Can you be beyond repentance? You are never beyond repentance or forgiveness as long as you are alive.
We have all been there: You put so much in your life that you could never possibly repent, then pray and ask God for forgiveness, and yet you couldn’t. Why? Because you knew that what you had done was impossible to repent. You knew it was bad, but you didn’t think it was really “bad” enough to get to repent. You could be forgiven though – perhaps an extra day or two at a time. Why is that?
First, we must take a look at why we make the decision to go down this road in the first place. Most of the time, we could just say, “Hey, that’s not me, I’ll never!” But, when we keep doing it, that’s when we start to realize that maybe we DO deserve to repent. It all boils down to fear. The fear of the unknown.
When you think about what it means to live an impossible life, I imagine that you might think of everything negatively. “I can’t do it. I can’t live like that! There’s no way I can fix it.” Even if you could fix it, you might think it would still be “impossible” to do. And, that’s the problem with our decisions.
When you don’t know what your choices are, and what’s “possible”, you have to choose the latter. You have to “know” what is “possible”. In other words, you have to “Dare To Dream” – even if you think you couldn’t, you have to dare to dream anyway. Sooner or later, you will learn that what is “impossible” to you is possible to others. Your world will suddenly change.
Think about this: When Jesus Christ experienced their sickness, he did not “repent” until three years later. Because of his passion, he suffered so much, yet he was able to “repent” for all eternity! So, when we experience sickness, or failures, or anything else in life that makes us uncomfortable, the only thing that is ‘impossible to repent’ is that we ourselves don’t try to change – we simply “accept” whatever is. If it is hard to change someone’s behavior, why is it that it is impossible to repent? When we accept things as they are, we are simply allowing ourselves to be miserable.
Of course, there are times when things are impossible to change. When your marriage breaks up, or when a child becomes ill, or when an important business deal goes wrong – we may not all be able to change those things. But, in the same way, that Christ could not stand before God at one time, we should not go into God’s throne of mercy with a toothache. We could pray and offer our prayer, but if we are unwilling to do what needs to be done in order to fix the problem, then we are simply allowing ourselves to be miserable.
I have lived in many churches, and I have sat in many churches where people are willing to allow God’s plan for them to work out, but they just don’t seem to want to. The reasons can be many, ranging from laziness to pride to a lack of desire. We should take seriously the words of James: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. Yes, we could stumble, and the result might be that something very bad happens to us and in return, God gives us something very bad in return.
However, the Bible says that God does not bear the blame. Instead, we should “hold nothing before Him”, that is, we should allow God to take responsibility for everything that happens to us. If it is impossible for us to repent, then it is impossible for God to forgive us either. Therefore, if it is impossible to repent, it is impossible for God to forgive us either. And God does not bear the blame, He only deals with what we ourselves have done!