THE WOUND OF CONTRITION

We have reduced repentance to a change of mind. It is a mental act, indeed, but I point out that repentance is not likely to do us much good until it ceases to be a change of mind only and becomes a wound within our spirit. 

No man has truly repented until his sin has wounded him near to death, until the wound has broken him and defeated him and taken all the fight and self-assurance out of him and he sees himself as the one who nailed his Saviour on the tree.

I don't know about you, but the only way I can keep right with God is to keep contrite, to keep a sense of contrition upon my spirit.

Now there's a lot of cheap and easy getting rid of sin and getting your repentance disposed of.

But the great Christians, in and out of the Bible, have been those who were wounded with a sense of contrition so that they never quite got over the thought and the feeling that they personally had crucified Jesus.

The great Bishop Usher each week used to go down by the riverbank and there all Saturday afternoon kneel by a log and bewail his sins before his God. Perhaps that was the secret of his greatness.

Let us beware of vain and over-hasty repentance, and particularly let us beware of no repentance at all. 

We are a sinful race, ladies and gentlemen, a sinful people, and until the knowledge has hit hard, until it has wounded us, until it has got through and past the little department of our theology, it has done us no good.

A man can believe in total depravity and never have any sense of it for himself at all. 

Lots of us believe in total depravity who have never been wounded with the knowledge that we've sinned. 

Repentance is a wound I pray we may all feel.

~A. W. Tozer~