Every preacher I know has a sermon on repentance. The difference is in degrees. There are those with an intense repent message and those with a mild one. The intense message are those messages you and I see in popular culture. It is the guy on the street corner. It is the preacher in Footloose. It is the message that says you need to give up some action. The ol’ “We don’t smoke or chew or hang with those that do.” Stereotypically this is found in conservative circles, but it is not limited to it. There are liberal circles that have their own version of an intense repentance, but the knock on liberal circles is that the call to repent is more mild. So mild in fact that some might not even say that liberals call for repentance. This mild message often comes as a reaction to the more intense repentance message and sometimes is a message that is not preached often in liberal circles.
Of course these are broad stereotypes and there is much more nuance in the messages of repentance. However, if the call to repent is intense or mild, one thing seems to hold true across conservative and liberal circles. The call to repent focuses on substance, and less on form.
When repentance is focused on the substance of our lives, then we begin to think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, as Dallas Willard says, a gospel of sin management. When we think that repenting means that we need to turn away from one set of actions that lead us to hell or unhealth, and take on a new set of actions that we think will lead us to salvation or health, then we are in the realm of sin management. We can get a life coach or a trainer to help us change the substance of our lives. We don’t need any divine help to change the substance of our lives, individuals and human communities can do that. The Christian call to repent is not focused on the substance but on the form of our lives. For this we need divine help and cannot do this on our own. Of course, the paradox is that if we repent in form, the substance of our lives will change.
Psychologist at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Canada Dr. Kenneth Hill looked at 800+ people who were lost in Nova Scotia and found that most of them repented of their substance. What I mean is when a person was lost, they stopped walking in one direction, turned and walked in a different direction. This is often how repentance is thought of. We are going one way and we need to stop and then start going a different direction. But this way of repentance is just in substance, not in form.
https://nasar.org/education/hug-a-tree/
Dr. Hill found there were two people who were lost who repented not in substance, but in form. One of these "repenting-in-form” people was a 11 year old child. When this child was lost in the woods, they did not stop walking in one direction and begin walking in another direction. This child just stopped walking. This child repented from the act of walking altogether. This child repented in form.
This 11 year old was taught in school that if he was ever lost that he should “hug a tree and survive”.
Of course, this runs counter to what we would think is the “correct” thing to do. You may think that to hug a tree is to be passive and that we really need to work to be found. We think that if we are not working for our salvation then we will not be saved, if we are not working to be found then we will not be found. We are not confident that anyone is coming to save us or even that we are lost to begin with, and so in our efforts to “save ourselves” we get more lost, walking in circles.
Christianity says that we are to repent of our form. Specifically we are to hug the tree of the cross and in doing so we will be saved. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ! We are to repent (turn) from trying to save ourselves, we are to turn from our refusal to admit we are lost, we are to turn from the very form of our lives and hug the tree of the Cross.
We are to trust that there is One who is coming to find us, save us and bring us into salvation.