Articles

An Introduction to the Excerpt

As pastors, Lent often becomes a season we lead others through, without fully living into it ourselves. Between sermons, services, and spiritual direction, it’s easy to overlook our own need for reflection, confession, and renewal. But what if repentance isn’t a task we add to our to-do list, but a gift woven into how God created us to heal?

The following excerpt from my upcoming book, Good Guilt: Reviving Repentance in Lives and Congregations, offers a reminder that repentance is not just how we begin the Christian life—it’s how we flourish within it. Drawing on both Scripture and emerging insights from Positive Psychology, Chapter 3, “Designed to Repent,” invites us to rediscover repentance as God’s built-in pathway to joy, wholeness, and restoration.

God’s creation amazes me—from the stars above to the depths below, including us. God is not only wonderful in His creation; He is merciful too. Consider our bodies’ ability to physically heal. When we cut ourselves, something remarkable happens beneath the surface. Blood cells rush to the site, forming a clot to stop the bleeding, and a scab begins to develop, protecting the wound like a natural bandage. Underneath, new cells multiply and rebuild the damaged tissue. Over time, the scab falls away, revealing fresh, healed skin. Originally, our bodies didn’t need this healing. God breathed life into us in a day and age when there was no crying, no pain, no death, no cuts that needed scabs, no scars to reveal past wounds. Yet, in his mercy, God still created our bodies with this ability.

I believe there’s another way that God mercifully created our bodies to heal. This healing isn’t the healing of physical wounds but of spiritual wounds. Just as our bodies are made to recover from physical wounds, our souls are made to heal when we turn to him in repentance. Though repentance wasn’t needed in Eden, God mercifully provided the possibility of it for our healing. From creation onward, humanity has been wired to turn back, realign, and renew—it’s God’s built-in pathway to flourishing within each of us.

“Unhindered Devotion to the Lord”

It sounds so nice! Doesn’t it? Paul longed for the Corinthian church to have this (1 Cor. 7:35). As he looked at a church in crisis, and as he longed for their utmost flourishing and abundant life, this was part of his prescription: unhindered devotion to the Lord. Paul saw this devotion as God’s original intent and rescue plan through Christ. And now, in Christ, we believe such devotion is possible!

Seventeen hundred years later, when reflecting on these very words in a sermon on the same passage, John Wesley wondered what leads a person to such unhindered devotion to God. He suggested, “They should begin with repentance, the knowledge of themselves; of their sinfulness, guilt, and helplessness.” 1 In that same sermon, he said that ignoring this call to repentance is most often the “one mistake” that so many Christians make in their daily pursuit of God.

Jesus restored the devotion lost in Genesis 3. In coming to Jesus through that initial place of repentance, the promise of such unhindered devotion is placed in our hands. However, for many of us, that’s where it stays, as an unrealized promise. Are we ok with settling just for an unrealized promise? God isn’t! He longs for us to see this promise of unhindered devotion unwrapped and made real and present for each of us. Such a realization begins, as Wesley noted, with truly knowing ourselves, warts and all.

A Positive Approach

I still sometimes feel anxiety about exposing my soul to God. Do I really want to face the mess inside me? What if, though, this hesitancy of mine, and likely of yours too, is because I can’t fully comprehend how incredible it would be to experience the inner healing that is really and truly possible from a life of continual repentance? A relatively new field of research is showing just how beneficial good guilt is in our lives.

I affirm the view of my denomination (The Global Methodist Church) that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments contain all things necessary for salvation in Christ our Lord. I don’t need new research to exist for God’s promise of new life born of repentance to be true. Yet God graciously affirms this truth all around us, and one area where we see this confirmation in the study of Psychology. This field reveals how self-examination and repentance aren't burdens—they’re essential tools for a flourishing life of healing, growth, and renewal.

Positive Psychology (a new subset of psychology, and hereafter referred to as PP) is relatively new. Early psychology focused on mental illness, human potential, and fulfillment. However, after World War II, with an abundance of soldiers coming back home with unprecedented psychological trauma, the world of psychology shifted from that holistic approach to a “disease” mindset almost overnight, focusing solely on curing mental illness. This shift was necessary then, but psychology still focuses on repair at the expense of flourishing.

The idea of a long, painful healing process doesn’t appeal to me. But what if God wants not just to heal me but to transform me? Psychologist Charles Hackney describes the goal of PP this way, and I believe in a way that could powerfully describe our own goal as Christians in following Jesus:

Think of a scale ranging from negative ten to positive ten, with negative ten being the lowest possible depths of misery, the zero point being neutral (neither doing poorly nor doing well), and positive ten being the happiest life possible. Currently, psychology is good at helping people who are around negative six or negative seven to make it up to the neighborhood of zero (maybe positive one on a good day). By contrast, we know very little about how to help people get from the zero point to positive seven. 2

 In my experience, the American church often settles for getting people to zero. They’re no longer trapped in the depths and misery of their own sin. They profess faith in Jesus Christ. They’re “safe.” And, as in the field of psychology, they are all too satisfied to stick with that result because the disease has been cured. The goal has been met.

But what if God wants more? How do we move from zero to ten in faith? I wonder if the challenges PP sets out before their field should also be the ones we set for ourselves. What is God showing us about his amazing creation of the human brain through the exciting research happening in PP, and how does this align with what we know to be true from scripture, that “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:9)?

I think the connections between what we’re learning in PP and what God promises in scripture are astounding. One study found that “people who experience greater guilt in response to specific transgressions or conflict episodes also report better long-term outcomes.” 3 Another study examined the effect of partial confession versus full confession: “…people seeking redemption by partially admitting their big lies feel guilty because they do not take complete responsibility for their bad behaviors.” The study concluded that total relief “requires people to fully come clean.” 4

Psychologists are also discovering a wealth of data from our prison systems: “…inmates who tend to feel guilty for the harm they caused beat the statistical odds and stay out of trouble.” This study ended with affirming this notion of guilt being good: “Guilt adds to our moral fiber, motivating us to be more socially sensitive and caring citizens than we might be otherwise….” 5

It's astonishing to me that the very thing so many of us have perfected, that is, thinking we’re protecting ourselves by never admitting any wrongdoing in the first place, is the same thing getting in the way of so much human flourishing that God longs for us to experience. We’ve only scratched the surface of what PP has to reveal about God’s invitation to all of us—his invitation into a more abundant life through the daily habit of repentant living. It’s one thing to get excited about the possibilities a psychological study reveals. It’s quite another thing to actually live repentance out and experience God’s promised hope firsthand.

So, Where Are You?

On a scale of -10 to +10, where do you feel you are in your relationship with God today? Negative numbers represent feeling distant or stuck, zero represents “neutral,” and positive numbers reflect a process of flourishing in your faith. What has contributed to where you are on the scale, and what’s one step you can take to move closer to +10 this week? Maybe it’s a step of confession and repentance.

1 John Wesley, “On Dissipation,” Wesley Center Online, accessed October 15, 2021, http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872- edition/sermon-79-on-dissipation/.

2 Charles Hackney, Positive Psychology in Christian Perspective: Foundations, Concepts, and Applications (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 6.

3 Levi R. Baker, Jamkes K. McNulty, and Nickola C. Overall, “When Negative Emotions Benefit Close Relationships,” in The Positive Side of Negative Emotions (New York, NY: Guilford Publications, 2014), 112.

4 E. Peer, S. Shalvi, and A. Acquisti, “‘I Cheated, but Only a Little’: Partial Confessions to Unethical Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 2 (2014): 215.

5 Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener, The Upside of Your Dark Side (New York, NY: Plume, 2014), 82.