What Is Repentance? | Theocast

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Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are talking about repentance.

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If you look around in the church and certainly on Christian social media, there seems to be a lot of confusion about repentance and what it is.

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So we're going to talk about repentance from the Old Testament, repentance from the New Testament. We're going to talk about repentance on the front end in terms of conversion and how one is united to Christ.

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And we're going to talk about repentance in an ongoing way in the Christian life and hope to make some sense of this topic.

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We hope that you're encouraged by the conversation. We hope as always that you find assurance and rest in the

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Lord Jesus Christ as you listen. Stay tuned. If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

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You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there.

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Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective, and as we've been saying lately, from a pastoral perspective as well.

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Your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Springhill, Tennessee, just south of Nashville.

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And myself, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. John, it's good to be around the mic with you, man.

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We've been out of the recording rhythm for the last couple of weeks due to various things, travel for each of us.

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And we recorded a few episodes before we left, and we're going to be recording several episodes over the coming weeks, trying to catch up.

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But today is the first time back in the seat, and we'll see how this goes, I suppose. Yeah, it's almost like we have to relearn how to ride a bike again.

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So, well, hopefully we're not going to fall down. Yeah, the giveaways have been going good. Everybody's been excited about them.

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So, we're glad. Really, it's a way for us to share books that we like, and we're going to work on expanding that.

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But we also like to give away some more stuff. We know that you've enjoyed our birch, so we're going to be giving away one of our coffee mugs, which seems to be a popular giveaway.

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Actually, there's a new one. This is the old one, but we have a new one that we're giving away. So, you can sign up for that.

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I wonder if I can get one of those. Yeah, I'll get you a new coffee cup. I know. This one here is like six years old, so we need to get the updated ones.

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But we're giving it to one of our members. We like to just thank our members for supporting us, and we like to give away stuff to them.

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So, Cody Kilshaw. Cody's been a member for quite a while now. So, we ran the

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Wheel of Names this morning according to God's sovereignty and the selection of the

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Wheel of Names. Cody, you came up, so we'll shoot that over to you.

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You can enjoy thinking about or praying for Theocast and Justin, Jimmy, and I as we drink out of the coffee mug.

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If you would like one, you can go to our social media. Every Wednesday morning, we post our giveaway, and you can go to Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and follow the instructions there, and we'll select a winner on Thursday and give you that coffee cup mug.

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So, there you go. I mean, I for one, John, am just glad to know that even though we haven't recorded in like three weeks, that the

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Wheel of Names is still alive and kicking. It's still alive. I was worried. I was very concerned that the

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Wheel of Names might just, I don't know, go away. That's right. No, it's good.

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It's getting full. It's taking longer to spin it, but that's not a bad thing. No. So, we're going to have a conversation today about something other than the

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Wheel of Names and the providence of God and how it relates to the Wheel of Names. We're going to have a conversation about something that's an important subject, and people have already seen the title of the episode, so I don't need to bury the lead,

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I don't think. The title of the episode is, What is Repentance? That's a topic that gets

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Christians worked up. If you look on Christian Twitter or Christian social media in general and find any kind of dialogue about the topic of repentance, you will notice that people are passionate about this conversation with good reason, because it is an important doctrine.

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It's an important subject when it comes to our union with the Lord Jesus Christ, our conversion, but then also it matters in the

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Christian life as well. And so, today we want to have a very simple, somewhat introductory conversation on the topic of repentance, because our plan over the summer, over the course of several months, is to have other conversations related to this one.

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And so, we're going to deal with some of the subject matter that is contained in several books. I'll go ahead and maybe give a sneak peek on this,

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John, if you're cool with that. So, in no particular order, we're going to be doing episodes that would be oriented around John MacArthur's book,

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The Gospel According to Jesus. We're going to do an episode that centers around the book edited by Michael Horton called

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Christ the Lord. And then we also will do an episode that is centered around the subject matter of the whole

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Christ by Sinclair Ferguson. And so, you can look for those episodes to be coming out over the course of the summer.

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And those are not going to be like formal book reviews, guys. They're just going to be conversations that will deal with some of the subject matter of those books.

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But they're going to be an accessible, I trust, theocast -ish kind of conversation that we hope you'll find encouraging.

