Repentance Is Required

Q: “Who, me?”
A: Yes, you. Jesus Christ calls all men to repent.

Q: But I’m not a sinner!”
A: That’s not what the Bible says.

Q: “Okay, so we’re all sinners, but why do we have to repent if everyone is going to heaven?”
A: Because there is judgment for sin…both on earth and in heaven.

Q: “But don’t my wife and children need to repent, too?”
A: Of course, they do…but shouldn’t you be setting an example for them instead of deflecting attention from your own sins?

Q: “Alright, where do I start?”
A: We start with making sure we understand what repentance is.

The Greek word that the apostles used for “repent” meant “to change” – specifically, “to change one’s mind or purpose.” This is what God is calling you to do through Jesus Christ. If you’re going to have a good relationship with God through Christ, you are going to have to change because He doesn’t need to. And besides, if He ever changed it would mean our ruination for He is perfect…and any change in Him would make Him less than that.

One of the best synonyms or metaphors for repenting is to “turn.” Repentance is a turning from self to God. It’s a turning from ignorance to knowledge. It’s a turning from darkness to light. It’s a turning from living for yourself to living for God through Christ.

There can be no turning to God without turning to Jesus Christ for that is the way God has designated that we should turn to Him. In Jesus Christ we find God – and we find Him no other way. If you find Jesus Christ, you’ve found God; if you try to find God any other way you’ll be misled. Through Jesus Christ, God forgives our sins and that’s what enables our repentance – our change, our turning. If our sins are forgiven, we can walk free from them.

Some people mistakenly think that repentance means regret – being sorry for your sins. Sure, regret can and should motivate us to repentance – but regret itself is not repentance. Being sorrowful about our sinning is of no use if we do not change. For this reason, it is better to repent without regret than to regret without repenting. Jesus doesn’t want us to work off the debt of our past sins because He has taken care of that debt. What he wants is for us to start doing right instead of doing wrong. This is the way any right-minded parent thinks. You don’t want your child to live in depression because of his past shenanigans; rather, you just want him to do right and enjoy life right now.

To summarize what we’ve covered so far, repentance means to change – to change from sin to righteousness, from thinking wrong and doing wrong to thinking right and doing right. Righteousness is the way God would do things if He were walking in our shoes. That’s what the life of Jesus was all about: to show how God would act as a human being. Thus Jesus is our great example of righteousness. He knew no sin…except ours. We know no righteousness…except His.

Some people balk at repenting because they don’t think sin is that bad. If sin were not that bad, Jesus would not have had to die to redeem us from it. Sin leads to death. Inexorably. Because Adam and Eve sinned, the entire creation fell into the grip of evil, such that we find evil at every turn in life. There is no place on the globe where it cannot be found. For even if you arrive at a place where there are no other people, you will bring evil there just by bringing yourself. Not all of the evil you have experienced in life is a consequence of your own sins, but a great deal of it is. And what’s not from your own sins is from the sins of the others. All evil in the world is result of sin. The easiest sins for us to stop are our own. And our means of stopping it is to repent – to be different, to be better.

Some people become busybodies by focusing their thoughts about repentance on the sins of others. These are the “social justice warriors” who cannot see sin in themselves because they’re too busy condemning it in others. Such behavior becomes even more counterproductive when they harp on the sins of dead people. These include people who were never slaves calling for reparations to be paid by people who were never slaveowners. I cannot repent of someone else’s sin; I can only repent of my own. Let’s get the sin out of our own lives, and then we might be able to help someone else get on the right track.

God judges all sin – our sins as well as the sins of others. He judges sins both on earth and in heaven. His judgment in heaven is the once-for-all judgment that comes at the end of our earthly lives. God’s final judgment of Jesus’ life was that He was raised to the highest place of honor in heaven. The rest of us will be similarly raised, but how highly we’re placed in heaven will be function of how we lived on earth. Some of us will, of course, be raised higher than others, but no one will be raised higher than Jesus because no one will have lived life that righteously.

God doesn’t just judge our lives at their end; He also judges them on this earth. We’ve all experienced His judgments – His wrath – when we know deep down that we’ve brought some evil on ourselves that we deserved. That is, we’ve reaped evil from the evil we’ve sown. Such harvests happen to individuals and to nations. As for nations, in America right now, we can see our country reaping a whirlwind of calamity for the calamities we’ve sown. For example, we’ve killed over 60 million babies in their mothers’ wombs, and we let abortion providers sell the baby body parts for profit. Is God going to let a nation that does these kinds of things get away with it? History tells us no; nations rise and fall just as individuals live and die. Of course, not all evil gets fully recompensed in this life, which is why each of us must face a final judgment – a final accounting that will right all wrongs that have not previously be righted.

