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Repentance (Part 1)

Foundations of the Christian Faith
Foundations of the Christian FaithSteve Gregg

In this discussion, Steve Gregg talks about the importance of repentance as a fundamental aspect of putting one's trust in God. He stresses that repentance involves more than just a general shift in attitude towards sin, but rather a complete turnaround from it. While overcoming sinful behavior is a separate issue, it is a crucial goal for Christians to strive for in order to live a life that glorifies God. Gregg also notes that true repentance involves feeling remorse for past failures and sins, and a goal to strive for holiness.

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Transcript

Today we're going to talk about repentance, and that is because it's first on the list. Repentance from dead works, the foundation of repentance from dead works and faith toward God. We'll talk about faith separately another time.
But repentance is the first on the list.
Now, in the previous, in the introductory session I gave, the talk I gave there, I mentioned that these are listed in the order of their occurrence ordinarily in the Christian life. Some might think I've made a mistake here, because repentance is mentioned before faith.
And it would be thought, I think by many, I would have thought this myself at one time certainly, that faith must precede repentance, because faith is believing in God. And why would anybody believe if he didn't already possess faith, if he didn't already believe in God? Now, I still agree with that point, except I realize now that faith, not all faith is the same. It is one thing to believe in God.
It's another thing to put your whole confidence
and your whole trust in God. And it is that second kind of faith that the Bible speaks of as a saving faith, and no doubt what the writer of Hebrews has in mind when he talks about faith toward God. Faith toward God is not necessarily the same thing as believing in God, that is, believing that there is a God.
It is true that Hebrews 11, verse 6,
says, without faith it is impossible to believe him, because he that would come to God must first believe that he exists and that he is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him. So, clearly, a person would never approach God in any way or even make the first step unless he believed that God exists. That's what the writer of Hebrews acknowledges in Hebrews 11, 6. But to believe that God exists is a far cry from being saved.
The devil believes
that God exists, the Muslims believe that God exists, the Jews of Jesus, they believe that God exists, but they weren't saved. Jesus said many of them were children of the devil and could not escape the damnation of hell. To believe that God exists is not all that it takes.
James says, you believe that there is one God, you do well. The demons also believe
in trouble, but wilt thou know that faith without works is dead. Simply to believe that there is a God is not the same thing as having faith toward God.
Putting your faith in the direction
of trusting God is a different issue than just believing that a God exists out there. I imagine that the American public have been told many times as to how many of them believe in God. I've seen the figures over the years, and it's astonishing because the number is so high and you'd never guess it by the way that the average person lives his life.
But
I imagine the figures up in the high 90s, for instance, in this country, people would say they believe in God. I imagine the atheist is probably, in this society, no more than about three to five percent of the person would call himself an atheist. Everybody else believes that there's a God.
Yet they certainly aren't saved. Now, a person must
at least believe that God exists if he's going to make any kind of approach to God, and that goes without saying, because why would you approach a being that you don't believe is there? But once you believe he exists and decide to approach, then there's two things that are necessary for the transition from death into life, from darkness into light, from damnation to salvation. And those things are repentance and faith toward God.
Now, repentance
we're going to be defining here first, and I'll point out as we go along why it is appropriate to place repentance before faith in the list. First of all, let's talk about what repentance is. In the Bible there are three significant words that are translated as repentance in our Bible.
In the Hebrew of the Old Testament there are two words principally. One of them
is nakam, which would be spelled, if you used English characters, N-A-C-H-A-M. N-A-C-H-A-M.
Nakam. That's Hebrew. That's one of the Old Testament words, the Hebrew word.
It means
literally to breathe heavily. This might seem a strange word to translate as repent, but to breathe heavily suggests sighing. To sigh, as if you're sorry.
And therefore the word
has the implication of being sorry. To heave a sigh because of grief. And therefore nakam has the meaning of being sorry.
And this can be being sorry for sin, that it's your own
sin, so that you repent of your sin. It can be sorry about any other sin. The Bible says that God, in Genesis chapter 6, was sorry that he made man, and he repented himself that he'd made man of the earth, and he grieved him for his heart.
God wasn't repenting of
having done what had made him sorry. How man had turned out had brought sorrow to God. It grieved him.
So the word nakam isn't only with reference to repenting from sin, but it's
a general word for being sorry. Now, if that is used with reference to sin, it means you'd be sorry about your sin, of course. But there's another Hebrew word which is even, takes the meaning of repentance even further.
The word is shub, which in English characters would
be spelled S-H-O-O-B. S-H-O-B. This is a Hebrew word also found in the Old Testament, translated repentance, but it means literally to turn back.
That is, to change directions and go
the other way. Turn around and proceed in the opposite direction. And this is another meaning of repentance.
Both of these words are found in the Old Testament and translated by repentance,
and if you put them together, of course, the idea is that you are sorry for your sins, and therefore you turn around and stop doing them. You start going the other direction. You change your direction because of your grief over your sins.
That is how we would
combine these ideas. There is a New Testament word that is somewhat different than these, but it's translated as repentance. The principle New Testament word is a Greek word, metanoia.
Almost always
in the New Testament it is the word metanoia that is translated repentance. And metanoia, spelled M-E-T-A, M-E-T-A, N-O-I-A, this is the way you think it is spelled. It's from two Greek particles which mean, meta means afterwards, and noia is to think.
And so metanoia
means to think afterwards. The suggestion is that you think differently afterwards than you thought on a previous occasion. You've changed your mind.
And so most lexicons would
say that metanoia means to change your mind, to have second thoughts, to think afterwards differently than before. Now, this agrees with, although it's not identical, to the Old Testament words that we just considered, because if you're sorry for your sin, as the word nakham suggests, then it is because you've changed your mind about it. You apparently weren't sorry about it before you did it.
You committed sins because you thought that would make you happy. But now you've changed your mind. It didn't make you happy.
Now you're sorry about it. You don't think it's
a good thing anymore. You don't approve of it anymore.
You don't put your trust in your
sinful behavior for your happiness anymore. You're not seeking it as something of value anymore, or something desirable. You have a different opinion about sin.
And the other
Hebrew word we talked about, tshuv, which means to turn back, is obviously the result of changing your mind. You don't believe in sinning anymore. You don't value sin anymore.
You don't agree with it anymore, therefore you don't do it anymore. Or at least you turn around and start going the other direction. And this idea of repentance is probably best described in Isaiah chapter 55, in a passage where, in our English versions, we don't even have the word repent in there, but it is absolutely, to my knowledge, the best short statement of what repentance involves.
It has to do with the change of the mind and of the action.
Isaiah 55, verses 6 through 9. Seek the Lord while he may be found. Call upon him while he is near.
Let the wicked
forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let him return to the Lord. You know, I haven't looked this up, but I wouldn't be surprised if the word return there is the word tshuv in the Hebrew.
It could be. In which case, it's repent. And I have
a feeling it is, but I haven't looked it up, so I couldn't tell you for sure.
And he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Now, God is speaking to the wicked. Let the wicked forsake his way. Let the unrighteous man forsake his thoughts.
Why? Because his thoughts are poor. They're different than
God's. God's ways and God's thoughts are different, higher, better.
As high as the
heaven is above the earth, God's thoughts and ways are superior to those of wicked man. Therefore, the wicked man is told to adopt God's thoughts and God's ways, rather than his own wicked and unrighteous thoughts and ways that he's followed before. So to forsake your evil ways and to forsake your evil thoughts is essentially what it's all about.