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And so, we're going to be dealing with those matters of lordship, salvation, and all those kinds of things, legalism, antinomianism, and the nature of the gospel, the sufficiency of Christ, the marrow controversy, and all of that over the summer.

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But what we want to do today is have an initial conversation about repentance and what it is.

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And I think what we're going to aim to do is talk about it some on the front end in terms of conversion.

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And then we're going to talk about what repentance is in the Christian life in an ongoing way and hopefully point out some of the pitfalls and some of the mistakes, frankly, that people make where categories are collapsed and things get a little bit confusing and unhelpful to the believer.

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And so, here we go. We're just going to take off running. Jon, if I were to just ask you straight away, what is repentance?

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How would you answer that question? Jon Moffitt Historically, how this has been answered is a change of mind.

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This is how it's been interpreted through commentators and through the Reformers. And what it means to give a good example of this from the

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Old Testament is we hear in the Decalogue where it says, you shall have no other gods before me.

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And this is God is telling them to change their mind from a polytheistic understanding to a monotheistic.

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You need to change your mind that it's no longer okay to serve multiple gods. You can only serve one God. So, not only should they change their way of thinking about something being good or bad, but then it's going to affect their actions, which is they should only serve one

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God. That would be a simple example of what repentance would look like in the

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Old Testament and the New Testament. And that change of mind is what produces the change in action.

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Just really briefly on this before we get any further down the road, I agree completely with you. The word, for example, in the

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New Testament for repentance is metanoia, which is a change of mind, as you said, or a change of understanding.

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And I think really what we're discussing, you've already hit one of these pillars. We're talking about a change of mind or a change of understanding with respect to a few really important things.

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One being God, who He is, right? And the fact that He's Creator and He's the only

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God, and thereby we have an obligation to Him. And the second thing is a change of mind or understanding about ourselves, who we are and whether we're good or not, all that kind of thing.

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And then lastly, sort of related, it's a change of mind about how we might be reconciled to God, and it's really specifically there a change of mind about Christ.

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And who He is and what He did, and why we need Him, and how it is that we're united with Him and why we need to be united to Him.

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So it's a change of understanding in all of these ways that then, yes, will produce a change in behavior or a change of course of life.

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But we ought not collapse those things, which I think is where we're going to get in a minute. John, I want to kick it back over to you because I think you were headed somewhere and I sort of jumped in.

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Yeah, no, there's definitely a collapsing of the two understandings of repentance.

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What I mean by two understandings is that there's a call to the sinner who is not under the grace of God and who has not received regeneration.

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There's a call to repentance to that individual. And then there is a call to those who are under grace and who are children of God.

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And then there's another interesting whole dynamic of being the

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Old Testament prophets and their preaching of repentance, right? To a nation. To a nation, right?

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So you have three different categories of repentance, and often we collapse the three.

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And many times we collapse the nation repentance with the believer and confuse those two or even the unbeliever and the nation, assuming that if one repents, then

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God will give them mercy. Like mercy only comes to the repentant. And that is true to the nation.

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And even in Acts, when Peter is speaking about the prophets of old, he's rebuking them.

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We somehow use it as a means to illustrate that we need to be preaching this type of repentance.

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But he was saying the prophets of old were telling you that Messiah was coming and calling you to repent of your ways and obey the law, which will usher in the

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Messiah. And of course, they missed it completely, not according to God's sovereignty, but that's exactly how it unfolded, which we can get into a whole nother time.

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But then we see that we hear verses where it says, repent and your sins will be blotted out.

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And we assume that that is gospel. One, because often you will hear

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John the Baptist or even Jesus mentioned this type of phrases. And because it's in the gospels,

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I'm using air quotes for those of you that are not watching this. We assume that that is tied to the gospel.

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And so, Justin, let's talk about this for a moment. Just because it's in the gospel and John the Baptist or even

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Jesus who calls people to repentance, we have to be careful to not assume that one cannot receive grace unless they've repented is what it makes it sound like.

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Because in the Old Testament to the nation of Israel, they would receive forgiveness and they would receive mercy and grace if they repented.

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But is that true of the unbeliever now, according to the Testament?

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Justin Perdue The way I'm going to lead off my comments on this is with something that I think I've said before behind the mic here.

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We would all be helped if the titles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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Because in the original, the titles are just according to John, is the title.

