The Lutheran Hour

"Repentance Refreshment"

#79-33
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on April 22, 2012
Speaker: Rev. Gregory Seltz
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: Acts 3:18-21

Grace, and mercy, and peace be from God our Father, who grants us times of refreshing through His Son Jesus, Our Savior, Amen.

I’ve just recently read about a store that was opened several years ago in the Mall of America, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Have you heard of this store? Its purpose, to offer “rest to shoppers.” The store is called MinneNAPolis, that’s right, MinneNAPolis. It rents comfy spots where weary shoppers can take naps for 70 cents a minute. Founded by PowerNap Sleep Centers of Boca Raton, Florida, the new store includes themed rooms such as Asian Mist, Tropical Isle, and Deep Space, and the walls are thick enough to drown out the sounds of squealing children or bustling shoppers.

The company’s website says, “Escape the pressures of the real world into the pleasures of an ideal one.” “It’s not just napping, some guests will want to listen to music, put their feet up, watch the water trickling in the beautiful stone waterfall, breathe in the positive-ionization-filled air, enjoy the full-body massager, and just take an enjoyable escape from their fast-paced lifestyle.”

Now my first reaction was, “Do you mean that we now need to take a rest from our shopping, too?” I thought that shopping was supposed to be the respite from the workaday world. Wow, it seems that even our leisure activities are tiring us out today. We don’t need an escape into an ideal, utopian world. No, we need real refreshment in the middle of our real lives, as they are.
It seems that real refreshment continues to be the one thing that eludes us today.

And there is good reason for it as our text says. Here, Saint Peter, a disciple of Jesus, speaks about “times of refreshing” that come, not from our creations, our escapes, or our best efforts, but from a repentance and a returning to God by faith. There are certain things that will never be right in our hearts and minds until we are reconciled with the Lord who created and redeemed us.

In fact, when Peter is speaking to the audience of the Israelites, he reminds them that God has been in the business of humanity’s salvation from the very beginning of time. Without God, nothing in this world can satisfy us, or grant us that restorative peace of being His man, or His woman. God’s offer of grace is not a temporary suspension of this life’s tragedies and travails. No, it is an offer of Christ’s eternal life in the midst of life’s realities, refreshment in His Name in the midst of life’s challenges, and resurrection life as His sure promise to all who believe.

St. Peter called the people of that day, just as he calls you and me today, to repent and to return to God for the forgiveness of sins, for a faith relationship with the Messiah, Jesus, for times of refreshment resourced by God, as only His grace can provide.
Peter says, “This is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, and times of refreshing may come from the Lord.”

This call for repentant refreshment comes amidst a tumultuous public event where things were spiraling out of control for Peter and John. They were confronted by a lame man begging near the temple. That wasn’t unusual. Beggars often lived off the benevolence of temple goers. And so, this man approaches Peter and John for money, what he thought he needed, but what he got instead was a healing of body and soul. Peter’s message to the man and to all who listened is “We don’t have gold or silver, but what we have is more precious, the Name of Jesus, yours as a gift.” In this case, the Name came with a very public healing, one that had people thinking of Peter and John as having some special powers or blessings of their own. But Peter would have none of that. His message was about the Name of Jesus, the blessing of Jesus. This healing was merely another way to proclaim God’s greater blessings of forgiveness, life, salvation, and eternal refreshment that was for all who believe in Christ, the Messiah, their Savior.

Repentant refreshment? That’s what Peter sought to deliver that day. That is what he is offering to you and to me this day.

But, why? Why do we need to get so spiritual about this? If I’m overwhelmed, or tired (and a lot of us are today), I thought we just needed leisure time, time off, or a little more sleep. Don’t we just need to work less and have some more entertainment or R and R? Don’t we just need a spiritual power nap once in a while for the kind of refreshment that we need, body, mind, and spirit?

I guess it depends on what kind of things are making you weary. If you’re merely overly tired, or in need of some extra energy, yes, then a power nap or some well needed exercise might do. But what if you are dealing with things that can’t be solved with a little shut eye? What if you are dealing with an issue that remains despite your best efforts? I’m talking about the things that keep you up at night, the things that no amount of money in the bank can fix, things deep in your heart, always on your mind, an inevitable drumbeat of missed opportunities or deep-seated disappointments!

