The Gospel, Faith & Repentance

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The Gospel, Faith & Repentance

December 26, 2021

Merry Christmas! Bryce and I continue in our series on Gospel foundations. This week the foundational principle to the gospel is faith coupled with repentance. Last Sunday we talked about faith being the conduit by which we enter into Christ's righteousness. This can be thought of as mere faith, however, this week we want to walk more fully through the nature of faith and how repentance plays an intimate role in every act of faith. Thanks for listening!

Key Texts:

* 1 Thessalonians 1:9

* Mark 1:14-15

* Psalm 7:12-13

* Psalm 51

My guest joining me this week on the Sunday series is my brother Bryce. Bryce is getting his undergraduate degree in philosophy and hopes to get his MDiv. from a seminary after he completes his undergrad. He hopes to be a pastor shepherding Gods people one day.

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Transcript

There must be, if you receive the gospel truly, it's a repentance turning from sin towards faith and God. And we're not trying to separate these things. We're saying they're one and the same thing.

True faith is always turning. It's turning to faith in God and that's repentance. You're turning from wicked sin towards God.

Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus the Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do. Jesus Christ is Lord of your life.

Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life because God has given him a name that is above every name, so that the name of Jesus Christ every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron. And I will not apologize for this God of the Bible.

[Music] Hello. Welcome to the For The King podcast. Where? What do we do here at the podcast? We recognize Christ as the King whom he was and we just had Christmas.

So, quick friendly reminder, Christ wasn't just King when he sat down at the right hand of the Father. He was Lord at his birth. The Magi come to him and says, "Who has been born here, King of the Jews?" Okay, this is a teaching from the very get-go of Christ's life.

And again, as we've walked through before in our Christology series we did a couple months back, we talk about Christ is the pre-incarnate King. He's always been King. He is King.

So, friendly reminder that we do know of a King who has dominion over the whole earth, over every nation who rules righteously and perfectly at all times. So, if you're listening and you don't know Christ, bend the knee and turn to Christ. And if you do know Christ, keep bending the knee and remind yourself that you serve a great King and humble yourself before him.

So, we've been in the midst of a gospel foundations series and we just had Christmas and we just walked through Christmas. And it's just a wonderful time of the year to remember that Jesus came and was incarnated and became veiled in flesh, God incarnate. And his whole life can be summed up in this King coming.

How are we going to respond to him as we watch God's plan unfold in Christ's life as he's obedient to his Father? How are we going to respond to him? And that is what the gospel is. The good news is Christ did something. He lived a life.

He's perfect, obedient, all the things we walk through obedient to the law. And if we believe and trust in him, we can enter into that righteousness and it can be imputed to us. Now, last week we talked about faith-based righteousness.

You must place your faith in Christ. But accompanying every act of faith is a repentance away from those which were ruling your life and you were worshipping. That happens every time to every believer that's ever placed their faith in Christ at the exact same moment.

They are repenting and turning away from things that they once believed, thought, did, said, worshipped, whatever. So, the text I want to start off with this week is Mark 1, verse 15. Well, I'll just start in 14 and read it real quick.

14 and 15. "Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.' Repent and believe in the gospel." So, Bryce, anything to add? Bryce is here with me this Sunday. Yeah, I mean, the way I've heard it described best is that a true faith is a faith that's a two-sided coin.

It's faith and repentance. It's both, both and. You can't just have one side.

You can't take off the head of a quarter. You have to have both sides of the quarter, right? And this is what we're laying out today. It's faith and repentance.

It's two sides of the same exact quarter, the same coin. Exactly. So, yeah, I think this passage really hits hard on that.

So, if you want to exposs at that. Well, and there's two. Like, there's the two things that happen.

And you can't get one without the other. If you're still holding fast to your sin, you'll never truly believe in trusting Christ if you're still holding fast to your sin. Now, we're not talking about perfect repentance.

We're talking about true repentance. A real measure of grace that God has given you to repent and believe. So, both repentance and faith is a gift of God.