You turn
around and you behave, and you change your mind. This is what repentance is. Basically, repentance results in a change of your life because it comes from a change in your mind.
Now, some people would say that if you've repented, you'll never sin again. I don't agree with that. That's not my understanding of things.
But I do believe that if you've
repented, you've decided that you don't ever want to sin again. You were in the world, I seriously doubt, before you were saved, if you ever had decided that you never wanted to sin again. There might have been some sin in your life you didn't like.
Maybe you drank
too much or had an unbridled lust or ate too much or had some other problem that you didn't like, it was inconvenient to you, and you would have been very gladly free of it. But that's a very different thing than coming to the point where you say, I don't ever want to do one thing again in my life that is disobedient to God. I don't ever want to tolerate any sin any longer.
And the reason you didn't come to that point is because you weren't enlightened
to do so. Before you were saved, you weren't convicted properly. I mean, you did get convicted eventually and got saved.
That's why you got saved, because you got convicted. But
the general attitude you had towards sin was not one of conviction. You may have felt guilt about some things, but there are things that even after you're saved, you probably don't even recognize to be sin in your life, which you later, you know, God illuminates you and shows you that this attitude, too, is sin and has to go.
I'm not talking about repentance
as a situation where you name every sin you've ever committed and try to make a comprehensive list and individually repent of each one. Repentance is when you just change your mind about sin in general. Say, I will not tolerate sin, period, whatever that may turn out to be.
At the moment I'm converted, I may not know of any sin in my life except that I, you
know, have lustful thoughts and bad temper or something like that. But then after I'm saved, and as I walk with the Lord, the Holy Spirit will shine the light on me and read the Bible, the Holy Spirit will shine the light on other things in my life, which it becomes evident to me, oh, these, too, are sins. And I don't have to make my decision all over again whether I'm going to repent of them, because I've already decided what I'm going to decide.
I've changed my mind about sin. I don't want sin in my life. Therefore,
whatever sin turns out to be, and no matter how many additional sins I discover in my life that I didn't think of as sin before, I'm going, the decision's already been made.
I'm renouncing those things. I want nothing to do with them in my life, because I have had a general shift in my attitude and my outlook on whether sin is to be tolerated in my life or not. Repentance means I now do not agree with sinning in any form.
Now, as I understand Romans 7, and by the way, there are many different ways of understanding Romans 7. Different people have had different opinions about it. But we looked at it yesterday. As I understand it, Paul is describing a situation that may well apply to a believer.
It shouldn't,
because it's not necessary, but it sometimes, I think, does. Because a believer who walks in the Spirit does not have to know this experience, but I would just have to say from my outlook and the believers I know, not all of them do walk in the Spirit all the time. And for that reason, you find many believers who can relate with what Paul was saying.
I want to
do the right thing, but there's another law in me that brings me into bondage to sin and death, and I don't do the thing I want to do, and I'm a wretched man. That passage in Romans 7, I think, is not describing the normal Christian life. I think it's describing what is normal when you're not walking in the Spirit, but walking in the Spirit is the normal Christian life.
If you don't walk in the Spirit, you will relate very well with Romans 7. As a Christian,
you will want to do the right thing. Why? Because when you became a Christian, you repented of sin. You decided that the right thing to do is what you want to do.
Your mind agrees
with what is right. But if you're not walking in the Spirit, you will not have the power to perform it. That's what Paul says.
I find in me a willingness, I have the power to want
to do and to choose to do the right thing, but I don't have the power to perform it, he says there in Romans 7. Now, the fact that he wants to do the right thing, to me is an indication that he is talking about a person who has had a conversion, but he has not learned to walk in the Spirit, because a person who is not converted does not agree with the law of God that it is right, in principle. It says in Romans 8, the natural man is incapable of keeping the law of God, or of even wanting to be in line with the law of God. It is a change of heart that brings us to the point where I say, I want to please God, I want to do whatever is right inside of God.
And when a person has had that change of heart,
that is repentance. Now, the question of actually forsaking sin and overcoming sinful behavior is a separate issue, but it certainly must grow from that fundamental thing. You must, first of all, have a radical turnabout in the way you think about sin.
Look at Ephesians
chapter 2, where Paul makes a contrast in the thinking of the person who is converted from the person who is not converted. Actually, the same person at both points, before and after conversion is what he has in mind here. In Ephesians 2, a few verses here, verses 1-3, And you he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, obviously the devil, among whom, that is, among the children of disobedience, we also once conducted ourselves, because we were then too, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
Now, when you were by nature
a child of wrath, he says, you fulfilled the desires of the flesh and the mind. Interestingly, the word desires in that verse, which is verse 3, Ephesians 2-3, we fulfilled the desires of the flesh and the mind. That word desires in the Greek is the word for will.
Like there's
two wills, the will of the flesh and the will of the mind. Now, when you were a child of wrath by nature, when you were unconverted and unrepentant, when you sinned, you were fulfilling the will of the flesh, but you were also fulfilling the will of the mind, because your mind was in agreement with it. In Romans chapter 7, however, we see a different situation.
With my mind I want to do the right thing, but the will of my flesh is still as
bad as it ever was. There's a law in my members that's at war with the law of my mind. And this doesn't happen until you've repented.
Because Paul said in Ephesians that when you
were by nature a child of wrath, your will of your mind and your will of your flesh were together. Your flesh wanted certain things and your mind agreed to it, because you were carnally minded, or fleshly minded, Paul says in Romans 8. Now, that being so, when we read Romans 7, he says, with my mind I desire to do the law of God, but my flesh has a mind of its own. There's two wills at war here.
And this is a war that the Christian enters
into after he has repented, because what has changed there is not the will of the flesh. Your flesh has the same set of desires after you're converted as it had before. You still have appetite for food, you still have sex with cravings, you still have a desire for sleep.
If you happen to develop a taste for alcohol or smoking or something like that,
you probably still have attraction to those things. Your flesh still desires those things. But one thing has changed, your mind.
Whereas those things were agreeable to your mind before
you repented, repentance is changing your mind. And now your mind is opposed to them. And when your flesh tries to influence you in those directions, your mind opposes it and you've got a war on your hands, and that's what I see Paul talking about in Romans 7. But in Romans 8 he talks about the victory is in walking in the Spirit, not according to flesh.
We'll have to talk about that some more another time. But what I'm saying is that
we have evidence in Romans 7 that the party in question has in fact repented, because their mind is on God's side. That is not the case with the unregenerate person.
And the unregenerate
person can live in sin and enjoy it. If you have repented of your sin, you cannot live in sin and enjoy it. You can't.
If you meet a person who's enjoying living in sin, and
happily so, you can chalk it up that person doesn't know what it means to repent. Or if they've repented ever at an earlier point in their life, they'd love to repent it back again and go the other way, because they are not living in the reality of repentance. You see, repentance is changing the course of your life, getting off of one road and onto another road.
If you happen to succumb to a temptation after conversion, it feels
very differently than it felt before. You've been spoiled for sin by conversion, because you actually feel like you've fallen off the road. When you sinned before you were converted, you weren't falling off any path, because the path you're on was the path of sin.
Sinning
was just part of being on that path. Today you're on another path. When you repented, you set your feet on another path going another direction with another object, which is holiness.
And any sin that you may succumb to is in fact uncomfortable. You are conscious of the fact that it's not the right thing, it's not really what you want. You've somehow stumbled off the path that you've chosen, fortunately, through repentance.
