matthew 5: Jesus says, “I say to you, everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.” Paul in 1 Corinthians 7: “If any brother has a wife who is an unbeliever and she consents to live with him, he should not divorce her. If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him. So Paul says clearly, if you’re in a mixed marriage, don’t divorce. Now, there he is thinking, likely, of those who one of them became a Christian. But nevertheless, there’s the principle. Don’t go around adding sin to sin. Okay? Maybe this isn’t the best situation, but you’re married. Don’t go and divorce.

So what should we do with this, which seems to be in sharp distinction to what we hear from Jesus and Paul? Well, there’s a number of things to consider. One, we could point out that Deuteronomy 24 allowed for divorce. Jesus even said Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, allowed for divorce. And there in Deuteronomy 24, it says if the woman has some indecency in her, and the rabbis disagreed about what that meant, but we see already in the Mosaic covenant there was a provision that, as an exception to the rule, sometimes divorce was allowed. We could also recognize that Jesus in that particular debate – there was a rabbinical school from Shammai that was the more conservative interpretation, and the more liberal interpretation from a rabbi Hillel – that Jesus very clearly comes down on the more conservative side. Some of the Jews, you know, a famous instance in one of their documents says for even burning the toast, that could be something indecent and you could send your wife away. And Jesus comes down on the more conservative side. We could also note that this is a passage giving us a description, not necessarily a prescription. So it doesn’t mean to lay out “here, now, is Jesus’ teaching on what to do and the proper liturgy for a mass divorce ceremony.” But even more importantly than that, there are some contextual clues that are really important if we’re to understand exactly what is and is not happening in this passage. And a big part of realizing what’s happening here is to understand the timing.

So you have your Bible open. I want you to pay attention because the writer here is very careful and giving us some timestamps. So look at Ezra chapter 7, verse 8. Remember Ezra, the second half of this book, he’s leading a second wave of returning exiles. Ezra 7:8 – “And Ezra came to Jerusalem in the fifth month, which was in the seventh year of the king. For on the first day of the first month, he began to go up from Babylonia. On the first day of the fifth month, he came to Jerusalem.” So, we have the basic markers there. Month one, he comes up, and he starts making plans to leave. And he gets to Jerusalem at the beginning of month five. Look, then, at the next chapter 8, verse 31: “Then we departed from the river Ahava on the 12th day of the first month. Easy for me to say. This makes sense, doesn’t it? We just read he started to make these plans, and he gets the instructions on day one. So here we read he leaves on the 12th day – took about two weeks to get ready. And they go to Jerusalem, and the hand of our God was upon us. Verse 32: “we came to Jerusalem.” Now we know from chapter 7, they come at the beginning of the fifth month, and there we remained for three days. So, we are here at the beginning of month five. Chapter 9, verse 1 says, “After these things had been done” – and this is where Ezra first realizes the corruption that has come upon the people by marrying these foreign women. So the question is, how long are we talking about after these things? Well, if you notice in the text, we have an answer to it. Look at chapter 10, verse 9. So, this is part of the scene of confession and repentance. 10:9 – “All the men of Judah and Benjamin assembled within three days” – it was, notice the time, the ninth month on the 20th day. So they arrived day one, month five. They are now gathered here. Day 20, month nine. So you can back up. It took days to gather. It took some time for Ezra to weep and to wail. So sometime in the ninth month, Ezra becomes aware of this sin. So do the math. We are talking about four months.

So this puts this whole thing in a very different light. These were not relationships that they had been married together for years and years and decades. They had quickly gotten married when they came into the land, and they had been married to these women for weeks or for months. These are not long-standing families. Now, there’s a couple notes about children. Look at the very last verse: 44 says, “Some of the women had borne children.” Now, notice there’s a footnote or you could translate it, “And they put them away with their children.” And whether that’s the translation or not – you could go either way – I think that is certainly the sense of it, because you cannot have children in four months. So they did not have children themselves, but some of these women – so, seems like most of them didn’t – but some of these women came into this marriage with children. That’s what it means. Some of them had already borne children, not with their new husbands, but coming into this marriage. So these are families that have just come together. You almost – it’s almost an annulment. They quick rushed into this marriage. They’ve been married for weeks or months, and now Ezra is saying you need to separate. And there’s one other factor that likely comes into play. If you can keep your finger there in Ezra, go to the last book in the Old Testament, Malachi, or you can just listen. Ezra is in the 400s BC. Malachi, the last prophet, is in the 400s. And what he talks about here may be the very specific issue in Ezra’s day, or if not, at least it’s the same kind of issue that was taking place. If not to this specific moment, then this is likely the sort of thing that happened when the exiles returned. So Malachi chapter 2, verse 11: “Judah has been faithless. An abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord, which he loves, and has married the daughter of a foreign god.” So there’s the issue. It’s not that the women are of a different nationality, but they are connected to a different god:

“May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob any descendant of the man who does this, who brings an offering to the Lord. And this is the second thing: You cover the Lord’s altar with tears, with weeping and groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. But you say, ‘Why does he not?’ Because the Lord has witnessed between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant, did he not make them one with a portion of spirit in their union and what was the one God seeking? Godly offspring. So guard yourselves in your spirit, and let none of you” – here’s the key – “be faithless to the wife of your youth.”

