Repentance (part 3)

All right, well, we have a quiz this morning, and it's about repentance. Number one is actually quite controversial, and we'll find out why in a second.

Number one, true or false, repentance is necessary for salvation. It's true or false, not yes or no.

People, I heard a yes, which

I guess I'll translate as true. No, don't translate it as true, okay.

Let your yes be yes and your false be false or something. What do you think?

Repentance is necessary for salvation. I know there are people who would say no, faith is necessary for salvation, that's right.

You would say false. It's a fruit of salvation. Okay, I'm going to read our statement of faith.

I thought I'd just dig to the bottom of this thing and go to the statement of faith, and then we'll see what you think. And by the way,

I like how this starts here, such of the elect as are converted at riper years.

That hurt. Okay, because I happen to think that 32 was a fairly ripe year.

Such of the elect as are converted at riper years, having sometime lived in the state of nature, which is to say unconverted, sinful, and therein served diverse lusts and pleasures, sinned a lot.

God, in their effectual calling, giveth them repentance unto life.

Is repentance necessary for salvation? I think it says so right there. God, in their effectual calling, when he calls you effectually in time, gives them repentance.

And you might say, well, what's the big deal there? Unto life. You were dead, he gives you repentance, and now you are alive.

See, that's why it's controversial. You think?

I don't think so. Because it's still true that what, here's what I didn't say.

I didn't say you must repent on your own in order to be saved.

I didn't say that. You inferred that. Yeah, I was hoping you were.

I set the trap and John fell right in it, and he's still plunging. No, no, Carol.

I'm going to turn the rest of my time over to Carol Rathman. Doesn't it say that in the

Bible? Repent, be saved, repent and believe, all these kind of things.

Doesn't it say that? Aren't people commanded to repent? In fact, what did

Paul do at the end of Acts when he's talking on Mars Hill? Did he say something about repentance?

God, having overlooked the times, now commands all men everywhere, something or other.

I thought he said that. I didn't even need to turn there, but I was pretty sure it said that. I want to turn for a moment to 1

Corinthians chapter 6, because I was reading that and I thought, you know, this is...

Well, I'll read it and you guys tell me. And I'm going to start in verse 9.

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ and by the spirit of our God. All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful.

All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach and stomach for the food, and for food.

And God will destroy both, one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the

Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

Never. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her?

For as it is written, the two shall become one flesh. But he who is joined to the

Lord becomes one spirit with him. Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you? Whom you have from God.

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. And here's the capstone.

So glorify God in your body. Just thinking back to what the confession says about how, you know, some people are saved in their riper years, their older years.

And then they had served diverse lusts and pleasures.

So glorify God in your body. Well, how do you do that? Through, this is a picture, such were some of you, right?

Homosexuals, etc., etc., such were some of you. Now, in spite of that, despite the fact that you serve diverse lusts and pleasures in your former lives, now

I want you to glorify God with your body. What is that? I like to call that repentance.

Why would I like to call it repentance? As I just got the notification for how much screen time

I've had this week. Gary?

Okay. Yeah, showing fruit of repentance, right? This is what

I used to do, now this is what I do. I used to, you know, serve my own self, my own desires, and now

I serve the Lord with my body. Yes. What do you mean?

Oh, will you say before, oh, I'm sorry, I missed that. Will you say before that or afterwards? What do you think? Will you say before you started a changed life or after?

You started before, right? So, I mean, the question I asked this a few weeks ago, ultimately the question is this, you know, repentance is necessary for salvation.

The reason it's true is what? If somebody will say, well, you have to believe.

And my question then is, can you believe and not repent?

Can you have faith without repentance? Not really, that's a waffle.

Can you repent and not believe, which we call repentance.

I mean, this is, I don't think, I mean, I'm willing to be shown to be wrong, but I don't think you can have repentance without having faith.

And I don't think you can have faith without having repentance. Why? Because they are both, I mean, maybe in the mind of God, there could be a separation, but I don't think we can sort it out.

You know, the ordo salutis, I think they're pretty much simultaneous. Yes, Charlie, right.

I mean, the need for change, right? Because this is the way

I have been living and it's sinful. It displeases God. I stand condemned because of it.

Go ahead. Oh, don't skip ahead. Anybody have a mirror? OK, I mean, you can't have one without the other.

Right. So is repentance necessary for salvation? I think so, and I think our statement of faith says so.