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And I think the insertion of the gospel according to makes us think that everything contained within them is part and parcel of the good news.

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When as we have pointed out over time, we've talked about this a lot, how much of what's contained in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is actually not gospel, it's law.

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And those statements of law come from any number of people, including John the Baptist and Jesus himself.

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And so with respect to John the Baptist, I think we need to understand who he is. He is effectively the last of the old covenant prophets.

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And so he should be understood much more akin to, pick your prophet,

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Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, etc. than he should be understood as a part of the gospel, like the coming of the

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Messiah itself. John is the forerunner. He is a transitionary figure from the old covenant into the new.

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But ultimately, the new covenant is ushered in by the Messiah himself. And we understand that even

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Jesus, as he is doing ministry on earth and as he is teaching, so often speaks words of law to people in order to unsettle them in their self -righteousness, to crush them with the law, and to show them that what they desperately need is the

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Messiah who comes to fulfill the law for them and to atone for their sins and to reconcile them to God.

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And so many times when Jesus speaks, that's his objective. And so we need to be careful in how we read

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Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then we also need to be careful in how we read the book of Acts, which again,

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I don't want to get us too far down the road here. But the book of Acts contains a bunch of different kinds of things too.

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Now Christ has already ascended and the preaching of the gospel is happening and the gospel is going forth and all of those things.

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That's not debatable at all. But I think what we need to do is be responsible with how we even look at the apostle's language in the book of Acts and not be biblicists in how we read certain passages, right?

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I don't know if you want to go ahead and go into Acts or if you want to make some other comments, man, about prophets and Jesus and John before we do.

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Because so yeah, I guess my last thought, sorry, man, last part of the shot on this is when you hear language of repentance, even from John the

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Baptist, for example, yes, I know it's in John's gospel. I understand these things. But when he says he's preaching a baptism of repentance, we ought not understand that he is preaching the gospel.

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He is preaching something else than the good news itself. That's right.

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Yeah, and to go back to a comment that might be new for a lot of people, when you said biblicism, this is a very important concept for you to understand as it relates to the confusion on repentance.

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I think a lot of people are confused on what is repentance because they are biblicists, and it's not a good word.

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It's a bad word because what it means is you are not allowing the context of the verse to influence and not only the context of the verse, but the surrounding passages and the

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Bible at large to influence what you are. So what biblicists will do is they will look at a verse or a couple of verses and say, this is exactly what it says.

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Matthew 4, 17, for that time, Jesus began to preach, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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See right here, it says it in the text that this is what you should be doing, but you're not looking at who

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Jesus is talking to. What is the immediate reason that Matthew wrote that?

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And at large, what does the entire Bible have to say about repentance and salvation?

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And is Jesus talking to unbelievers or believers? Like those are really important questions. So biblicism doesn't take into account all of scripture and all of theology.

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And I would even say often biblicism doesn't even allow you to systematize scripture. You have to systematize scripture.

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A good example of this is you will not be Trinitarian if you don't allow scripture to be systematized because that's how we come up with the understanding that a monotheistic

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God is triune. Yeah, really quick on biblicism. I think the real pitfalls of it and where it falls short is that it does not take into consideration the canonical context of scripture.

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By that, I mean the whole canon, all 66 books. You don't take the Bible as a cohesive whole and try to hold that together appropriately if you're a biblicist.

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You tend to pit texts against each other as though they contradict themselves or like there's just some mystery here that you've introduced into the text that actually isn't there if you understand the scriptures with an appropriate framework, as you just said.

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And then, yeah, the second pitfall of biblicism is that it is inherently opposed to theological frameworks and theological systems that would even arise out of the text like covenant theology or the distinction between the law and the gospel.

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And so then what you end up doing is saying things that sound schizophrenic because it's over here it says this and over here it says this and how we reconcile the two.

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We're not sure, but they're both kind of true and it becomes very confusing for people. And what ends up happening whenever you collapse categories, clarity is lost and the saints are harmed because peace and assurance before the

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Lord are taken away and the gospel becomes less clear and none of that's ever good.

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And we all have pit passages, well, not all of us, but then you'll see pit passages that become the ones that we run to.

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It's like when you first meet a Calvinist, it's like all they can emphasize are the passages on sovereignty.

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So let's look at this and I put a tweet out there recently that I was trying to help people understand that repentance is a fruit of regeneration.

