1 Samuel 16: 1-13 • Psalm 23 • Ephesians 5: 8-14 • John 9: 1-41
The Rev. Dr. Israel Ahimbisibwe
Today is the fourth Sunday in the season of Lent – a time when Christians pay close attention to our inward brokenness and humility. Central to the theme of brokenness, humility and repentance are important Scriptures such as this one: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17).
The good news is that God loves us and will forgive us all our sins after we humble ourselves and repent.
He then revives and refreshes us. As the Psalmist has put it, “The Lord restores my soul and guides me in paths of righteousness” (Psalm 23:3).
In fact, repentance is so good that God’s people in the Bible, like King David, had an expectation that once he had repented of his sins, God would make the broken bones in his body to rejoice (Psalm 51:8).
We get complete forgiveness from God after we have completely opened our hearts and allowed God to empty them of all our sins.
As God said to Samuel, while we people look at the outside, He is the only one who looks inside and judges the character of people.
God knows our hearts so well and clearly understands obstacles that hinder us from receiving complete forgiveness. But when we become honest and open our hearts for Jesus Christ to come in, he does just that – He comes to live within us, and He comes with the power that He embodies.
Like the Collect of the Day says, Jesus Christ is the living bread that came down from heaven, and when you “eat him,” that is, when He joins you and lives in you, you become the function of Jesus.
Yes, Jesus comes and enters our hearts. That is what He was saying to the disciple John when He said, I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me” (Revelation 3:20). And when He enters the life of a person, He does it in His full capacity as Jesus the Savior and Son of God.
He is the Prince of Peace and He makes you peaceful within yourself and with the people around you. He is strong, He is powerful, and He combines those qualities with wisdom and humility, making ordinary people extraordinary. He is merciful, kind and patient, and full of joy – and when He lives in you He makes you to be gentle, to love and to care for other people. And not only that – He also forgives your sins and removes all of the impediments that make you unable to see things from their right perspectives. At the end of it all you will be able to say, “I have been struggling with such and such a problem in my life, but now that I have a relationship with Jesus, I have been forgiven.”
Now, you may not fully understand how Jesus solves all your problems, but surely you will have a true experience similar to that man who had been blind from birth and who said, “I do not understand. One thing I do know is that though I was blind, now I see.”
This experience should and must be God’s amazing grace for all of us. It is the amazing experience of repentance that should bring every one of us to say, “Once I was lost but now I am found.”
Each one of us is found when we sincerely admit that we are lost. Jesus finds us because He came to seek and look for the lost sheep. His desire is to find us and to be our good shepherd who leads us in paths of righteousness.
Otherwise if we have our hubris and exuberance spent on defining what will and what will not work for us, what we think is good for us – if everything is about what we can do to make ourselves feel good – then we are 21st-century Pharisees with a misguided enthusiasm for the outward trappings of coming to church while we tell God what is good for us and that we do not need to repent.
But we must repent, because all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. And we ask our Lord Jesus Christ to make us the type of people He wants us to become.