Yes, Mark, because, again, you can't have belief, you can't have faith apart from repentance.

And, you know, is that repentance going to be perfect? Well, no, but that's not the point.

Right. Other thoughts, questions, Gary? Now, that's that's interesting, right?

Whoever says what was it? I love him or I know him, you know, and then does not keep the commandments as a liar.

How many of you keep the commandments? I mean, ultimately, our our repentance, our obedience, you know, none of these things save us.

And which is good because our obedience is never enough. Our faith has to be in the.

Person of Christ, person, a work of Christ who did obey perfectly. Right. OK. Other thoughts or questions?

See, this is number one. We're doing fine, Gary. One more time. That's an interesting point.

Does our sanctification cause us to sin less? It should, but I mean,

I've known people who've done. You know, I don't know who've done crazy things, you know, when they should have no better.

Right. Does it mean that we're getting well here?

I mean, there are a lot of answers to that, but one is I think we're just. Usually more aware of our sin and more aware of the depth of our sin and hopefully sinning less.

Right. And I think we want to be putting off and putting on and that whole process. But but I don't know.

You know, can somebody who's. Ninety still sin. Ninety five still sin.

Did Abraham sin later on in life? So I don't know what the answer to that is.

You know, I think progressive sanctification, yes. But does that mean somebody can't then fall into a chasm of sin?

And I don't know. I don't think we can say that necessarily. But yeah,

Mark, you know, that is an excellent question. And I'm going to summarize it this way.

I could have made this another true or false question. Repentance is a one time act. It's false.

But but that's a question that we're going to be dealing with in a moment here. But it's a good question.

But there is a sense in which repentance is necessary for salvation, which is ultimately just that initial change of mindset that my sin is

OK, because, for example, I'm not as bad as other people. I mean, that that is the number one.

When I was talking to not Mike, Pastor Mike, but Mike, the driver the other night from the airport.

And I said, well, why are you you know, why is God going to let you into heaven? And what do you think he said?

Because I'm a good person, I'm better than most, you know, I don't do bad things, you know, and this is what people think, right?

So repentance isn't I'm going to stop doing bad things. It's understanding that I am bad, right, that at my core,

I am selfish, I'm a sinner. And up to this point in life, I've had really no concern whatsoever, ultimately for God, because I haven't understood who he is.

So that's an excellent question. Is it a one time event? No. Is it an ongoing situation?

Yes, ultimately. But I think we'll cover that a little bit more to other thoughts. Or questions,

Mark? Well, I think confession is something we'll be talking about, too. So next. Bob, OK, I like that there's repentance to feel bad in our culture and repentance and to salvation, you know, in the

Bible. Absolutely. But I want to move on to number two, so because otherwise we'll never get to question number two.

Number two, true or false, true or false? These are easy questions, right? When a person is saved, he or she will not necessarily have any change in attitude towards sin.

Yeah, false, thank you. Also from our statement of faith, it's safe when you go to the statement of faith, you know, even

Pastor Mike can't argue against it. Number two, the answer, listen to this statement of faith, this saving repentance is an evangelical grace.

So it's not a work. Whereby a person being by the

Holy Spirit made sensible again from God made sensible of the manifold evils of his sin doth by faith in Christ humble himself for it with godly sorrow, detestation of it and self -abhorrency, which means you hate yourself.

Praying for pardon, I mean, just think about that just for a moment. Some people say

Christianity is needing to learn to love yourself, accept yourself. OK, our statement of faith says self -abhorrency, praying for pardon and strength of grace with a purpose and endeavor by supplies of the spirit to walk before God unto all well -pleasing.

In all things are unto all well -pleasing in all things. Yeah. So it is a gift of God with this repentance, right?

It changes how we think and how we act.

So we will have a change in attitude as will be evidenced by what we do and what we say and how we perceive ourselves.

Van Dix horn wrote this. He said repentance is a gospel grace because repentance involves believing something about ourselves and something about Christ.

I don't like myself. I don't like what I've done. And I love Christ. I love him all the more.

Why? Because I know that he paid the price for what I've done. He lived the perfect life that I couldn't.

As we look on Christ, the one who was pierced for our transgressions, we begin to see the full measure of our sin, right?

When we consider what he suffered. And we think it was my sin that put him there, that hung him on that cross that kept him there, right?

He suffered for me. So that sort of thinking makes us change our attitude about sin, which then should impact our behavior as well.

