Repentance (Part 2)

Foundations of the Christian Faith — Steve Gregg

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Repentance (Part 2)

Foundations of the Christian FaithSteve Gregg

In this talk, Steve Gregg discusses the concept of repentance and its importance in the Christian faith. He explains that repentance involves a change of mind towards sin, and a desire to no longer grieve God. However, he cautions against making excuses for sin, and emphasizes the need to accept responsibility for one's actions. Gregg also highlights the role of repentance as the first step in the gospel message, and the joy that comes from being forgiven and restored by God.

Transcript

Let's turn now again to 1 Samuel, Chapter 15. 1 Samuel, Chapter 15, we are continuing our discussion of the subject of repentance. Repentance is one of the foundational matters of the Christian faith, and in fact, it's the first thing to consider according to Hebrews Chapter 6, where foundational matters are listed for us.

Repentance from dead works comes first on the list. And we have already begun to broach this subject in a previous talk. We're going to continue on it now.

I gave you at that time the definitions, at least, of the Greek and Hebrew words in the Bible that are translated by our English word repentance. Two Old Testament words in the Hebrew that are both translated as repent are the words necham and shub, which mean, respectively, to be sorry and to turn around or to return. So, repentance involves both concepts, feeling sorrow and turning around or doing something different as a result of feeling that sorrow.

Now, repent is not a word that is entirely, in every case, related to repenting of sin. It is in our present consideration, but the word itself doesn't always mean to repent of sin. The Bible tells us of God repenting of things, and it's quite clear He never sinned.

It just means He felt sorry about certain things, and He turned around and did something different. When Jonah preached to the Ninevites that destruction would come in 40 days, and then they repented, the Bible says God saw what they did, and He repented of the things He said He was going to do, which means He turned around and did something else. He forgave them.

He felt sorry for them. So, to repent isn't always a concept that is only related to the issues of sin, but when it comes to repentance as a foundation of Christian life, we are talking about, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, repentance from dead works, and dead works would be sinful works, works that issue in death, works that produce death. The wages of sin is death, and works of sin are very much involved in spiritual death and lead eventually to physical death.

And so repentance from sin is what we're mindful of here, and the Old Testament idea of being sorry and turning around with reference to sin would mean that you are genuinely broken and sorry over your sins against God, and you turn around, that is, you're determined to go another way, to not sin anymore, to live a holy life. That's what repentance involves. In the New Testament, the word in the Greek is metanoia, and that word is most frequently said by lexicons to mean to change your mind, to have a new opinion, to think afterward is the literal meaning, but it means to think afterward in the sense that you now have a new opinion, you've changed your mind with reference to what it used to be that you thought on the subject.

And this is the word that is almost always used to designate repentance in the New Testament, and it's not really unlike the Old Testament words we considered. If you're sorry about something that you once did approvingly, it means you've changed your mind about it. You don't approve of the thing you once approved.

You did something without being sorry about it at one time, now you feel sorry about it, it means you have a different evaluation of that particular action. And when you change your mind about sin, it means that you've decided that sin, you don't think about it the way you did before you changed your mind, obviously. An unrepentant sinner approves of sin in himself and in others.

And I might just go off on this a little bit before we get back into 1 Samuel, but in Romans chapter 1, Paul describes the state of sinful society in the latter part of that chapter, the whole last half of the chapter is devoted to a description of how corrupt society has become because of its rejection of God, deliberate rejection of God. And at the end of that chapter, after he's listed a great number of great evils, sins, in Romans 1.32 he says, "...who, knowing the righteous judgment of God that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same, but also approve of those who practice them." Now here's the picture of the unrepentant, of the unconverted. He not only sins, but he approves of sin.

He thinks sin is all right. In our society it is such that even the grossest sins are approved of by perhaps the average unbeliever in the sense that they would think you're wrong to criticize a homosexual for his behavior, or that you're wrong to criticize somebody for his lifestyle choice. We have a general prevailing spirit of permissiveness in our current culture.

A few generations ago it wasn't quite that way. The average non-Christian still did not approve of adultery or homosexuality or a number of other things, probably drunkenness either, although in many cases they did those things. They knew they were wrong.

These days there's actual blanket approval given of almost every kind of lifestyle choice, as they would call it, and no disapproval is to be tolerated. Intolerance is not to be tolerated. And so we see a picture here of how sinners think they do sin and they approve of sin.

Now Paul said in Ephesians 2, which we looked at in the previous session, that when we were in the world and by nature children of wrath, we obeyed the lusts of the flesh and of the mind. When you commit sin, you are obeying the lusts of the flesh. When you commit sin and approve of it, you're not only obeying the lusts of the flesh but also the mind.