We cannot repent for the whole of America. That is, whatever we’ve sown as a nation, we will have to reap as a nation. We cannot make things better by becoming like the social justice warriors who only want to focus on the sins of others. We can, however, look to find pockets of deliverance in the midst of national judgments – pockets for ourselves and our families if we men set our hearts to individually repent. As a citizen of America, for example, I am limited in what I can do about abortion. I can do some things, and all that I can do I should do. But I cannot eradicate this evil from our land by myself. What I can do, however, is stop the sins that I myself commit. I stop them by studying the Bible and putting it into practice – loving God with everything I’ve got and loving my neighbor as myself. If I successfully repent of my own sins, then I reduce the individual wrath I face in this life, and I find protection from national wrath for myself and my family through the promises of God – documented in the Bible just as the commandments are. Those promises are for protection and provision – just the sort of things by which a father distinguishes himself. The God who calls us to be good fathers is Himself the epitome of a good father. No father has ever provided and protected as well as He does.

At this point, someone will surely think, “But Jesus died a unfair, torturous, and lonely death; where was a heavenly Father’s protection and provision in that?” In the resurrection on the third day. Sometimes the only way to the mountain is through the valley of the shadow of death. When a son walks that path righteously, the father is all the more proud of him. There is more to life than our next meal. Fathers have to teach as well as provide and protect. Sometimes we have to learn obedience through undeserved sufferings – as the Son of God did. The Father’s deliverance for us won’t always come at the time and place of our choosing, but, when it doesn’t it will always be more fitting, lasting, and glorious than we could have imagined.

To receive deliverance from individual and national wrath, whether that deliverance is going to come easily or with difficulty, repentance must be practiced as a lifestyle – not as a one-time event. For me to become like Jesus is going to take a lot more acts of repentance than one – no matter how big that one change is. If I can repent of one bad behavior today, I can better see what else I need to change tomorrow. We must repent daily, finding some thought or behavior pattern to reform. Every time we read the Bible – and we should do so every day – we’re going to learn more about righteousness. And we need to practice those learnings to make them a permanent part of our character. A life of this kind of daily repentance will take us from a life of sin to a life of righteousness.

John the Baptist preached repentance and baptized people with water, but we get to be baptized with the Bible. That is, we can immerse ourselves in it, turning to it every day. God’s word is like water that washes away our sins, refreshing our souls. It’s the Bible that tells us about Jesus Christ, which paints for us the picture of righteousness toward which we can direct our repentance. The more familiar we become with the Bible, the more familiar we become with God’s righteousness, leaving our sinful thoughts, words, and behavior farther and farther back in the rear view mirror.

True daily repentance starts with heart, and works outward through words and deeds. Therefore, the heart is where righteousness must begin. For the leaves of tree to be healthy, the branches have to be healthy; and for the branches to be healthy, the roots have to be healthy. All our words and behaviors are rooted in our thoughts. If Christ rules your thought life, He rules your whole life; but if your thought life is strictly your own business, then you’ll never stop being sinful – no matter how hard you try.

Though repentance is not a once-and-done process, it does have a first step – a foundational phase. That is to turn to Jesus Christ, submitting the entirety of your life to His authority. By enslaving ourselves to Him, we free ourselves from selfishness. By contrast, those who resist Christ’s rule become shackled even more heavily to the enslavement of sin. Jesus of Nazareth didn’t come just to be admired – He came to be obeyed. His commandments are good for us…and for others. There should therefore be no hesitation in us about following His commandments. How could it be bad to love God and love people?

Men – most of all – should lead their families in repentance, being examples for each other and their respective families. A man was not designed to lord it over his wife and children, but rather to provide for and protect them. The children are his flock and his wife is his helpmate in the care of those children. A man must lay aside all vanity and demonstrate Jesus to his children day after day. He also is to be the chief Bible teacher in the family, encouraging all family members to be constantly speaking God’s truths to each other. If he is not on a quest to learn all he can about righteousness, he has no right to expect his children to honor him. The mark of a good man is to care more about his children’s future than his own. Our culture started deteriorating when men stopped caring deeply about their children; repentance is the only move that can get things back on the right track.

Repentance is good for you, men. It is refreshing to the soul. It delivers us from evil, helping us on earth for the here and now. And our degree of repentance on earth affects our placement in heaven for the hereafter. That is, repentance now helps us now and later. Repentance therefore helps us constantly and eternally. Don’t postpone it!

God intends this life to be a journey from sin to righteousness, from either ignoring or else giving lip service to Jesus Christ to living your life entirely for His benefit. You will be shocked – and thrilled – when you find out just how rewarding that kind of life can be. Repentance is the path from death to life. Let us walk it with determination and appreciation…one day at a time.