It's possible that it's
through confession. It is possible to get back on that path and continue, and you're expected to do so. But the difference between a person who's repented and one who has not is not always seen in the fact that one lives sinful and the other lives without any sin whatsoever.
I would like to be able to say that all Christians live their lives without
any sin. I don't know of any passage that describes that being the case in the Bible, and I see a number of places that suggest otherwise. 1 John indicates that we cannot say that we have no sin without being liars.
James says, in many things, we all stumble.
In chapter 3 of James, verse 1. So it's quite clear that James acknowledges, John acknowledges, that among Christians sin sometimes occurs. But the difference is that a Christian will never enjoy his sins again, he'll never approve of his sins again, he will never sin and walk away without feeling bad or wanting to make stricter resolves or whatever, that he wants to quit that, whereas an unbeliever sins and doesn't even know the difference between that and ordinary life, because that is ordinary life for him.
For Christians, sin is not part
of your life. Sin is not part of your life, it's a deviation from your life course. And once you've repented, you cannot sin comfortably ever again.
And because of that, you probably
will sin less than you did before, in all likelihood, that's the point. The point of repentance is to stop sinning, to give up sinning. So John opens up 1 John chapter 2 with these words, my little children, these things I write unto you, so that you will not sin.
But he says, if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus
Christ the righteous, and he's the propitiation for our sins. So, he says, I'm writing this so that you will not sin. That is the goal.
That is what every Christian hopes to do,
is not sin. He says, if you do, fortunately, there's a propitiation made, there's a sacrifice of atonement that's been made. Jesus can offer forgiveness, but it is not the goal of any Christian to live in sin and continually ask forgiveness.
The goal of the Christian is to
overcome sin, to cease sinning, to live a life that glorifies God, and the reason that he desires that is because that's the mindset he has now that he's changed his mind. It wasn't what he wanted before, it is certainly what he wants now that he's changed his mind. And that is, in fact, what his mind has been changed to.
If you meet somebody who has not
set it as their goal to live a holy life, has not set it as their goal to be like Jesus and to be without sin in their life, if that's not their goal and desire, then they just haven't had that change of mind yet, because that goal and that desire is part of that mindset to which you have changed when you've attended. That's what the changing in your mind is all about, about sin. Unfortunately, there are many who do not understand that repentance has anything to do with salvation.
There is a controversy that some of you may
not be aware of, if not, then you will become aware of it now. There is a controversy over what is sometimes called lordship salvation. The issue is simply this.
Some evangelicals,
if we could call them that, would say that Jesus can be your saviour without being your lord. Others say, no, he only becomes your saviour at the same time he becomes your lord. If you have a lord, you also have a saviour.
If you have no lord, you have no saviour.
Now, the second position is called lordship salvation. I mean, that's what it's been dubbed by its opponents.
They call it lordship salvation, that you have to have a lord to be saved.
Whereas the position that I mentioned first, I don't know what it's called. I guess non-lordship salvation, anti-lordship salvation, I don't know what it's called.
But I call it antinomianism,
which is the name of a heresy that existed in the early church, which literally means no law, anti-namos. Namos is the Greek word for law, so antinomianism is anti-law, no law. And it was basically the teaching, and it was taught among the Gnostics, it was not taught by the apostles, it was taught among the Gnostics and a number of written works in the New Testament were written to counter it.
But antinomianism taught that since we're
saved by faith, it really doesn't matter how you live. You can live in sin. In fact, the more you allow yourself to live in sin, and resign yourself to it, and even enjoy it, the more it shows that you understand how gracious the gospel is, and how you're not saved by works, and you're not saved by obedience, and you're just saved by faith.
And to the
antinomian, the most exalted revelation of the grace of God exists in the heart of the person who can go out and live in sin without any conscious pain, because he realizes that his behavior has nothing to do with his salvation, it's all faith. Now, this is such a perversion, of the doctrine of justification by faith, that I should hope it would require no reputation, but it does, because those who are teaching against lordship salvation, there are books published, there's a published debate going on, those who are opposed to lordship salvation, as we call it, say, if you say a sinner's prayer, and believe in Jesus once, then even if you never walked with Jesus one day of your life after that, even if you became a Satanist, presumably, or a Muslim, or simply became an atheist, you'd still be saved, because that one act of faith saved you, and once saved, always saved, you're in there. Now, to me, this is tremendously heretical, and it is nothing other than antinomianism, the very heresy that the apostles denounce, and that's what James wrote James chapter 2 about, and John addressed it in 1 John, and it was a serious heresy in the early church, and it exists now among people who call themselves evangelicals.
The biblical teaching, of course, is what
saves a person, is not having somebody that you call a savior, but by having Jesus, and if you have Jesus, he happens to be a lord as well, therefore, if you have Jesus, you have a lord. You don't have Jesus if you don't have a lord, and if you don't have Jesus, the angels announced to the shepherds at the birth of Jesus, unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior, who is Christ, the lord, in Luke chapter 2. Paul said in Romans chapter 10, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you shall be saved, to be your savior, when you confess that he is lord, and many other scriptures make this very clear. The point is this, John tells us, he that has the Son has life, he that does not have the Son of God has not life.
It's quite simple. If you have Jesus, you have salvation. If you don't have Jesus,
you don't have salvation.
Put another way, if you have Jesus, you have a savior and a
lord, because he's both. If you don't have Jesus, you have neither savior nor lord. You get a savior and a lord at the same time, and no one has a savior without having a lord, and if I say, you might say, well, of course, that's obvious, but it's not obvious to everybody.
I've often heard people say, in giving their testimony, well, I accepted Jesus as savior when I was six years old, but I never really accepted him as my lord until I was 25. What condition were these people in, from age six to age 25, when they had accepted Jesus as savior, but not as lord? Did they accept half of Jesus? Were they half-saved? Is Jesus two separate parties? It's strange doctrine, unknown in the New Testament. In the New Testament, you are saved when you have Jesus as your savior and lord, and if he is your lord, it means that you're committed to obey him.
That's part of what faith means. You believe him
to be lord, then you must believe that he is an authority. You must believe he has a rule.
You must believe that there's some obligation on your part to do what he says, or else why
would you call him lord, lord, and not do the things he says? Now, that being the case, conversion, salvation, requires this particular shift in thinking. Prior to salvation, you have yourself as your lord. You do what you want to, ultimately.
Now, even if you submit
to some human government or some human being as an authority over you, you still do so for selfish reasons. You still do so because you see it as in your best interest. It's still you making decisions for yourself and for your best interest that governs you.
When you become a Christian, you must deny yourself, take up your cross, in a sense, die to yourself, and say, it is no longer my best interest that I will seek, but God's best interest, because I now have a lord who owns me, and because he owns me, his interests have got to be my compelling interests. I have no obligation to myself. I'm not a debtor to my flesh, but I'm a debtor to Christ.
I don't have to even save my own life. I should
be ready to lose my life for his sake, and I'll find it if I do, Jesus said. But I don't have to look out for myself.
I have to look out only for one thing, and that's why I plead
my lord. And this is the mindset of a truly converted person, and that is what repentance brings a person to, because they say, all sin is just disobedience to God. All sin is doing something other than what God prefers for me to do, what God doesn't want me to do, what God's not pleased for me to do.
Therefore, if I repent of sin, I have changed my mind,
and I now want to do only what pleases God, only what God has commanded, only what is good in his sight. And while at the moment I'm converted, I don't know all the things that are good in his sight, yet the moment of conversion is a decision to do what is good in his sight, insofar as that can be ascertained. And that's why Jesus said, go into all the world, make disciples, baptize them, and then teach them to observe all things I've commanded you.