Now this is about divorce. Presumably – you put the pieces together – what had happened, not only had these Israelite men married foreign women, but a number of them had divorced their Israelite wives to do so. Maybe their wives were back in Babylon, and they were going to come in another caravan some months later. Or maybe they came here, and as tragically happens sometimes, men were having a mid-life sinful crisis or something, and said, “Well, let’s get a newer model here, and we’re going to do away with this one. And this is kind of extravagant and intriguing, and look at these foreign women here.” And many of them were putting away their wives. So this puts it all in a different context. These are not households that have been happily living together for years and years and decades. This is a situation that unfolded within a matter of weeks and months. The men come, some of them divorcing their own wives to do so, others giving their sons to marry these women. And now Ezra says, “This has to be undone. This has only happened in the last weeks or months, and we cannot move forward.” Think about the tenuous nature of this small exile community, surrounded by the nations – how easily they had become compromised. And remember, at the very center of it was the leadership. It’s like – the priests and the Levites. It’s like finding out that the leading culprits were your pastors and your elders. Of course Ezra says, “You have to make this right. If we don’t, do you remember why we got shipped off to Babylon in the first place? It was this sort of worldliness.” This isn’t merely we’re teetering at the top of some slippery slope. They are going 100 miles per hour, at breakneck speed, down this slope. And so the only answer in this setting, the lesser of two evils truly, was to set aside these wives. What would happen to them? Likely they would go back to their families. They had not been separated from their families but weeks or months, and they would return, and these men would have to – would welcome back their own wives, or if they were single, they would remain single.

Now, having understood more properly what is happening here, we need to try to discern what are the lessons, and we’ll move through these quickly. Three things about repentance from their example for our pattern. Number one: Notice their repentance was born out of a serious conviction. Remember in chapter 9, Ezra goes off, and he pulls at his hair, and he tears his clothes – the symbols of great weeping and contrition over sin. And as he continues to pray and make confession, in chapter 10 verse 1, the house of God – a very great assembly, men, women, children – they gather around him. And notice what it says in verse 1: they, too, wept bitterly. And the same language we had in chapter 9, we have again in chapter 10, verse 3. It references those who tremble at the commandment of our God. And you notice the atmospheric setting is very much in keeping with the psychological and spiritual setting. I mean, if this were a movie, you couldn’t have made it more picturesque, for the weather to fit the spiritual weather. There’s a heavy rain. This is the winter months. They’re outside in the open. They’re trembling at the word of God. They’re physically shivering in the cold. It’s dark. It’s dreary. It’s wet. They’re shivering. They’re trembling. This whole scene is to depict that they have fallen under the displeasure of God. They agree with the plan that is hatched. In verse 12, the whole assembly answered with a loud voice, “It is so. We must do it.” Their response to the sin comes out of a place of serious conviction. They have been swept over by the convicting power of God’s spirit. I think of it like a dam. Some of you may have in your life a little trickle coming through the dam. That trickle is the convicting work of God in your life. And you don’t want it. It keeps coming and you plug some fingers in there. You put your fingers in your ears. You have your phone – that can distract you. You bury yourself in work. You’ve convinced yourself. You’ve given yourself excuses that there was a reason for it, that it was a long time ago, that nobody knows about it, and you are trying to plug the holes in the dam. It won’t work. These people finally let the dam burst forth, and the water of God’s convicting grace to sweep them away, wash over them. Friends, don’t keep patching up the facade of your righteousness. You won’t get clean that way. You won’t have freedom that way. You have to let the waters of conviction burst through and overwhelm you. I know you have different personalities, different emotional registers. Has there ever been a time you’ve wept over your sins? I mean, really wept? I have. If you live long enough, you will have times where the most appropriate – in fact, the only appropriate – response to your sin is to break down and weep bitterly. The whole community says, “I can’t. We did it. We’re guilty.” And they wept. Their repentance was born out of a serious conviction. Don’t hold it back if God is doing that in your heart.

