Truth For Life

Guest (Male): The Bible describes repentance as a change of mind. It's a radical reversal from our sinful wanderings, and it's a crucial element of our salvation. But it doesn't end there. Today on Truth For Life, Alistair Begg explains why repentance isn't simply a one-time event that marks the beginning of our lives as followers of Jesus.

Alistair Begg: Repentance is a mind-altering experience. It is not simply a change of direction, it is not simply a change of heart, but it is a change of mind. The Westminster Divines put it so helpfully in the Confession of Faith, and I quote from it, when they said repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it to God, with full purpose of and endeavor after new obedience.

And Calvin in his Institutes says repentance is the true turning of our life to God, a turning that arises from a pure and earnest fear of Him, and it consists in the mortification of our flesh and of the old man, and in the vivification of the spirit. Now, I'll come back to that and say it in layman's terms in a moment or two from now, but for those who get the tape, at least they have two helpful quotes.

Let me turn you to the New Testament and give a classic illustration of this radical reversal. Luke's Gospel in chapter 15. Luke 15, the story of the lost sheep, the lost coins, and the lost son. We don't have time to work our way through it nor should we, but I simply want you to notice the change in this boy between verse 12 and verse 19.

In verse 12, he says to his father, "Give me my share of the estate." His life is marked by the demand "Give me." In verse 19, his life is marked by the request "Make me." Because he has come to an awareness of his condition. The Bible says that he came to himself. And when he came to himself, he said, "How many hired servants of my father have food enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger?"

And then he traces the roots of his condition to that which he is about to confess. "I will arise and I will go to my father, and I will say unto him, 'I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.'"

Now, if you turn forward again to 2 Corinthians chapter 7, we can further advance our understanding of genuine biblical repentance. 2 Corinthians 7 and verse 10: "Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death."

In other words, the change of mindset expressed in repentance is accompanied by a lifelong moral and spiritual turnaround. Indeed, the verb that is used, or the word that is used most routinely in the Bible concerning this, is the word metanoia, which means simply to do an about-turn or an about-face, I think it is that is said in the American military.

In Britain, the sergeant major says about-turn, I believe he says about-face here. Is that correct? In other words, turn your face around. You were going in this direction, facing clearly there, and now you have turned around and you are going in this direction.

It is a radical reversal. Once you were going one way, and now you are going another. And it is to be distinguished from a momentary flush of regret, a momentary experience of being found out. It was not that you were going along in a certain direction, you had a bad day, somebody gave you an emotional surge, you decided to buy into the Christian thing, and then you continued in the exact same direction in which you'd always been going. That's not salvation. That's someone going in the wrong direction with an interest in Christian things.

So it is imperative that we understand the nature of biblical repentance, for without that repentance, there is no salvation. You have the same thing, for example, in Colossians chapter 3 in a different metaphor. Paul uses there the picture of clothing, and he says you put off all these things in Colossians 3. Since you have been crucified with Christ, you no longer are a part of these things. Therefore you put off the old self with all of its practices, and you put on the new self, which is being renewed in the knowledge in the image of its Creator. That's Colossians 3 and in verse 10.

Now, the further thing that we need to say is simply this: that repentance does not merely begin the Christian life. According to Scripture, the Christian life is repentance from beginning to end. When Martin Luther on All Saints' Eve in 1517 nailed his thesis to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, he was putting the axe to the root of all the obscurities and nonsenses of medieval theology.

And although certain things from his theses are made much of, it is often overlooked that he begins right here, and this is what he says: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, He meant the entire life of believers should be one of repentance." Now interestingly, if you recall the Calvin quote, that is exactly what Calvin was saying as well.

He said that the experience of repentance is the experience of the Christian life in the mortification of the flesh and in the vivification of life by the spirit. In other words, in dying to that which is no longer to be ours and in living in the power of the spirit.

Now, this was most significant because the Latin Vulgate translation of Matthew 4:17, the words of Jesus right at the outset of His ministry, where from that time on, Jesus began to preach, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near," the Latin Vulgate translation of that, Poenitentiam agite, was translated "Do penance. Do penance."

When Erasmus translates the New Testament into Greek and using the word metanoite, it makes clear to the minds of people that what is being described here is not a call for an act of penance, but for a radical change of mind and an equally deep transformation of life. Now loved ones, this hits at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian. There are more roads open up to me as I stand here than which I daren't walk.