He didn't say, impose on them my teachings as law. You don't have
to do that. If they're converted, they want to know what Jesus wants.
If they're converted,
they've already made up their mind. All I want is to do the will of God. Just tell me what it is.
And so you teach them to observe all the things he commanded. That's the service
that you perform when you disciple a person, is you don't impose on them a law that they are resistant to. If they're resistant to obedience to God, they need a full conversion.
They need to repent yet of their sins. They're still living for self. But if they have repented, you can usually tell.
I should say, always tell. I don't know of any case, well, there's
some cases it's a little hard to tell exactly what people want. Because sometimes what they really want and what they do are not very much the same for a while at first, because they have some life-dominating problems that they take a while to get over.
Not that they
need to take a while, but that's just a fact. Some people are really repentant, really do want to please God, but keep stumbling in areas, and it makes it a little hard to tell immediately whether their repentance is good or not. But I will say this.
It's generally
possible to tell if a person is really repentant by the question of how they feel about their failures, how they feel about their sins, and what their goal is with respect to holiness. Because repentance is the foundational thing. And I said earlier, I'll tell you why it is mentioned before faith.
I guess it's time for me to tell you that. There are three times
in the Bible where repentance and faith are mentioned together. In each case, repentance is mentioned first, as if it's prior to faith, to saving faith.
In Mark chapter 1 is the first
instance, and this is in Mark's gospel, the first specimen of Jesus' preaching in this gospel. The very first recorded words of Christ in the gospel of Mark are in Mark 1 verse 15. Mark 1 verse 15, and it says, Jesus said, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe the gospel. Now, there's repent and believe, repentance
and faith, but repent is first. Repent and believe the gospel.
You repent of your sins,
and you believe the gospel for the forgiveness of sins and for salvation. Now, another place where these two are mentioned together is in, if I can recall, I hope I got it, because it's not in my notes, Acts chapter 24, I believe. No, no, Acts 20.
And
this will be found in verse where he's talking to the elders in Ephesus, or he's not in Ephesus, but he's called them from Ephesus to meet with him, and he wants to tell them what it is he has been teaching. Acts 20, 21. He basically is summarizing the preaching that he has been involved in in these terms.
He's been testifying to the Jews and also to Greeks, repentance
toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. Again, we have those two mentioned together, repentance and faith, but in that order. Likewise, in Hebrews 6, which we look at, repentance from dead works is mentioned prior to faith toward God.
Why? Because repentance
is repenting from something, and faith is toward something. You turn from your old life and your old way of thinking to a new life, which is characterized by seeking and trusting in God. If you look at 1 Thessalonians 1, Paul describes the conversion of the Thessalonians.
I hope I didn't say chapter 5. It's chapter 1. 1 Thessalonians 1, verses 9 and 10. Paul says, For they themselves declare concerning us what manner of entry we had to you, and how you turned 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, even Jesus, who delivers us from the wrath to come. Now, he says, you turned from idols to serve the living and true God.
You
turn from something, and you turn to something when you repent. It's turning around. Before you can face another direction, you have to stop facing the direction you were already facing.
You have to turn from it so that you can now be turned toward something else. And
what you are turned toward is a life of faith, a life of total trusting and confidence in God for your salvation, rather than in your own works, your own goodness, your own religiosity, and also a life characterized by faith in God for other matters, too, not just for your salvation but for your life and all things necessary for life and godliness. It's a life of trusting.
It's a life of relying on Christ. That's what salvation is.
But in order to do that, you must turn from whatever it was you were trusting in before, almost certainly yourself.
You may have been trusting in someone else, but you weren't
trusting in Christ before you were saved, or else you would have been saved. Salvation is nothing other than trusting Christ, but you can't trust Christ until you stop trusting in whatever you've been accustomed to trust in. And most of us are raised to have confidence in ourselves.
We're raised to believe that you can't trust anybody but you. No one else
is going to look out for you, so you've got to look out for number one, yourself. And most people in this world are conditioned to say, I'm suspicious of everybody but me, and I trust in me.
And if they have money, they might trust in their money. If they have good
looks, they might trust in their good looks to open doors for them and stuff that others would not have. If they're smart, if they're athletic, if they're talented, if they have some other things the world values, they may have been conditioned all along to exploit these things, to open doors for themselves in life, and to secure a place for themselves, and to get what they want, and to find happiness and so forth.
And all of this is conditioned
in us from early age. And to begin to trust Christ for all of those things, and to begin to trust in Jesus' righteousness rather than your own, if you've been thinking, well, I'm good enough. And most people, even who aren't religious, are still trusting in their own works for salvation.
There's many people I've talked to who say, well, I just think that
if you just do the best you can, you can go to heaven. Well, they may not have a religion except the one they made up. The one they made up is do the best you can, but that's a religion of sorts.
And it's obvious that it's them doing the best they can that they're
trusting in. To begin, they're not trusting in the righteousness of Christ, they're trusting in themselves to do it. The irony of that is that if you follow that up with a question and say, well, have you always done the best you could? No one can honestly answer yes.
Everyone can think of a time when they could have done something better than what they actually did do. They could have been a little more generous, a little more sacrificial, a little less selfish. And if they admit it, then you could say, well, then you made up your own religion to accommodate yourself, and yet you condemn yourself by your own religion.
Because by your religion, you say you have to do the best you can, yet you admit you haven't. So you can't go to heaven, even by your own man-made religion that you made up to feel comfortable with. You've condemned yourself.
But that's the way it always will
be. No matter what standard a person makes to trust in for his salvation, he will not live up to it, because man is sinful. And that is why repentance from that way of thinking is necessary.
Instead of thinking that you can earn it by any code of conduct, whether
it's the Ten Commandments, or doing the best you can, or giving your body to be burned, if you're trusting in yourself instead of in Christ for your salvation, you need to repent of that. And so repentance calls you from a way of thinking of, I trust me, I trust my friends, I trust my money, I trust my good works, I trust the flesh, the arm of flesh, and I say, I don't trust any of those things anymore. My works are a filthy rag.
My strength
is nothing. Without Christ, I can do nothing. I now trust in him for all these things, for all the things that I ever trusted myself for, I must trust in him.
This is why self-confidence
is not a good thing. Confidence is just another way of saying faith. It's just another word for it, trusting.
Being confident in God is another way of saying trust in God. Being
confident in yourself is trusting in yourself. Now there is perhaps something that is legitimate that we could label as self-confidence, when a person is not intimidated, when a person is certain that he's on the right course and he moves forward in overall opposition.
Some
might say, well, that's a self-confident person, but if he's a Christian thinking rightly, he may only appear to be self-confident. His confidence is in God, not in himself. Paul said that we had the sentence of death in ourselves so that we might learn not to trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.
He says we are pressed beyond measure, above strength,
so that we despair of life itself, so that we might not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead. That passage is in 2 Corinthians 1, verses 8 and 9. Paul is saying essentially that God put circumstances in his life that were beyond his measure to trust himself for, things where he was despaired of life, so that he would have no reason to trust himself. What good would it do to trust in yourself if things beyond your control threaten your very survival? You have to just trust in God who raises the dead, and God desires that.
Repentance has called us from a life of trusting in ourselves to a life
of trusting in Jesus. And therefore, faith in God of that kind is the result of repentance. It may happen at the moment of repentance, because that's what repentance does.