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It's not the cause of regeneration. So regeneration is what? So regeneration, a good example of this is

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Ephesians when it talks about he took us from death to life, right? It means to regenerate or bring back, it means to give life.

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Yeah, that's a good way of saying that. So we believe that according to Ephesians that we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

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Christ made us alive. So he took us from death to life and that's what regeneration means.

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So to say that repentance is required of sinners in order to receive regeneration or another way of saying this is you must first repent before you can receive mercy for sins or before you can be brought into the family of God.

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You often you can hear this repent and believe and you know, as Peter says, but we have to be very careful that we understand in context.

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I agree like just like when it says in John 3 16 for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. Whoever believes, sorry, that's

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John 10. But I believe that for God so the world that he gave his son,

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I believe all of that. But that's not disconnected from the fact that you are dead.

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You are in Adam because you were in Adam. You were born sinner. And so to think that one has the capacity to repent.

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So here's the problem, Justin. We'll talk about this in a minute. Yeah, for a minute. So we're talking about before one is alive in Christ.

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Okay. Yes. Before one is alive in Christ. I absolutely believe in the command that is given to us by Christ that one must repent.

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I believe that it's a legitimate command and even the imperative to believe.

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That's right. Yep. It is an imperative to believe you have to believe in order to receive Christ. A dead person cannot spiritually speaking cannot repent.

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Not only that, let's say they can change their direction.

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They were trapped in sin, and now they're no longer trapped in sin. I don't believe

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Jesus means in general, and I don't believe God means in general. If you're going to turn away from your sin and receive forgiveness of sins, you have to be able to turn away from all of your sin.

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If this is what he's talking about, and I don't think it's possible to turn away from not loving

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God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, because we don't have the capacity to do that.

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That's the thing about this is that if you're saying one must repent in order to be saved, then no one will ever be saved.

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Let me talk a little bit about the order of salvation, as it's been understood, or in theological vernacular, the order salutis.

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All we mean here is trying to break apart how it is that someone comes to faith and is saved.

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We understand, along with the Reformed through history, that regeneration,

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God's sovereign work of giving life to a dead sinner, precedes faith and repentance, and that faith and repentance are both fruits of regeneration.

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Obviously, our conversation today is about repentance. Life must be given by God in order for a sinner to have this change of mind.

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It is granted by the Lord, and we are united to Christ by faith given to us by God.

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Our minds are quite literally changed by God as we hear the message of the law and the gospel.

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Thereby, we are, as I've already said, united to Christ and are saved. We've got to get this really clear, because if we do say what you just said, that you must repent first in order to receive grace or you must repent first in order to receive mercy from God, then no one will ever receive mercy or grace.

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You are making repentance the efficient cause of receiving grace, life, mercy, etc.

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from the Lord. You really have turned it into a work that a human being must do.

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I would argue that you do the same thing with faith, if you think in these terms. You're turning faith into something that the person must do that is then the effective cause of salvation.

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Whereas we would understand Jesus is the one who saves, and God, in His sovereign grace and mercy, gives life to dead sinners.

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This is related to a number of things in my own mind, John. I know we're going to get to the whole Christ later this summer, but just a brief little insertion here.

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What sparked the Marrow controversy in the Church of Scotland was a question, effectively this question, must a person forsake sin in order to come to Christ?

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Which is essentially what we're talking about today. We're talking about right now. Must a person forsake sin and turn from sin in order to come to the

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Lord Jesus Christ? And the answer to that question that split the Church of Scotland apart on the part of some brothers in Christ was no.

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If we need to do anything in order to come to Christ, then no one will come to Christ, because we can't.

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That's right, because we believe in a very important doctrine that all in Adam died.

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Forget Calvinism. I want to say true Calvinists cannot believe this.

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If you're a Calvinist, you cannot believe you have the capacity to repent on your own without Christ.

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Or the Holy Spirit's power. You cannot do it because in Adam all died. That's right. So this is why we always say repentance is a fruit of our salvation.

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And faith and repentance happen simultaneously. We're going to get into this in a moment. What does repentance look like after salvation?

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We're going to talk about that in a moment. But I want to belabor this point that if you go to someone and you require them to repent of sin in order to come to Christ, I'm sorry, but you are preaching to dead men's bones and telling dead men's bones to do things that cannot be done.

