Repentance

INTRODUCTION

We are just over halfway through the Gospel-Centered Life Study.

In light of that, let’s stop to do a little review before we get going tonight.

Thus far we have talked a lot shrinking and growing the Cross in our lives.

We have seen how once we are converted we want to grow in our awareness of:

God’s Holiness

Our Sinfulness

The more we become aware of His holiness and our sinfulness, we realize more and more just how much we need the finished work of Jesus upon the Cross.

This is how we grow the Cross in our lives.

Things go off the rails when we try to perform our way to heaven or pretend that we are better off than we are.

When that happens, we end up minimizing God’s holiness and minimizing our sinfulness.

This is when the Cross shrinks and we start believing that we don’t need the Cross of Christ as much as the Bibles says it does.

Tonight, we are going to talk about how we should respond to the Cross-shrinking tendencies we have in our lives.

Tonight we are going to talk about repentance.

TEXT

Mark 1:14–15 ESV

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

A MESSAGE OF REPENTANCE

EXPOSITION

In Mark 1, after Jesus has been baptized and tempted in the wilderness, He comes into Galilee preaching and proclaiming the Gospel.

John the Baptist has been arrested.

He is being rejected by Israel like all the prophets before him.

But now the ultimate Prophet has arrived.

The one that Moses said would come:

Deuteronomy 18:15 ESV

“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—

And when this Prophet comes, what does He say?

What is He proclaiming?

The Gospel of God.

The Gospel of the Kingdom.

The Gospel of Repentance and Belief.

Verse 15 seems to say it all for us:

The time is fulfilled.

The history of redemption has moved along through time and it has reached the point where God has sent His Son.

The time has come for God to fulfill His New Covenant promises.

The kingdom of God is at hand.

The Messianic-Royal Ruler of 2nd Samuel 7 has arrived.

The son of David who will sit on his throne forever.

The One greater than Solomon.

The King has come. The Kingdom is at hand.

And then we see our “Word of the Night”— repent and believe in the Gospel.

There is to be a surrendered faith in the Gospel of the Kingdom.

Turn away from sin and trust in God’s promises by faith.

The Creator of the Universe has purposed to restore what has been lost in the sin of Eden.

He will do this through His sent Son.

He will accomplish what humans cannot in their own strength.

He will forgive their sinfulness and rebelliousness.

He will provide a way for souls to be reconciled to God through His Son, the Prophet.

What this shows us is:

The Gospel of the Kingdom has always been a message of repentance and faith.

REPENTANCE AND FAITH

And these two words don’t just tell us how to be saved, but how we are to live as redeemed people until our death or the Lord returns.

I want to teach you two Greek words tonight that we see in this passage. They will be helpful to us beyond what we see in the English.

The Greek words for repent and believe are in “present durative tense.”

That is pretty much just a fancy way to say, “Ongoing.”

Ex. The Mississippi River is running.

If I say that, you know I don’t mean that it is running for a day or even a year.

It is ongoing. It runs and runs and runs.

The first word is Metanoeite: Repent in an ongoing way (Meh-Tah-No-Eh-Teh)

The second word is Pistuete: Believe steadily or believe over and over and over without stopping (Pi-Stew-Eh-Teh)

Don’t worry if you can’t master the pronunciation.

You join a long list of people like me who really wish they were better at Greek!

The most important thing is the meaning of these words.

Jesus is not calling for one time repentance and belief.

He is calling for ongoing repentance and belief.

The sort that will carry on like the running waters of the Mississippi.

This is so much of what we have been talking about in our study.

We must daily confess our efforts to perform (try to earn our own righteousness) or pretend (try to fake our own righteousness).

We must daily confess how our affections are pulled away from false saviors and functional idols in our lives.

We must daily confess how we break God’s law and fall short of His glory.

And we must daily trust in Christ to save us and forgive us through His Cross.

Ongoing repentance and ongoing belief.

NEGATIVE CONNOTATIONS

Some may be surprised that these are the first words of Christ in the book of Mark.

Jesus’ first sermon isn’t “God is love.”

Jesus’ first sermon isn’t about not judging others.

Jesus’ first sermon isn’t even a direct invitation to come to Him like the one we see in Matthew 11, when He calls the weary who need rest to Himself.

These are all things Christ teaches us in His Word and they are glorious, but in Mark 1, Jesus’ first message is, “The King is here and you need to change.”

The reason this may surprise some people is that the word repentance has negative connotations.

It might make us think of “Turn or burn,” preachers who shout and spit.

It might make us think of street evangelists wearing sandwich boards and shouting out to the people passing by.

It might make us think of the concept of penance that is more familiar to Roman Catholic theology—telling your sins to a priest and then being given certain prayers and actions that you must take to truly receive the Sacrament of Penance.

REMORSE AND RESOLUTION

But I think that this is simply due to a misunderstanding of the word.

When many people think of repentance, I fear they think of remorse and resolution.