Repentance
is shifting to faith in God. So, it might not be, we could say, chronological prior to faith, repentance prior to faith, but it's logically prior. Faith is accomplished by repentance.
Repentance from not believing in God, from believing in anything other than
God for everything. So, really, repentance is the first word of the gospel. It's the first ultimatum of the gospel.
When, on the day of Pentecost, the people who heard Peter
preach said, What shall we do? His first word was, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus. He didn't even say anything about faith. Presumably, they already believed what he said.
But he says, What you've got to do is repent. So, repentance is what
people need to be told to do. I once heard a Bible teacher on the radio whose name is actually a household word.
He's a very famous Bible teacher. And he was saying that we have
no business to preach repentance to non-believers. He said, The church can be called repentance, but unbelievers should know what we call repentance.
He never could figure out where he was coming
from. He must be coming from this non-lordship business, because that's also what guys like Zane Hodges say. You may not be familiar with Zane Hodges.
He's not that well known, but
he wrote a couple of books against lordship salvation. He's basically saying, You don't need to have a lord to be saved. You don't have to repent.
You just have to believe.
But what he doesn't take into consideration is that the kind of believing that is involved is a life-changing believing. And the very act of believing is a repentance from any other frame of mind that you were once in.
You have to change your mind. And that change
of mind should be comprehensive. It should not just be, I've changed my mind.
I now
believe what I did not once believe, namely that Jesus died and rose again. But I also believe he's Lord. I believe that his resurrection was God's declaration that Jesus is Lord, and that he's at the right hand of God the Father, and that he is the King of kings and Lord of lords, and therefore he commands honor.
He commands obedience. I believe that.
Now my obedience will not save me, and I will not be saved by obedience.
But if I have a
saving faith, obedience is what I will be committed to. A failure to be obedient after my best efforts and desires to be obedient is no indication I'm not saved. I can very well be a good Christian, and if I'm making every effort I know to be obedient and fail, fall short in some way, that is no indication that my repentance was not genuine.
But if
I fail to be obedient because I never had any serious intention to be obedient, that's a very different story. Then it's evidence that I've never really repented. If I have no serious intention of being obedient to Christ, then in what way can it be said that my mind has been changed over what it was when I was a non-Christian? So this is what repentance is.
Now in the time that remains, and I think we may need more than one lecture
to cover this, but sometimes we do, so we won't be too worried about the time passing here. I want to talk about counterfeit repentance and a failure to repent, because whenever a person is confronted with sin in his life, repentance is called for. But there are many other things that people do other than repent, which any one of them would prevent you from repenting and would therefore be a very dangerous thing to do.
And one of the best examples
of a false repentance is found in 1 Samuel 15, where we have the story of Saul being confronted by Samuel for his disobedience. In 1 Samuel 15, as the story goes, Samuel, the prophet of God, spoke in the name of the Lord to Saul, the king, and told him to go and exterminate all the Amalekites and leave nothing that breathes, including animals, women, children, anything. Nothing alive of the Amalekites was to remain.
And Saul carried
out the instructions partially, mostly. He did go beat up the Amalekites. In fact, he killed virtually all of them except for one, Agag, the king, whom he brought back as a trophy, alive.
He also noticed that a lot of the livestock was pretty valuable, and he brought
it back to sacrifice to the Lord. Now, this was not pleasing to God. Saul apparently didn't realize how displeasing this was.
He certainly knew he didn't do exactly what God told him
to do, but he apparently didn't realize how important it was to do exactly what God wanted him to do, which shows that he did not have the kind of mindset that a saved person must. It may be that you don't fully understand what God wants, but you fully do want to do his will if you're a Christian. You really do want to do the right thing.
You do want
to be obedient, and it's important to you, though you may be disobedient because you don't fully understand what his will is, or because despite the fact that you want to do the right thing, you fail to avail yourself of all the resources available in the spirit of God, and you fall into a temptation that you perhaps wouldn't have had to fall into, but it caught you by surprise and, let's face it, it happened. Christians sometimes, unfortunately, do that, but it's not permissible. It's not okay.
And a Christian takes full stock of his need to
obey God. Saul apparently didn't take full stock of it. He knew exactly what God told him to do, but doing exactly what God said wasn't exactly that important to him.
And
so he kept some of the things that he should have killed. And I like to read verses 12 through 26, because in this passage, though it's a somewhat lengthy one, in this interchange between Saul and Samuel, we find all of the basic elements, or at least the major ones. I don't know if all of them are there or not.
There might be others I'm not aware of, but
all of the ways that people respond to sin short of repenting. When they're confronted with sin, the thing that should happen is repentance, but there's a lot of other things that often happen instead of repentance, and that's what we want to look at here, because Saul did them all, all the wrong things. Begin with verse 12.
So when Samuel rose early in the morning to meet
Saul, it was told Samuel, saying, Saul went up to Carmel. And indeed, he set up a monument for himself, and he has gone on around and passed by and gone down to Gilgal. Then Samuel went to Saul, and Saul said to him, Blessed are you of the Lord.
I have performed the commandment of the Lord. But
Samuel said, What then is this bleeding of sheep in my ears, and this lowing of oxen which I hear? And Saul said, Oh, they have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen, to give sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have utterly destroyed. Then Samuel said to Saul, Be quiet, and I will tell you what the Lord said to me last night.
And Saul said to him, Speak on. So Samuel said, When you were little in your own eyes,
were you not the head of the tribes of Israel? And did not the Lord anoint you the king over Israel? Now the Lord sent you on a mission and said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners, the Amalekites, and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of the Lord? Why did you swoop down on the spoil and do evil in the sight of the Lord? And Saul said to Samuel, But I have obeyed the voice of the Lord, and gone on the mission which the Lord sent me, and brought back Agag king of Amalek, and I have utterly destroyed the Amalekites.
But
the people took of the plunder, sheep and oxen, the best of the things which should have been utterly destroyed, to sacrifice to the Lord your God in Gilgal. So Samuel said, Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.
Because you have rejected the word
of the Lord, he also has rejected you from being king. Then Saul said to Samuel, I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words, because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. Now therefore, please pardon my sin and return with me, that I may worship the Lord.
But Samuel said to Saul, I will not return with you, for you have rejected,
has rejected you from being king over Israel." There's something about Saul that is pitiable. There's a tendency, I think, many times to be sympathetic towards Saul here. It sounds like he really kind of thought he was doing the right thing and really wanted to do the right thing, but Samuel didn't let him off the hook.
Samuel just kept pressing him. And Saul gave every excuse you
could imagine, but Samuel still said, No, you're guilty. Even finally, Saul said, I've sinned, I've transgressed.
Please forgive me. And Samuel said, No. Why? Because at no point in this
interaction was there any real repentance.
There were four things that Saul did, all of which fell
short of genuine repentance. And the reason it's instructive for us to look at it is because they are so common. They're the way that men commonly respond to sin when they have not repented and when they're not willing to repent.
And we need to be careful because there's a lot of people who
are professing Christians who likewise respond in the same way. We need to examine ourselves just to make sure that we're not doing the same thing. The first thing that Saul did was either to conceal or to belittle his disobedience, to minimize it.
He either intended to conceal it
or to minimize it. I don't know how he could have hoped to conceal it because, you know, the sheep were making noise and he did have the king Agag there. He knew that this was not exactly what God said and I don't know how he could have hoped that he would conceal it.
