“REPENTANCE toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:2323Save that the Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions abide me. (Acts 20:23)), was the apostle’s testimony to men, whether Jews or Gentiles. God is holy; He is light—in Him there is no darkness at all; He hates sin, which is contrary to His nature. Man is by nature a lover of sin—he is unholy. Hence, when man in his natural state approaches God, he cannot but feel what he is—his conscience tells him what he has done, and what he has done the truth teaches him God hates. The first right thoughts we had of ourselves were like those of Job when brought into God’s presence; he said, “I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” The holiness of God, brought by the light of His truth to bear upon what we are, withers up every vain pretension in which we may have indulged concerning our goodness, and consumes within us every idle hope to satisfy God in our strength with which we comforted ourselves. As the human heart learns God, there is repentance—entire change of mind as to what we are, and as to what we have done, whether our thoughts or our ways; and the end is entire abhorring of self.
Together with this sense of what we are and of what sin is, there will be a doing of works meet for repentance, as the apostle preached, “That they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance.” (Acts 26:2020But showed first unto them of Damascus, and at Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judea, and then to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance. (Acts 26:20).) That kind of repentance which does not carry with it works meet for repentance, is merely a name for a real dealing with God as to our own personal sins, and is therefore a delusion. There may be a so-called repentance for having done a bad act, and yet the same kind of evil deed may be straightway and willfully repeated. This is not turning to God, for if we truly turn to the holy God we must turn from evil, as did the Thessalonians: “They turned to God from idols.” Lot’s wife turned her face to Sodom, and so was lost. Many a poor sinner is professedly on the way to safety who has not turned from sin; his heart is not repentant, and he goes on, like Lot’s wife, without reality of soul.
We must not sit down and measure out what we consider is a sufficient quantity of repentance, and say, “Now I have repented sufficiently,” or “I have not repented enough,” for then we shall be thinking about our repentance, and not of God. The point is, turning to God, and those who turn to God do turn from sin. It is no light thing for a sinner to turn to the holy God. Naturally we shrink from having to do with God. Like Adam, we hide from His voice. A vast amount of the world’s pleasures—and religion, too—is simply machinery to keep us as far as may be from God’s presence. The best test to prove where we are, is to inquire if we are now, at this very moment, in God’s presence as to our sins and ourselves. Unless this be the case, and unless we have made a clean breast of our doings to God, we have hardly learned what repentance towards God is.
It was by a long process that Job at length came into God’s presence. There was muck dealing of God with him to bring him to learn himself. And if it were so with Job one of God’s people, who needed a deer sense of God in his soul, what is the case respecting sinners who, not having the new life, have thoughts of God and holiness which are mean and worthless?
Never, until the cross of His Son, had God fully revealed to man what His thoughts of sin and of righteousness were. The law demanded righteousness of man; and, in the days of the law some thought, as SOME think in the days of the gospel, that there was ability in man to fulfill the demands of the law. The cross of Christ requires no righteousness from man—far from it; the cross is the proclamation that God has condemned sin in the flesh. The cross leaves man in himself utterly hopeless. And faith submits to the sentence, saying, “We thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead.” (2 Cor. 5:44For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life. (2 Corinthians 5:4).)
How, then, shall a sinner come into God’s presence? Only as utterly undone and lost. The cross of the Son of God is the most terrible witness to what sin is, and to what sinners are. It leaves us without the faintest trace of expectation to discover one single good thing in self. Therefore a complete bowing of the soul alone befits him who turns to God. And we repeat, that to practice sin in the face of the light of God’s holiness and hatred of sin, is to approach God with a lie in the right hand. Nay, no sinner really repentant towards God could thus act. Wheresoever there is turning to God, there is turning from evil, and doing works meet for repentance. We see it in young and old—even a child is known by his doings.
Now, where there is this repentance toward God, faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ comes very simply to the soul: for when there is true turning from self, Christ in His death for the ungodly is mostly deeply valued. The Lord Jesus Christ has accomplished all the work of sin-bearing, and by that work God is fully magnified, and the Scriptures testify that “by Him all that believe are justified from all things.” The Lord is the Saviour, and His work has accomplished salvation. What has the sinner to do but to believe? “What must I do to be saved?” is the cry of a sin-convicted man, who has repented, and the answer is, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”
The answer is most simple. On God’s side all is done, and we know man can do nothing. No wonder, then, that the sinner, having been awakened to the realization of what his sins are, and having a yearning desire for mercy upon hearing the simple word about the Lord Jesus, leaps forward by faith, and is saved. “By grace are ye saved through faith.”
Thank God! in our day there has been very much of this springing forward into the open arms of the Saviour: still we may justly inquire whether, with the spreading of the testimony of the freeness of grace, there is a sufficient accompaniment of the need of repentance.
Broken hearts need binding up, but hard hearts need breaking; and it is an easier thing to bind up than to break the sinner’s heart. A broken heart is repentant, and there is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner that repenteth.