Repentant refreshment deals with those issues. Issues where there is an eternal just payment due. It takes those issues to the cross where Jesus, the Messiah, took upon Himself the weariness-causing sin, upon Himself the strength-sapping failure and rebellion that exists in every one of our lives and He literally blotted it out by His death on the cross, a suffering Savior for your real refreshment.

Peter uses a common image to the people of his day when He says, “God blotted out your transgressions” through Jesus. Debts of that day were written, literally carved into wax tablets, so that they would remain clear until the debt was paid. To blot it out was to take an object and literally scratch it away as if it never existed!

King David, in the Old Testament, knew the bone-aching power of unrepentance and the healing refreshment of God’s grace. You remember the story of David and Bathsheba. It’s a brutal reminder that his temptations are ours and that those kinds of lusts, and sins, and debauchery are the things that not only destroy our relationship to God and to one another, they destroy us as well. Listen to how David talks about such things in Psalm 32.

Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the LORD does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit. When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as if in the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you. I did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Blotted out. We need more than a power nap, we need more than a little of God’s help for today. Peter is proclaiming God’s offer of real forgiveness for sin and eternal guilt, God’s offer of a resurrection life for people destined for self-induced destruction; a message where even the blessings of this life are merely a foretaste of eternal life with Him.

The message of the Bible is clear: repent of your sins, of your desire to be the one in total control of your life, believe in the One who created you, redeemed you, and yearns to reconcile you with Himself, so that you will be refreshed, refreshed by His grace, confident of His love, and empowered by His Spirit.

Peter says, “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you-even Jesus.”

Now, some of you may be thinking, “Okay, Pastor Seltz, if repentance leads to godly refreshment, then how does this repentance thing work?” Well, the first thing that comes with repentance is that God, by the power of His Spirit through His Law brings you to the knowledge and belief that your life is not what it should be, and that remaining on the path of your spiritual indifference, or worse, your self-righteous solutions. This path is the way to certain death and eternal destruction.

By the power of God’s Spirit, repent see the weight, the emotionally draining power of sin, and guilt, and worry in your life, as it is something to be repented of, sorrowed over, even turned away from. God doesn’t want that for your life and neither should you.
Repentance is a call, then, to turn away from our ill-fated attempts to live life on our terms. It is a call to real sorrow and contrition for those things that dishonor the God of heaven who made us and
redeemed us. It’s a call to see the depth of despair from which we have been rescued.
Do you remember the opening scenes of “The Wide World of Sports” television program? I can still hear the words, “The thrill of victory; the agony of defeat.” The “the agony of defeat” was illustrated by footage of a man cascading off a ski jump, rocketing out of control off the end of the ramp, tumbling and flipping wildly, and crashing through a light retaining fence, before finally coming to rest before a crowd of stunned spectators. Did he fall or did he abort the jump? Was this merely another athlete messing up or was this an athlete boldly changing course?
What viewers didn’t know was that he chose to fall rather than finish the jump. Why? As he explained later, the jump surface had become too fast, and midway down the ramp, he realized that if he completed the jump, he would land beyond the safe landing area, which could have been fatal. Halting the jump literally saved his life.

Changing one’s course for life. To change one’s course in life can be dramatic and sometimes a painful undertaking, but change is better than a fatal landing at the end.

Repentance is seeing clearly that our path without God clearly ends in death and despair. Repentance is the power of the Spirit of God in action, turning us away from such a life and tuning us to God by faith. Later, in Acts Chapter 5, Peter even says that, “God exalted Jesus to His own right hand as Prince and Savior that He might give repentance and forgiveness of sins. It’s clear. Our real problem is not our productivity, not our amount of leisure; it’s not about how much money we have, or how much time we need. The world is hard and unrelenting place, because it is evil. This world has pain because there is sin. The great challenge to life, a life of abundant refreshment is the rebellion that lives in every human heart and the separation from God that such sin causes.

