Ash Wednesday sermon on Joel 2:12-13, preached by Finn Chirnside at SumRed Church
A sermon for the beginning of Lent, drawing on the prophet Joel to call the congregation to genuine inner repentance, lament, and trust in God's mercy.
Summary
Finn Chirnside, speaking at SumRed Church on 22nd February 2026, delivers a sermon on Joel 2:12-13 to mark the beginning of Lent. He argues that genuine repentance must be an inward transformation of the heart — not an outward performance — drawing on the prophet Joel's call to "rend your heart and not your garments." He makes a personal and direct appeal to anyone struggling with pornography addiction, sharing his own experience of healing through repentance and counselling, and inviting the congregation into a season of grace. He also addresses forgiveness, global lament, and the broader biblical story of human brokenness and redemption, culminating in an invitation to receive communion and reorient toward God.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Joel, Lent, and the Prophets
Finn Chirnside: The passage from Joel that we've got up on the screen here is traditionally read at the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, but I actually felt like there was something to doing it today as well, and hopefully as we move through this extended waffle, you understand what I'm trying to achieve.
The church for centuries has used this text to draw people to a posture of repentance and lament as we anticipate the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. In the original context, Joel is speaking prophetically to the Israelites to critique them of a whole bunch of their sins and to call them to repentance.
Joel is unique because pretty much all the prophets do this thing where they're calling out a certain situation. Micah has a very specific thing in mind and he's basically calling out people who oppress the poor in a very specific time. But Joel joins with all of the prophets and doesn't condemn a single person, king, or sin — he just kind of hits all of them, which is quite unique.
Just for fun, here are some of the sins that the prophets got a little bit angry at Israel for. Oppression of the poor. Property fraud — that was a genuinely big one — because what would happen is the rich people would move the boundaries of the property slowly to make it look like they owned more land than they did, and then they would get you into dishonest loans, and then you'd be screwed, and you'd have to give them the land. So that was a big thing, and God was not happy about that. There's a massive chapter in Micah dedicated to that. Idol worship. Sexual debauchery that was often linked to idol worship — how many children are in the room? I probably shouldn't say the specifics of that, actually. I'm not going to. And then child sacrifice was a big one. There was genuinely a massive problem in Israel where they would — I'm not sure I want to say how they did it, actually. It was pretty bad. It was really, really bad. They basically joined in with the pagan cults around them and the Babylonians and the way they killed children, and then made it worse. Good times.
The Core Biblical Diagnosis: The Broken Human Heart
So the church has used this text as a reminder of how God's chosen people are in constant need of returning and repenting before God of their sins, trusting in the fact that God — through Jesus and by the power of the Spirit — is ridiculously merciful and kind. God doesn't want us to repent because he's like a narcissistic control freak, but it actually turns out that going in the way of the Creator and living by his measure for the world actually might be the best thing for you.
So the core of the biblical proposition is that there is something fundamentally flawed with the human heart, which spills out into our impact on the world. This idea starts really with Moses, and then it goes through the prophets and the Psalms into the New Testament. Jesus really picks up on this in his teachings, and Paul and Peter do as well. The idea is this: it is from deep within, from the heart, that evil flows and causes destruction to the world.
What Lent offers is a gift that can be perceived as a curse or something to be afraid of. But I'm going to be straight up. The best people and most wonderfully alive and joy-filled people I've ever met are the ones who let Jesus into the mess, and let themselves acknowledge that actually they kind of suck, but that God in his mercy wants to reform and transform them into these wonderful, incredible people who love deeply and love their neighbour well.
Paul uses the language of transforming from glory to glory — that process of the more you come to know and follow Jesus, the more you just become more and more who you're made to be.
Israel's great sin throughout the Old Testament, if there was really one, is that they put their trust in their own ambitions and systems, not on the one who had already redeemed them. Lent is the space where, for many of us, we can realign our trust fully back to Jesus, and for some here, it might even be that first time.
The diagnosis of the story of Scripture is that human beings are fundamentally broken, but still capable of great beauty, and also of great evil. And the longer you follow Jesus — this might just be me, maybe I'm a psychopath — but the longer I follow Jesus, the more you actually realise just how messed up your core ambitions are. A lot of the time you're doing things like, oh, I did this really nice thing for a person, and you look inside your heart and you go, oh, it's because I wanted them to like me, or it's because I wanted people to think I was really cool. We were not designed to be like this, to live in this tension.