Your mind approves of what you're doing. But repentance changes one of those two things. It changes your mind.

Repentance is a change of mind. After you repent, you no longer approve of sin. And even if you succumb to a temptation in the flesh and do a wrong thing, you never can approve it.

Paul describes in Romans 7 the person who does things he doesn't approve of. He doesn't know why he does them. He says he finds two laws at work in him.

There's the law of his mind, which is the law his mind approves of now as a Christian, but then there's the law in his members, the law of his flesh. There's two forces at work. There's two things happening.

I used to, in the world, have a congruence and a consistency between my actions and my things I approved. I approved of sin and I sinned. Now I no longer approve of sin, but sin still occasionally is found in my experience.

But when it does, I can't approve it anymore and I do the things I have to say. Now I do the things I hate. Whenever I sin, I'm doing a thing that I hate.

And he said the fact that I hate it is proof that it's no longer in agreement with me. It's no longer I, but sin that dwells in me, he says. Now that is the first evidence, probably the most certain evidence that repentance has taken place, is that you don't approve of sin anymore.

Some would say the best evidence that you have repented is that you don't anymore. Unfortunately though, I think the Bible describes a situation in which people who are believers still have a warfare that goes on and they don't always get the upper hand in that battle. They sometimes succumb to the flesh, which they needn't, but they do.

And because they do, you wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at them to know for sure if they've repented. Sometimes they may hate desperately the thing that they are falling into because they've not yet been found the way of deliverance from it. Deliverance from sin is available.

But Christians are not always walking in or even aware of those resources that God has given us to overcome sin. And therefore, although they hate it, they sometimes are found to be doing it. The fact that they hate it shows that there's been a fundamental change in their outlook and their thinking about sin.

A Christian, indeed, might find that he sins again, and in all likelihood will find that he sins again after the moment of his conversion, but he will not find that he approves of sin. The unbeliever is continually trying to rationalize his sin. Even if he believes that what he did is not really the best thing, he always tries to minimize how bad it is.

Because it's hard to live with yourself thinking you're a total wretch, thinking of yourself as a total slime ball without anything good to be said in your favor. That's not easy on the ego. And if you're not following Jesus, the ego is about all you've got to try to satisfy.

And so the natural man doesn't easily acknowledge how sinful his own sins are. As soon as he does, he has changed his mind about them for what he thought before, because he approved of his sins before, at least at some level. He may have realized he's not doing the best he can.

He might wish he could give up his alcoholism because it's ruining his life. He might wish he could give up his homosexuality because it stigmatizes him. He might wish that some of his sins were not his problem.

But he has not made a decision that all sin is bad, and that it is entirely wrong for him to be living a life of sin. You see, it's easy for unbelievers to acknowledge some sin or another to be bad without renouncing sin in general. Sin meaning living for yourself, doing what you please instead of what God pleases, doing your will instead of God's will, living by your own standards instead of God's standards.

That's what all unbelievers do, and it's a life of sin. It's easy for them to see if a particular sinful pattern is self-destructive, that this is a bad deal, and that people ought not to do it, and they particularly want to quit doing it themselves in many cases. But that's not the same thing as repenting of sin in principle.

When a person repents of sin, he decides that all sin, whatever it may be, even though he may not know all the sins that he will later discover in his own life, he doesn't know how many things that he now practices will someday be revealed to him to be sin that he'll have to change. But that doesn't matter. He makes the decision once and for all, I agree with God.

God is always right, and anything that's contrary to God is always wrong and intolerable to me. That's the fundamental change of mind that a person has made when he's repented. And while that would, of course, lead a person to give up sin as a vocation, and so we read in 1 John that the person who has been born of God doesn't practice sin, and that whoever knows God doesn't practice sin.

Yet 1 John acknowledges that sin, in fact, may appear in some of your lives when John says, these things I write unto you, that you sin not. But if any man does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, fortunately, 1 John 2, verses 1 and 2. John is realistic about this, but he indicates that a Christian's life is not a life that practices sin. Why? Once you've adamantly set yourself opposed to a certain thing, and your mind is set like a flint against it, it's quite clear that you're not going to lightly do it.

You're not going to continue doing it as you used to do. Well, you might say, well, then why would you sin at all, then, after you've made such a decision? Well, the problem is that we have the will, after you've repented, you have the will to do well, but Paul says, I find not the power in me until I find it in the Holy Spirit, until I find it in walking in the Holy Spirit. There is the power in me as a convert, though I may walk in the flesh at times wrongly, there is the power to want to do what's right, but there's not the power in me to do the thing that's right.

