both and.

There’s a sign that hangs over the altar at an old church camp. It reads,
“God calleth sinners to repentance, and believers to entire sanctification.”
If someone wandered into that old tabernacle and read that sign now, there’s a really good chance they’d have feverish visions of “Children of the Corn”. To some, the sign reads like fire and brimstone. It’s reminiscent of a t-shirt I once had that said, “Turn or Burn” across the back. (I wish I was kidding.)

For more than 100 years, people who have stepped onto those grounds have heard a call to repentance and sanctification.
Thousands have responded, many were changed, and countless seeds were planted. That old church camp, that holy place, held regular rhythm in my life. I walked its grounds, and knelt at its altar almost every summer of my life. It carved a pattern in my heart for regular return to the Father in repentance, and a deep desire to pursue holiness.

As I stepped from adolescence into the transitions of adulthood, and began charting new courses in new places, I grew distant from that old leaning tabernacle. Its memory becoming more hazy with every passing year. It would be 20 years before I walked under that tabernacle again. When I did, that old sign hung in its place with the same old call, to repentance and entire sanctification.

I’ve been stuck with those words ever since.
Repentance AND.

I’m left wondering if we’ve lost something.
If I look back on my church experience in my early life there was a clear sense that God called people to repentance. I never experienced a call to repentance in a scary or threatening sort of way. The call to surrender was always wrapped with a clear message that repentance brought forgiveness, and forgiveness brought the freedom to live in the fullness of God’s love.
In my adult life, the call to repentance seems to have faded.
In our efforts to tell the world that God loves, God claims, God redeems, we seem to have neglected the very necessary step of admitting our need for God in the first place. We take without giving. As if we believe we can be filled with all of God’s goodness without first emptying ourselves before him in repentance. That’s all it is, repentance isn’t shame, it’s not God rubbing in our failures, it’s admitting our need for for something only he can give - a fix to our brokenness.
We’ve neglected the “call to repentance” even as we’ve attempted to share messages of the new life only repentance can bring.

I wish that were our only failure.
But somehow the church has missed the call to sanctification in the process too.
We have a deeply moving Wesleyan heritage that believes in growing in perfection, pursuing righteousness, and living the marks of a Christian life. But I listen for the joyful call to pursue the likeness of Christ Jesus, and hear reassurances for our failures instead.
We’ve stopped expecting more of all believers. Instead we’ve offered messages that leave people stewing in half-hearted faith and less that satisfying results of a transformed life.

Full, satisfying faith has seen repentance, reaches for sanctification, and stands in awe of the God who makes both things possible.
Maybe we’ve avoided these messages in recent years for the fear of conviction as unnecessary and punitive judgement.
And in our fear, we’ve denied ourselves, and others, the life-changing goodness that comes with a life fully surrendered.

There must be something to repentance and sanctification.
Or surely they would have taken the sign down by now.