The Good News About Repentance
Repentance is supposed to beautifully liberate, rather than adding chains.
. 1) The simple, essential definition of repentance is to redirect one’s mind and purpose of heart.
. 2) Repentance is not supposed to contradict the Gospel. We cannot preach the Gospel of grace through faith, and then add a works-based definition of repentance.
. 3) Repentance does not imply or demand that you be able to change yourself. Otherwise, all honest sinners would be horrified and confused by a seemingly contradictory gospel that would not be new or Good News.
a) First they are promised salvation as a gift by grace through faith: But then a faulty definition of repentance would require them to accomplish changing themselves, despite having already confessed to having a fallen nature that sins (which sins are not atoned for by their own works but by the death and resurrection of Jesus).
b). Furthermore, since our fallen nature is corrupt, there are many things about ourselves that we cannot as yet simply choose to stop doing by our own power.
c). The fruit that God is after is only possible in the power and new nature received by grace through faith, as the Spirit provides a born again self. Even then, it is only fueled by His own indwelling and abiding Presence, transforming us from within, with fruits accordingly… And He does so amid the process of sanctification.
. 4) Salvation is not by law but grace, so repentance must be a matter of faith. Then the fruits are a matter of course by that Source from which faith in Jesus now draws. Grace by faith will transform as God’s love is received, fills, transforms, and overflows.
. 5) The entire process of sanctification is a matter of shifting our dependence off of self and onto God as our Entire Source. So again, repentance is about faith.
a). For the unbeliever, to repent is to stop believing all the lies that are made clear to him by the Spirit, which contradict the essential Gospel, and to instead receive the Spirit’s grace to truly believe the Gospel.
b) For believers, repentance is to recognize by the Spirit, the symptoms of believing lies (at whatever level), and to allow the Spirit to provide the truth, as He works in us to will and to do according to God’s loving (Biblical) will in those areas.
c). God’s will is that foundationally, we stop believing lies, as the Spirit applies the truth of God’s Word to the places of our heart that we didn't recognize are struggling to fully realize and live out the simple Gospel.
. 6) So in summary:
For the unbeliever, repentance is about the heart, which is really about faith. Unbelievers need to simply believe the Gospel for real, and as such, they have repented of unbelief, which encompasses all of the ultimate goals of known sin in their lives. But it would be unbiblical to say that they can or have to change themselves in order to get or stay saved. That would be heresy.
.7) For the Believer, repentance is still about faith in God, for the grace that is already ours to be rested upon in the areas of need, with the purposeful faith that grace will progressively free us from the harmfulness of sin… Such faith is resting in God’s perfect, eternal, agape love, and fruitfully receiving (with a yielding heart that God provides), the result of The Spirit’s work in us…
