Is sorry enough?

They say love means never having to say you're sorry. That's not quite the case though between us and God. God loves us as His precious creation and we are supposed to love and respect Him back, in awe of the fact that He cares. But by nature and habit, we rebel against Him and do things that aren't honoring, that doesn't show love, to our creator. This lack of love on our part creates relational distance between us and God and the only way to bridge that gap is, in part, to say I'm sorry. But is that enough?

I was recently watching an interview with a man who was talking about how God had used him through different seasons in his life. While seasons were his main topic, he said something else that grabbed me. He talked about a repentence from failure. Not just forgiveness of sins, but repentence from failure. That wording spurred me to define the word repent.

Repent-1. To feel sorry, self-reproachful, or contrite for past conduct; regret or be conscience-stricken about a past action, attitude, etc. 2. To feel such sorrow for sin  or fault as to be disposed to change ones life for the  better; be penitent. 

The second definition is the one that struck me. Not only does repentence call for an acknowledgement of where we were wrong, but a turn away from that wrong. We like to quote 1John 1:9 when we talk about forgiveness, but all too often we read we read it as "if we confess our sins with our mouth yada yada yada forgiveness yada yada yada." We are OK (sometimes) with admitting our sins to God and asking Him to forgive them in light of our position in Christ, but how often are we willing to let ourselves feel so bad about our failure before God, that we change our lives because of it? In II Chronicles 7:14, God tells the Isrealites that healing for them as a nation would not happen until they first humbled themselves and prayed (this presumably would include forgiveness), and then, as a separate act, turned from their wicked ways. Healing would not come until they turned their backs on their past mistakes, their past rebellions.

Repentence then, involves not just recognizing my mistakes but learning from them so that hopefully I never make them again. But the man in the video didn't just say that I needed to repent for my mistakes, he said failures. That's what my mistakes really are, not just breaking the rules, but, a failure to measure up to the standards that God has set for us. And not only should we be sorry for failing God, we should be so broken by our failures that we want to change our lives because of them. That's what God expects of us.

So maybe love isn't never having to say you're sorry. Love for God seems to be more than that; saying you're sorry, meaning it, and working hard to never do it again. The video I was watching went on to talk about how a man moves from one season to another and what his priorities and objectives should be in each stage. As I am 25, they said I am in the summer of my life and that my job right now is to learn, learn, learn. As I'm in this season of learning, I want to learn that though my failure is expected, I'm expected to change my life for the better because of it. I cant just say I'm sorry, I'm supposed to repent.