Remorse: “I can’t believe I did that!”

Resolution: “I promise I will do better next time.”

This sort of thought process around sin and repentance actually exposes unbiblical attitudes in us.

REMORSE: When we say, “I can’t believe I did that!” we are saying, “I didn’t think I was sinful and broken enough to do that sort of thing.”

It is a faulty way of thinking.

It is like we are saying, “I’m not really like that.”

In truth, the capacity for the worst and most grievous sorts of sins lies in every human because we are all depraved apart from God.

RESOLUTION: When we say, “I promise I will do better next time,” this also shows a faulty way of thinking.

It is us saying, “I have the power to change myself.”

We think that if we make resolutions, we will try harder and get it right next time.

TRUE REPENTANCE

When we turn to remorse and resolution as our responses to our sin, we are falling short of repentance.

We do not need remorse and resolution, We need to realize and repent.

This is what must happen if we are to truly be in fellowship with God and see real transformation in our lives

Here is a biblical sketch of true repentance.

True repentance is oriented toward God.

Psalm 51:4 ESV

Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.

True repentance is motivated by godly sorrow, not just selfish regret.

This is the old question of, “Do you feel bad because you did it or do you feel bad because you got caught?”

Another way to put it is this: “If no one ever caught you, would have kept going and kept faking godliness?”

The Bible gives us a clear distinction between godly sorrow and selfish regret:

2 Corinthians 7:10 ESV

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

True repentance is concerned with the heart, not just actions.

Psalm 51:10 ESV

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

True repentance looks to Jesus for deliverance from the penalty and power of sin.

Acts 3:19–20 ESV

Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus,

THOMAS WATSON’S INGREDIENTS FOR REPENTANCE

Thomas Watson can help us out further.

Watson was a Puritan preacher in England in the 17th century.

I like to call him the cotton-candy Puritan because his writing is a lot easier to read and understand compared to some of the other men of his era.

His book, The Doctrine of Repentance, is probably the greatest book on repentance that I have ever read.

He defines repentance like this:

Repentance is a grace of God’s Spirit whereby a sinner is inwardly humbled and visibly reformed.

Thomas Watson

And in order for this to take place, Watson says there must be six ingredients to repentance.

He doesn’t talk about them like steps you take in order to get right with God.

That would be more like the Roman Catholic concept of Penance.

Instead, he talks about them as ingredient that you would stir up together to make a medicine for the soul.

For there to be true repentance, all of these elements must co-exist together.

Watson’s ingredients are a follows:

Sight of Sin: We must see the fault in our own hearts and our own actions for what they are—transgressions and God and our neighbors.

Sorrow for Sin: Watson says that a Christian can’t expect to repent without sorrow, anymore than a woman can expect to bear a child without labor pains.

We should feel a real sadness over what our sin has done to God and those around us.

Confession of Sin: We must confess our sins to God.

Not just at church.

Not just on really bad days.

This must be our regular habit.

As we see sin and feel sorrow over it, we must confess our sins to God.

And you don’t need to visit a priest in a booth for this because you have a Priest in heaven.

Shame for Sin: Sin makes us guilty. It leaves us feeling naked. And it caused the Son of God to have to die for us.

As Watson says, there should be some blushing in the face for the blackness in our hearts.

Hatred of Sin: Those who repent will loathe the sin they are repenting from.

Especially those King sins that seem to rise up over and over and fight for the dominion of your heart.

Christ is never loved until sin be loathed. Heaven is not longed for until sin be loathed.

Thomas Watson

Turning from Sin: We must forsake our sin and intend to do it no more, by God’s gracious help.

Turning from sin to God is different than simply be resolute about not sinning again.

Resolution is a white-knuckling of the wheel where you say, “I WILL DO THIS!”

Truly turning from is where you say, “I don’t want to do this anymore. JESUS HELP ME TO DO THIS!”

When these ingredients are mixed together it is a medicine for the soul that carries us away from guilt and condemnation and back into full friendship and fellowship with God.

This must be our daily habit.

CONCLUSION

As we get ready to head into our time of prayer tonight, I want to close by emphasizing that last exhortation.

Repentance must be our daily habit.

It must be our lifestyle.

Some weekdays I have to come into the office in a jacket and a tie and dress pants.

That is typically because someone passed away.

But those clothes are not my daily habit.

My daily habit is usually a polo, a pair of jeans and hat depicting the logo of one of my favorite sports teams.

That is my lifestyle when it comes to clothes—-everything else is an outlier.

Repentance can’t just be our special formal wear for the days when we think we have really messed up.

Repentance can’t be occasional.

Instead, repentance must be a lifestyle.

It must be our daily garments.

It is how we dress on the normal days.

And it is our lifestyle, because we know that the more we are seeing God’s holiness and our sinfulness and we are responding in repentance, the more we will be turning to the Cross.

The more we will be turning to the Savior who died on it.

And that is how we see the Cross loom larger and larger in our hearts and lives.