And when Jesus comes and commands this, you know, we have to hope and ask God for the grace and the strength to even act upon such things that happen. But you'll never place your faith in something without repenting of some prior thing that you were believing or trusting in. And you'll never believe in, sorry, you'll never repent of something if you're not turning to something to believe in.

Right. And we're talking about the act of justification, believing in Christ for the first time and relinquishing the authority that obviously sin once happened. The Christ is freeing you from that.

You're relinquishing your allegiance to that because of the grace God has given you as He's opened your eyes to turn to Christ. Right. And the most predominant example of these is when you look in the Old Testament and when the people of God have a reception of the gospel, when they come in contact with the God who delivers them, they don't keep their idols.

They don't keep their Baal idols or Molech idols or Asheroth. They don't keep these things and turn to God. Over and over and over again, when you see God deliver His people, you see a repentance of them tossing out their idols and a faith in Yahweh by turning to Him and His commandments.

Yeah. So you see that duality here of this repentance is the turning and the faith. They're the same thing.

They're happening at the same exact time. So what this does mean is that you cannot have a true faith if there is no repentance, if there is no turning away from sin, if there's no turning away from the world. And in the same token, you cannot have true repentance if you're not putting your faith in something.

In the true Christ, which is what we're doing in this gospel. We need to know who Christ is because you can, in a sense, you can repent. People do this all the time.

Alcoholics Anonymous, if it's not based in faith in Christ, you can turn away from one addiction and go straight to the next addiction. The only freeing addiction is to be addicted to Christ. So we must have the right, if you're going to repent, you can't repent unless you're turning to something.

Yeah. Right? And then it must be the thing that frees you. Right.

Which is Christ. And just going, even when we see, if you read through first and second Samuel, first and second Kings, first and second Chronicles, these stories of the kings of Israel and the ones that God was displeased with always were the ones that were given over to what God had not commanded them. So what must they do to be right with God? Or even just think about the story of David.

Nathan comes to David, gives him this story, this prophetic story about David having taken another man's one lonely sheep when he had all the sheep or whatever. He had all the things he could ever want. And he takes this one man's sheep, his one lonely sheep and steals it and tells him the story and what this day would do when we read it in Psalm 51.

He repents. He has a contrite heart. He asks God, please do not take your Holy Spirit from me.

Restore to me the joy of your salvation and then repents and turns back to God. So this is not like a, and again, we believe obviously now that was an act of sanctification. David was obviously a Godly man and believed in God Yahweh before that.

And that faith was counted to him as righteousness, just like Abraham, because he was falling in the footsteps of his father Abraham. So that is an act of sanctification of turning away from sin later on in a believer's life. But we're talking about this very first act of believing in the gospel.

And that must be a relinquishing of all that you once held dear before. And sometimes we gain disordered passions later on in our Christian walk and we must repent of those and turn back to Christ, which is what's happening with the Israelites. Those are more instances of sanctification happening.

But there are times when they are literally, they have gone astray and there is, they need to be justified once again before God because they were in a works based covenant. Where the blessing is cut off from them if they do not do the stipulations of the covenant, sanctions will be applied. So that's kind of my exposition and exegesis of the text throughout scripture that way that out, especially Psalm 51 is a great one if you just want to know.

My first act of repentance, what must it look like? Well, it must look exactly like David's, but instead of one particular sin, it's allegiance to sin in its entirety and turning to Christ in faith in his entirety. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And what Rocky doesn't mean there with the Old Testament is not that you can lose justification and find justification once again. Because once you're justified, and this is, we'll probably get on this later on in the future, but once you're justified, you are secured because you have Christ's righteousness and you can't lose it.

Yeah. Neither death nor life, angel nor demon, nothing can separate us from God's love in that. Yeah.

But what Rocky is definitely getting at is there had to have been that true repentance that was accompanying it. Yeah. And one great verse that corroborates exactly what Rocky's saying comes from 1 Thessalonians verses 9 through 10.

And Paul says this, "For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you." And that's the important piece. This is a reception that they're having of the gospel specifically. And what was it? "And how you turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come." So you're seeing even here in this 1 Thessalonians verse is that you turn to God and the way you turn to him is by turning from idols to serve the true and living God.

