You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan continues a conversation about gratitude and repentance, this time focusing on misunderstandings about the nature of repentance.

Using the story of the prodigal son found in Luke chapter 15. Dan walks through the complexity of what we

deserve, desire, and ultimately receive through repentance.

Again, may I hope that you had a very lovely and satisfying Thanksgiving.

And though we are still within the purview of likely that eating and some of the

trippeline left turkey that is causing some level of rest and play within your world,

what I want to do is to take us a bit further into that conversation about gratitude and repentance.

So as we begin to deal with repentance, I can say that there seems to be so many misunderstandings about the nature of repentance.

And one that seems to be endemic is that repentance is just feeling bad over what you have said or done, feeling bad enough that you, to some degree, vow and labor no longer to do what it is

that you have done.

The byproduct of that is feeling bad is meant to create sufficient internal external

pressure to compel you to change something of the very nature of what you have done.

And it comes very close in some ways to what I think is also a lovely, an important construct,

lovely not so much in that it is well and good, but lovely in that it's so

often misunderstood as a former repentance. And that's the term penance. Where you pay for what

you've done in some form making restitution and therefore reclaiming the right to then, in one sense, have what

you have done erased because you have paid enough to compensate those that you have harmed.

Again, we're not going to get into the category of restitution and it's important for reconciliation,

but at the moment to say there's a radical

difference between repentance and penance. And as we try to labor to make sense of this, I don't

want to presume even from the beginning that this will be adequate to do uh, to be very clear about what needs to be done.

...