Questions, thoughts, question number two. We're at 26 minutes. Yes, that's okay, though.

Right. Judas Iscariot was sorrowful, right? And his response was despair and killing himself, right?

The rich young ruler, his response was sadness, sorrow, right?

Not repentance, just sorrow. So, yes, there is definitely a difference between godly sorrow or a sorrow that leads to repentance and a sorrow that just leads to what?

Depression or self pity or what have you.

Any thoughts, questions, Charlie? Is the cessation of sin, you mean like all sin?

No, I didn't say that. I said I wouldn't want to say that as a rule. I would hope that that's true, right?

But is it always true? Yes. Well, but I mean, I and I want to be careful with that, too.

Because I just think there are people who later on in life just seem to, you know, have this second wind of sin, you know, shall we say, you know, and they're looking to break the tape.

So but but I think generally that's true. I mean, like, for example, in First Timothy, when Paul says that he is the chief of all sinners.

Well, did he literally mean that he's pretty sure that, you know, compared to everybody else, he does the most sin?

You know, he was out there on Friday and Saturday night and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. No, that's not what he meant.

I think what he meant was, I mean, if you it's certainly if you looked over his whole life, you could say that, right?

Given the fact that he was involved in murder and other things. But I think his point was more and even going to Roman seven, you know, a wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from sin.

Deliver me from this body of sin or this body of death. And his point was the more he grew in Christ and the more he came to love the

Lord and the more he hated his own sin, the more sin he saw. Right.

And so that's the kind of progressive sanctification I think Charlie's talking about. And that's what we would like to see in ourselves, you know, and in others.

It's not always the case, but it, you know, it sometimes looks more like,

I don't know, an earthquake. You know, sorry about that. Rather than, you know, kind of a straight line sort of thing.

But I think that's typically or like we'd like to see it going like this or like this.

My sin and Paul saying, you know what, as I see my sin, it just seems like it just continues to increase.

But that's because he was just being more aware of it, I think. So other thoughts or questions,

Larry? So I think what you're trying to say, Larry said, you know, as we mature, we, you know, even the little sins become bigger to us.

And I think what he's trying to say is as we grow in Christ, we become less Roman Catholic. Thank you very much.

So I'll just kind of leave that there. Sorry.

Okay, number three. Number three, true or false?

Saving faith and repentance are synonyms. I had to pause because I didn't want to say cinnamons.

And I did not. Saving faith and repentance are synonyms.

Two words that mean the same thing. I saw a thumbs down. No, if they meant the same thing, they wouldn't be the same words.

Two different words. Right. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'll take it. Okay. Faith.

What is faith? Faith focuses on the object, Christ and his grace.

Repentance focuses on, okay, our failure to meet

God's law, right? It focuses on God and his law. They cannot be the same.

The Bible never asserts that we are justified by repentance. We are justified by faith.

Waldron says this in his book. Repentance and faith are so intimately connected that one cannot exist without the other.

You cannot repent unless you believe. You cannot believe unless you repent. All true faith is repentance.

All true repentance is believing. Um, but they're not the same thing.

Repentance is a mark of saving faith. Okay. And both must be stressed.

I want to turn for a moment to Acts chapter 20. And then I'll take your questions or comments.

Acts chapter 20 verses 17 to 21. And this kind of explains it a bit.

Paul says now, or this is actually Luke, but he writes this about Paul. He says, now from Miletus, he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him.

The Ephesian elders. And when they came to him, he said to them, you yourselves know how

I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the

Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the

Jews. How I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both the

Jews and the Greeks of repentance toward God. And of faith in our

Lord, Jesus Christ. Repentance and faith. Two different things.

Okay. Any questions or thoughts? Excellent. Number four, true or false?

Repentance is a good work for which Christians will be rewarded. False. Waldron says this.

He says, God does not forgive us because he considers our repentance a deed that deserves a reward.

I'll go with that. We must be careful not to refuse or not to confuse.

Sorry. Repentance with what? Penance. Listen, what

Burkoff says. The church of Rome has externalized the idea of repentance entirely.

The most important elements in its sacrament of penance are contrition, confession, satisfaction, and absolution of these four.

Contrition is the only one that properly belongs to repentance. And even this from the

Romanist excludes all sorrow for inborn sin and retains only that for personal transgressions.

What's Burkoff saying here? About contrition. Contrition is properly part of repentance.