The key to times of refreshment has to do with our relationship to God. The real key to repentant refreshment is faith then; faith in the Jesus who makes such repentance possible and blesses us with His forgiveness, His abundant life lived in the power of His Spirit!

Faith in Him is key because now you have a merciful place to stand before God, without fear, without judgment, a place of hope in Christ, a place that is sure and certain, a place in God’s presence, the One who is the author, the sustainer, indeed, the refresher of all of life.
Sin disconnects a person from God. Sin literally removes oneself from that fount of refreshment, that living water that you and I so desperately need.

Repentance, by the power of the Holy Spirit, reconnects you to God because it turns you away from yourself, shows you indeed what you are missing, but even more wonderfully, returns you to the One who not only created you, but redeemed you by His grace.

And the returns of that grace just keep on coming, don’t they?

Not only did this healed man in the text have a new, hope-filled standing before the Lord, he was now able to take his stand, to take his place, in the temple as well as one praising and worshipping God with the others. He was not only healed, he was returned to society in ways that only his healing from the Lord could affect.

He was reconnected to others because he was reconciled to God in the Name of Jesus.
When repentant refreshment is poured into our lives, it turns us away from our selfish, self-centered struggle to take control of our lives, as if we could. Repent refreshment comes from being immersed in His Word, the deep well of His Living Water being refreshed by His Spirit-filled promises and His clear proclamation of grace.

When you are refreshed in Him, you are empowered to be His people to others, vessels of His grace.

So, today, let God’s continual repentance refreshment strengthen your ability to stand not only by grace in His presence, but to continue to take your stand in love in the lives of those you care about.

And don’t let anything other than the grace of Jesus motivate you to care for others. As Peter and John learned, even when you share Jesus, a bit a chaos can ensue. But, even better, Christ’s blessings still can be shared and received even there!

There were two unmarried sisters who had such a bitter fight that they stopped speaking to each other. Unable or unwilling to leave their small home, they continued to use the same rooms and sleep in the same bedroom. A chalk line divided the sleeping area into two halves. The chalk divided rooms so that both sisters could come and go and get their own meals without trespassing on the other sister’s space. In the black of night, each could hear the breathing and snoring of the other. For years, they coexisted in grinding silence. Neither was willing to take the first step to reconciliation, let alone refreshment in their relationship.

Then one night, a sister got up to go to the bathroom and fell, breaking her hip. The other sister awakened by the fall and the scream of pain jumped out of bed, crossed the chalk line and came to her sister’s side. Even though she couldn’t resist a jab on her sister of why she would do such a foolish thing as trip over her own feet, the sister who crossed the line, held on to her foe of the past few years until the paramedics came and carried her to the hospital.

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall told this story and added these words at the end: “The legal system can force open doors and sometimes knock down walls, but it cannot build bridges.” Marshall was right. That is the job of Christ and His Church. Repentant refreshment in action.

It took real pain to finally get this sister to look to her sibling with begrudged mercy. That’s not what it means to be God’s people. God’s people know that Jesus erased the lines between us and God, lines that we selfishly drew between us. Christians know that Jesus doesn’t just erase the lines; He crosses them, bringing His mercy, His continued care, and His abundant life to us as a gift. Christians know that all these blessings were meant to be shared whenever and wherever He so desires and that’s all that Peter and John were doing that day.

Peter called his brothers to faith by calling them to repentance. Peter called his brothers to faith by pointing them to Jesus as their savior. And, when you know Him, in repentant faith, you know the forgiveness, the love, and the mercy that only He can provide. When you know Him, real refreshment is possible because in Him, your relationship to God is renewed again.

So, when all the machinations of modern life fail to bring the refreshment we need, when leisure is not enough, when work is not enough, even when the things of this world that we love are not enough, the call to faith in Jesus Christ remains. In Him, sin is forgiven. In Him, life with God is restored. In Him, we are reconciled to God with a firm place to stand graced in His Presence. With Him, there is a refreshment of soul that even affects the body. Just ask a lame man who was healed one day, from the word of an Apostle who blessed Him in Jesus’ Name.
Amen!

LUTHERAN HOUR MAILBOX (Questions and Answers) for April 22, 2012
Topic: The Church, Out Of Step?