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And if you call yourself a Calvinist, you're confused because depravity demands us to preach the gospel, and the gospel would lead one to faith and repentance.

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Amen. Really quickly, John, on this, I just want to jump in. Sorry, brother. From the 1689

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London Baptist Confession, this is chapter 14 on saving faith, but I think this needs to be stated because what you're saying right now is entirely right.

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On the front end of this thing, when we're talking about somebody being converted and united to the Lord Jesus Christ initially, it really is not a wise thing in an ultimate sense to try to pull faith and repentance apart because it becomes very clear that they do go together in this regard.

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For example, chapter 14, paragraph 2 at the very end of it of the 1689 Confession says this, The principal acts of saving faith focus directly on Christ, accepting, receiving, and resting upon Him alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace.

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I think when you state things that way, it's very clear that a person only does such a thing like resting, receiving, trusting in, hoping in the

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Lord Jesus Christ because that individual has been given life from God and has also come to see that God is

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God, is holy, and we are not. I'm undone and I need a Redeemer, and Christ is

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Him, and I am casting myself completely upon Jesus and depending on Him, not me, on Him and nothing else.

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That is evidence that this change of mind has been wrought in a person, and it's evidence that the

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Lord has given someone life that they would ever say, I need Christ and I'm trusting Him. When we talk this way,

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I think it's helpful. One more comment, if I may, in terms of how a lot of times people say things about repentance and faith that are super confusing.

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They go to the book of Acts, and they will cite Acts chapter 2 with Peter.

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What must we do to be saved? Peter says, repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins. But then later, for example, in Acts chapter 13,

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Paul will say that, for example, let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, this man being

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Jesus, and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses.

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Or the Philippian jailer in chapter 16, when he's undone, people remember the story how there are disciples of Christ in the jail and then miraculously chains fall off and the gate swings open and the

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Philippian jailer is going to kill himself because he's going to be ruined because he's allowed all the prisoners to escape. The disciples look at him and say, don't kill yourself.

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He basically ends up asking, what do I need to do to be saved? They say, believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved. I think what we need to see is that the presentation, even in the book of Acts, you see certain times repentance is stated, other times faith is stated, and instead of pitting those against each other and making it sound like schizophrenia,

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I think it's a better answer. What we're giving today is a better solution to say, yeah, that all of this is a fruit of regeneration of the new birth and what's happening here is the change of mind is wrought and a person believes in Christ.

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This happens in our experience practically simultaneously. That's right. On the front end, we're talking about the front end.

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That's right. Speaking of the front end, when you see Jesus using a phrase like,

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I have come to seek and to save the lost, I have come to the sick, the blind, the needy, you are hearing

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Jesus say, normally he says this to the Pharisees. He's saying this to the self -righteous because they're standing before him and they don't believe he's the

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Messiah. They don't believe they need to trust in him and they can't see that they're sick.

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They can't see they're sinners. So, Jesus is saying the thing you need to repent of or the thing you need to see against the law is that you are sinful, you are sick, you are depraved, and they can't do it.

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This is why even in John 6, it says that the Father has to open their eyes in order for them to see it.

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Then he says things like, my sheep will hear my voice and they will come unto me, they will know me, they will hear me.

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And so, when you hear Jesus speaking of repentance before he goes to the cross, he's talking about the self -righteous.

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He even uses the illustration of the two men in the temple, right? Which one walked away justified?

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The one who is beating his chest, who understands he needs mercy.

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Be merciful to me. And then who's self -righteous? Lord, I'm so thankful I'm not like this man. Jesus gives the exact illustration of what these people need to repent of.

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My conviction is that Jesus came preaching repentance of self -righteousness.

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Stop trying to save yourself by yourself. That's what he came preaching.

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And so, I would say that when we're preaching repentance, we would do well to do the same, to tell people as you preach the law, the law crushes people.

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You have them look at the law and say, see, you can't save yourself, so to repent of that and turn to Christ.

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And we know that if they do this, you can see them turn away from self -salvation and they turn to Christ.

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Immediately, we can say that is a fruit of the Spirit. And to be able to do that, you have to have the

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Spirit of regeneration in you. To turn from self -salvation to God's salvation is without doubt a change of mind that is wrought by the

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Holy Spirit. Right. And it's wrought of the Holy Spirit. So, I'm going to read from the 1689 again briefly, just to keep referring back to Reformed Confessions.