He certainly
belittled it as if it was no big deal that he had not been completely obedient. He begins by saying to Samuel when he first sees him, Blesser to you of the Lord, I have commanded, I have performed the commandment of the Lord. You know, as he basically said, I did what I was told.
Later on, when Samuel
says, No, you didn't obey, Saul protests in verse 20. Saul said to Samuel, But I have obeyed the voice of the Lord and gone on the mission which the Lord sent me. I noticed I did some of the things God said to do, didn't maybe do it all.
I was mostly obedient. And this is his problem. He
thought mostly obedient was okay.
He thought, Well, I'm doing better than I was before I was
following the Lord. But that's not good enough. The Christian does not want to tolerate any sin in his life.
Now, you might say, But we got to be realistic. Nobody's perfect. Well, that may be
true.
Maybe nobody is perfect. But that's not the way a person talks is repentance. When you find
some small sin in your life, you don't say, Oh, well, no one's perfect.
I can live with that. No,
you can't. You can be forgiven of it.
That's true. But you are called to and you're committed
yourself to a life of holiness. And sin is the archenemy of God and of holiness in your life.
And it's like cancer. I mean, how much cancer do you want to tolerate in your life? If you went to the doctor and he said, Well, you've got a lump in your breast or one of your you've got a cancerous mass somewhere in your body, but it's only a small one. Yeah, it is malignant, but it isn't very big yet.
And you say, Oh, well, no big deal then, right? No one's
perfect. No one's in perfect health. I should be glad it's only a small malignancy.
Let's forget
the surgery. You know, I don't need any surgery if it's just a small one. But obviously, no one would think that way.
As soon as you learned you had a malignancy, you'd have nothing more
priority in your life than to be rid of it. Because you know that small malignancies are as threatening to your life as others. In fact, many times a tumor, once it's found, has only even appeared after cancer spread through the entire lymphatic system or something else.
You're in big trouble sometimes before there's even a tumor or before there's a visible or discernible tumor. Any evidence that there is a malignancy in your body is something you would not want to tolerate at all. You'd do all that you could to be rid of it.
You wouldn't say,
Well, you know, some people have it a lot worse than I do. Some people have big tumors. I only have a little one.
Well, that's not the way you'd be thinking. It may be true. It may be true that
there's nobody on the planet who's in 100% perfect health without any viral or germs or bacterial problems in their body.
I don't know if that's true or not. Even if it were true, what's that
got to do with anything? If you've got a malignancy, you don't want it there. If you have a small sin in your life, or one that you regard as a small sin, maybe you've overcome 90% of the sin in your life, but you've only got this 10% that's still there.
And you've repented of it.
You don't really want it there, you think. But it doesn't alarm you much.
You just figure no
one's perfect. Well, that may be true, but what's that got to do with anything? The imperfect is what we're called to pursue. Let us go on to perfection.
And it's very, very important that
we don't have any grounds for compromise with sin. If there is sin in your life, that doesn't mean you're not saved. But if you don't feel too bad about it, and you feel like, well, it's okay, we can live with a little of that, then you have serious reason to doubt whether repentance has ever happened to you.
Because repentance, as I said, is a wholesale renunciation of sin as a
category. And it's a wholesale turning to seek after God, and to trust only in God, and to pursue after God, and to pursue after holiness. That's what repentance is.
It's a shift
of thinking. And if your thinking hasn't shifted like that, then it hasn't shifted. That simple.
If it's not facing the right direction, it's because it's not turned around to the right direction yet. And there's reason to wonder if you think sin's okay. A little sin.
As long as
other people have bigger sins than yours, or at least other people are doing the same thing that you're doing, if you're not passionately desirous to be holy and to be rid of sin, then you're very much like Saul in this case. He wanted to obey God, and he thought he had, for the most part. He knew he didn't do exactly what God said.
It wasn't 100% of obedience,
but gosh, 99%. What do you want? You know, I did wipe out the Amalekites. I only brought one of them alive.
That's not many. I've been almost entirely obedient. Give me a break.
I've been obedient to God. But see, God doesn't grade on a curve. And being 99% obedient when you could have been 100% obedient is not okay.
It is forgivable. I want to make that clear.
I'm not saying that if there's any sin you're likely to not say.
That's not the way I talk.
I don't believe that way. There is forgiveness.
But repentance means that you don't want that
sin, any bit of it, not one shred of it. You see it as as intolerable as God sees it. And Saul didn't have that attitude.
He thought that to be mostly obedient was good enough.
That is simply not good enough. And it's not because God is harsh and demanding, and will not tolerate you if you're not perfect.
He will. I mean, I won't say tolerate,
but he'll forgive. He's very gracious.
He bears with very much imperfection. It's not a question
of how much God is willing to endure. It's a question of how much do you want to make him endure? How much grief do you want to give him? Just a little? A lot? How about none? Sin grieves the heart of God.
And if you don't mind doing that a little bit,
then your love for God is deficient. Then you have a biblical concept of sin. A second thing that Saul did that was equally a failure on his part to repent, and prevented him from doing so, was to rationalize.
And what that means is to say,
there really was a good motivation for what I did. I disobeyed, but really I did it for a good reason. In this case, we saw that there's some good sheep there.
And we thought, you know, God,
in his law, has told us to sacrifice sheep. He must like sheep. He must like sacrifices.
What we'll do is we'll keep these sheep. What a shame to kill them right here out on the field and have their blood go to waste. And besides, when you sacrifice, you eat.
That's part of the whole
system. We slaughter them, we bake them and eat them. And you know, it would be a shame to have all this good meat go to the vultures out here on the hillside.
Let's take them home. We'll
sacrifice them to the Lord and have a big feast. Sounds unselfish.
It's not entirely unselfish.
Most people would rather eat a feast than not. And yet it sounds so religious.
It sounds so
spiritual. You know, we're just a sacrifice to the Lord. And to give religious rationalizations for disobedient behavior, I think, is something commonly done in many ways.
Now, some of my
opinions about what's right and wrong may not agree with some of yours on some points here. But I can think of a lot of ways that it seems to me people sin and try to rationalize it by saying, but some good result came out. This is the pragmatism we spoke of in an earlier session.
It came out good. God got sacrificed too. So what if, you know, the methods we use weren't exactly kosher? I lived with an evangelist shortly after I was out of high school when I was single.
He was
still single at the time and we shared an apartment. And we also were, we used to live together in places. And so I had an opportunity to see him in action sometimes.
And he would give
an evangelistic message where sometimes he embellished the truth a bit. He'd tell a story that, the real story was a good story, but he could put a spin on it. Not 100% honest, but he could put a little spin on that story to really give it an evangelistic impact, to really make it seem more striking and more alarming and so forth.
And he did this on a regular basis. In other words,
his integrity was not perfect. And since I lived with him, I had a lot of times to talk to him about his philosophy of ministry and stuff.
And I asked him about that because I had told him I
couldn't do that, tell a lie, to embellish a message. And he said, well, how do you argue with souls being saved? People getting saved. Well, you know, I don't know if I need to argue with souls being saved.
I like souls being saved. I don't like sin. And lying is a sin.
No matter what
good motives you have. Here we're offering this sacrifice to the Lord. God says not to lie.
Well,
we don't exactly do what he says here. We'll lie, but at least what we have to offer him should make him happy. We've got all these convicts to give him.
We won't kill all the Amalekites,
but we'll, and their sheep, we'll just take some of them and offer them to the Lord so he can be happy with our disobedience. There is a cult, I've referred to them several times already, the Children of God. They've changed their name many times.