Contrition being what? Godly sorrow, right?

But he says the Roman church excludes all sorrow for inborn sin, which is to say, what's inborn sin?

Original sin and retains only that for personal transgressions. In other words, in Rome, you don't have to repent of original sin.

Which why would that be a problem, by the way? How do we repent of original sin? Okay, by faith in Christ, right?

We turn away from the first Adam and toward the second Adam. And why would Rome not include that?

Thoughts in the gospel. Baptism takes away. Very good.

Takes away original sin. Which is why, you know, they think that you can get baptized as an infant and eventually you're going to wind up in heaven, even if you have to spend eons in purgatory.

Burkoff goes on to say, he says, and because only few experience real contrition, he is also satisfied with attrition.

That is to say, a reduction in sin, right? Because they never really have godly sorrow about their sin.

They're just happy if they sin less. They think that that's progress. And this is the mental conviction that sin deserves punishment, but does not include trust in God and a purpose to turn away from sin.

It is the fear of hell. So in other words, I don't deserve hell if I can reduce some of my sins.

That's the Roman Catholic teaching. Confession of the Roman Catholic Church is confession to the priest who absolves.

I mean, how many times do I walk around saying to absolvo? My favorite one, though, is may absolvo.

I like to forgive myself, you know, absolve myself of my sins. So may absolvo.

Who absolves not declaratively, but judicially, because he doesn't have the power to declare somebody innocent.

He gives them punishment, and that's supposed to absolve them of their sin. Moreover, satisfaction consists in the sinner's doing penance, that is enduring something painful or performing some difficult or distasteful task.

The central thought is that such outward performance really constitutes a satisfaction for sin.

So what does all that mean? Well, you go to a priest in the Roman system and you say, forgive me for I have sinned, right?

And you tell them your sin. And then what does the priest do? Okay, you know,

I've murdered 275 people, say, two are married and three are fathers.

What? That's it? That's pretty, pretty sweet. I don't know.

I guess, you know, depending on how bad your sin is, there might be additional punishment. Maybe they give you three, 10.

Well, she must have been really bad. Okay, but that whole idea there, outward performance, penance, right?

Look at what I've done, Lord. Now, in light of my sin, I think I've done pretty well.

We look to Christ. He paid the price for our sins. Number five, true or false, repentance is a one -time act.

I knew that was going to come up. How did I know? Because I wrote the quiz. Number five, true or false, repentance is a one -time act.

I think we should know, false. Okay, and we can go back to the London Baptist Confession of Faith.

Chapter 15 .2, whereas there is none that doth good, that does good, and sinneth not, and the best of men may, through the power and deceitfulness of their corruption dwelling in them, with the prevalency of temptation, fall into great sins and provocations.

Let me read that again. The best of men, through the power and deceitfulness of their corruption dwelling in them, with the prevalency of temptation, in other words, living in this world system and still having inward sin, fall into great sins and provocations.

God hath, in the covenant of grace, mercifully provided that believers, so sinning and falling, be renewed through repentance unto salvation.

So is there any sin, even after salvation, that you cannot be forgiven of? Let me see.

Is there any sin after salvation that you cannot be forgiven of? No. Sorry.

All sins can be forgiven, right? Kid, what's that?

Well, it is already forgiven. So then why do we confess it? Because God tells us to.

That's exactly right. Let's turn to Romans chapter 8 for a moment. Romans chapter 8, and this is an astonishing insight, follows

Romans chapter 7. And Romans chapter 7,

Paul's doing what? That was kind of a delayed response.

I don't know what that's all about. Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, he says,

I do the things I don't want to do. I don't do the things I want to do. You know, I don't read scripture as much as I want.

I don't, you know, teach my kids as much as I want. And then

I, I waste my time and my money and everything else doing this. Okay.

But then he says, Romans chapter 8, verse 1. After he talks about, you know, all these things.

And how Christ is sufficient. He says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

For the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.

For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. And the law could not, what could not save us, cannot perfect us.

What it does is point to God's holy standard. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemns sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.

In other words, if you're in the spirit, if you're in Christ. Then you have the righteousness of Christ.

As your own, which is what you need. Let me go back to the confession again.

15 .4. As repentance is to be continued through the whole course of our lives, upon the account of the body of death and the motions thereof.

So it is every man's duty to repent of his particular known sins, particularly.

And my word processor did not like the fact that particular and particularly were that close to each other because it seemed a little bit redundant.