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So, chapter 15 on repentance to life and salvation, paragraph one reads this way.

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Some of the elect are converted after their early years, having lived in the natural state, that is without the

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Spirit, for a time and served various evil desires and pleasures. Then this, God gives these repentance to life as part of their effectual calling.

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So, it's very clear that God is the one. Acts chapter 11 is like this.

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The words of Titus 3 are like this, that God grants repentance to people as a part of his effectual calling on their lives, meaning

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God has said to a dead person, live. Like when Jesus says to Lazarus, come out of the tomb, the one who gave the command gives the life so that the command can be heeded.

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It's the same with us. God effectively looks at us and says, live. And what happens?

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It's like, again, simultaneously in our experiences, the law and the gospel is preached and Christ is heralded.

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Scales are knocked off our eyes and we immediately see that we are ruined before a

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Holy God and that Christ is our Savior. That he has atoned for my sin, he has accomplished my righteousness, he has secured my sanctification, he has secured my resurrection.

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I need him and I'm trusting him. Justin Perdue That's right. And so, this does not contradict passages like Acts 17 30, where he says, in the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

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We would say heartily, amen. Amen. Repent unto Christ. Fall upon Christ.

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Amen to that. So, Justin, for just a couple of minutes here. Justin Perdue Let's talk about in the

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Christian life. Justin Perdue Yeah. And then we're going to have to really take this into the simple reformanda, but we'll just kind of tee it up here for a little bit.

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Often when people hear me say this, what they're saying then, John, is, John, if you preach that, then people will live however they want.

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No, look, you have to understand the difference between preaching the gospel to the unbeliever and preaching the gospel to the believer.

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It's the same gospel, but the application does have its differences. You're calling someone unto faith and then you're calling someone to live out their faith, as James says, right?

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Faith without works is a dead faith. Justin and I believe that. Repentance is a fruit.

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It's a real fruit and it should be happening. And I think it is a wonderful fruit that God repents us.

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I mean, we often look at repentance as something that we can do on our own and it's not.

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It's a spirit rot work. It's something that happens to us. We will repent, but I will tell you that there's nowhere in scripture that indicates that you have the capacity to repent of all your sins all of the time.

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That would mean you don't walk by faith, you walk by repentance. That's not the command that we've been given.

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I just want to read you a couple of passages that I think are helpful. We need to be living in a life of repentance.

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What that means is we're constantly changing our mind from trusting in the lie of Satan to to believe in the sufficiency of something outside of Jesus Christ.

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All sin can be summarized basically of trusting in something else is more sufficient than Jesus.

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And then we end up fear, anxiety, lust, anger, all of that comes out of us. And where we must find our rest is we do not have the capacity to repent of all sin.

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We need to, Justin, I would both agree, we need to repent of known sin. And if we're actively in a sin, we need to change our mind about that and walk away from it, change the direction.

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But where we also rest is in the reality of, for instance,

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Hebrews 4 .16, let us with confidence draw near to the throne of grace. Why should we have confidence?

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Well, the whole book of Hebrews is about the sufficiency of Jesus being our mediator.

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And it says that we might receive mercy and find grace in a time of need.

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When do you need grace and mercy for sinners, Justin? When you're sinning. I must continue here in Hebrews.

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It says in chapter 10, therefore, brothers, since we have the confidence to enter in the holy places by the blood of Jesus.

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So we don't have confidence to walk into the presence of God because we've done righteous things. It's because we don't do righteous things.

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It's the blood of Jesus. By the new and living way that he opened up for us through the curtain, that is through his flesh.

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And since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, where the heart sprinkled clean from the evil conscience and our bodies washed with the pure water.

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Let us hold fast the confession of our hope while wavering for for he who promised is faithful.

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He's faithful, not us. So that's where our confidence lies. So yes, we repent.

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But Justin, you and I both know we don't feel that we are good with God because of our repentance.

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We feel we are good with God because of Christ's blood being sprinkled upon us and God is faithful.

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That's where we rest. No, amen. I mean, Hebrews 12, 24, you know, the blood of Christ speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

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Well, that word effectively is, it is finished. And that's where our confidence is found. Amen, completely.