Rending the Heart: Dallas Willard and Inner Transformation
What Scripture invites us to is a renewal of the heart. Dallas Willard — if anyone knows Dallas Willard, he's this amazing Christian philosopher — he says it like this, that it proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God and Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates the deepest layers of their soul.
So when Joel, in our passage, talks about rending your heart and not your garments, he's speaking to this practice that — if you've read the Bible at all, you would have come across in different parts — where people would tear their clothes as an expression of grief. And there were genuinely moments where that was a legitimate expression of repentance and grief, one hundred percent. Josiah does it, David does it. But in Jewish culture at the time, it had become a way of saying, oh man, I'm really sad about this — but you're actually not. It just was a way to look good.
A great modern example — I'm probably going to annoy some people with this — but back in 2020, after the death of George Floyd, there was the make-your-Facebook-profile-black thing. And it was like, oh, I'm totally not a racist because I made my Facebook profile black. That was enough. It wasn't about the inner transformation. It was just about, I've done this and that's great. That's the idea that Joel was getting at — that actually that's not enough, because that's not getting to the inner part.
So when he says rend your heart, the idea is — it's a bit visceral, but it sounds a bit like Jesus — tear at your heart, and it will hurt, but it will transform you. What it means is this: genuine repentance and lament hurts, because it must affect the inner heart and the inner human. But if the way of God is renovation and transformation into someone better, then that process of pain can only be for our good.
Repentance can sometimes be a show to get out of trouble, but the heart itself is not transformed. Genuine repentance always results in transformation of the heart.
Lament: Grieving Before God
In Lent, we are provided with a space to repent and to lament. If lament feels foreign to you, lamenting in the biblical vision simply means to grieve before God, or to God, or with God — even if that is just yelling at him, crying, sitting in sadness. If you've read the Psalms, they're all covered. Lamenting is a very real, necessary, and thoroughly biblical part of the human experience. And everyone laments in their own way, and it can be incredibly unhealthy and toxic. But in Lent — and in general as Christians, but in Lent in particular — we do it with Jesus, the one who formed and understands the depths of our hearts.
You probably know this, but if you don't: Lent is a season, it's 40 days long, because it parallels the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, praying and fasting before he begins his public ministry. Often people will fast something in order to imitate that experience, and they will ask Jesus to meet them in that metaphoric wilderness, asking him to triumph over their sin or to meet them in their lament.
The season of Lent is the perfect time to ask Jesus to highlight things within us that he wants to work on, to transform, in order that he may make us people who are more fully alive, more fully ourselves. Maybe there's something you've been struggling with, or carrying guilt about for a long time. Lent is a season of grace where you're invited to meet Jesus, and where he can work to heal your heart and to transform you.
The story of the wilderness — Jesus in the wilderness — really, this is the simple idea: where you have failed, he has triumphed, and his triumph will enable you to prevail.
A Personal Appeal: Pornography, Forgiveness, and Healing
I'm going to go out on a limb here, get a little bit awkward, but it's day one, so why not just start as I mean to go on? Half of you will be like, jeepers creepers, that was a bit odd. I'm already a bit weird, so anyway — I'm going for it. I didn't do this at the nine o'clock, so I didn't pre-warn you.
I think that there is something here — here comes the Pentecostal — for healing for pornography addictions this Lent. I don't think I need to go on about how destructive porn is. I would recommend just Googling how destructive porn is, and it's pretty easy to find pretty much straight away that it's probably one of the worst things you can do to your soul. I'm not knocking people for getting addicted to it. My gosh, no one was ready for the algorithm. No one was ready for the iPhone. It was just something that no one anticipated, and it has destroyed so many people.
But I believe that in this season of Lent, I just feel like there's something — I think Jesus wants to do something in this church where people who are struggling with porn in any capacity, whether in marriage or in singleness, come and experience a real, genuine healing from that.
I can speak to that because I'm not the guy who's like, I'm perfectly sexually whole. Before I was a Christian, I did some silly stuff. As I came into following Jesus, I had a porn problem. I'm going straight up — day one, this is a bit fun, isn't it? And it was through a genuine season of repentance, of counselling, of acknowledging the things that had led me there in the first place, that Jesus was able to heal me.
