Psalm 51 with R. C. Sproul, “A Psalm of Repentance,” 1

Today, we're going to begin a new series in which we will study the biblical concept of repentance, and we'll be looking at the importance of repentance, the meaning of repentance, and how we are properly to manifest that repentance before God.

Repentance at the Center of the New Testament Message

Let me start by saying that the whole idea of repentance is at the center of the New Testament message. You will recall that when John the Baptist comes out of the wilderness to make the path ready for the coming of the Messiah, he declares to the people of Israel, repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

And then just a short time after, Jesus comes and begins His public ministry with basically the same message, which is a call to repentance. And in the preaching of the apostolic church, we see after the announcement is made of the work of Christ, then the call, the summons to people to respond to that gospel always includes the call to faith and to repentance.

And so again, I say that in the New Testament understanding of redemption, repentance is at the very core and center of the message. But that's not the way it is today. In fact, the concept of repentance has all but disappeared from contemporary forms of evangelism.

I think partly it's because we're so desirous and so zealous to win people to Christ that we stand before them, we tell them all the benefits of becoming a Christian, and we tell them to make a decision to follow Jesus or to ask Jesus to enter into their lives or come into their hearts.

And in our efforts to persuade people to embrace Jesus, we try to make it as easy as possible for them to do it. And so we'll often underplay or conceal altogether the biblical mandate to repent. Now in theology, we make a distinction between faith and repentance.

They're two different words, two different concepts, and because they're two different words and two different concepts, obviously we have to make a distinction between them. But when we distinguish these two words, we are engaged in something very dangerous.

We are in danger of in our distinguishing them ending up by divorcing them by making such a wide separation between them. Where in biblical categories, even though these two ideas are distinguished, they remain so closely connected that they exist in an inseparable relationship to such a degree that true faith always involves repentance, and true repentance always involves faith.

Now, I chose my word there very, very carefully when I used the word involved for this reason that in theology sometimes we see repentance as being a necessary consequence or fruit of true faith, where other theologians see the connection so close between faith and repentance that they would include repentance as an integral element of faith itself.

And so I was cutting the Gordian knot there by sort of skating around that controversy and not landing on whether repentance is actually something altogether different from faith or is itself an element of saving faith.

I'm saying we can get around that by simply saying that faith involves repentance, and repentance always involves faith. Now, just this weekend I was listening to a radio broadcast of a minister who was giving a sermon, and he told the story on the radio of a church in South Florida that was very fast growing and had a tremendous outreach program to teenagers.

And they had one of the largest and most active youth groups in the city. And as the students were studying the Scriptures in their youth group, they were a little bit disturbed because their youth leaders, which included a man and a lady, were not married, but were living together.

And so some of the kids went to this couple and said, what's the deal here? You are our leaders in our Bible study in church, and here you are living together without being involved in marriage to each other.

How can you justify that if you are Christians? Maybe the world is involved in cohabitation without marriage, but that's certainly not permissible for a dedicated Christian. And the answer that the young man gave to the question of the student was this, well, we're Christians, but we didn't say we were disciples.

And then I heard another young fellow who was involved in the same kind of a relationship and who was involved in the dealing of drugs while he was cohabitating with his girlfriend and was claiming to be a Christian, and somebody pointed out the inconsistency between his lifestyle and his profession of faith.

And he responded to that inquiry by saying, well, I'm a carnal Christian. And this whole idea of the carnal Christian as being somebody who is truly converted but has never really brought forth the fruit of repentance is as foreign to the teaching of the New Testament as it is new on the horizon of Christian thinking and Christian doctrine.

And when you hear it, I would hope that you would run for your lives, because what is involved here is an attempt to make sure that our evangelistic fruit counts. We are so concerned to win souls that we use our methods to reach out, and we tell people all you have to do to become a Christian, all you have to do to be saved is to raise your hand, or all you have to do is come forward to the altar and make a profession of faith.

All you have to do in order to be saved is to say the sinner's prayer, or all you have to do in order to be saved is to ask Jesus into your heart. Those statements are simply not true. Now, don't get me wrong.

There's nothing wrong with having people make an outward demonstration of their commitment to Christ. There's nothing wrong with asking somebody if they want to commit their lives to Christ to raise their hand or to come forward or to do all of those things.

But if we phrase it in such a way that we communicate that that's all you have to do to be a Christian, we're simply not telling them the truth. And what is so dangerous about that is that people will respond to our request.

