Surprisingly Far from Repentance #1

We want to distinguish true repentance from its counterfeits. We want to see what true repentance looks like and distinguish it from the false versions that give people a false assurance that lead them ultimately into a very true and real time of judgment.

You've heard the expression, so near yet so far. Well, it turns out that can be aptly applied to repentance. Some people seem outwardly repentant but are not biblically so. Hi, I'm Bill Wright and on today's edition of the Truth Pulpit, Pastor Don Green will discuss what repentance is not as he continues our series, Unless You Repent. Don will offer two major examples in scripture of people falling short of the real thing. Along the way you'll see why it's not even in the power of the natural person to come to genuine repentance. Rather, it's the work of the Holy Spirit.

Let's join Don Green right now in the Truth Pulpit. What is the gospel? Jesus Christ, who is the eternal Son of God, came to earth and lived a perfect life of obedience to his heavenly Father. He offered that life at the cross of Calvary and died for sinners in their place. God accepted the sacrifice of Christ and raised him on the third day to prove that point.

The resurrection shows that Jesus Christ is Lord over all, even over death. Now in the gospel, Christ offers himself to sinners for the forgiveness of their sins. How do you respond to that offer of salvation?

How do you respond to Christ? Scripture tells us that you must repent and receive Christ personally into your life. In repentance, a sinner recognizes his sin and understands the mercy that God offers to him in Christ. And with a sense of grief and with a sense of hatred of his sin, a sense of self-denial, by faith he turns from sin to receive Christ with a full purpose to pursue obedience to Christ as Lord. There is this recognition of sin in repentance.

There is some measure, there is some kind of grief and regret over sin that is wrapped around that. And there is a motion of the will away from sin toward Christ in order to receive him. And Christ is received by faith alone for salvation, not by anything that we do. Repentance is not something that we do beforehand in order to position ourselves so that we can receive Christ. Repentance is a demeanor by which we approach Christ in faith.

It's not something that is done apart from faith. Faith and repentance are inextricably linked together like two sides of a coin. That's the nature of true repentance. And what we find when we look at this passage in Matthew is that somehow these people completely missed the boat on repentance. Perhaps they didn't really hate their sin. Perhaps they never really turned to Christ in faith.

Perhaps they never understood the terms on which the offer was made at all. Whatever the case, this is tragic. This is an irreversible tragedy of eternal proportions to think that any sinner would go to hell is a tragedy of immense proportions. That he would go to hell, sent away by Christ, shocked and surprised is unthinkable.

It would be unthinkable except that it's revealed to us in Scripture. Here's the thing. Whenever a pastor comes to preach on these issues, he's mindful of the weight of it. Sometimes weighty things are not the easiest things to hear and respond to and think about. There's this tendency we so want things to be easy and not have difficult consequences that it is so very easy to push it aside and say, I don't even want to think about that.

I would rather suspect that that's how a lot of people end up within the scope of verses 21 through 23. I don't even want to think about it. It's too horrible to contemplate.

Now my response to that is this. I think about it just the opposite. It is precisely because it is so horrible that we have to contemplate it. We have to think about it. We have to deal with it.

We have to come to grips with what Scripture says. I have, with tongue somewhat in cheek, halfway jokingly said there are two keys to discernment in just generally speaking in the world as you go through life. My greatly simplified two principles of discernment is this. See what everybody else is doing and then go, secondly, go do the exact opposite. That's going to serve you pretty well.

You see what everybody else is doing and then you say, I will do the exact opposite. That will actually take you a lot further than you might think in the spiritual realm. You could look out and see what most other churches are doing and the circus that they use to try to attract people and they get big crowds. I say, great, take your crowds.

I'm going to do the exact opposite. We're going to build a ministry around God's word that has no appeal to the carnal mind and we'll see what God does with that. I would rather see the results of that than just joining in the circus and being another clown in a pulpit. I have no interest, no desire in that. I don't care how isolated that might leave us.

I'm happier to be isolated with all of you than to be some place with a bunch of clowns and a crowd gathered around. That's the way I feel about it. The fact that many people would say this is too difficult, this is too harsh to contemplate, I don't want to consider it, in my mind tells us that we need to consider it all the more and it's important for us to think this way. When we do that, we know Christ well enough here, I think, to be able to say that there is an embedded blessing, there is a blessing waiting for us if we take this word seriously. And that Christ will meet us not with a deepened sense of despair but with clarity and with discernment and with a sense of joy for those of us that truly know him. And to see the marvel and the wonder of the fact that he delivered us out of that kind of darkness and truly brought us into his kingdom by a sheer act of his amazing grace.

