Biblical Repentance/The Need of Repentance

From Gospel Translations

Revision as of 14:39, 4 August 2008

Why is Biblical repentance the need of this hour? Because we are living in a day when most religious leaders actually deny the need for repentance. If they preach it at all, they water it down like the seminary president who said repentance means no more than “a gentleman telling God he is sorry.” Others say that re-pentance was only for the Jews and not for us today. Some say that repentance is only for the children of God and has nothing to do with lost sinners, while others teach just the opposite: they say repentance is only for lost sinners but not for the children of God! And still others claim that repentance is just a form of works and un-necessary for any group! So, my purpose is to refute these fatal errors that are beguiling precious souls to eternal destruction.

Now let us hear the testimony of the Word of God. In Luke 13:3 and 5 we hear our Lord’s words: “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” What He is saying is this: “Unless you lay down your arms of rebellion against God, you shall perish in Hell, for you abide under the wrath of God. Confess your sins and leave them or you shall perish forever!”

So to begin with, I must set forth the effect of sin upon the human race, especially upon you and me. What is sin?

Sin: Its definition

Sin in its essence is rebellion against God. This means thinking we have the right to do with ourselves as we please and acting independently of God and His Holy law. As the Apostle John says, “Whosoever commit-teth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law” (1Jo 3:4). In fact sin is our way of saying to God, “Stay out of my life; I don’t need you.”

Sin: Its Solemn Consequences

The doctrine of sin’s effect upon you and me and the whole human race is most solemn. As no heart can sufficiently conceive, so no tongue can adequately express the state of wretchedness and ruin which sin has brought upon guilty, miserable man. You ask, “What has it done?” Oh my friend, it has separated us from God! It has warped and ruined our bodies, souls, and spirits! Sin has filled our bodies with sickness and disease. Sin has defaced the image of God in our souls. Sin has cut off our fellowship with Him Who made us in His own moral likeness! Sin has made you and me by nature lovers of evil and haters of God, Who is the only good. Yes, it is a most solemn thing to view sin in the light of God’s Word, to see what it has done to man, to God and His Christ, and to God’s creation! Sin has shut us out from God and opened the gates of Hell. It is solemn, because sin has cost man his most precious possession—his never-dying soul.

Sin: Humbling to Man

Again, the doctrine of sin as revealed in God’s Word is a very humbling one. Why? Because the Bible does not present us as merely ignorant and in need of instruction. Neither does it present us as run down and in need of a tonic. Rather, it reveals that you and I have become spiritually dead and void of any righteousness that will commend us to God.

This means we are spiritually without strength, thoroughly incapable of bettering ourselves, exposed to the wrath of God, and unable to perform a single work which can find acceptance with a holy God (Rom 3:10-18).

The impossibility of anyone gaining God’s approval by his own works appears plainly in the case of the rich young ruler who came to Christ (Mat 19). When you judge this young man by human standards, he was a model of virtue and religious attainment. Yet, like so many others who trust in self-efforts and self-righteousness, he was ignorant of the spirituality and strictness of God’s law. When Christ showed him the covetousness of his heart, he went away sorrowful, for he had great riches. It was humbling to find out that his best duties in religion were nothing but stinking rags in the nostrils of God (Isa 64:6). This young man would not confess that his morality and his best deeds were only damning works of darkness that he needed to mourn over and forsake.

Sin: Our Nature

How humbling it is to discover that God requires truth in the inward parts (Psa 51:6)! How humbling it is that we cannot shut off sin in our hearts and our minds! How humbling it is that we, like all others, must take our place before God as sinners and plead guilty before Him. We do not want to confess that we are sinners—lost, undone, helpless, and guilty—before God. The moral and self-righteous do not want to confess that they are in the same fix before God as the rapist, the harlot, and the drunkard! Nevertheless, we are sinners by na-ture and by practice. We cannot get rid of sin by resolution, command, sacrifice, or by shutting ourselves out from the world, because it is our nature. Jeremiah 13:23 reads, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”

This fact humbled the apostle Paul. It led him to repent and confess himself a hell-deserving sinner before God. In Romans 7 he tells us that he was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came that he should not covet, then all Hell broke loose in his soul. He saw that he was carnal, sold under sin. He confessed that it was humbling to find out that what he wanted to do—live righteously—he could not do. And what he did not want to do—sin against a holy and righteous God—he found himself doing. He confessed that he had the will to do good, but no power to perform it. His will was depraved and held captive by his sinful nature: “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Rom. 7:19). Fight it, resolve against it, denounce it, do everything against it that he would—he could not get rid of it.

Likewise, when we by the illuminating power of God’s Spirit see the awful power of sin in our lives, it is humbling.