Blog on the Lillypad
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
 | AW Pink on Repentance (edited for brevity)
What it is not 1. Trembling beneath the preaching of God’s Word is not repentance...Felix “trembled” (Acts 24:25) under the preaching of Paul! [but never converted to Christ] |
2. Being “almost persuaded” is not repentance. Agrippa (Acts 26:28) is a case in point. A person may give full assent to the messages of God’s servants, admire the Gospel, yea, “receive the Word with joy,” and after all be only a stony-ground hearer (Matt. 13:20, 21). Not only so, he may be conscious of his evil-doing and acknowledge the same. Pharaoh owned “I have sinned against the Lord your God” (Ex. 10:16).
3. Humbling ourselves beneath the mighty hand of God is not repentance. People may be deeply moved, weep, go home and determine to reform their lives, and yet return to their sins. A solemn example of this is found in Ahab.... We are told that he “rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted . . . and went softly” (1 Kings 21:27-29). Yet in the very next chapter we find him again rebelling against God.
4. Confessing sins is not repentance. Thousands have gone forward to the “altar”...but without any deep realization of the unspeakable awfulness of their sins, or a spark of holy hatred of them. The sequel has shown this, for they now ignore God’s commandments as much as they did before.
5. You may even do works meet for repentance, and yet remain impenitent....Judas confessed his sins to the priests, and returned their money (Matt. 27:3-5), and then he went out...and hanged himself!
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Repentance, then, presupposes, first, a recognition and acknowledgment of God’s claims upon us as our Creator, Governor, Provider and Protector.
Because God is who and what He is, namely, the sum and source of all moral and spiritual excellency, and because of our relation to Him as creatures completely dependent upon Him, He is infinitely entitled to be loved with all our hearts, worshipped with fullest adoration, and served with joyous, perfect and unremitting obedience. Until there is at least some measure of a clear and definite (we do not say full) recognition of this, the mind is yet under the blinding power of Satan (2 Cor. 4:4) and the heart is yet alienated from God (Eph. 4:18).
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The first evidence that this supernatural enlightenment has been given, is the inward apprehension of God’s excellency and supremacy, accompanied by a horrified consciousness of how dreadfully I have failed, all through my life, to give Him His rightful place in my heart and life.
In the second place true repentance presupposes a hearty approval of God’s law and a full consent to its righteous requirements. “The law is holy, and the commandment is holy, and just, and good” (Rom. 7:12); it cannot be otherwise, for God is its Author, and nothing unholy, unjust, or evil could ever proceed from Him....
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What it is
Thus, genuine and saving repentance is a taking sides with God against myself. It is not that our repentance extirpates our sins, for there is nothing meritorious about it.... No, repentance is designed to make the heart loathe sin, and that through a deep sense of its infinite enormity and dreadful pollution: it is to make us dread sin through a heart-realization of its awful guilt. Only thus is the stubborn will broken and the heart made contrite and prepared to turn unto the Lord Jesus and seek salvation through Him by grace alone.