That's what comes from this. And so what we need to see, what we want to do, is we want to distinguish true repentance from its counterfeits. We want to see what true repentance looks like and distinguish it from the false versions that give people a false assurance that lead them ultimately into a very true and real time of judgment. And I think that as we do this, we'll gain some clarity about the nature of true repentance and either be able to examine our own hearts with greater clarity, for one thing, and also to be able to be more effective in the hands of God as ministers of the gospel as we understand what true repentance looks like. We're going to look at some biblical illustrations to see what repentance is not and to see what is not a mark of true repentance. And I think that what you'll find is that even in these two subject matters, this could have been four, I'm saving the last two for another time, is that even in these two things that we're going to consider, we're going to see how easy it is to fall into the trap of false repentance. To think that there is something real which is not the real repentance of which Scripture describes. Repentance, reminding you again, a sinner recognizing his sin and understanding the mercy of God offered to him in Christ with a sense of grief turns away from his sin in order to embrace Christ by faith with a full desire, a full purpose of mind to pursue obedience to Christ as Lord. That's the kind of repentance that we're talking about. And when you contrast some of the biblical examples of people who fell short of it, you start to see what the real thing looks like.

So we're going to look at two here. And the first one is this, is that regret alone is not repentance. Regret over sin alone is not repentance.

And this is a tough one to get your mind around. It would seem that as you're talking about regret over sin, it would be easy to assume that you're talking about true repentance. But that is not the case. And beloved, what I want to say to you just plainly here is that sorrow over sin, standing alone by itself is not true repentance. To simply be sorry over sin is not true repentance.

That is not an expression of what biblical repentance is. And we see that illustrated in the life of the traitor Judas Iscariot. Turn in your Bible, if you would, to Matthew chapter 27.

Matthew chapter 27. As you know, Judas betrayed Christ and identified him to the Roman authorities at night in exchange for 30 pieces of silver. And he betrayed Christ with a kiss. And the Roman soldiers had found their man as Christ voluntarily yielded himself over to their dominion in that moment at Gethsemane. Now Judas later regretted what he had done. And we see that expressed in chapter 27 verse 1. It says, When morning came, all the chief priests and the elders of the people conferred together against Jesus to put him to death. And they bound him, and they led him away and delivered him to Pilate the governor. Then in verse 3, Then when Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that he had been condemned, he felt remorse and returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood. But they said, What is that to us?

See to that yourself. In verse 5, And he threw the pieces of silver into the temple sanctuary and departed. And he went away, and he hanged himself.

He committed suicide. And scripture calls Judas in different places a son of perdition. Jesus referred to him as a devil in John chapter 6. This was not true repentance. And beloved, self-destruction in the form of suicide is not an act of repentance. It is not a spiritual act at all.

And I say this with a lot of sympathy and knowing that this kind of method of dealing with issues is increasingly common. But self-destruction, suicide is not a spiritual act at all. And Judas shows by his act of self-destruction that he was not truly repentant. He felt regret, but he did not repent in the way that we're talking about, in the way that scripture describes repentance. It wasn't a renunciation of self. It was not a returning to Christ. It was not a crying out to mercy to Christ. He felt regret, and he ended his life instead. That is not true repentance.

And so, when you and I think about life and when we hear about people who have committed suicide and all of that, we must think very clearly and precisely in spiritual terms about it. We recognize, we understand that there is something very sad and sorrowful about that, and we drive no satisfaction out of it at all. But there should be in none of our minds any sense that this was somehow an act of repentance, that there was some kind of repentant act there, because that, if repentance leads you to Christ, repentance is a turning from sin toward Christ. And the last thing that Judas did in his act of suicide was to turn to Christ. He felt regret, but he did not repent.

And so, while he felt regret over what he had done, he felt regret over the betrayal. That was not the same thing as repentance. You can see this in another illustration in Scripture if you'll turn to Acts chapter 7. Acts chapter 7.

You see, in part you will recognize repentance by its fruit, and the fruit of repentance is found in a peaceable trust in Christ, a peaceable turning to Christ, a resignation to Christ and a submission to him. And that was not the mark of Judas at all. In Acts chapter 7, you remember that Stephen was preaching to the Jews and he convicted them of their sin and turning Christ over to crucifixion. And in Acts chapter 7 verse 51, just picking it up at his conclusion, he says in Acts 7 51, he said, You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit.

You are doing just as your fathers did. Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the righteous one, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become, you who received the law as ordained by angels and yet did not keep it.

Now, I like the courage and the forthrightness of his preaching, don't you? In verse 54, we see how the men responded. They were certainly convicted. As it says in verse 54, Now when they heard this, they were cut to the quick.

They were cut to the quick. They were pierced in their heart by the truth that Stephen had proclaimed against them. They felt the weight of it. They felt the conviction.

But how did they respond? Did that lead them to repentance? Did it lead them to a turning from sin, a self-renunciation, and a turning to Christ?

Not at all. They began gnashing their teeth at him, it says in verse 54. And in verse 55, Stephen, being full of the Holy Spirit, gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. And he said, Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.

But they cried out with a loud voice and covered their ears and rushed at him with one impulse. And when they had driven him out of the city, they began stoning him and the witnesses laid aside their robes at the feet of a young man named Saul. They went on stoning Stephen as he called on the Lord and said, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And then falling on his knees, he cried out with a loud voice, Lord, do not hold this sin against them.

And having said this, he fell asleep. Notice the result of the conviction that they felt inside. They cried out against Stephen, and in a most symbolic and instructive act, they covered their ears so that they would not hear anymore. This is what sinners do. This is what people who fall short of repentance do. They stop listening.