They will do the technique and answer the method that has been prescribed for them and walk away believing that therefore they are Christians, which can be to their everlasting peril, where they walk away thinking that they are in Christ because they raised their hand or walked the aisle, when in fact they've never experienced authentic faith and they've never repented of their sins.

And so they are not at all converted. And yet they are walking away with a false sense of having been converted. And you also have the impact that that has on the evangelist, where the evangelist now he can count how many hands were raised, how many people came forward, and he can say, look how effective our ministry is.

We had fifty people walk forward tonight. Well, because we have fifty people walk forward does not mean that there were fifty converts.

That night.

All it means is that fifty people walk forward. When I was in started my teaching career as a college professor, the first year I was teaching, I came upon a sermon written and preached by Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan divine, and I of course was already a devotee of Edwards, and this happened to be a sermon that I was at least obscure enough that I had never noticed it before and had never.

Read it.

But the title of the sermon caught my attention, and the title of it was, A Warning to Professors. And so I said, hey, that's me, you know, I've been a student all my life, and now I'm finally a professor, and here is Edwards giving a special warning to professors, so I thought I'd better read the sermon.

Well, I shortly discovered that what he was talking about when he used the term professors was not people who were in an academic position of teaching in a school somewhere, not that kind of professor, but his warning was given to those who had made a profession of faith, and where Edwards makes it very clear that there is a difference between making a profession of faith and possessing that faith that you profess.

And the warning that Edwards gave was this. He said, we see people who make an outward profession of faith, who become involved in the life of the church, who are present in worship on Sunday morning, but whose lives remain unchanged, who still live lives that are godless.

And Edwards says that that person is in serious, serious trouble, because added to his paganism is his practice of blasphemy in which he enters into the holy things of God pretending to be a believer, when in fact he is not.

And so he adds to his guilt before God. Now, we could look at that as just part of the Puritan mentality of preoccupation with God's judgment and wrath and all of that sort of thing and dismiss Edwards at that level.

But I've always said in my judgment the most frightening thing that's ever taught in the New Testament is found in Jesus' most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, where when He comes to the conclusion of that sermon, He gives a warning to professors, where He says that many will come to Me in the last day saying, Lord, Lord, did we not do this in Your name, and did we not do that in Your name, Lord, Lord?

And Jesus said, and I will say to those who come to Me saying, Lord, Lord, depart from Me, you workers of evil. I never knew you. That's a sobering thought, that on the last day there are going to be people who rush up to Christ and pretend that they have an intimate relationship with Him.

They're going to address Him in personal terms, intimate terms, Lord, Lord.

I went to church.

I preached. I was involved in mission programs. I did all of these things, and Jesus has said, what's your name? I don't know who you are. Please leave. You see, because what He is addressing here are people who claim to belong to Him who have never repented of their sin.

The Meaning of Repentance as a Change of Mind

Well, again, what does this repentance that the New Testament calls for mean? The word itself, to repent, comes from the Greek. I won't even bother to put it on the board, the Greek word metanoia, and the Greek word metanoia literally, etymologically means to change your mind.

Now, whenever we seek to learn the meaning of a term, particularly a biblical word, it's always valuable, I think, to trace the historical origin of the term, and we do that by paying attention to what's called etymology, which goes over how words derive from other words in the ancient world and so on, and what was the original meaning of the term.

And the original meaning of the Greek term that is translated to repent simply means to change your mind. Because of that, I have read theologians who have said that all that repentance means is that you change your mind about Jesus.

I mean, prior to your conversion, you thought maybe Jesus was some kind of primitive lunatic with religious inclinations, or maybe you thought He was a great moral teacher or even a prophet in the ancient world, but then after studying the Scriptures or hearing sermons or doing your investigation, your mind is changed.

You come to a different conclusion, and you recognize that Jesus was truly the Son of God, and so now you have a new viewpoint about Jesus. And this particular theologian says, that's all the Bible means by repentance, is all you have to do in order to meet the requirements for biblical repentance is to change your mind about Jesus because the Greek word metanoia means to change your mind.

Well here's where studying the original meaning of words can get you into big trouble, because if you would go to your dictionary and you would look up the meaning of a word that you're using in your vocabulary today, and you see what it meant originally, you might sometimes be shocked at how that word has changed in its meaning over time.