They're not called that anymore,
I don't think, unless they've come full circle and called themselves that again. But they were a cult that got into gross immorality. Their leader, Moses David, as he calls himself, has a harem, and he's into all kinds of weird homosexuality and every kind of perversion, sexual perversion.
But he is the infallible prophet of their movement. And he put up these
things called the mole letters, which were printed tracts, that really were expressions of whatever his newest revelation was. That was the way he communicated, like a newsletter to all the people in the cult.
And I saw some of these mole letters, and he actually advocated what they called
flirty fishing, where they had the sisters, the attractive girls in the movement, go out and sell themselves into prostitution in order to draw men into the cult. I don't know how much success they had in drawing men into the cult that way, but that was advocated by their founder. He's never repented of that, by the way.
I mean, he's still as weird as he ever was. In fact,
his own daughter came out of the cult and wrote an essay against him. But he was a sex pervert and a wicked man.
But the interesting thing is, of course, we would say immediately,
that's very evil to do that, to sell yourself into prostitution in order to bring people into the cult. But we tolerate other compromises, other sins, maybe not as blatantly, in order to bring people in. When I think of how the Christian rock and roll culture has developed since the 70s, it is not pleasing to me, to my taste anyway.
In the early days of Christian rock,
it was just a bunch of guys who wanted to be evangelists. And they didn't have seminary training or anything like that. They were new Christians, but they did know how to play electric guitars, so they decided to use music as a vehicle to evangelize the lost.
And they would never charge for it, because it was ministry. You'd never
very important concern on their part was that people didn't idolize them the way they do secular groups. I mean, they'd rebuke the crowds for having too great an esteem for the band.
They'd say, we're here just to talk about Jesus. We're just here so you can see Jesus. And there was a very high exalting of Jesus in the early Christian rock and roll scene by the musicians.
And it was because they saw it as a ministry. They saw it as evangelism.
They felt like they should operate in the same code of ethics as any other evangelist.
Being rock and roll musicians didn't mean to them that they could adopt the rock and roll culture and find their identity in being rock and rollers. Their identity was being an evangelist. Rock and roll was simply the medium they used.
Now, no doubt, many people felt like rock and
roll was not an acceptable medium of evangelism, and there were many who criticized it. At least, however, the intentions, I believe, of the musicians, all the ones I knew, were very pure. But eventually, there began to be an industry in Christian rock.
There began to be Christian
radio stations that played Christian rock. There was a demand now for records. And so, record labels began to form, and concert circuits, and big money began to be made, because there was a lot of sales of Christian records.
And eventually, there was a very
commercial enterprise. And then it became very important, because they wanted to sell more records, that they look and act as much like secular rock bands as possible. And I may sound just like an old man ventilating my displeasure with the younger generation or something, but I have seen what I consider to be deterioration in the integrity of the ministry of this kind.
And I remember seeing an interview with one of these bands, you know, one of these
bands that wore spandex, you know, skin-tight clothes, and you know, very immodest stuff, and who do sexually seductive writhing on the stage when they play. I mean, they do all the things the secular bands do, but this is an extremely popular Christian band. And they were being interviewed, and they said, well, we have a ministry of people who would never darken the door of a church.
There's people who would never come and hear a preacher preach, and so they will
come and hear us, because we act and dress this way, and so forth, and we're reaching people that wouldn't be reached otherwise. I think, what about the Bible talking about modesty? What about the Bible saying, have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but renounce them? What about humility? What about this idolatry that's being encouraged toward the musicians? It's totally a worldly mentality. It's totally, in my opinion, sinful.
And it's not because I'm
opposed to rock and roll music as a medium of music. It's simply because the culture and the look and the performance style is so self, self, self, band glorified, so commercial, so immodest in many cases, that it just becomes sinful, in my opinion. I mean, I don't want to name names, although I could easily give a long list of the names, and I think we're offended from this.
Some
of them are the best known soloists among Christian artists. Some of them have crossed over, and they're making secular music now, too, as well as Christian music. But the album cover photos, the poses they do, their rock videos.
I've had the misfortune of seeing a few of those.
And I mean, they're just flat-out seductive, worldly, musician-glorifying junk. And yet, every one of these people, no doubt, thinks we're doing God a service, because after all, we're reaching people who wouldn't come to church.
But reaching them with what? You know,
this is like saying, sure, we do things a little unorthodox. We're doing things a little bit, maybe questionable morally and so forth. But after all, we're reaching people.
Again, it's like,
we didn't sacrifice all these sheep like God told us to, but we brought them over here to sacrifice to God on an altar, and that should be acceptable to Him. We don't obey exactly, but we're doing something good, and the end justifies the means, and so forth. Yes.
Well, that's exactly what I'm
saying. It's never right to do wrong to be right. Now, one of the areas where I don't expect everyone here to agree with me is, I personally am a pastor, so I don't believe it's right for Christians to fight in war.
Now, there's a lot of people who won't agree with that, and it really is a matter
for Christians to sort out for themselves. I get along fine with Christians who have not yet reached that conviction. But, given, for the moment, suppose you agree with me for the moment that it is wrong for Christians to fight in war.
Maybe that isn't your conviction,
but that is the conviction of many, many Christians and of Jesus and the apostles. So, if you don't agree with that, just look towards it. But, suppose for the moment you agree with me on this.
What do you suppose, if I said to the average Christian in America today, what do you suppose the response I most often get would be if I say, I don't think Christians should fight in war? Any ideas? Why, our freedoms were won by men fighting in war. If we didn't have a war machine, we'd lose our religious liberty. Think of all the missionaries Christianity has been able to send out because of the fact that we've maintained our liberty by having a powerful military, and so forth.
Well, okay, let me just say this. All that's beside the point. I do appreciate religious liberty.
I would not enjoy losing it. I do appreciate the fact that America has been blessed to send out many missionaries. I wouldn't like to see that change.
But, the question is not whether it's okay
to do something that we're commanded not to, because some very desirable thing might result. Who knows? If the whole concern of every American person has been to just do the will of God, and if that had involved not fighting in war, maybe God would have blessed the nation and given us the same liberty. Who knows? Never can tell.
You never can tell what might have happened if
you'd done the right thing. We can say, as history stands, certain good things were accomplished through things that were done bad. But, see, I can look at my own personal life and say, well, I can think of some sins I've done in the past, and I can see that some good results have come from some of them.
One of the most scandalous things in my past, I'm not going to tell you what
it is, but one of the most horrible sins that I can remember in my whole life has had a very sobering and humbling effect on me, which is positive. I'm very glad for the humbling. I'm very glad for the brokenness that it brought.
But, should I say, because this sin brought
brokenness and humility to a degree that I didn't possess before, and self-knowledge and self-discourse and so forth, which are all good things to have, is it okay then that I sin? Should I not repent of it? Should I say, well, sin is okay then, because it brought about some good result in me that I can point to? Obviously that's the wrong way to think. Who knows how many good results would have come if I hadn't sinned? That's the point. All we know is that God can take anything, no matter how bad, and He can work it together for good.
God's a big God. God's a powerful God. He's a sovereign God.
And because He is, He can take even the mistakes and the sins and the evils that people do. He can make the wrath of man to praise Him, the Bible says. God's able to do that.
But just because
God is able to exploit a bad thing and make something happen anyway that's good, to carry forward His purpose, does not mean that the means was justified by the end. If God can work all things together for good, does that mean that all things in themselves are good? He can use even the bad things. Joseph's brother selling him into slavery was a bad thing.