But for example, in this whole notion of a coalition between evangelicals and Roman Catholics, the very nature of what it means to be a Christian is substantive. And there cannot be two separate ways to be a Christian. There is the way that the Bible outlines, and at the very heart of this is the nature of genuine biblical repentance.

Now some people are listening to this and they're saying, "I don't know if this really matters at all." Well, I'm wanting you to know that it matters a great deal. If it didn't, I wouldn't take as long as I'm doing to make this known to you. Let me quote to you a good friend, Sinclair Ferguson, on this very subject.

He says, "Seeing repentance as an isolated, completed act at the beginning of the Christian life has been a staple principle of much modern evangelicalism." Now let me say that another way. Those of us who have grown up in evangelicalism have grown up with the idea that repentance is something that you do once, which you're responsible for, it starts everything off, and you've been there, done that, got the T-shirt as it were.

Says Sinclair Ferguson, "This has been the staple diet of evangelicalism, certainly in the 20th century. Result," quote, "it has spawned a generation who look back upon a single act, abstracted from its consequences, as determinative of salvation. The altar call has replaced the sacrament of penance. Thus repentance has been divorced from genuine regeneration, and sanctification has been severed from justification."

You see what he's saying? In medieval theology, people lived with the idea that if you just do penance, you're okay. And in contemporary evangelicalism, people have lived with the idea that if you have a sense of remorse in some event where someone is speaking and gets rather emotional about it, and you do whatever the man tells you to do from the front, whether that is to walk forward or raise your hand or sign a card, and you complete that, then that's it.

And you can always and forever look back to that one moment where you did that and responded in that way, and on that you can hang the nature of your whole spiritual experience. But if there has not been in that genuine biblical repentance, then what have you got? You've got an isolated abstracted event in your past that involved an emotional surge which had religious connotations but has produced no change in life.

I talk to people all the time, they tell me, in fact in the baptismal pool I hear it all the time, "Well, I came, I gave my life to Jesus on such and such a day, and then I didn't do anything. Then I did this and then I went away to college and then I did drugs and then I had a number of girlfriends and then this and that, and finally, on such and such a day I woke up and I decided to get serious about it."

I got news for you. In the majority of those cases, and heaven will reveal it, I don't think those people became Christians when they thought they did in 1970-whatever it was. Because what they're saying is it's possible to be justified without being sanctified. It's possible to have a savior who doesn't save. It's possible to have new life with no accompanying lifestyle. And that's impossible, the New Testament says.

What possible reason is there for believing that I have been radically altered, that there has been a radical reversal in my life when I have no interest in reading the Word of God? When I have no concern for worship amongst the people of God? When instead of sitting listening under the Word of God and saying, "This is food for my soul, this is light for my path, this is meat for my portion," instead of saying that, I'm looking at my watch and going, "I hope we're going to be able to get out of here by 12:00, because I got a lot of things still on my calendar to do today."

That's okay for somebody to feel that way because that's an indication of an unbelieving and hardened heart. But it's not the expression of the individual who has been transformed. When is the last time any of us put our heads on our pillow at night on a Sunday evening regretting the fact that the day was over? Regretting the fact that the opportunities now for fellowship and worship and the enjoyments of one another's company have been taken from us and now we must go back and face the week, largely on our own? It just reminds me of the need for genuine repentance in my own life.

Now the extent to which this has rooted itself in contemporary thinking was never better revealed than in the lordship controversy as it was described in the last decade or so. And in that debate, and some of you read those books and took sides, people erroneously suggested that it was possible to receive justification without sanctification, to receive new birth that doesn't actually give new life, or to have a faith that is not radically repentant despite uniting us to a crucified and risen Christ.

Let me try and drop it down a couple of notches here. On the 16th of August 1975, when I was married in a rather muggy church in suburban Philadelphia with the temperature approaching 100 degrees, I, along with Susan, went through the routine that I performed yesterday of responding to the questions which were fairly straightforward. "Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy estate of marriage?" and so on. "And will you keep yourself only unto her so long as you both shall live?"

In other words, are you prepared to enter into an absolutely exclusive relationship with this girl? Yes. So they sign it three times. One a big one that goes in your case, one a wee one that goes to the court, and another one that the guy says he'll keep, which he usually just crumples up in a ball and puts in the wastepaper basket because it's not necessary. I shouldn't let you know what I do, but anyway.

