“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants”―Luke 15:18, 19.
THEOLOGIANS have often discussed the relative place of repentance and faith, and have argued strenuously as to which comes first in the soul’s experience. The fact is they are so intimately connected that no man would rent in the Scriptural sense who did not believe what God has declared concerning sin, its punishment, and its remedy, and no man would put his faith in the gospel message and trust the Lord Jesus as his Saviour who had not been brought to repentance. It should be borne in mind that there is nothing meritorious in this. To repent is to change the mind. It involves a reversal of one’s attitude toward self, sin, and God. This comes out very clearly in the case of the prodigal. Proud, haughty, self-sufficient, and indifferent to his father’s love, he left for the far country. Humbled, subdued, penitent, and awake to a sense of his sin against his father’s goodness, he started back to the home he had left sometime before with such utter unconcern. In this we see both repentance and faith manifested.
“The Prodigal, with earthly comforts fled,
Thought not about a father’s care—his dream
Was mostly of the abundant food that fed
Those wild young days as swift as a mountain stream:
And here, in this far country, dwelled no man
Who grieved that the wants of swine were better met—
He would arise—then lo, his heart began
To say the litany of true regret—
Forgiveness, just forgiveness, was his plea—
The strange new hunger that oppressed him so;
Thus step on striving step he came to know
How vast his father’s tenderness—a sea
With waves of love and mercy rolling in
To wash away the weariness of sin.”
—Kathrine H. Williams.