Repentance Is Ongoing - Christopher Brenyo

The Gospel, even for us, starts with repentance and confession. You have no capacity to understand Christ and His Gospel before you have a grasp of your own sinful condition. And it seems fitting that John would be pointing out to the people whom the Messiah was intended to save in terms of their national identity, their character, their ethnicity, who they were as the visible people of God.

They would understand that central to the Gospel is this idea of repentance. So John is taking the shift here and saying repentance is at the heart of the Gospel. Repentance is at the very center of what Christ is doing in delivering and saving His people from their sins.

Today, most all of you are with repentance and confession. I wonder if that's something that's ongoing for you now. Are you a repenter? Are you a confessor? Are you turning away from your sin? Are you running and fleeing again to the safety and security of Christ?

The Christian, the Gospel-believing Christian, does that routinely. They run again to Christ. They're confronted again with their sinfulness. They're confronted again with their lack... They're confronted, as we prayed, with their blood guiltiness, their borderline blasphemy.

Every day we're confronted with that and we're to turn again and look to our God for grace and mercy and our help in times of need. He's provided for us in Christ. So this idea of baptism for repentance and this idea of repentance is not a once-for-all kind of thing.

It's an ongoing thing for the Christian.