More
and more it becomes evident that ours is, as
Carlyle expressed it, an "age of sham."
Unreality and specious pretence abound in all
departments of life. In the domestic,
commercial, social, and ecclesiastical spheres
hypocrisy is not only openly condoned, but
recognized as almost a necessity for advancement
and success in attaining recognition among one's
fellows.
Nor is this true only where heterodox
religious views are held. Orthodoxy has its
shallow dogmatists who are ready to battle
savagely for sound doctrine, but who manage to
ignore sound living with little or no apparent
compunction of conscience.
God desires truth in the inward parts. The
blessed man is still the one "in whose spirit
there is no guile." It is forever true that "He
that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but
whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have
mercy." It can never be out of place to proclaim
salvation by free, unmerited favor to all who
put their trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. But it
needs ever to be insisted on that the faith that
justifies is not a mere intellectual process --
not simply crediting certain historical facts or
doctrinal statements; but it is a faith that
springs from a divinely wrought conviction of
sin which produces a repentance that is sincere
and genuine.
Our Lord's solemn words, "Except ye repent,
ye shall all likewise perish," are as important
today as when first uttered. No dispensational
distinctions, important as these are in
understanding and interpreting God's ways with
man, can alter this truth.
No one was ever saved in any dispensation
excepting by grace. Neither sacrificial
observances, nor ritual service, nor works of
law ever had any part in justifying the ungodly.
Nor were any sinners ever saved by grace until
they repented. Repentance is not opposed to
grace; it is the recognition of the need of
grace. "They that be whole need not a physician,
but they that are sick." "I came not," said our
blessed Lord, "to call the righteous but sinners
to repentance."
One great trouble in this shallow age is that
we have lost the meaning of words. We bandy them
about until one can seldom be certain just how
terms are being used. Two ministers were passing
an open grocery and dairy store where, in three
large baskets, eggs were displayed. On one
basket was a sign reading, "Fresh eggs, 24 cents
a dozen." The second sign read, "Strictly fresh
eggs, 29 cents a dozen." While a third read,
"Guaranteed strictly fresh eggs, 34 cents a
dozen." One of the pastors exclaimed in
amazement, "What does that grocer understand
'fresh' to mean?" It is thus with many
Scriptural terms that to our forefathers had an
unvarying meaning, but like debased coins have
today lost their values.
Grace is God's unmerited favor to those who
have merited the very opposite. Repentance is
the sinner's recognition of and acknowledgment
of his lost estate and, thus, of his need of
grace. Yet there are not wanting professed
preachers of grace who, like the antinomians of
old, decry the necessity of repentance lest it
seem to invalidate the freedom of grace. As well
might one object to a man's acknowledgment of
illness when seeking help and healing from a
physician, on the ground that all he needed was
a doctor's prescription.
Shallow preaching that does not grapple with
the terrible fact of man's sinfulness and guilt,
calling on "all men everywhere to repent,"
results in shallow conversions; and so we have a
myriad of glib-tongued professors today who give
no evidence of regeneration whatever. Prating of
salvation by grace, they manifest no grace in
their lives. Loudly declaring they are justified
by faith alone, they fail to remember that
"faith without works is dead"; and that
justification by works before men is not to be
ignored as though it were in contradiction to
justification by faith before God. We need to
reread James 3 and let its serious message sink
deep into our hearts, that it may control our
lives. "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the
Lord will not hear me." No man can truly believe
in Christ, who does not first repent. Nor will
his repentance end when he has saving faith, but
the more he knows God as he goes on through the
years, the deeper will that repentance become. A
servant of Christ said: "I repented before I
knew the meaning of the word. I have repented
far more since than I did then."
Undoubtedly one great reason why some earnest
Gospel preachers are almost afraid of, and
generally ignore, the terms "repent" and
"repentance" in their evangelizing is that they
fear lest their hearers misunderstand these
terms and think of them as implying something
meritorious on the part of the sinner. But
nothing could be wider of the mark. There is no
saving merit in owning my true condition. There
is no healing in acknowledging the nature of my
illness. And repentance, as we have seen, is
just this very thing.
But in order to clarify the subject, it may
be well to observe carefully what repentance is
not and then to notice briefly what it
is.
First, then, repentance is not to be
confounded with penitence, though penitence will
invariably enter into it. But penitence is
simply sorrow for sin. No amount of penitence
can fit a man for salvation. On the other hand,
the impenitent will never come to God seeking
His grace. But godly sorrow, we are told,
worketh repentance not to be repented of. There
is a sorrow for sin that has no element of piety
in it-- "the sorrow of the world worketh death."
In Peter's penitence we see the former; in the
remorse of Judas, the latter. Nowhere is man
exhorted to feel a certain amount of sorrow for
his sins in order to come to Christ. When the
Spirit of God applies the truth, penitence is
the immediate result and this leads on to
repentance, but should not be confounded with
it. This is a divine work in the soul.
Second, penance is not repentance. Penance is
the effort in some way to atone for wrong done.
This, man can never do. Nor does God in His Word
lay it down as a condition of salvation that one
first seek to make up to either God or his
fellows for evil committed. Here the Roman
Catholic translation of the Bible perpetrates a
glaring deception upon those who accept it as
almost an inspired version because bearing the
imprimatur of the great Catholic dignitaries.
Wherever the Authorized Version has "repent,"
the Douay-Rheims translation reads, "Do
penance." There is no excuse for such a
paraphrase. It is not a translation. It
is the substituting of a Romish dogma for the
plain command of God. John the Baptist did not
cry, 'Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at
hand.' Our Lord Jesus did not say, 'Do penance
and believe the gospel,' and, 'Except ye do
penance ye shall all likewise perish.' The
Apostle Peter did not tell the anxious multitude
at Pentecost to 'Do penance and be converted.'
