The Repentance Priority #2

Welcome to The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people God's Word. Today Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time.

So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in The Truth Pulpit. What is repentance? What is this divine call that is upon our lives? Go back to the book of Acts chapter 26 with me, as we'll let Scripture define it for us after the manner of the teaching of the Apostle Paul. Acts chapter 26. Paul is giving them his testimony. This is a perfect day to talk about testimonies after we heard one in the waters of baptism at the start of our service.

Paul is heading toward a trial for his life. And he says in verse 12, In this connection I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priest. At midday, O king, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun that shone around me and those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

It is hard for you to kick against the goads. And I said, Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you as a servant and witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from your people and from the Gentiles to whom I am sending you.

Now, watch what happens there in verse 18. He's explaining to Paul what the mission will be and what it is that he is to accomplish under the authority and power of Christ. He says, Paul, I'm sending you, verse 18, to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. I'm sending you to turn them from darkness to light, from Satan to God, from sin to obedience. And Paul says in verse 19, having completed his testimony, now he says, he tells the king who is hearing his case what it is that he did in response to it. He said, therefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout all the region of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance. Repentance is a turning. It is a twofold turning. It is a turning away from your sin and a turning to the God who offers the gospel to you, a turning from sin and a turning to Christ.

And beloved, here's the thing. This is a conscious act of human volition that we are talking about here. This is something that you do consciously. You're not born as a repentant person just because you're born into a Christian family. You do not become repentant just because somebody with golden threads on his dress sprinkled some water on you and declared you to be free from original sin. You weren't necessarily repentant just because you went into the waters of baptism sometime when you were six years old and had no idea what you were doing. That's not repentance.

There's a recognition of moral responsibility, moral culpability that in principle, not in fullness, but there is a conscious recognition that the Spirit of God opens your eyes to recognize as he is working the work of salvation in your heart, you realize, oh, I'm in trouble here. I have broken the law of God. I have violated the love of God. I have cursed the name of Christ. I have lived in drunkenness and sexual sin and lying and all manner of disregard of the Bible and prayer, and I have mocked the people of God.

I'm ruined. And you realize how wrong that is, and you turn away from it. You say, I reject all of that, and I turn asking for mercy to Christ alone. That's the sense of repentance. In repentance, in repentance, you reorient yourself from darkness to light. You reorient your heart. You make a conscious decision to turn from sin and to turn to Christ, and you realize that there is a wholesale change that you have embraced.

And I'll deal with that a little bit more in the Q&A part here in point three. But, beloved, this true repentance, true repentance is something that has a life-changing impact on you, so that John the Baptist in Luke 3 told his audience, bear fruit in keeping with repentance. He looked on the Pharisees, those proud, arrogant men who pretended sympathy with his message, when in their heart they were still committed to their legalism and pride, and he said, don't play games with repentance. You say you're repentant?

Fine. Bring forth fruit in keeping with it. Let your life start to show new patterns of obedience to Christ and to his Word and to the revelation of God, rather than just making an outward mouthing of something to get applauded by people who are watching you, with the full intent to go back to your private sins and under the cover of dark continue in the sinful, dark life that you've been living all along. Don't play those games. Don't pretend that hypocrisy before an omniscient God who knows your every word, thought, and deed.

Just a little side note here. Repentance is something that's done in the presence of God. And there's a way for us to think about, you know, God is omniscient, we say, and it's true. You know, he knows our rising up and our laying down. You know, he knows what we're going to say before we say it. He ordained our days before there was one of them, and so he's sovereign over all of our lives.

But Charles Spurgeon, I'm not quoting him here, I'm paraphrasing him here, had a brilliant insight into the nature of the omniscience of God and what it means for us. God knows you so completely that it's like you're the only other aspect of existence apart from him. If suddenly everything in the universe disappeared and suddenly all the people were gone and only you were left and God, and there was nothing else, you would know in a powerful sense that you are in the presence of God and he knows everything about you.

Well, beloved, that's the reality with all of the world and all the people around. God knows you so thoroughly as if you were the only person in existence. That's how comprehensive his omniscience is, and that is a motivation to repent. God knows your sin. God knows your hard heart. God knows your rebellion and your rejection of everything holy. God knows the hypocrisy. God knows how much you want to get out of this room at this moment, some of you.

I ain't letting you go just yet. God knows all of that, and there's no escaping what he'll do with it. J.C. Ryle from the 19th century said this. What is repentance is our question.