So now we have the sheet and now we have the life in front of us. Now what is the indication that there has been a genuine turnaround that is represented in that declaration? It's 21 years of married life, right? It's 21 years of saying no to temptation and saying yes to fidelity. It's 21 years of ratifying in our daily experience the expressions that were made in that moment in time.

But the working out of sickness and health and joy and sorrow and good and bad is the arena in which that testimony is authenticated. And if, for example, three months after I had walked down the aisle there in Philadelphia, I began to call girls from my high school in England or acquaintances that I'd known in the past, then both Sue and everyone else who knows us would be forced to conclude: whatever that was about at 1:30 in the afternoon in that muggy church, it was spurious, because there is no lifestyle which attaches to the profession of a new life.

Someone put it in a little poem which is not a great poem, but it notches it down again for us. Here it is:

'Tis not enough to say, "I'm sorry and repent,"

And then go on from day to day just living as we went.

Repentance is to leave the sins we loved before

And show that we did earnest grieve by doing them no more.

I hope that none of us are hanging our hats on a date that we arbitrarily wrote in the flyleaf of our Bibles, or on the recollection of a moment in time where somebody asked us to do some external thing. Why you say? Because that is irrelevant? Absolutely not. But because the nature of biblical repentance is not locked in a moment in time, but is expressed throughout the totality of our days.

And the question for the unbeliever has to do with repentance in its initial expression. The question for the believer is, "When did you last repent?" Now, that brings us back to the story of Joseph. Remember Joseph? Well, what we'll do is we'll return to Joseph. We'll pick up the narrative this evening.

Because I want us simply to concentrate in the conclusion on this issue in our own lives. Because there are people here this morning, indeed there are people all across America who are confused about who and what they are, because they did at some point what someone told them to do, but there's no change in their lives.

And they figure that what it is about is about somebody telling you to do something and then you do that and then you just kind of muster it up from that point out. No. In salvation, God grants to us the grace of repentance and places within our lives the reality of His spirit, so that He not only justifies us as a legal transaction declaring us in a right standing before Him in the person of His son, but He also regenerates us by the power of His spirit so that He implants within us the principle of new life. And our new lifestyle is an evidence of the change which He has wrought. May God grant to us the discovery of genuine biblical repentance.

O God, our Father, we thank You this morning that Your Word shines as a light on our path. We thank You, too, that it is sharp as a two-edged sword. We thank You that it relieves the teacher of the responsibility of trying to make people happy, and sets each of us as listeners free from the quest to feel good about everything.

We thank You for the wonder of godly sorrow which produces a radical turnaround that becomes central to our Christian experience and allows us to bear testimony to Your saving grace. So work in us, we pray, that which is pleasing in Your sight. Comfort those who are unnecessarily distressed. Discomfort those who are unfoundedly assured.

And grant that we might know what it is to take up our cross every day, to die to ourselves, and to follow hard after the person of Your son. And it is unto Him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Savior, that we give glory and majesty, dominion and power, now and forevermore. Amen.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Truth For Life. That is Alistair Begg with an important question for each of us to consider: When did you last repent? Alistair returns to close today's program in just a moment.

Here at Truth For Life, we think you're never too old or too young to hear about Jesus. And today we are recommending a brand-new book from Alistair that makes it easy to introduce young children to who Jesus is and why He came. The book is called J is for Jesus. It's a colorfully illustrated book that explores the attributes, character, and nature of Christ using words that begin with the letters A through Z.

Each page presents a word that describes Jesus, followed by a reflection from Alistair that draws from Scripture. Children will be prompted to think about what they've learned by answering a couple of short questions, and then they're invited to close with prayer. Whether you're looking for a bedtime book for children ages six and up, or a devotional for the whole family to read together, or maybe a book to read week by week to your Sunday school class, ask for your copy of J is for Jesus today.

It's yours when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org/donate, or you can arrange to set up an automatic monthly donation when you visit truthforlife.org/truthpartner or call us at 888-588-7884. And if you request your copy of J is for Jesus with your donation and would like to purchase additional copies for your church or to give as gifts, you'll find them in our online store at truthforlife.org/store. They're available for purchase at our cost of $5. You'll also find a companion book Alistair wrote called C is for Christian.

Glad you've joined us today. When someone gives you something for free, do you become suspicious? Do you think there must be a catch? Tomorrow, we'll consider why this is often our response to God. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth For Life, where the learning is for living.