St. Paul did not announce to the men at Athens
that 'God commandeth all men everywhere to do
penance' in view of a coming judgment day. No
respectable Greek scholar would ever think of so
translating the original in these and many other
instances.
On the contrary, the call was to repent; and
between repenting and doing penance there is a
vast difference. But even so, we would not
forget that he who truly repents will surely
seek to make right any wrong he has done to his
fellows, though he knows that he never can make
up for the wrong done to God. But this is where
Christ's expiatory work comes in. As the great
Trespass Offering He could say, "Then I restored
that which I took not away" (Psalm 69). Think
not to add penance to this -- as though
His work were incomplete and something else were
needed to satisfy God's infinite justice.
In the third place, let us remember that
reformation is not repentance, however closely
allied to, or springing out of it. To turn over
a new leaf, to attempt to supplant bad habits
with good ones, to try to live well instead of
evilly, may not be the outcome of repentance at
all and should never be confounded with it.
Reformation is merely an outward change.
Repentance is a work of God in the soul.
Recently it was the writer's privilege to
broadcast a Gospel message from a large
Cleveland station. While he was waiting in the
studio for the time appointed an advertiser's
voice was heard through the loud speaker
announcing: "If you need anything in watch
repairing go to" such a firm. One of the
employees looked up and exclaimed, "I need no
watch repairing; what I need is a watch." It
furnished me with an excellent text. What the
unsaved man needs is not a repairing of his
life. He needs a new life altogether, which
comes only through a second birth. Reformation
is like watch repairing. Repentance is like the
recognition of the lack of a watch.
Need I add that repentance then is not to be
considered synonymous with joining a church or
taking up one's religious duties, as people say.
It is not doing anything.
What then is repentance? So far as possible I
desire to avoid the use of all abstruse or
pedantic terms, for I am writing not simply for
scholars, but for those Lincoln had in mind when
he said, "God must have thought a lot of the
common people, for He made so many of them."
Therefore I wish, so far as possible, to avoid
citing Greek or Hebrew words. But here it seems
almost necessary to say that it is the Greek
word metanoia, which is translated
"repentance" in our English Bibles, and
literally means a change of mind. This is not
simply the acceptance of new ideas in place of
old notions. But it actually implies a complete
reversal of one's inward attitude.
How luminously clear this makes the whole
question before us! To repent is to change one's
attitude toward self, toward sin, toward God,
toward Christ. And this is what God commands.
John came preaching to publicans and sinners,
hopelessly vile and depraved, "Change your
attitude, for the kingdom is at hand." To
haughty scribes and legalistic Pharisees came
the same command, "Change your attitude," and
thus they would be ready to receive Him who came
in grace to save. To sinners everywhere the
Saviour cried, "Except ye change your attitude,
ye shall all likewise perish."
And everywhere the apostles went they called
upon men thus to face their sins -- to face the
question of their helplessness, yet their
responsibility to God -- to face Christ as the
one, all-sufficient Saviour, and thus by
trusting Him to obtain remission of sins and
justification from all things.
So to face these tremendous facts is to
change one's mind completely, so that the
pleasure lover sees and confesses the folly of
his empty life; the self-indulgent learns to
hate the passions that express the corruption of
his nature; the self-righteous sees himself a
condemned sinner in the eyes of a holy God; the
man who has been hiding from God seeks to find a
hiding place in Him; the Christ-rejecter
realizes and owns his need of a Redeemer, and so
believes unto life and salvation.
Which comes first, repentance or faith? In
Scripture we read, "Repent ye, and believe the
gospel." Yet we find true believers exhorted to
"repent, and do the first works." So intimately
are the two related that you cannot have one
without the other. The man who believes God
repents; the repentant soul puts his trust in
the Lord when the Gospel is revealed to him.
Theologians may wrangle over this, but the fact
is, no man repents until the Holy Spirit
produces repentance in his soul through the
truth. No man believes the Gospel and rests in
it for his own salvation until he has judged
himself as a needy sinner before God. And this
is repentance.
Perhaps it will help us if we see that it is
one thing to believe God as to my sinfulness and
need of a Saviour, and it is another thing to
trust that Saviour implicitly for my own
salvation.
Apart from the first aspect of faith, there
can be no true repentance. "He that cometh to
God must believe that he is, and that he is the
rewarder of them that diligently seek him." And
apart from such repentance there can be no
saving faith. Yet the deeper my realization of
the grace of God manifested toward me in Christ,
the more intense will my repentance become.
It was when Mephibosheth realized the
kindness of God as shown by David that he cried
out, "What is thy servant, that thou shouldest
look upon such a dead dog as I am?" (2 Sam.
9:8). And it is the soul's apprehension of grace
which leads to ever lower thoughts of self and
higher thoughts of Christ; and so the work of
repentance is deepened daily in the believer's
heart.
"Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream,
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him.
This He gives you,
'Tis the Spirit's rising beam."
The very first evidence of awakening grace is
dissatisfaction with one's self and self-effort
and a longing for deliverance from chains of sin
that have bound the soul. To own frankly that I
am lost and guilty is the prelude to life and
peace. It is not a question of a certain depth
of grief and sorrow, but simply the recognition
and acknowledgment of need that lead one to turn
to Christ for refuge. None can perish who put
their trust in Him. His grace superabounds above
all our sin, and His expiatory work on the cross
is so infinitely precious to God that it fully
meets all our uncleanness and guilt.
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