During a recent hospital stay I spoke to one of my nurses concerning the things of the Lord. It seems she was caught up in the new Grace Movement; that is, majoring on grace at the exclusion and expense of all other Bible doctrines. She mentioned her "Media Minister" on television, located somewhere in the Orient. She quoted him when attempting to prove her point on grace, "What good has preaching individual repentance done us? To which I could have argued, "What good has preaching an isolated grace done us? The followers of this pseudo-grace movement, I have observed, are the very ones Jude refers to in his brief epistle, "Ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness." This type of teaching on grace is a disgrace!
There has been much, some very heated, discussion on the meaning of the word repentance. But there is no need for lexicons, dictionaries, or the Greek. Our good old reliable K.J.V. interprets it for us. "Turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God. Surely after that I was turned, I repented." Repentance is a gift of God's grace to an individual (2Tim. 2:25). Repentance is not apart from God's grace, it is an intricate part of His grace. As Oswald Chambers writes, "It is the threshold of knowing and understanding God...it is the bedrock of Christianity." And when it takes place, there is a radical u-turn in one's life. It is not only a change in direction, but in a person's thinking, actions, and principles; your entire lifestyle, inward and outward is changed.
It is important to realize repentance has not only to do with our unrighteousness, but our self-righteousness. We're to repent of our virtues as well as our vices. The thing that kept David so long from repenting was, no doubt, his reputation. But when he did, it was a "true repentance." Augustine wrote, "Repentance damns many" (speaking of false repentance). And as the Puritan, Thomas Watson, says, "A broken bone, if not set properly, will result in a person being a cripple all their life. So it is with repentance, one will go through life not fully healed." Beware of substituting remorse for repentance. The former's attention is centered on you, the latter on God.
Repentance is fundamental to all Bible preaching: John the Baptist preached it; Jesus commissioned the twelve to preach it; Peter preached it at Pentecost; Paul preached it to the Gentiles; and our glorified Lord preached it to the seven churches. And that, my friend, is why I've preach it it these many years, and will continue as long as God gives me breath.
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