Repentence a Perfect Revolution

‘Therefore now, saith the Lord, Turn you unto me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning.’  Repentance is nothing else but a kind of circling, to return to God by repentance from whom by sin we have turned away.  And much after a circle is this text of Joel.  He begins with the word 'turn', and returns about to the same word again.  Twice he repeats the word, which two must needs be two different motions.  First, a ‘turn’ wherein we look forward to God, and with our whole heart resolve to turn to him.  Then a turn again, wherein we look backward to our sins wherein we have turned from God, and with beholding them our very heart breaketh….  These two between them make up a complete repentance, or to keep to our text, a perfect revolution.

– from a sermon of Lancelot Andrewes
preached before King James I at Whitehall,
Ash Wednesday 1609

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