Spiritual Corner - Turn Your Life Around, Come Back to The Lord
John the Baptist’s message was “Repent,” but it wasn’t repent the way we think about it. The way we think about repentance is you come down on your knees and bang your head on the floor and say how sorry you are. He was talking about something quite different. He was talking about Metanoia-which means, “Turn your life around.” “Come back to the Lord.” He was calling. The Messiah is here.
John the Baptist knew that sin was a failure to love, and it still is. It’s a failure to love, to do what you know you should do, to be the kind of person you know that you can become, to do and walk with Jesus, for Jesus has come for only one purpose and it is to teach us how to love and be loved. Jesus has come and has walked into this world to say, “I am bringing you back to joy and peace.”
And don’t be afraid to admit that you are sinners, and that you fail yourself and you fail your family and you fail your God.
Metanoia: a very, very important word for Advent.
Metanoia: to turn yourself around, to leave behind all the nonsense and the poverty of your life, not meaning physical poverty but moral poverty, and to try once again to take Jesus’ hand and walk through your life.
He will lead you into a life that is full of deeper meaning, sometimes pain, but a deeper understanding, a deeper meaning that you might embrace something that your heart hungers to embrace, which is God’s love and the love of Jesus and the love of your friends and the love of each other.
And this is what John the Baptist was doing. He wasn’t just saying you had five or six little sins and should make a good act of contrition. He was saying you had to turn your life around, because sin would destroy you. Gradually it would take away all that you held near and dear.
And you begin to understand that this is why Jesus came: to bring the world back to joy, to peace, to happiness, to unity and to caring. But you have to turn your life around and surrender to God.
It is Christmas time. John the Baptist comes and stands before us, with tough but beautiful words: “Prepare your heart for the way of the Lord.” Whatever is standing in the way of you loving, not just God but each other, and caring, get rid of it, throw it aside.
For every Christmas is a new life, a new beginning, a new hope, a new joy, not just for we ourselves but for the people that touch us every day of our lives. And then we will understand what Christmas really is. Christmas is to live with a loving, kind, forgiving Father who will lead us with Jesus safely home.
Yours,
Deacon Tom Kung