So what I want to say is this. If you're coming to this place where your heart has been like — right — there'll be someone. And you're like, oh crap, it's me. What I would say is this: find someone you trust. It doesn't have to be me, especially if you think I'm a bit weird. It can be Harry, it can be your home group leader, it can be a mentor, a youth leader, whatever it is. Just instigate that conversation. And we will do literally anything we can to support you. We will pay for apps, we will pay for counselling, we'll do whatever we can, because it's such a vital thing for you to move out of. And I can tell you from personal experience the difference of when you drop something like that — how much closer to Jesus you feel, and how much more fully alive you feel. It's radically different, and I want that for you.
Sometimes the hardest thing in life, regardless of your faith stance, is forgiving others. We as Christians know this is something Jesus wants us to do, but it can be so difficult, particularly when the sin is actually horrific. Jesus wants you to forgive, yes, because it emulates how he has forgiven us, but also because it's genuinely good for your soul.
This might sound crazy, but it's true. Maybe this Lent is the time for you to go through a journey of forgiveness. Maybe it's a friend who hurt you. Maybe it's your spouse, your colleagues, your child, your parents. Don't let the anger and the hate win. Let Jesus and his freedom win instead.
Lamenting the World: Ukraine, Christchurch, and the Capacity for Evil
In Lent, we are also given the space to lament in our world. I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is a little bit messed up. There's some beautiful things happening too, but there's a lot going terribly, terribly wrong right now. The world is going through crisis after crisis, and over and again they reveal the capacity for evil and deception within the human heart, particularly when people who share a grievance or ambition decide that anything is fair game to achieve their goals.
I'm sure you can think of dozens of examples, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is that my brother-in-law is in the army, and he was over in Germany training some Ukrainian soldiers last year. He was like, oh, cool, see you guys next time, something like that. And they said, oh no, you won't — we'll be dead in two weeks. The life expectancy for Ukrainian soldiers is two weeks. They basically said, if you see any of us again, it'll be a miracle.
There's so much bad news that we don't even really know what to do. If your algorithm is hitting you with six billion different things — the Epstein files, Candace Owens, all these different things just going on — it's just constantly coming at you. And you become desensitised, you don't know what to do.
Even in Christchurch, it's the 15th anniversary of the quake. If you were there, you remember that it will never really leave you, that feeling. I still have the image in my brain of the building in front of me exploding opposite the bus, and the glass just shattering out. That's never going to leave my brain. Even just the last couple of weeks here — the Mount Manganui slip, people who lost their lives in that. So much pain and sadness and sorrow.
What do we do? It can be so easy to feel hopeless. But the great assurance in Lent is a God who meets us in the wilderness and is no stranger to grief. We meet in our lamenting a God who is not aloof or apathetic. He is indeed no stranger to grief and remorse. Instead, we see in Jesus the image of the invisible God, who laments over Jerusalem, who weeps at Lazarus' tomb.
And if we go back to Joel, the text reminds us that Yahweh is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. This is a direct quote from Exodus 34, where Yahweh — by the way, if you didn't know, Yahweh is the name of God. His name's not God. His name's Yahweh. And he gave himself that name.
This phrase — gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love — is the John 3:16 of the Old Testament. In fact, by far, it's the most quoted verse in the Bible. The way they rephrase it and rehash it throughout Scripture, it is the Bible. It's more than John 3:16. That's the verse.
The point is this: at his fundamental nature, Yahweh is gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love. He actually does want to see you changed and healed — more the real you.
The Biblical Story: Creation, Brokenness, and the Far-Off Country
I want to take a moment and assume that there's at least one person in the room who's hearing all this for the first time and going, my gosh, is this guy a nutter? Let me just make an argument for this. I'm going to do this by going back to Genesis 1. And if you've been a Christian for a long time, Genesis 1 is actually quite important, so I'm going there anyway, and hopefully it'll be helpful for you too.
The Bible is presenting you not with a book of rules, but a story — a story about God and his creation. In the beginning, God makes all human beings in his image. Every single human shares in some way the value and capacity for love and creativity that is intrinsic to the Creator. Humans are made to be in community together because God is Trinity, communal in nature — Father, Son, and Spirit, who coexist together as one being, yet three persons, eternally.
