Sermon Title: Daily Repentance [Sermon]
Sermon Text: Isaiah 55:6-9
Sermon Summary: The proper time for repentance is today, not years past or some future date. God invites us to daily confess our sins and covers us with the robe of Christ’s righteousness.
Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christopher D. Jackson
Liturgical Date: Pentecost 17, Proper 20 A
Calendar Date: 2026-09-20
Location: Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church, 316 W. Main St., Forestville, WI 54213. 920-856-6420.

Saint Peter’s serves Sister Bay and other area throughout Northeast Wisconsin.

The following transcript has been cleaned and lightly edited with the assistance of AI:

TRANSCRIPT

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. You may be seated.

Today we heard from the prophet Isaiah, “Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord that he may have compassion on him, and to our God for He will abundantly pardon.”

And on the basis of this passage, we’re going to be taking up the theme that the proper time for repentance is today. Not sometime off in the future, not far off years ago, but rather instead today.

A Pickup Truck Full of Rust

Back in college, as many of you know, I had my dirt bag white water rafting guide days. And one summer I was getting ready and making the preparations for when I’d be guiding out west in Colorado.

The place where I was gonna be guiding out west didn’t have a bunk house for the guides, and so we had to kind of provide our own arrangements for sleeping. And so I went and I looked around the community and I found a Dodge D-100, a 1989 Dodge D-100. You know, this is just before they transitioned to that more rounded body. It was still the boxy body, classic look.

But what really set this pickup truck apart from just about any other that I could find, it had an eight-foot long bed. And for a six-foot long guy, that was the perfect size for me to live out of the back end for a summer, and that was my plan. I was literally going to use the bed of the pickup truck as a bed.

Now, I ended up not needing it there. I found a literally one-room shack with no electric and no water that I lived in for the summer. So a bit of an upgrade over what I was looking to. But anyways, I still had this pickup truck.

And as I was driving out west to Colorado from where I went to school in Indiana, I drove through Topeka, Kansas, where my granddad, a jack-of-all-trades farmer, lived. And my granddad saw the pickup truck and about lost his mind ’cause it was full of rust. He couldn’t stand the sight of that rust. And so he took me into his shop, handed me an angle grinder, and started showing me everywhere he wanted me to knock the rust off that vehicle, on the bumper, on the doors.

And on the doors after I knocked that rust off the vehicle, he gave me a can of white primer, and he said, “Okay, go ahead and put this primer over it. Unfortunately, the day is getting short and I don’t have any top coat, but when you get out to Colorado, make sure you buy some top coat.”

So across the country I go, out to Colorado in my baby blue pickup truck with white spots on the doors there. It looked like I was driving the sky there, like clouds in the sky. Off I went out west and, you know, I had a good intention. Yeah, when I get there, I will go ahead and buy that top coat.

Friends, do you think I ever bought that top coat and painted over those white primer spots on my doors? No. It stayed that way for a few years until I finally sold it, and what was absolutely predictable happened, right? Eventually, the rust stains started showing through again, and eventually, well, I had big old holes in my doors.

The Corrosion of Sin

I’m here to tell you that we have a corrosion far more serious than rust on the side of a door. And that corrosion that we all have is the corrosion, the corruption of sin.

And on the one hand, we might be like 21-year-old Chris Jackson and say, “You know, I’m gonna take care of that at some point in the future.” The fact of the matter is that the time to address that corruption, that corrosion of sin, it’s not at some ambiguous point in the future, but instead it is now.

And that is the point that Isaiah was making to the people of God in Jerusalem about 2,700 years ago. Isaiah was telling the people of Jerusalem this: Now is the time to repent. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord that he may have compassion on him, and to our God for he will abundantly pardon.

What Isaiah was saying is this: You may think, people of Israel, that you have time to lay aside your sin. You may think that you have time to get rid of all those idols that you are hiding or maybe not even hiding but rather instead putting in full sight on your rooftops. You may think you have time for that. And you may think that you have time to reform your business practices by which you defraud one another. Instead of using your business to serve one another, instead you are using it to defraud one another. You have time to reform those practices, but the time is now. You don’t know about the future.

The Day to Repent Is Now

And brothers and sisters in Christ, that is a message as pertinent today as when it was first preached by Isaiah so many thousands of years ago. And that’s a message that we as well need to hear.

