Nearly everyone, if asked to be truly honest, would admit that they have regrets. Certain things we have done or said or thought or whatever, we have regrets. As the saying goes, hindsight is 20:20. We have things that we wish hadn’t happened. I can think of situations in my own life where I have done something or said something that I later regretted and decided wasn’t a great thing to do. But regret can be a powerful feeling, and if we don’t take care of it rightly it can be a huge issue in our lives. . .
There’s a difference between regret and repentance. In our spiritual lives, we can either be like the first guy I met, who felt the weight of regret for what he’d done but didn’t do anything about it, or we can be like the second guys I encountered, who turned their regret into repentance and got rid of it forever. It seems like a simple choice, but it’s one that we are often times not very willing to make.In our own spiritual lives, it can be easy to experience regret without repentance. We sin, or do something we know we shouldn’t, and we feel bad about it, but we don’t really take care of the issue. Maybe we push it back into the back corner of our lives, or we hide it under the rug, or pretend it isn’t there, but we don’t really take care of things. We don’t really deal with our stuff in a Biblical way. . .
And as we come to Lamentations today, we see that this is very similar to where God’s people were. And as we start chapter 5 today, we see Jeremiah attempting to lead the people towards true Biblical repentance. They perhaps had experienced regret; they certainly felt the affects of sin in their lives as they suffered God’s hand of judgement. And now Jeremiah attempts to lead them in dealing with their regret rightly and moving toward Biblical repentance. As we walk through this passage together, there’s one truth I want you to remember—it’s our big idea for this morning. Repentance is greater than regret.