Genesis presents creation as God's temple, where his presence fills it, heaven and earth completely united. Yahweh then gives humans the responsibility to be his images — or a good translation might be ambassadors on earth — and to care for it and to expand the human project with Yahweh as its sustainer.
Genesis then tells us that humans are made for God and for each other. We are made for the earth and to be loving masters over it. We are made to create and to innovate as a reflection of the God who beautifully and masterfully creates in Genesis 1. We are made to live in community with God who will sustain us eternally.
Because God is love, he gives us the freedom to choose him freely. And the tragedy of the human story comes when we choose our own wisdom and the wisdom of other powers over the wisdom of the Creator. It actually turns out that if someone makes something, they probably know best how it's supposed to work. But humans — the constant tragedy of the Bible is that humans go, oh, I've got a better idea, let's try this instead. And the inevitable reaction is that if you say to the person who is by definition life — thus being God — actually we don't want your way, the inevitable result is that you bring in death. Because you bring in things that aren't God, and what is not God? Death is not God. So death comes in.
The great arrogance — I'm going to go for it — of the Western project is to think that somehow with the right politics, protest, policies, and programs you'll magically fix everything and head speedily along to a secular utopia. A utopia we can't fully describe, and everyone disagrees on what it actually looks like, but we instinctively seem to reach out for. We feel that there must be something that makes sense of the world, but it's almost scary or undefinable.
Here's a really simple example — and this is not a political stance, what I'm about to say. In 2023, National ran a campaign slogan that said, "Get the country back on track." The question is: on track to what? Can you tell me? There's just an assumption that we're going somewhere. They couldn't say, oh, we're heading to the new heavens, the new earth. Where are we going? We're just going somewhere that's better, but there's no defined explanation. But we are going somewhere. There's a feeling and assumption that we must be heading to something. But if you talk to someone on the right, it's drastically different to what someone on the left says it looks like. But we all think we're going there.
C.S. Lewis calls this utopian ambition the desire for a far-off country. And he puts it like this:
"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, I feel a certain shyness, because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that has settled the matter. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them. It was not in them, it only came through them. And what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our past — are good images of what we really desire. For they are not the thing itself. They are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
So much of the human story, and its many tragedies, and the things that we repent for and lament in Lent, is people looking for answers to eternal questions and trying to reach this far-off country by their own means and looking in the wrong places. How many times do you hear, all we need to do is this? If only we could educate these people and it would all be better. It just doesn't work. I'm sorry. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. It doesn't work.
The best thing for a broken world is the one who formed it and the one who will one day heal it completely. And as Christians, we have come to believe that 2,000 years ago, God entered into the human experience as Jesus of Nazareth. And in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, he shattered the power of death from the inside out and offers to all who would freely choose him life with him that begins now and goes forth into eternity.
And the eternity that we're going towards isn't some heaven where we all float disembodied in the clouds. The final destination is actually this earth, made right and made new, with God and humans together in a healed creation, just as we saw in the beginning. And it makes so much more sense of the human experience. We try to build paradise on earth because that's where we come from and that's where we're going. But we fail to do it because we do it by our own wisdom and definition of good and evil.
What the secular humanist dream grasps for finds its reality in fullness in the story of Jesus. Friends, through Jesus, that country, that hope, that reality is on offer to all who will receive.
Invitation: Come and Rend Your Heart
Here's the thing, though. It requires a heart that is open to what God might do in you. A heart that is open to acknowledging that maybe you, or your political party, or Richard Dawkins, aren't the fount of all wisdom and morality.
Come and rend your heart before God. Even if you don't believe, just try. What's the worst that can happen? If our final destination is eternal oblivion and nothingness and we return to the primordial soup, then nothing matters if you try Lent. Nothing matters at all. Just give it a shot. What's the risk? You risk nothing, but you might just gain everything.
Communion
As we go into communion, we enter into a precious moment that brings eternity into the present. The bread and wine reminds us of our Saviour's death and reminds us of the great feast that Jesus promises to welcome his people with in the new heavens and earth. Here we can repent, we can weep, we can sit in silence, all with the hope of the age to come, grounded in the reality of Jesus' resurrection.
So in this season of Lent, I pray that you would reorient your soul towards Yahweh in his loving kindness, allowing him to meet you in your grief and to heal you by his Spirit.