Have you ever changed your mind?  We have all changed our behavior.  We usually make these changes for some pretty basic reasons.  Usually those changes come because we want to gain something or because we want to avoid something.  This is how we train dogs, offer something good to reward good behavior or offer something bad to punish bad behavior.  Soon, we change our ways to make life more comfortable.  But we don’t repent.  We conform.

Repentance involves something deeper.  Repentance involves changing our will.  While we don’t use the word the same way anymore, the Bible talks about people having a heart.  For the Bible, the heart is the core of the person.  You can change your mind without changing your heart.  You can certainly change your behavior without changing your heart.  These days, when we speak of the heart we usually are thinking of our emotions.  Will is what we now say that indicates what the Bible refers to as the heart.  We all do things that we don’t really want to do, but we do them anyway for many different reasons.  It may be that we choose to do something or not grudgingly.  On the other hand, we may choose to do that thing, or not to do that thing, what we call wholeheartedly.  Wholeheartedly means enthusiastically, and gladly, and with the full exercise of our will.  Because the will is what forms who we really are deep down inside.  It is the heart of the matter.

So Repentance involves a change of heart, not of our minds, or of our emotions, and certainly not of our behavior, but a change of our will.  To put it another way, it is a change in who we are.  And when who we are changes, all of those other things change too.  It may not happen all at once, because habits often die hard.  But when we repent, we recognize that is not who we are anymore, and all of the stuff that is not as deep as our heart or our will begins to change. 

The scriptures tell us that mankind looks upon the surface of other people, but God looks on the heart.  We may be able to fool people by changing our behavior.  We may be able to fool ourselves by changing our mind.  But God knows whether we have really repented of our sins because he looks past all of our deceptions and he sees deep into our hearts and lays bare who we really are.

Remember the prayer that we say to begin just about every service:  “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid….”  That is the God that we proclaim, and that we serve, and whom we love.  And He is the only one who sees our repentance.