Here’s the second thing: their repentance was marked by a deep commitment. This plan was not entered into lightly. They were all in with their repentance. Look at the markers. Verse 3: “Let us make a covenant with our God to put away these wives.” Verse 4: “Arise, it is our task. We are with you. Be strong and do it.” And then in verse 5, Ezra arose and made the leading priests and Levites take an oath. I mean, they are serious. This is not just we had an emotional moment. We’re so sorry. Promise it won’t happen again. They say, “What’s the plan? What are you doing to make this right? Who do you have to talk to? Who do you have to call? Do you need to pay somebody back? Do you need to get on your knees and ask for forgiveness? What are you going to do, that this doesn’t happen again?” And so, they make a covenant. They make a vow. They swear an oath. And there is a proclamation in verse 7. The returned exiles have three days. And there are serious consequences – if you don’t amass in Jerusalem within three days, your property will be forfeited. You will be cast out. And they assemble, verse 9. And now the people, in verses 13 and 14, decide they need more time to properly address the crisis. They realize this is too entrenched. We can’t do this. This isn’t a day or two days. And so they come up with a further plan. All right, we agree we must do it. But we need some time to look into the matter. So what if we have the leading elders and judges of each of these towns, they come before the proper court with the situations where men are accused of having foreign wives, and let’s take some time to sort this out. There are too many cases to decide at once. It’s raining. We have no open shelter. They wisely realize that this cannot be taken care of with just a motion, a second, a vote, and we’re done. In fact, you go to verse 17, first day of the first month, they had come to the end of all the men who had married the foreign women, and it started on the first day of the tenth month.

So, this is a process. Month 10, 11, 12. It takes three months. And you can do the math. There’s about 110 of them that are listed. So they’re not rushing through. They are going through case by case, one or two cases a day over three months. There’s this curious verse 15. Jonathan and Jahzeiah opposed this. And then two other Levites supported them. We don’t know what the “this” is. At first reading, you may think they opposed the plan to make it right, but likely what they opposed was the slowed-down process, that there were at least four men who said I don’t want to take time, I think we can get this done right away, but they went ahead with it. And it does show you even in doing the right thing you may not always have unanimous approval. This was not a witch hunt. Discipline like this takes time. For all intents and purposes, they appointed a committee. They took time to do it the right way. They brought in the local leaders who would know them, know the situation. They didn’t want to rush to judgment. It’s not like the internet where you’re just guilty until proven innocent. And if you’re ever proven innocent, by that time, everybody’s moved on, and they just remember you as being guilty. No, there was due process. They didn’t just round up everybody who had an allegation against them. But they made it right with a very deliberate, concrete plan. And it took three months to set it right.

Some of us – we don’t have that hard a time feeling bad for our sins. We may even have good intentions to do something about it. But oftentimes, our repentance, so-called, is very quick. It’s easy. Not like these men. They made a covenant. They made a plan. They took an oath. This was serious, deliberate business. I wonder, as you think about repentance in your life, is it a casual thing or a commitment thing? Or to put it another way, there’s a difference between repentance as catharsis and repentance as character. Repentance as catharsis is, “Oh, that felt so good.” And we have to be careful. You can do this in church small groups, accountability groups – just, “Oh, that felt really good. I got that off my chest, and, wow, I’m messed up. You’re messed up. We’re all messed up. What a great accountability group.” A catharsis – because it does, it feels, you know, there’s something healing, and ah, I don’t have to bear the secret, people know, I’ve explained it. But that’s not repentance. Any person without the spirit of God, without the gospel, can have a catharsis. No, this is about true, godly character, which leads to the final point.

Their repentance bore a personal cost. Rarely do we see in the Bible an entire community coming to such a strong and swift conviction of sin. There was a cost to it. Now, there’s the cost here. They’ve gathered out in the winter rain. There’s a cost with a deliberate plan and a process and a committee to investigate the matter. There’s a cost, certainly, for the men, 110 of them, who have to send away these wives. There’s a cost for those women. They, perhaps, had very little choice in the matter and were sinned against, and now they’re sent back. It’s costly for Israel’s leaders. The priests and the Levites are mentioned prominently throughout this whole debacle, because they were the leading sinners. This was no occasion where the leaders could just nicely stand up and say, “Well, a few people out there have sinned.” No, it went right from the top to the bottom. It was a costly repentance to say goodbye, even the weeks or months – not only to say goodbye, to be absolutely outed. Oh, so where’s your wife? Well, I was one of those who sinned and almost brought judgment upon our community. Many of us are quite happy to confess, maybe privately, but we want a repentance that costs no time, no money. We will repent, so-called, as long as there’s minimal discomfort, no long-term ramifications. Our family will not be adversely affected in any way. The Apostle Paul calls this worldly grief. It’s easy to have worldly grief. You regret. You made a mistake. You’re embarrassed. You wish it wouldn’t have happened.