God used it for the good,
but that doesn't make it okay what they did. It was still a sin. They shouldn't sit back later and say, well, you know, I almost wanted to repent of selling Joseph into slavery, but when I see how good it turned out, I realized that I shouldn't repent of that at all.
Because some good thing
came of it. The whole nation was spared. No, you see, that some positive thing results is not a Christian argument for whatever happened to make that result.
Because good things can result from
obedience to God, and sometimes good things may even result from disobedience to God. But that doesn't mean disobedience was okay. It just means that God sovereignly used whatever He had to work with and brought about His purposes down the line from it.
But just because you can see that some
growth or some good thing may have come or some apparent advantage has been gained through something you did wrong does not mean that what you did wrong is okay. It isn't okay. And that's what Saul's making that mistake.
He's trying to find some good way to make his bad
deeds seem okay. Well, you know, God, it's true I didn't obey Him, but when you think about it, God should appreciate the results. He's getting all these sacrifices off of him.
That, in my
opinion, is not repentance, obviously. Apparently, in God's opinion, it wasn't repentance either because God didn't accept it. He said, I don't have as much concern about sacrifices as I have about obedience.
And even if you shift it from animal sacrifices, which is what Saul was talking
about, to whatever else we're offering up, converts, religious liberty, spiritual growth in my life, all these things could be seen to have come by certain means that may not have been exactly what God said should have been done, but they were done anyway and good things came from it. That doesn't make it permissible. And what we have to understand is that God graciously has turned around many bad situations to turn them out for the good, but we still need to repent and say, there's nothing good about what I did.
Nothing good about what was done. And even if you're,
for instance, when we were talking about war, even if you're not a pacifist, you've got to admit that some things done during any war are sin. Even if you think that some wars are okay and Christians decide in some wars and so forth, some Christians feel that way.
I'm not in that camp, but if that
happens to be your position, realize this, that even in the most moral, most justified of wars, and usually people would point to when we went to war against Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler is the quintessential demoniac, the demonic, satanic leader who threatens to swallow up the whole world, and if it wasn't for the Allied soldiers going to stop him, then the world would have been lost forever, as if God wasn't sovereign. But anyway, Hitler couldn't have been stopped, but by us, good thing God had us.
Don't know what he ever did before we were around.
But when you think about World War II, it's the war that people most often glamorize. We saved the world for democracy.
We stopped that demonic creature, Adolf Hitler and Mussolini
and those guys and the Japanese and so forth. But you know what? Even that war, the one that people feel the most positive feelings about our involvement in, it had many, many things about which Christians should be ashamed of. The firebombing of the city of Dresden, where the whole city was engulfed in flame soap that were sucking air in so much that even children and women trying to run from the city were sucked back in by the vacuum of the mighty flames that consumed the whole city, that was a bit of an overdoing it.
I mean, you don't have to do quite that much
destruction to destroy a city. You don't have to wipe out every woman and child in it. And as far as I'm concerned, even dropping the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, even if war was okay, even if there was some justice being accomplished in this war, can we say that that was a just act? Now we say, well, it got results.
The Japanese surrendered when they saw that. Well, what if we had
dropped the same bomb on some unpopulated area? Wouldn't they see it just as well? Wouldn't that impress them too? Saying, okay, next time it's on a populated area. War could have ended without wiping out all those Japanese people.
Let's face it, lots of war crimes were done by us too, and that's the
problem with war. War has been called the sin that includes all other sins. Rape, stealing, wine, murder, it's all there.
Never have a war without an abundance of all other kinds of sin. And when
James talks about it, he says, where do wars come from anyway? Patriotism? No. They come from lust.
That war in your members, you lust and don't have. You kill and desire to have and turn out in pain. You fight in war.
You have not because you ask not. In other words, your prayer is a decision, so you have
to go out and fight war to get what you want. Christians would do their spiritual warfare.
It wouldn't be necessary.
Anyway, no, I don't want to get on a war rave because actually I don't, it is not my intention to take all of my idiosyncratic views and impose them on this school. You'll hear them.
You will not be able to answer them, but you will not also be required to believe what I believe. So you just have to, you're going to be forced to hear it once in a while. Anyway, so to minimize the sin and to rationalize the sin are two ways that are very commonly done.
You can often find
that you could have been more disobedient than you were, therefore you feel good about yourself. Because, I mean, sure I wasn't 100% obedient, but I can easily point to some Christians who are a lot worse than I am, who sin in bigger ways than I do. Or that I did obey an awful lot, I just didn't take the final step of obedience.
That's right or not? No matter how much obedience there is,
whatever disobedience is left has to be returned to that and called by its right name. It's an abomination, it's rebellion. It's like the sin of witchcraft.
And rationalization, where you basically
say, you know, what I did, you know, perhaps something better could have been done, but think about the good result that comes from it. The end justifies the means, but it doesn't. The end doesn't justify the means.
The end is always going to be good because God can work everything out for good.
Ultimately, the kingdoms of this world will be the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ until we say, well, therefore, everything that happened before was okay. No, not everything is okay.
We have to look at sin as something that's intolerable no matter what good thing may result from it. And of course, in most cases, even if any good thing does ever result from a sin, that one good thing is usually outnumbered by the many bad things that result. There's always complexities of relationships and so forth that come of it that are horrible.
But even if that weren't so, it'd be intolerable simply because it breeds God when we sin, and therefore there's no toleration of sin permissible. We come right about to the middle of our discussion of repentance now, and we've run out of time, so we'll, in our next session on this subject, we will finish up talking about Saul's failure to repent, and then we'll go on to talk about what Jesus said in identifying the evidence of true repentance. And so we'll just finish this up next time.

Series by Steve Gregg

1 Samuel
1 Samuel
In this 15-part series, Steve Gregg teaches verse by verse through the biblical book of 1 Samuel, examining the story of David's journey to becoming k
Making Sense Out Of Suffering
Making Sense Out Of Suffering
In "Making Sense Out Of Suffering," Steve Gregg delves into the philosophical question of why a good sovereign God allows suffering in the world.
Kingdom of God
Kingdom of God
An 8-part series by Steve Gregg that explores the concept of the Kingdom of God and its various aspects, including grace, priesthood, present and futu
Introduction to the Life of Christ
Introduction to the Life of Christ
Introduction to the Life of Christ by Steve Gregg is a four-part series that explores the historical background of the New Testament, sheds light on t
Gospel of Mark
Gospel of Mark
Steve Gregg teaches verse by verse through the Gospel of Mark. The Narrow Path is the radio and internet ministry of Steve Gregg, a servant Bible tea
Isaiah
Isaiah
A thorough analysis of the book of Isaiah by Steve Gregg, covering various themes like prophecy, eschatology, and the servant songs, providing insight
Titus
Titus
In this four-part series from Steve Gregg, listeners are taken on an insightful journey through the book of Titus, exploring issues such as good works
Leviticus
Leviticus
In this 12-part series, Steve Gregg provides insightful analysis of the book of Leviticus, exploring its various laws and regulations and offering spi
Ephesians
Ephesians
In this 10-part series, Steve Gregg provides verse by verse teachings and insights through the book of Ephesians, emphasizing themes such as submissio
Gospel of John
Gospel of John
In this 38-part series, Steve Gregg teaches verse by verse through the Gospel of John, providing insightful analysis and exploring important themes su
More Series by Steve Gregg

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