Repentance or love?

A recent post by Shane Pruitt reads:

Here’s the difficulty – when you pit love and repentance against each other like this, you don’t understand either one. Repentance becomes hard like iron, ruthless like fire, and as relentless as death.

Trying to define repentance over against love makes one cruel and hateful, as those who know this author can attest.

In the bible, repentance is turning away from your hateful, hard hearts and turning towards the love of God and his free invitation of redemption. The result of true repentance is a heart that loves God and loves one’s neighbor.

This is the same spirit that seeks to define holiness over against love and mercy, when God is not so divided. Holiness IS perfect love, perfect beauty, perfect goodness. Repentance is turning from our hateful, stone gods and to the God of love.

Repentance is turning away from the attempt of self-salvation, with its iron clad, man-made rules, making one censorious, judgmental, proud and contemptuous and turning towards love, compassion, mercy and humility.

In other words, repentance is the b-side of love. God’s love is the beautiful magnet that draws us to his bosom (which is what repentance IS) and away from the world that the modern evangelical preacher inhabits.

The modern preacher’s call to repentance is simply a call to remain in the slavery of Egypt, working harder and harder to make more and bricks of our own self-righteousness. The Love of God calls us out, and to the land of his love, resting in the joy of the Lord. This is Repentance.

The result of resting in God’s bosom is that our life and our words and our hearts begin to reflect the beautiful light of God revealed in Jesus Christ, as we become more and more like him in love.

Don’t pit repentance against love. You don’t know what you are talking about.