The Broken Sin Detector

Maybe this is a good picture of repentance. It’s a smoke detector. And when the smoke detector says beep, beep, beep, it tells you there’s a very dangerous thing and you either need to get rid of it or run away from it. And if we think about instead of a smoke detector, a sin detector that goes beep, beep, beep, then repentance would be what? Getting rid of that sin or if it’s just too big, running away from it. Except this particular smoke detector stopped working at my house. And so maybe it’s really a picture of when your repentance stops working. When your sin detector doesn’t beep right. When the sin in your life doesn’t seem like an emergency to take care of. And I don’t know about you, but when a smoke detector goes wrong in my house, one of the first thoughts is it just needs new batteries. So for this smoke detector, I got some new batteries. And what I’d like to think about is if this is a picture of our repentance and it’s not working, maybe we could find three new batteries for our sin detector or for our repentance in these two verses we just read from the prophet Joel. Three very basic truths about repentance. And if you forget even one of them, your sin detector isn’t gonna work. Your repentance will be broken. Our first battery that we get from the prophet Joel is the truth that you need to remember that repenting isn’t just something you do on the outside. Repenting is in your heart. We might think of repentance as, oh, I gotta stop these two bad habits or I have to start these good habits. But Joel says, no, what repenting really is is returning to God with all your heart. Your heart is going in completely the wrong direction and it needs to turn back to God. So you get new priorities in there and new feelings, new plans, new dreams, new identity, and so on. Your heart is going the completely wrong direction. We need a 180-degree turn, we need a U-turn so that you’re pointing that heart of yours back toward God. And you can add, Joel says, you can add some fasting to that so long as that shows what’s in your heart, that your heart is saying, God, having you means more to me than food, than all my bodily needs. Joel says you can add some weeping to your repentance on the outside so long as that’s showing what’s really in your heart, that you’re saying to God with your heart, you mean more to me than all my happiness. You could add, Joel says, some mourning on the outside as long as that shows what’s really happening in your heart, that your heart is saying to God, God, to lose you would be worse than losing my dearest loved one. But what God wants isn’t so much a pale of your tears as a turned round heart. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise us, doesn’t he say that throughout the Bible, that what he really wants is your heart? We think about what God said to the prophet Samuel when Samuel was picking out which son of Jesse should be the next king. First Samuel 17 verse six, God says to Samuel, man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. The Lord looks at the heart. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us or maybe it should completely surprise us that the creator of all, the controller of all, the judge of all should want my raggedy old rotten heart at your heart and yet he does. Even now, he says, this is the number one job. This is your first priority. This is an emergency. Even now, return to me with all your heart. Because that’s what I want. I want your heart to turn to me, to belong to me. That’s our first battery to put in our sin detector, our repentance as a basic truth. You got to remember the repentance isn’t just about things on the outside. It’s about your heart turning back to God. And the second battery we could put in there, second basic truth about repentance is that it’s not just turning my heart, but it’s rediscovering God’s heart. Return to me, return to the Lord your God. God says in Joel chapter two, why? Why return? He says why. Now it would be worth trying to turn back to God, even if you weren’t sure he was going to like you. A lot of religions do that. They do their darndest to at least make God less angry at them. That’s a good idea because he’s the only God there is. You know, it would be worth trying to turn back to God, even if he was going to love you just a little bit because he’s such a big God. Even a little bit of love from him is a big deal. But our verse says return to the Lord your God. Why? Because he’s going to love you a whole lot because he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in love. We don’t want to just think about repenting as turning away from bad stuff in our life. It is also turning back to our very very good God and finding his very good heart again because he is gracious. That means every corner you turn in life, he’s going to surprise you with more good things that you do not deserve. He is compassionate. Everything that grieves your heart, grieves his heart too. And whenever he can bring relief to you, it relieves his very soul. He is slow to anger all the things we have ever done that should arouse his anger. His patience outlasts them all. He is a bounding in love. Again, he is such a big God. If he loved you even just a little bit, that would be a big deal. But he says he’s abounding in love. He has piles of love for you. He has oodles of love for you. We think about our repenting. We got to not just think about the bad things we’re saying no to but about rediscovering the goodness of God again, not just turning our hearts but finding God’s heart again. Being turned around so that yes, we’re walking away from sin, but also with every step we are coming closer to God. Not just closer to following his rules, not just closer to thinking his kind of thoughts, but closer to him and to his tremendous love. Three basic truths about repentance to get our sin detector our repentance working again. First one was it’s not just outside. It’s in your heart. Second one was it’s not just turning your heart, but it’s rediscovering God’s heart full of love to you. And our third one, our third battery. Third basic truth about repentance here in Joel chapter 2 verse 12 and 13 is the