But repentance is something different. And worldly grief just – it doesn’t lead to change. It just leads to the same kind of character, and even continuing feelings of shame and embarrassment. But true, godly repentance leads to freedom, healing, forgiveness. When you say, “I don’t care what it costs me. God’s reputation is worth more to me than my reputation.” You can sniff it out anytime some famous person in the public eye commits some sin, especially a Christian, and then they come back, they make a statement. Sadly, too often, it just seems like a lawyer wrote it. No offense – we thank you for the lawyers out here who help with those things. But it keeps them from really speaking to their heart, and it seems like somebody just made them do it to kind of move through this PR crisis, instead of a real moment where they acknowledge, “I have been living a lie, and displeasing God is worse to me than any earthly hardships I should bear because of it.”

You see, the glorious chapter on confession in Ezra 9 does not count for much if it isn’t followed with chapter 10 – a chapter of deep repentance. God is not so much interested in you just having a feeling of being wrong. Some of us are convinced “I must be a good Christian because, you know what, I do feel bad all the time.” Actually, that’s not what God wants. Now, if you sin, you feel bad, and he wants you to be forgiven and repent and turn and be cleansed. And some of us think, I’ll just live with a low to medium level feeling of guilt and just kind of feel like a bad person. It never gets so high that I actually make the costly step of repentance, but I never really put my head in my pillow and know that God is pleased with me. That’s the life that too many Christians live. It may seem as if this is a strange way to end the book: “And some of the women had even borne children. The end.” Well, part of what we have to remember is this is really a two-parter. You go to Nehemiah – ah, okay, so Nehemiah. But that doesn’t help too much, because you know how Nehemiah ends? Putting away foreign wives. Same thing.

But it makes sense when you consider that Ezra was a teacher of the law. And what was his chief responsibility? It was to help people live by the book – to live in such a way that they would preserve their freedom in Judah instead of returning to bondage. The whole reason they had been exiles is because they had disobeyed the covenant that God made through Moses. And so Ezra is doing just the job he should do. And this is, in other words, quite the appropriate ending to Ezra. It’s not one of these “and now we’re on the mountaintop, and we made it, and now the glory of God fills the temple.” It’s very realistic, saying, “We messed up. We sinned. We went to Babylon. Now we’re back. And we got this close to messing it all up one more time. But we didn’t.” It’s showing the way to continue as God’s covenant people, to walk in faith and repentance. The end of Ezra shows the way to stay out of Babylon: brokenhearted repentance and faith. So, this was not a flawless re-entry. It doesn’t end on a strong note of obedience. Didn’t take long for God’s people to start acting like their old selves again. But here’s the lesson they learned, at least initially: repent. And when you sin again, you know what you should do? Repent. And when you sin another time, you know what you should do? Repent. And how many times will God forgive you? Jesus said 70 times 7. In other words, ongoing, never ending. When God’s people are truly sorry and mean to change their ways, God never, never runs out of chances.

I want you to notice, just as we bring this to a close, verse 2: one of these little minor characters – be good to meet him someday – Shecaniah. He stands up and addresses Israel. “We have broken faith.” Notice how he does here. He expresses, without any excuse – he doesn’t say it was my parents, or times were tough, or I’m sorry if you were offended – he says, “We have broken faith.” We did it, with our God. It’s very specific. How? We have married foreign women from the peoples of the land. Don’t you love this last line? But, even now there is hope. There’s hope for Israel in spite of this. It’s one of the most important lessons you can ever learn in life. There is always hope, but you must first learn to be hopeless. Hopeless in themselves – they didn’t come with their own righteousness. They came, and they said, “Nothing in my hands I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling. We’ve broken faith. We did it. We messed up. You’re right. We’re sorry. But there’s hope.” Here’s the hope: not because of us, but in spite of us, God will be merciful. A broken heart and a contrite spirit he will not deny. And so we know that Jesus comes as a light – a light, Galilee of the Gentiles – to bring the foreigners close at hand, to bring the gospel to those who are far away. And the Spirit of God, as Peter preaches that sermon at Pentecost, is to call those from the nations who are far off that they, too, might be brought in as followers of the true God. In Colossians, Paul teaches us that Jesus himself was cut off – circumcised, as it were. He was cut off. He was banished. He was put into exile for our sakes as covenant breakers, that he, as our covenant-keeping Messiah, might lead us all the way back home.

The choice you have to make is not whether to be sinful or sinless. You will not be sinless on this side of heaven. You’re going to be sinful. So, the choice is what you will do when you see your sin. Will you resist or will you repent? And if you will confess and repent and turn, God will be faithful and just – how could he be otherwise? – to cleanse you from all unrighteousness for Jesus’ sake. Let’s pray.

Our heavenly Father, as we consider our great sin before you, we acknowledge that we have done wrong. We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us. But thou, oh Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, oh God, who confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent, according to thy promises, declared unto mankind in Christ Jesus our Lord. And grant, oh most merciful Father, for his sake, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.