J.C. Ryle answers it. True repentance is no light matter. It is a thorough change of heart about sin, a change showing itself in godly sorrow for sin, in a heartfelt confession of sin, in a complete breaking off from sinful habits and an abiding hatred of all sin. Such repentance is the inseparable companion of saving faith in Christ. So that's repentance, a thorough, sincere, earnest breaking from sin, breaking from self, breaking from sinful relationships, breaking from the world, and turning to Christ with the spirit that we read from the Apostle Paul, Oh, dear Lord, what would you have me to do? I stand before you exposed with nothing but my guilt to bring to you, nothing in my hands I bring simply to thy cross I cling.

Take me, save me, deliver me. I am not holding on to anything. I'm not playing any games, dear Lord. I'm not hiding reservations in my heart, mental reservations that I'm going to continue doing this a little while longer while I mouth off repentant words to you. No blank check. Here's the check of my life.

You sign it in any amount that you want. I completely surrender to you in abject surrender, abject confession of my sin, and I reject it all that I might have you. That's repentance. Now, let me answer some clarifying questions here in our third point, a repentance Q&A.

I'm going to give you four common questions, some theological in nature, some personal in nature, to just kind of help you think through it. This isn't all that could be said or should be said, but it's enough of the major themes that it should be pretty clear to you when you walk out whether you are a repentant person or not. Now, in light of the way I framed it at the beginning with churches that don't preach repentance and the doctrine of repentance and the preachers of repentance have been shamelessly slandered over the past decades that you're preaching a gospel of works. When you tell people to repent, you're calling them to works. And, you know, okay, well, fine.

You can judge me how you want. But I just want you to go and say that to John the Baptist, say it to Jesus, say it to the disciples, say it to Peter, say it to Paul, and say it again to Christ after he had preached in Revelation 2 and 3. Then you can come back and talk to me about my doctrine of repentance.

But we need to answer this question. Is repentance contrary to grace, the undeserved favor of God? Is it a work of man? And when we say is it a work of man, is repentance something that we bring to God with a sense of merit and pride? See, here I am repenting. I give you the repentance and now you give me salvation in exchange for my repentance.

That's not what we're saying at all. That's a ridiculous distortion that men should be ashamed of themselves for imputing to those who preach the doctrine of true, free grace. Is repentance contrary to grace?

No, not at all. We don't bring repentance to God as something of merit, something that means we are deserving, that God has to reward us under some kind of legal system. Oh, he repented. Now I owe him.

I'm under obligation. It's none of that. What repentance is is an inner principle in the heart of hating sin, of forsaking sin.

It is not a work at all. Scripture says in different places that repentance is a gift of God. You see this in Acts 11, verse 18.

You don't need to turn there for the sake of time. But after the apostles had made a report to people who were skeptical of their ministry, they'd heard that the Gentiles had come to faith in Christ. They were saying, What are you doing? They need to be Jews before they can become Christians.

They said, No, no, no. He said when they believed in the Lord Christ, they received the same gift we did when we believed. And they said in response, verse 18, When they heard these things, they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life. Repentance is a gift from God, just like faith is a gift from God. As a dead sinner, you cannot repent in your own power. But when God works in your life and brings Christ to you through the preaching of the Word and through the work of the Spirit in your heart, He imparts to you a capacity and a desire to repent in the way that we've described here today.

And the one who truly believes embraces that. Of course I repent. I want to be free from sin.

I don't want to cling to it. The whole idea of my coming to Christ, deliver me from my sin. And so it is something that God gives to us, not something that we do in our unregenerate state, and then He responds and gives us salvation in response. That's one thing, kind of a theological clarification there. Secondly, for those of you that are Christians, you struggle with assurance.

Maybe you're kind of wired toward introspection. You ask a question like this. And now this becomes very pastoral and a desire to help souls here who are in Christ. And you ask, how do I know if I've repented enough? How do I know if my repentance is good enough?

Well, let me give you some encouraging words here. First of all, true repentance, it does not make you perfect. True repentance does not mean that you will be forever free from temptation. If you remember, this ties in with what we were teaching about sanctification.

There is a process of purging and cleansing, of remaining corruption. And so your perfection doesn't come in this life. Perfection is not here on earth, contrary to other realms of bad theology. Your perfection awaits you in heaven when you are glorified, when you see Christ face to face, and you become like Him because you see Him as He is.

That's when perfection comes. You're not perfect here on earth. There's a sense in which your repentance is always going to be imperfect while you're in the flesh here.

You can see that even from the basic biblical commandments that are given. Jesus said in the Lord's Prayer, you know, that we are to confess our sins. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. 1 John 1.9, if we are confessing our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us and to cleanse us from all of our sins.

And beloved, understand the significance of this. This is pretty profound to recognize that if Scripture anticipates that we are going to be confessing sin, then it means that there's going to be an ongoing nature of repentance in our lives. It's not a one-time event that suddenly snaps us out of sin and we never sin again.