But it really isn't. Why? Repent of his particular known sins, particularly.

When you're aware of a sin, then you ought to. Confess it.

Particularly by name. And let's go back to first John chapter one, as somebody was reading it earlier.

And let's read verses eight and nine. Repentance is to be continued during the whole course of our lives.

Why? Because we sin. And when we sin.

We need to confess. First John chapter one, verses eight and nine.

Who'd read that, please? Go ahead, Gary. OK. Now, it may be.

That we're not guilty of some sins, right? But if we think to ourselves,

I have not sinned today. Then what is probably true?

What's that? You're prideful. You're a liar.

OK. And you haven't gotten out of bed yet.

See, I think that's good. You're not very observant. You don't understand the holiness of God.

You don't understand what sin is. OK. Almost everything we do and think and say springs from an impure motive and therefore is.

Sinful, right? So what does it mean to confess our sins?

It means to agree with God, not to go to the priest, but to agree with God to say. I am a sinner, not

I'm not as I think the that I'm not like other people, not like that. Tax gatherer, not like that guitar player.

Oh, sorry. That is not confession.

OK, number five. That was number five. It's not a one time act. OK, so I think that's a good answer.

And, you know, I might even summarize it this way. You know, it's how are we supposed to live our life?

I mean, when you first started thinking or saying that, I just thought, OK, this is like the Martin Luther, you know, focus, which is

I'm so sinful that I need to be in constant confession.

Right. And I think there's some some truth in that, in this sense, that we probably think too lightly of our sin.

We probably don't think of it often enough. Right. So another possible way, other than just walking around in life, just, you know, trying to scour through everything at every moment of the day and just thinking,

I need to figure out what I should be confessing right now because I know I'm in sin. That is one approach.

The other approach, and I think this is closer to what Larry was saying, is this, that I need to be as I as I see my sin or as sin crosses my mind,

I need to be driven back to the object of my faith, which is Christ and just think, yes,

I am a sinner. I am a horrible sinner. My motives are impure. I lie. I do all these other things.

But I have a wonderful savior. And I can't believe that in spite of who

I am, he would do that for me. And if we live that kind of life where we're thinking constantly about the gratitude that we owe our savior, right?

Then I think a lot of things would be better for us. I can't even help but think if we could get husbands and wives and kids, you know, parents and everybody, you know, everybody in a family unit to kind of think that way about their own sin first and about Christ as their savior.

Those two things, then what kind of communication will we have with one another? You know, if instead of saying my angry impulse, what if I thought that's anger, that's a sin.

I can't believe I even want to say that, you know, I'm thankful that Christ Jesus died for that sin, you know.

Now, how can I respond? Changes things, right?

If we filter things through the lens of the gospel, that in spite of what I deserve, despite what

I do, Jesus Christ died for my sins. So now, knowing that, now that I've been bought with a price, how should

I respond? Instead of my first sinful impulse, how should I think?

How should I talk? How should I act? Other thoughts? Yeah, I think you could even say it this way that, you know, if I was the

NASA computers counting on putting a man on the moon, that my calculations will be off just enough to put them probably on the face of the sun or something like that.

So it would not be good. Just enough variance to, yeah, or even, you know, our sin nature is not only trying to destroy our witness to others, but it's also trying to destroy what?

Our, I think our faith in Christ, right? Trying to, um, I mean, if Satan could get us to distrust

Christ or distrust our own salvation, I'm so bad. I can't possibly be saved, right?

That kind of thinking. But speaking of so bad that I can't possibly be saved, we have some people that need to be baptized.

So we need a close in prayer. Father, thank you for this time. Thank you for your word, for what it says, uh, for such a great salvation.

The fact is that we do sin. We sin in thoughts and indeed, uh, if not constantly than nearly constantly and sometimes multiple ways at the same time.

And yet, in spite of all that, uh, you call us your children, not because of how good we are, but because you have put us in Christ, granted us faith and repentance.

And we look to the object and, uh, of our faith, the author and finisher of our faith.

And we praise you for him, for his life, his death and his resurrection. Father, help us to think through, uh, repentance, help us to repent of our repentance and to have right, uh, attitude toward it.

I pray in Jesus name. Amen. By the way, please hang on to that quiz. We won't be in it next week because I, well,

I will be here, but I won't be here until the AM service. So we'll do it two weeks from now. We'll be back at this quiz.