Repentance

California’s Day of Repentance Two Years On by James Wilson

Sept. 9 marked the second anniversary of California’s first Day of Repentance. The rolling event of 2015 grew to include coordinated and consecutive repentance days in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska.

The harvest began with a steady rain within 24 hours of the event conclusion. Over the following 18 months the rain picture in California did an about-face and five years of the worst drought in state history was announced over in early 2017.

None of it was magic; it was miracle.

The human contribution was a process of corporate and identificational repentance in the spirit of 2 Chronicles. 7:14. Such a process features the people of God repenting on their own behalf, not on behalf of those we think outside the family of God.

For California’s Day of Repentance we begged forgiveness for complicity and participation in four pillars of sin in our state:

shedding innocent blood

covenant breaking

sexual sin

idolatry. 

Have Christians – Bible believing Christians – shed innocent blood by having, supporting, or returning to office leaders who support abortion in similar numbers to secular society?  How about assisted suicide? 

Have we broken covenants by divorcing as often as the so-called unsaved? 

Have we reaped the benefits of land stolen from and treaties broken with the tribes who lived here before us? 

We can ask the same questions per sexual sin and placing agendas and priorities above service to God, the very essence of idolatry.  We will receive the same distressing answers.

God promises in that same passage He will hear our repentance, forgive our sin, and heal our land.  He predicates His promise on our humble acknowledgement of what we have done and failed to do, not on acknowledging the sin of others while we stand apart in lofty presumed innocence.  Leaders of the season of repentance were clear it was about ourselves needing forgiveness.

If we read the scriptures depicting identificational repentance from Isaiah to Jeremiah to Hosea to Daniel, and up through the letters of Paul the assumption of responsibility is not a generalized phenomenon but an intensely personal admission. 

Isaiah calls himself, for example, a person of unclean lips; Paul refers to himself as an abortion, though we sanitize his confession in English as “one untimely born.”  If I would dare to put myself forward as a leader in repentance it is clear I had best be ready to fess up and seek healing for my personal failings.

The way we did this was simplicity itself.  As the leaders met and prayed one of us felt led to the first four or five chapters of Nehemiah. 

Someone else reflected Nehemiah needed fifty-two days to lead rebuilding of the wall circling Jerusalem.  It was my part to note if we counted back fifty-two days from September 9 – we had already chosen California’s Admission Day as our launching pad – we come to July 20.  This is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon and proclaiming, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”  The aggregate convinced us we were called to a season of fifty-two days of prayer and fasting repentance – for our personal shortcomings – as we prepared and publicized the coming corporate season of a day in each of our states.

My personal fast was diet soda – to which I was addicted – and the occasional use of profanity – against which I have struggled all my life.  It was between each leader and God what the personal fast would be. 

As leaders we encouraged others to undertake the fast – people we knew and people who read our posts and emails – but it was a deeply personal connection with God for each of us that counted.  I can say with honesty my time of fasting and prayer brought me immeasurably closer to the Lord who is always and already as close as a prayer.

There are two bottom lines. 

One is that God is as good as His Word spoken in 2 Chronicles; He ended the drought even though the thousands who participated in the Day of Repentance process are only a pinch of leavening in a loaf of forty million Californians. 

The other is that California remains essentially as estranged from God as she was before the process.  God awaits the rest of the Church in California’s return to the One Who – according to the State’s own constitution – gave us all we have.

When that happens the Golden State will become authentically golden.