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There are so many other passages that are just kind of popcorning around in my brain right now that I think are helpful in this conversation.

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I mean, 1 John 1, 8 through 2, 2 is really good because we're told that if we say that we have no sin, then we make

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God out to be a liar and the truth isn't in us. But what we're encouraged to do is to confess our sins because God is faithful and just in the

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Lord Jesus Christ to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And John then says,

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I'm writing this, little children, I'm writing this, beloved, I'm writing this so that you might not sin. But if anybody does, know that we have an advocate with the

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Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous. He's the propitiation and the satisfaction for our sins. And so we're encouraged to confess sin and to acknowledge sin and to trust the

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Lord in Christ that we are absolved and that we're forgiven and that we're righteous. And so, yeah, we're not saved by our confession.

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We're not saved by our repentance, but God will continually grant these things to His saints.

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And we live a life, as has been said so many times, of continual repentance, because we understand that when it comes to us, we are always failing.

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And then we are casting ourselves anew upon the one who has paid for every failure. As I say things like this,

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John, I'm saying this to myself as much as I am to the listener because I need to be reminded of these things because I tend to be very bothered and grieved by my sin.

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I'm not saying that I'm grieved as much as I should be because that's a whole other hyper -introspective

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Pandora's box of things. But when we encounter sin in our lives, our tendency is to be bothered by that, to be concerned by it.

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We question whether we're legitimate. We doubt whether we're gods and all these things. And I think my word there is instead of having that mindset, we should be reminded that the fact that we're even grieved by our sin in the first place is evidence that we now belong to Christ.

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And what we are encouraged to do is to continue to take our sin to the Lord, to confess it to Him, to confess it to our brothers and sisters, and then to be absolved in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And there are various other texts in the Scriptures for sure where you see the apostles exhorting churches to repentance.

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Many times that's because they're turning to a different way of salvation. I'm thinking of Galatians. I'm thinking of Hebrews.

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Not neglecting such a great salvation means don't go back to the law. Then you have certainly passages like the letter to the

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Corinthians where Paul will in various places do kind of a law gospel thing, and he's rebuking them for how they understand

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Christian freedom effectively. You think that sexual promiscuity and gross sexual immorality is an expression of Christian freedom.

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Don't you know that people who do these things won't inherit the kingdom of God? Why would you engage in things that the judgment of God is coming for?

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But you used to be this. You've been cleansed. This isn't who you are now. So that's sort of the word of Paul in Ephesians.

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It's the word of Paul in Corinthians. Remember who you are. You're not this anymore. It's a very consistent message.

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Don't go toward another gospel. Don't revert back to self -salvation. Don't go back to the law.

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And then remember who you are now in the Lord Jesus Christ and live that way. And we always are having to be reminded of these things because we go astray.

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Full stop. So Justin, for those of you that are new, we do a podcast and I'll let Justin explain that.

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But I think in Semper Firmanda, what I would like to now take us into is the confusion that repentance is a fruit, but just like other fruits like joy, meekness, patience, long -suffering, they aren't full and complete.

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And repentance isn't full and complete. In other words, I'll say this now and explain it later. Just because you're now a believer doesn't mean all sin will always be repented of fully and completely forever.

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Otherwise, that means we could be perfect. I'll leave that here and we'll explain later. Justin Perdue Oh, listener.

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Dear listener, notice what John Moffat just did, how he set it up. And man, he just took it right away.

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He kind of dangled it in front of you and he's like, oh, but not for now. We're going to talk about it later. If you want to be a part of the conversation that we're going to have, that John has just teed up for us, we're going to have that in the other podcast that we offer weekly called

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Semper Reformanda. And that podcast is for people who have partnered with our ministry and have locked arms with us to see this message of the sufficiency of Christ and the rest that is ours in Him spread as far and wide as possible.

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So if you want more information about Semper Reformanda, how you can become a part of this great thing that the

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Lord is doing and how you can get more involved with Theocast and meet other people that think like you and are wrestling through the same things you are, then go over to our website, theocast .org.

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You can learn everything about Semper Reformanda over there. So for many of you, we'll talk with you again next week on the regular edition of the podcast.

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And for others of you, we're going to talk with you in just a few minutes, I trust, as you go over to your

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Semper Reformanda feed and listen in on the conversation there. Take care.