You cannot turn to God if there is nothing that you're turning from. Yeah. Because that's not turning at all.

It's like try right now wherever you're at, wherever you're sitting, standing, whatever, try to turn towards something without turning from something. It's impossible. You can't do it.

And this is exactly what Rocky and I are talking about, is that repentance is the turning from the dark side of the room to the light side of the room. It's turning towards the true and living God by repenting of wicked sins specifically in this text idolatry. Yeah.

You know what this kind of gets into? This is off the cuff. This is not something we had rehearsed. But I think this gets into the myth of neutrality.

Yeah. That the people that say, "Well, we can just kind of sit in a neutral place and we're either sometimes we're really are believing in something sinful." Right? Or giving our allegiance to or worshiping something that's not right. Or we can place our faith in Christ like we're sitting on some neutral thing.

But it's like, again, entailed in that idea of repent to faith and the fact that you're always turning from something shows the objective truth that the Bible is clear. We're always worshiping something. You always have your allegiance to something.

You're always on someone's team. There's no neutrality. We're not sitting on a fence and we're trying to figure out what to believe in.

And some people are just like, they have this privileged view of agnosticism, whether it's not sure. And they're so righteous because they're so smart to figure out. Socrates says, "I'm the wisest man because I'm the only man that realizes I don't know anything." Right? Like this kind of false pietism.

That is not what the Bible portrays at all. You must turn from something to turn to Christ because we're all worshiping something. There is no neutrality.

There is objective truth. And the objective truth is that we are creatures of worship. And we're worshiping something at every waking moment.

The Bible is clear. We must turn away from something to turn to God because there's none who does good, no, not one. Right.

That's Psalm 53. And Paul quotes it in Romans 3 as we laid out in these past couple of episodes about our fall a few episodes ago in the Gospel Foundations. Our fall entails that we're, because of that, we're on Satan's team.

We've inherited being at the teammate of Satan from Adam. We're not neutral by nature. So I just thought that was good.

I thought I had. I thought that might be helpful. It lays out the reason why this is so precious.

And there's so many people that want to say, "Jesus doesn't call me." Nobody repents perfectly. Therefore, when Jesus says, "Repent," he can't mean repent perfectly. So you just need to repent about who you think Jesus is, but you don't have to repent of your sin.

Yeah. That is a theological line. There is a lot of people in America that take that line.

And that's not right at all because it totally, that myth of neutrality sneaks in. And it's not accurate to realize that, again, like, the nature of it is something like light. You can't have a lack of light without having darkness, and you can't have light without a lack of darkness.

They necessarily fall. They're logically connected. It's one of those things.

That's what we're talking about here with repentance and faith. It's that kind of thing where you can't have one and not the other. It's like, again, darkness and light.

You can't. It's one or the other based on the amount of photons in the room. Right.

Yeah. There has never been a Christian who has ever lived who just had faith and did not have abundance. Yeah.

That sort of Christian who does have faith indeed does, but it's not faith in the Christ of the Bible. It's faith in, ultimately, a conception of his own mind. And there is a heaven for that person, but that heaven's found in the deepest parts of hell.

Yeah. And that's what God says in Revelation, that those who are lukewarm, who are neither hot nor cold, he spews them out of his mouth because he recognizes, "This is not my child." Yeah. He treats them just as a...he treats them as if he's on the other person's team, namely Satan.

Exactly. So if you're free Christ, that does not give you a license to go play with Satan. Yeah.

You're not going to be able to play with him anymore. That's not...you're in a different...you've been translated, like it says in Colossians 1, 13, "From the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of his beloved Son." Yeah. Right.

So there must be...if you receive the gospel truly, it's a repentance turning from sin towards faith and God. And we're not trying to separate these things. We're saying they're one and the same thing.

Yeah. True faith is always turning. Turning to faith in God and that's repentance.

You're turning from wicked sin towards God. You're turning from self-autonomy, self-glorification to glorifying God. They follow.

You can't have one without the other. Exactly. Faith and repentance are the exact...they're the exact same coin, but they're just two different faces of that coin.

Yeah. Another passage I would like to read. I just read this this morning, actually.