For example, if you looked up in a good dictionary the word cute, you would see that the original meaning of the term cute in Elizabethan English was bow-legged. And so when you say that that girl's cute, if you mean the original sense of the term, you would be saying something about her shape, namely that she looks like she's spent too much time riding a horse because she's bow-legged.

And of course that's not what you mean when you use the term cute, because the word cute has undergone changes in nuances since it was first introduced into the language. Now let me give you another example of that.

Right now as I speak I'm trying to finish up a book. That's usually true when I'm speaking, I'm working to meet some publisher's deadline, and this book is on the love of God. And so one of the things that I've been examining in the preparation of this manuscript is the meaning of the biblical concept of love.

I'm sure you've all heard that in ancient Greek there were three words for love, eros, which was the sensual kind of love, phileo, which refers to brotherly love, and finally the highest, most exalted form of love, the spiritual love of agape.

And it is true in the Greek language that was used before the New Testament was written you had these three distinct views of love. But if you would examine the meaning of agape, that special concept of love, and how it was used among the Greeks before Plato, for example, and before Aristotle, you will see that it had a very weak content to it, didn't mean a whole lot really, and was hardly used.

And then when the Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek and tried to get one Greek word that they could use to contain all of the riches of the Old Testament concept of love, they chose the word agape.

So suddenly the word agape now means a whole lot more in the Greek language, after it was filled with Hebrew meaning, than it ever meant to the Greeks before Plato and Aristotle. Then you see Jesus comes along and gives a whole new dimension to the import of that spiritual, depth concept of love when He defines what love requires of people.

And so in the teaching of Jesus, in the teaching of the Apostles in the New Testament, you get an even higher view of this concept of agape. Now I'm just using that to illustrate how words change, and to try to understand the concept of repentance simply by looking at its etymological roots, where you have the conjunction of the Greek word for mind and the word to change, and you stick them together, and you say, aha, all repentance means is a change of mind.

You miss the fullness of what is communicated when Jesus places this concept at the core of His message, because here this is not just a mere changing of your mind where opinions shifts from moment to moment.

You change your minds all the time about many, many, many things. But when we're talking about repentance in the biblical sense, we're talking about something that doesn't happen at the edge of our experience, but something that happens in the very core of your personality, where you are pierced by the Spirit of God to your heart.

It goes to the center of your being, and you are, as it were, turned upside down, where before you were walking according to the prince of the power of the air, following the course of this world, living your life by the standards or the customs of the culture around you, imitating the world.

If the world was involved in premarital sex, you're involved in premarital sex. If the world okays having an abortion, you go out and have an abortion. If the world cheats on tests in school, you cheat on tests in school, because you take your marching orders from what is acceptable by the group in which you are involved, whereas the New Testament calls you to a completely different realm of behavior, a whole different lifestyle, where the Apostle says, don't let fornication, for example, even once be named among you as befitting saints, where God calls you not to allow your hearts to be hardened by the ethics of this world, but rather to have your heart softened and made tender by the Holy Ghost so that when you repent, that means you turn away from that whole way of living that marks paganism, and you fly now to Christ, and you submit yourself to His lordship where you resolve now to live a life of obedience.

That doesn't mean that at the moment of your conversion you are healed of all sin, or it's the end of temptation. We know that. But there can be no real conversion without a real turning from your former ways of life and fleeing now to the arms of Christ, whereby at the very core of your being you have resolved to leave that sinful lifestyle behind you and seek the forgiveness of sin.

Repentance, Forgiveness, and Psalm 51

But we live in a day today where the Christian community is overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, a guilt that is like a burden, like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress that's weighing him down, and he can't get past it.

And we try everything that we can to alleviate the pressure of this guilt, try all forms of rationalizations, none of which work because there's only one cure for guilt, and that's forgiveness. The only thing that can cure guilt is forgiveness, and so forgiveness is essential to cure guilt.

But before you can have forgiveness, there must be repentance, and just as forgiveness is essential to get rid of guilt, so repentance is essential to gain that forgiveness. And so if there's any concept in the New Testament we need to master, it is this concept of repentance because so much hangs upon it.

So what we're going to do is we're going to look at the model prayer of repentance that is contained for us in the Scriptures in Psalm 51, the Psalm of David, because if anybody ever understood the full measure of repentance, it was the man who wrote that psalm.

So we'll look at David and his psalm in the sessions to come.