only alternative to repenting is calamity. I guess we could imagine somebody who’s in their house, their house is on fire and they’re coughing so hard because there’s so much smoke in the air, but they really believe the fire can’t hurt them. They really believe that all that smoke is actually good for their lungs. And so they just sit there and don’t run out of the house. I guess we could imagine somebody like that. But in fact, so often we are like that with our sin, aren’t we? We don’t believe the fact that the only alternative to getting away from our sin, the only alternative to repenting is calamity. But our God here in Joel verses 12 and 13 of Joel chapter 2 he says, “He’s gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, and He relents from sending calamity.” Because that is what our sins deserve. Every single one of them earns us calamity. And that’s the only alternative to giving up our sins is to suffer the calamity that we have earned for ourselves. Now a more positive way to say that is the more we repent, the more God will repent or relent if that word is more palatable to you. The more my heart is broken over the bad that I am doing in my life, the more God says His heart will be broken over the bad that He has put into my life or is planning to put into my life. He will regret it. He will fix it. He will relent. And so we have our three batteries to put in there, right? Repentance isn’t just outside. It’s in my heart. Repentance isn’t just turning my heart. It’s re-finding, rediscovering God’s heart. His love turned me and finally repenting, right? The only alternative is calamity. And we put them in there and it beeps all wrong. That’s what I found when I got my three new batteries. I put them in the smoke detector. It was still making the “I’m broken” beep and in about 22 seconds, it’ll make that sound again. And I realized, oh, it didn’t need new batteries and I finally read the back of it and it said two chirps every 30 seconds means your alarm is expired and you just need to go buy a new alarm. And so we hear tonight from the Prophet Joel. There it is. Say, “I’m broken.” That’s what that means. “I’m broken.” We hear three basic truths about repentance and maybe they don’t change us at all. Maybe we hear God saying, “Now, now is the time to turn back to me, to return to me with all your heart.” And we’re like, “Turn from what, God?” Change what? What is really that wrong with me and the way I live? Because the problem isn’t that we didn’t have the right batteries, but our whole sin detector is broken. We can’t even recognize what sin is anymore. How are you going to fix that? Well, you could get your catechism out, pray over that and the commandments. You could get the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapter 5 through 7 and pray over that. You could get out 1 Corinthians 13. Here’s what love is supposed to look like and it doesn’t look like us. You could maybe have a heart-to-heart with Pastor Cok or talk to somebody close to you in life and ask him, “Hey, what are some ways that I’m not living like Jesus?” But the thing is, if you get your sin detector working right, you know what it’s going to tell you? It’s going to tell you, you need a whole new heart. There’s two pictures, two pictures of repentance in our verses, or two images. One is turning, right? “Return to me,” he says, “Return to me with all your heart that we’re headed towards sin. We got to turn around and head toward God.” And the other picture is what? “Tear up your heart.” He says, “Rend your heart.” And not your garments. I brought some rent garments here. This is a pair of black pants. Can you see what happened to him? I lost 40 pounds and so I needed smaller black pants. And then I put 20 pounds back on again and the pants didn’t fit me so well. But I wore them anyway and when I bent over just a certain way, it did this. And then I had my mother-in-law sew them up again and decided I’d try to wear them again and bent over again and did that again. I tried to staple them together. I tried to staple them together to make it through the rest of the day. That was interesting. But since then I’ve thrown them on the floor of my closet and haven’t worn them since. I just, I can’t wear them. What I told myself after ripping them up twice, I just can’t wear those anymore. And if our sin detector is working right, that’s what we’ll say about our heart. I got to tear this up. I can’t wear this anymore. Maybe you know the custom of the people in the Bible times when they got very bad news. Right? They tore their garments. I don’t know for sure what that means, but what makes sense to me is it means something like this. That’s the outfit I was wearing when my loved one died or when that tragedy happened or that saddest day of my life. I’m never going to wear that again. And when our sin detector is working right, that’s what we’re going to say. That’s what we’ll say about our heart. Instead of rending my garment, I will rend my heart. And I will say, I can’t ever wear that again. Jesus, I can’t ever wear that heart again. That old heart that will always choose calamity instead of you. That old heart that always takes me farther away from that wonderful heart of yours. Jesus, I can’t wear that heart anymore. And when we start to think like that, then, then, then, well, then I guess that smoke detector picture doesn’t work so well, does it? Because the smoke detector makes me think like sin is over here and I can run away with it. But what if the thing I most need to run away from is my own heart? How do you run away from your own heart full of sin? Or what, what parts of your heart do you grab hold of to tear it into pieces? I don’t know. But I’m starting to get the sense that I need a new one. How about you? First John chapter three says, when our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. Well, that’s the kind of God we need, isn’t it? Knows how to tear our bad heart up and replace it with a new one. And most of all, for some surprising reason, he just plain wants my heart in the first place. And he wants your heart to turn to him, to belong to him. He showed at the cross. There isn’t anything he wants more. Amen.