Oh, we may think that we have time to lay aside whatever our besetting sins are. Maybe this is the abuse of alcohol. Maybe this is lust. Maybe this is greed. Whatever it is, we may think that we have time, but the fact of the matter is that the Lord has not guaranteed the next day, let alone the next breath.

This was driven home recently to me and my family. Right now she didn’t end up going, but right now my wife’s classmates from high school are celebrating their 20th anniversary of their graduation with a reunion. And an email went out pointing out the fact that of her class 20 years ago, these are people still in their 40s mind you, but of their class 20 years ago, 30 people in her class have already passed away.

And as a 46-year-old man, I look around and it seems like every other day I hear about a guy my age that’s drawing his last breath. Brothers and sisters in Christ, the day to repent is now. Not far off at some future date.

But rather, God calls each of us to daily confess our sins. We’re gonna talk about that a little bit more in a minute. To daily confess our sins, and God, who is faithful and just, will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

In other words, if we confess our sins, God will in fact remove that rust from us far better than I could with that angle grinder, and God will cover us over with something better than an automotive top coat. But instead, He will cover us with the robe of Christ’s righteousness. A righteousness which he earned for us through a holy life that he lived for our sakes, and an atoning death that he died for our sins.

It Is Never Too Late to Repent

Now on the other hand, there may be some of us present who know that their days maybe are a little bit more numbered than others, but who think that the opportunity for repentance has far passed. Maybe the years have grown long and the sunset is in view. And we look back upon our lives, and all of a sudden we understand how we have failed to do as God has commanded, and we think that maybe there is not time to get right with God, and that time has passed.

And to this we have this beautiful parable that the Lord Jesus Christ preached. The parable of the master of the vineyard, this generous master who gives to all of his workers equally, whether they came in the cool of the morning or as the day was waning, he gives to each of them the same reward.

And so it is with our God. Whether we have come to Christ as an infant, as Leighton was just baptized, or whether we come to Christ at late age, God’s grace and mercy remains the same. And it is able to cover over all of our sins.

And so my message for you is this, is that repentance is not something that we ought to have done far back years ago, nor is repentance something that we can delay for some future date, but rather instead, the proper moment of repentance is right now. And this applies for each and every one of us.

A Life of Daily Repentance

I’d like for you to open up your hymnals to page 325. Page 325. So this is the Small Catechism, which, in a great blessing, is included in our hymnals, and on page 325 we have the Small Catechism’s discussion of the sacrament of holy baptism. And on the right-hand column, down towards the middle of the column, there’s the fourth part of the teachings regarding the sacrament of holy baptism.

And it asks this question, “What does such baptizing with water indicate?” I’d like for you all to read the answer along with me. “It indicates that the old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.”

This is a beautiful representation of the Lutheran teaching regarding repentance. There are some Christians who teach that repentance is maybe a one-time occasion in your life, or maybe something if you backslide that maybe you do a few times, or maybe even once a year when the revival season comes around. For those who have this viewpoint, repentance is an infrequent activity.

There are other Christians who maybe believe that repentance is a little bit more frequent. Maybe repentance is something that you do every few months or every month, and they maybe have a little bit different understanding of what repentance is in the first place, but repentance, once again, is an occasional thing.

But as Lutheran Christians, we believe that the entire life of the Christian is a life of repentance. That every day, yes, we are called to reckon with our sin, to examine our lives according to the law of God. According to the Ten Commandments, we are called to examine our words, our deeds, and even more importantly than our words and our deeds, the motions of our minds and the affections of our hearts.

And if we are honest, we will see that daily we fail to keep God’s holy and righteous commands and demands and the law.

And some people may think, “Well, what a miserable thing to do, Pastor Chris. Why in the world would you think upon your sins on such a daily basis?” It’s because on the other side of this is something so precious, so beautiful, and such a blessing. That as we said, if we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will in fact forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness day by day.

And so brothers and sisters in Christ, this is the true reason why repentance isn’t just something that maybe ought to have happened years ago, and maybe not something that we wait to happen into the future. But instead, God invites us to daily, today, repent of our sins so that we may have the assurance that we have His grace and mercy to life everlasting.

Praise be to God for this. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.