Announcer: Is the church out of step? Pastor Gregory Seltz responds to questions from listeners. I’m Mark Eischer. Today another follow-up question concerning this recent topic in the news concerning the church. A listener asks, “Why should the church be all this concerned about contraception anyway? Sex and relationships are so much different today. Why can’t the church just adjust to the times? It seems so out of step.”

Seltz: Well, our listener has one thing right, the church does seem “out of step” with a certain part of society. And even if relationships are different, that doesn’t mean that it’s better for us. But, here I think the question is much bigger than merely the church’s perspective on contraception. The real discussion is much broader than that.

Announcer: And, how do you mean?

Seltz: Well, lost in this discussion about health care and access to contraception is the underlying discussion of sex, relationships, marriage, and family.

Announcer: Right, I don’t recall anyone really talking about those deeper issues.

Seltz: Right, and there are two worldviews, literally colliding in our culture here and that collision has been going on for quite awhile. Secularism seeks for the individual to be, in their words, “unshackled” from all authority. That mindset was unleashed upon the American culture especially in the 1960s in the area of personal relationships, especially as they concerned sexual relations and practices; whereas the church has always understood these questions in relationship to God and His Word.

Announcer: All right. And these different worldviews, then, produce very different results, very different ideas when it comes to marriage, the family, and sexual relations.
Seltz: You can already see that in this contraception debate. In the secular world view that’s the way to ensure that unfettered sexuality is possible without consequences. Such a view, then, disconnects sexual relationships from the commitment of marriage and the desire to create and raise a family.

Announcer: Right. And all of this discussion, it seems like pregnancy is being treated as a disease, something to be cured, and that a baby is a punishment of some sort.

Seltz: Right. Such a worldview has unleashed millions of abortions upon humanity, dehumanizing venereal diseases and too many broken relationships to count as well. (And we don’t have enough time to talk about the coarseness and the utilitarian views of sex that are so destructively prevalent today unlike any time before). In fact, more and more access, actually even more and more promoted use of contraception, is this worldview’s answer to these problems.

Announcer: Which is not much of an answer at all. Actually, the Biblical perspective seeks to challenge that worldview at an even deeper level.

Seltz: Yeah, it sure would. That’s why we have to be careful that people don’t just see our response to things like this legislation as merely us saying, “NO.” We want to make sure that people hear the positive message that comes with the Gospel; a message of self-discipline, committed relationship, sexuality, and intimacy and the benefits to society of healthy marriages that are built not just for sexual happiness but for children’s welfare. In that regard, the church may be “out of step” but it might just be the answer that our culture needs to hear.
Announcer: A word of caution, though. We don’t want non-Christians to only hear that the church has moral positions on certain public questions. Ultimately, the message of the church is much greater than that.

Seltz: That’s for sure. The church’s ultimate message is about the grace and love of God in Jesus Christ and only that message can save us. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to help build a civil society for all, even for those who deny this greatest gift of freedom, life, and salvation in Jesus alone.

Announcer: All right. Summing it all up today, then, this is a call for us to live moral lives, ultimately so that others can be blessed, and hopefully, even there, maybe wonder why it is that Christians are so different. They might come around to ask why do you do things the way you do.

Seltz: Well, and we’d better be ready to say “It’s actually for you, if you’d really like to know.”

Announcer: Very good. So, in summarizing, the church is perhaps out of step, but certainly it is out of love for God and also, ultimately, love for our neighbor wanting to share the blessings of Christ with them. Thank you Pastor Seltz. This has been a presentation of Lutheran Hour Ministries.

Music Selections for the program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.

“This Is the Feast” by Richard W. Hillert, arr. Adam Countryman. From UnOrganized by Adam Countryman (2010 Adam Countryman) Text & music © 1988 Richard W. Hillert.

“At the Lamb’s High Feast” arr. Charles Ore. From From My Perspective, vol. 1 (© 1992 Organ Works Corporation)

“He’s Risen, He’s Risen” arr. Jeffrey Blersch. From Resounding Alleluias by Jeffrey Blersch (© 2005 Concordia Publishing House)