No. What you look for is whether there's a principle of repentance in your heart, not perfection of repentance. Is there something fundamental in you that when you sin, you react against it, you mourn over it, you grieve over it, you don't want to persist in it. You say, I've got to go to the Lord and confess this.

You see, you can mourn over sin without being morbidly consumed by it. But what you want to do in your repentant heart is this. Rather than being so inwardly focused, I haven't repented enough, there's, you know, what about this in me, what about that in me, and looking, and you never find answers there, do you?

You introspective people that are like me in that regard. What you do in repentance is you look outside of yourself to Christ. You lay hold of Christ in your repentance. I turn from this sin and instead of saying, I have sin in my life.

I've sinned. And instead of saying and going morbid, as a Christian, going morbidly deep into that, you say, oh, I've sinned, I need to look to Christ again and find his faithful love and forgiveness again. You look out to Christ for the reality of your repentance, not on your inward feelings that the devil is more than happy to twist and distort and confuse you with.

I know I quote Spurgeon a lot these days, get used to it. Spurgeon said in his sermon, Repentance Unto Life, he said this, Repentance is never perfect in any man in this mortal state. There are degrees of repentance, and the least repentance will save the soul if it is sincere.

End quote. So have you repented enough? No, you haven't, because you've still got sin. You're going to learn more about sin as you continue to grow in Christ. The human aspect of your repentance is always going to be less than what perfection would manifest. Don't rely on the perfection of it. Look for the reality of it, and if you see the reality of it, the imperfection does not have the right to undermine your assurance of your salvation. Thirdly, here's the money question.

Here's the million-dollar question on this subject. How can I distinguish true repentance from something that is false? How do I know that my repentance is real and that I'm not self-deceived? Pretty important question. Let me give you four brief principles here about that. First of all, understand this. Is your repentance real?

Ask yourself this, or recognize this principle. Repentance is not only a turning from sin. Repentance is not only a turning from sin. True repentance, as it turns from sin, turns to Christ. Is there a Christ-centered aspect to your profession of repentance? Has your repentance led you to appreciate and honor and worship the Lord Jesus Christ in some manner?

Scripture says, if anyone does not love the Lord, let him be accursed. You see, you're not simply saying, oh, man, I'm ashamed of the things that I've done. Lots of people are ashamed of the things they've done, but they haven't turned to Christ.

Have you turned to Christ in your repentance? Stated differently, repentance, true repentance, is something far beyond struggling to break a bad or sinful habit that you have. You know, I want to quit smoking, I want to quit all these lustful things. You know, I know I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

I'm going to try harder to stop. That's not repentance. If it's only about trying to stop a bad habit that you have, or a sinful thing that you've been doing, and that's not accompanied by a love and submission to the Lord Jesus Christ, your repentance isn't real. You can keep trying to stop sinning, it's not going to do you any good. True repentance joins itself to Christ. Now, along those lines, secondly, repentance involves some kind of godly sorrow, some kind of vertical acknowledgement before God that says, I've not only done bad things in the sight of man, I have sinned against God. I have sinned against the Holy One of the universe.

This is not simply a matter of human shame. This is a recognition that God is entitled. God commands our full allegiance, devotion, and obedience to Him, and I haven't given it to Him.

And that's wrong. I am wrong to have violated God like that. And in His goodness and His love, I've sinned against that. What is wrong with me that I've responded to a holy loving God like that? And your heart snaps within you.

A fire consumes your heart and you're left with ashes in its place. It's not just that you've pursued your lusts. It's that you have not responded with the being of who you are to the law and love of God. It's not that you got caught. It's not that you might get caught.

It's not that someone's going to find out what you're doing and then there's going to be a big blow up. It's repentance that's secondary. There's an aspect of it, I guess, but the real of it is that it's toward God. I've sinned against my Creator. I've sinned against the blood of Christ. I've rejected the calls of the Holy Spirit.

I've spat on His Word. I've blasphemed not only God but the people of God. And there's this Godward orientation toward it that's what's real and that expresses the sense of what we read in Matthew 5-4, blessed are those who mourn.

Now let me say this. Sometimes you read some of the Puritans maybe or the diaries of really godly people and they talk about weeping over their sins and all of that. Beloved, let me free you from a false sense there. True repentance may not generate literal tears from your eyes.

You may not literally weep, break down in that. God may give you repentance that doesn't dive you deep into that kind of mournful regret. Just ask yourself whether you recognize you violated God and His love. If that principle is there, then your repentance is real. If you don't care about that, then you're not repentant, you're not a Christian, and you're going to hell. At some point you get to be my age.

You just stop wanting to beat around the bush and just be direct so that people can't miss it. So godly sorrow. Another aspect of true repentance is that true repentance will last. It will continue in your life. Maybe there will be times when the tide of repentance is in, sometimes the tide goes out, but it lasts because, beloved, time and truth go hand in hand on these matters. And if God works repentance in your heart, it will endure. You won't quit your repentance when you get tired of it. Jesus said to the church in Ephesus, you know, you need to come back to your first love.

