There are some of us who having been Christians for a long time look on a person who has been a Christian for a much shorter time and are surprised, critical, jealous over the spiritual growth in that person. By comparison we feel we haven’t grown as much as we could have, and that may be true.
What has happened in us? What is the root of growth in them? Clearly, it’s not time. Time may measure change or reveal change, but of itself it cannot produce change.
Still, if the difference of growth as Christians did correspond merely to the passing of time, every Christian in their decades would be automatically more mature in their faith.
No, the difference is not time. Time doesn’t change you. Repentance changes you.
The younger Christian may be zealous for God, passionate, full of love and obedience. The thought of, the act of, deliberately sinning, going against or drifting away from their Savior, startles them, provokes them, convicts them. They are quick to repent, to “turn to the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:16) and are, therefore, changed. “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
But the older Christian may have grown stagnant, complacent and passive, nominal in their faith and cold in their love, disinterested in their growth and distracted from their obedience. If they are aware of sin or disobedience, rather than repent from it, they “turn away from the Lord” and set a distance between themselves and that sin.
God’s kindness is not meant to lead us away from sin, but rather towards repentance from sin (Romans 2:4). But in our repentance what do we turn to? With firmness of truth and warmth of love, with divine authority and humility, God stoops down to serve us—to wash us, show us, teach us, and lead us, if we will follow, to the realization and acceptance that we need to change and that our need is Christ.
It is God’s goal not that we might grow out of our need for Christ, but that we might grow into our recognition of our never-ending need of him. Perhaps his greatest grace/gift is to give this recognition of our need, exceeded only by the giving/gracing of himself to meet it. God’s kindness, our repentance, aligns both our wants and needs: I want what I need and I need what I want. Both are reconciled in Christ.
Repentance redeems the time, makes the most of it. By repentance we grow both younger, more childlike in our dependance on God’s grace in Christ, and older, more mature in our likeness to God’s image in Christ. Repentance may or may not restore to us the things we’ve lost to sin and its consequences in our lives, but it can restore us to the One who makes us new and makes us whole.