In Psalm 7, verse 12, it says, "If a man does not repent, God will wet his sword. He has bent and readied his bow. He has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts." Right.

So this here definitely clarifies once more that repentance, again, if you are not a man...if you're not... if you have not repented and put your faith in Christ, you are God's enemy. He has his bow readied for you. His fiery arrows have already been lit.

They're ready to go. Right. So this is the...this is a...again, this is a call to the gospel right here.

This is a call to repentance and faith in Christ because you cannot be born again. You cannot be justified truly in God's sight unless you have repented and put your faith in Christ. So an example we can bring up in Acts, chapter 2. The Jews say to Peter on his sermon, "What...you know, we have crucified our Messiah.

What must we do?" Right. So they have recognized that they have done something wrong. They have repented.

Well, not exactly. Not yet, but they're realizing... They have this recognition they've done something wrong. They've been convicted.

Sorry. They've been convicted. Exactly.

And they don't know what to do. They're standing in this place of neutrality, which is actually still on Satan's team, and they have no idea what to do. They've murdered their Messiah, and Peter says back to them, "Repent, be baptized, every one of you in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, for the remission of sins." Right? So he tells them, "You must repent." Because they already understand and recognize that that was their Messiah.

So they must turn from their wicked idolatry, from the evil act and murderous bloodlust that they've done, and turn towards the living God. I see. Yeah.

So at that point, they've just realized that they did something wrong. They were convicted of it, and now they must act on that conviction that they had done something evil and said, "You know what? I turn away from that, and I turn to Christ. I want to cling to Him even though I killed Him." Exactly.

Because at that point, they had just been convicted. They hadn't turned away from it yet. Even though they realized that it's wrong, that doesn't mean they've repented of it yet.

Just because you think something's wrong and evil, and you've been convicted and you have a soft heart about it, doesn't mean you've repented yet. Yeah. And that's it.

That might be the difference between worldly sorrow and godly sorrow. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Because they've had a sorrow generally for themselves, but it has not been a sorrow that... Oh, ultimately, I would actually say it has been a sorrow that's led to salvation. For them, it was.

First Corinthians 7 was because, yeah, they were genuinely sorrowful. It says in Acts 2 that they were cut to the heart because they recognized, "We just murdered our Messiah." Yeah. And now they turn to God.

Yeah. So they turned from their idols, I guess, as in 1 Thessalonians 1, 9. They've turned from their idols and they've turned towards the true and living God and faith in Him. They've relied not on themselves because they murdered Him and they turned towards God.

Yeah. So this is for everyone who's listening, and hopefully even Rocky's friend Keegan, who seems to be listening quite often, who's an atheist. Yeah.

I mean, if you do not know Christ, you must repent and put your faith in Him because He has His arrows ready for you. They're ready for you. And the only way to find salvation is like it says in 1 Thessalonians 1, that the wrath of God, these readied arrows for you, can be mitigated by the blood of Christ.

Christ's blood is the only thing that can have God's wrath taken from you because He took it for you. Right? Scarcity will a person die for a righteous person, but Christ died for the unrighteous. That's what He did.

He died for us. We deserve God's wrath, but He died. And that's what it truly means to be justified by faith, is that God grants us faith.

And this true faith, it turns from idols to serve the living and true God. Yeah. Amen.

That's good, brother. Well, I think that's all we got for you this week, guys. So thanks for listening.

Those of you that tune into the For the King podcast and listen on these Sundays when Bryce and I walk through these gospel foundations, these things that are necessary to the gospel. We hope it's been edifying and encouraging to you guys. Remember that we have a website, forthekingpodcast.com. You can reach me at forthekingpodcast@gmail.com. If you have any questions or inquiries.

And also we have a Facebook page, and I put that down there too. If you want to donate and support the channel and podcast financially, then you can do that on my website. Or through, I put a cryptocurrency support tab if you want to do that as well.

So thanks for listening. Those of you that do. 1 Timothy 5, 15.

He who is the blessed and only sovereign, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see to him be honored and eternal, demeaned. Amen. Sole day-o, Gloria.

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