Repent. And as I said earlier, some people settle back into their sin, you know, under a high pressure sales technique from particular churches or campaigns, or, you know, the pressure of an overzealous parent who really wants their kid to be in the kingdom of God and puts words in their mouth that don't come from the maturity level of the child at the particular age. If there's true repentance, it will endure.

To my great, great sorrow, I've said this before, I won't dwell on it here. You know, I've baptized people who made a profession of Christ, seemed genuine at the time, but now you look, and they're not walking with Christ. They've repented of their repentance and gone back into sin. And all that that baptism meant was that they got wet.

There was no spiritual reality to it at all. Well, in true repentance, it continues. There's a principle that there's something in your heart that won't let you go. This is what God does with His children.

He keeps them moving in that direction. So a man who professes repentance and then stiffens his neck against it, a man who rejects reproof, a man who won't have anything to do with holiness or anything like that, that kind of repentance, it was never real. Maybe it was an emotional reaction. Maybe it was trying to fit in with the crowd because you were there with your spouse and your spouse was really repentant, so you go along with it just to keep peace in the home.

But meanwhile, you're off doing whatever you do. That's not real repentance. One other thing that I'll say, that going even to biblical counseling while you are stubbornly hanging on to your sin, doing, practicing your sin, going to biblical counseling when that kind of hard principle is in your heart, that's not repentance. And beware of the very real threat that you can think that you're safe because you're going to a biblical counselor someplace when there's no reality or desire to repent really in your heart. All that kind of behavior does and that kind of interaction does is it vaccinates you against true repentance. It puts something dead in your spiritual system that your body reacts to, but when the true message of repentance comes, the true call comes, you've been vaccinated against it so that it doesn't take root. One last thing.

The fourth thing here, and this is the last thing I've got to say. We're distinguishing true repentance from false repentance. It's turning to Christ. There's a godly sorrow to it. There's an enduring aspect to it.

It'll last. Finally, this one. True repentance will accept the consequences of your sin and respond to those. It makes open confession and restitution where appropriate. Think of Zacchaeus in Luke 19. Tax collector, the Lord saved him. He said, Behold, Lord, I'll give half of what I have to the poor. If I've defrauded anyone of anything, I'll pay them back four times as much. He didn't keep the fruit of his sin.

He dispersed it and returned it to its rightful owner. You see, beloved, you chose your sin. You don't get to choose the consequences, and a truly repentant person accepts that and says, Of course, it's only right that I would make this right. It's only right that I would go to that person and confess that I slandered them. It's only right that I would break off the sinful relationship.

It's only right that what I've stolen from my employer, I would go and confess it and pay it back. Regardless of what happens to me, I have to do what's right in the presence of God. So we can summarize all of this and trust the Holy Spirit to apply it to your hearts. True repentance turns from sin to Christ, and it turns to Christ with an intent to obey Him.

And so the questions that are left are this. May God help us have a genuine, sincere spirit in each heart before me here today. Have you repented? Have you repented, yes or no? If not, will you repent? Because Christ calls you and commands you, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Will you repent, or God forbid this outcome?

Will you walk out of the doors and into the parking lot and get into your car? Having hardened your heart once again against the working of the Spirit in your heart, saying, I will not repent, I will keep my sin, you stick your spiritual fingers in your spiritual ears and say, blah, blah, blah, I'm not listening. God sees that. May He deliver you from it. May God help you, my prayer is, may God help you discern the reality of your soul and grant you the repentance that leads to eternal life. Please stand with me as we pray. Father, would you take the meager words of the fallible human instrument and do a greatly infallible work in the hearts of many in response to the things that we've seen from your Word here today.

In Jesus' name, amen. Well, my friends, before we go at the end of today's podcast, I wanted to let you know that I'm very excited to announce the upcoming release of my latest book. It's an evangelistic book titled An Easy Guide to Missing Heaven, and I think you're going to want to get a copy for yourself and also to have copies to give to others. It's a short book, it's about the size of my hand, and with very short, brief chapters that make it easy for people to read.

You know, I'm not a great evangelist on a one-to-one basis, and I understand that sometimes it's hard to get a conversation started with someone you know, a friend, or even more with a person that you love within your family or the circle of your household. Well, this is a perfect book if you are like me. You can give this book easily to anyone.

They can read it in an hour, and that will set the stage for further conversations down the road. Again, the book is titled An Easy Guide to Missing Heaven, and you can find it at our website, thetruthpulpit.com. Just look for the link Books on our website, thetruthpulpit.com. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's word.