They plug their ears. They say, no, no, no, I'm not listening anymore. And far from turning from sin, they turned to sin in order to stop the conviction that was being brought up upon their heart. They hated Stephen for the conviction that he brought through his preaching and therefore they killed him. Now, beloved, all that we want to see out of this understanding of guilt is not full repentance. It is not true repentance. They were close in one sense in that they saw the issue. They were close, but they were surprisingly far away from repentance. And this is what I want you to see as we think about Matthew 7, as we think about Judas, as we think about the men who stoned Stephen, the first Christian martyr. It's sobering, to me at least. It's sobering to recognize that men could be so close to the real thing. Lord, Lord, depart from me.

I never knew you. Judas feeling remorse and even casting away the silver that he had taken to betray innocent blood. But then he goes out and he hangs himself. Stephen rightly convicts the Jews and they understand it so much that they're cut to the heart. And yet the response is one of greater sin. It turns to murder rather than turning to Christ. Judas turned to suicide rather than turning to Christ in mercy. And so we have to understand that the mere bare fact of feeling guilty over sin is not true repentance, because it stops short of turning to Christ.

Now this tells us many things. A man who feels somewhere in the corner of his heart, no matter what he professes outwardly, a man who in his heart feels satisfied with his own self-righteousness is a man who's not repentant, no matter how much he talks about God or Jesus or wanting to do the right thing. If you have a settled sense of self-righteousness, you are not repentant, you are not in Christ, you are outside of the kingdom.

This is serious. Someone who has heard of Christ again and again and again and begins to inwardly, if not outwardly, roll their eyes and here it comes again, no matter what they say about themselves, that inward dissatisfaction, resistance, indifference of pushing away, when that's a settled mark of a heart, they're not a Christian, no matter how often they show up at church, no matter how often they tag along with somebody else. You see, there is a genuine sincerity to true repentance of a genuine hatred for sin and a genuine turning to Christ that is without guile, that is without pretense, that is full of sincerity in saying, I really do want to leave my sin behind, I really do want to receive Christ. There's a reality to it, and yet it is a reality that goes beyond mere regret.

You see, beloved, and I have in mind no one in particular as I say this, but it's just important to say, and so I'm going to use the second person singular, you. If you simply regret the consequences of your sin and it goes no further, that's not real repentance. Lots of people can regret the fact that they are suffering the consequences of their wrongdoing. Prisons are filled with people like this who regret the fact that they were caught, who regret the fact that they are being punished, but it stops short of a self-renunciation in order to embrace Christ fully as Lord. And so we should not confuse feelings of guilt standing alone as being that which is the expression and the fullness of repentance. Repentance involves a sorrow over sin, to be sure it involves a recognition, yes, I'm a wrongdoer, yes, I'm a sinner, yes, I have broken God's law, it involves that, but it goes further than that to a turning to Christ.

And those two things, while intimately related, cannot be separated. So we see in Judas and in the Jews that they were surprisingly far from repentance, even though in our superficial day and age we could look and say, look, there's spiritual motions going on in their heart. No, repentance can be known in part by its fruit.

It can be known in part by its fruit. What comes afterwards? And in Matthew chapter three, I believe it is, in Matthew chapter three, you can turn there with me, in Matthew chapter three, John saw, and this is again a good illustration of falling short of true repentance, John the Baptist saw, Matthew chapter three, verse seven, Matthew chapter three, verse seven, John the Baptist saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism. And you would think, oh, this is good, they must be repentant, they've got spiritual desires, they're coming to the leader seeking to submit their selves to him. And John the Baptist says, you brute of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? And he challenges them and says, therefore bear fruit in keeping with repentance. Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. If there is repentance, it can be known by the fruit that follows.

Feelings of guilt followed by suicide is not true repentance, it's not biblical repentance, it's not the change of mind, it's not the change and redirection of life, it's a full preoccupation with self that is not the fruit of true repentance. And so you and I as biblical Christians need to be able to distinguish these things in our minds. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, with part one of a message titled Surprisingly Far From Repentance, the latest installment of our series, Unless You Repent. Don will have part two on our next broadcast, so join us then here on The Truth Pulpit.

Right now though, Don's back in studio with news of a great resource. Well, my friend, as we bring today's broadcast to you from the United States, I want to offer you a very special gift, a special resource as a gift from our ministry. It's my series called Trusting God in Trying Times.

And this series, over the years, has proven to be the most popular set of messages that I've ever done. It helps you know how to trust God as you're going through the deep sorrows that sometimes come to us in life. It comes from the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament, and it talks about how to trust God as you're going through the deep sorrows that sometimes come to us in life. And it comes from some very deep sorrows of my own that were present early in my Christian life. It's very personal, it's very helpful, it's very biblical. And I would love to see you have it in your hands.

It's available in CD album or by download. Transcripts are available if you prefer that. My friend Bill is going to give you information on how to find it. Just visit our website at thetruthpulpit.com to get the resource Don just mentioned. I'm Bill Wright and we'll see you next time for more from the Truth Pulpit.