It's got to be the Holy Spirit who does in me the thing that's right, and that's where walking in the Spirit becomes the answer. But the person who has repented of sin has basically taken God's opinion and given up his own former opinion about it. His own former opinion was, well, nobody's perfect, but that's not too alarming.

Yeah, I got a few sins in there, but I'm not as bad as some other people. You know, I've given up most my sins, I just have a few that are hanging on there, and they're really, you know, not all that intolerable. None of that kind of thinking works for the Christian life.

If you have not come to a place where you've renounced all known sin, and you've made a solid decision that whatever other sin in your life becomes known to you in the future, you renounce it already, and you will put it away as soon as it is revealed to you, that decision has not been made, you have not come to a place that the Bible describes repentance, and you may be living a semblance of a Christian life outwardly, but something very fundamental to the foundation of being a Christian is missing, and without a foundation, the storms of life will certainly knock over your house eventually. So, repentance is an essential thing. It is a renouncing of sin and a change in your mind to agree entirely with God about the wickedness and intolerableness of sin and the need for holiness.

Now, we said last time we were in 1 Samuel, chapter 15, that there are many things that people normally do rather than repent. I say people, I mean people in general, hopefully Christians, repent more naturally when they become aware of sin in their life. Although, sadly, people who are called Christians sometimes do the same thing as unbelievers do when confronted with sin.

Rather than repent, they take several different kinds of dodges. When you become aware of sin in your life, it's an uncomfortable thing, and in fact, it's a thing that people don't like to live with. If you are feeling continual low-grade guilt, or worse yet, high-grade guilt about something that you're doing in your life, or something you've done that is not a settled matter yet, and someone's holding it against you, and you know that God's holding it against you, that is a very uncomfortable way to live.

And there's really two things that you can choose from. One is really repent, and say, yes, that is every bit as bad as I feel that it is, that is every bit as bad as God says it is, and I am a schmuck and I just need to be forgiven by the grace of God. I need to turn from that sin and be sorry that I've done it, and try to turn around and go the other way.

Or, you have to minimize the sin. Or some other way, artificially alleviate yourself to the feelings of guilt. Well, I feel guilty, but I shouldn't feel guilty because it's really, you know, not that bad.

I mean, think of all the good deeds I do that certainly outweigh this one mistake I made, this one little mistake. Or some other way. There's ways of trying to, short of repenting of the sin, trying to learn to live unrepentant, but relieve yourself of guilt.

And that's really the various things that the world turns to, because they know they're guilty, and so they try to suppress it, or repress it, or excuse it, or rationalize it, or do something, because everybody wants to be right, everybody wants to be justified. It's just that the Bible says there's only one way to be justified, and that's through faith in Jesus Christ, but those who have not taken that way try to justify themselves in one or another way. Now, we talk about Saul, who was told by God's prophet, and therefore by God, that he should go out and exterminate the Amalekites, root and branch, leave nothing alive that breathes, no animal, male, female, adult, child, nothing.

Kill them all. Leave no trace of their ever having existed. And this is in 1 Samuel chapter 15, and he went on the mission that he was told to go on, but he didn't exactly conduct himself according to the instructions.

We read this last time, but just to refresh our memories, I'll read it again, beginning at verse 12. So when Samuel rose early in the morning to meet Saul, it was the morning, excuse me, it was told Samuel, saying, Saul went to Carmel, and indeed he set up a monument for himself, and he has gone on around, 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 the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear? And Saul said, They have brought them from the Amalekites, for the people spared the best of these sheep and oxen to sacrifice to the Lord your God, and the rest we have utterly destroyed. Then Samuel said to Saul, Be quiet, I will tell you what the Lord has said to me last night.

And he said to him, Speak on. So Samuel said, When you were little in your own eyes, were you not head of the tribes of Israel? And did not the Lord anoint you 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 utterly 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 on 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 commandments of the Lord in your words, because I feared the people, and I obeyed their voice. Now therefore, please pardon my sin and return with me, that I may worship the Lord.

But Samuel said, I will not return with you, for you have rejected the word of the Lord, and the Lord has rejected you from being king over Israel. Now when we read this last time, I told you that I find in this four mistakes, four errors that Saul made, when the one thing he should have done was repent. To humbly repent, there's four things he did instead.

Now it may look like he repented finally at the end, but since Samuel rejected this show of repentance, it would appear that he did not regard it as sincere. We'll talk about what happened at that point as well. But there are four things that I see Saul doing that I see people doing all the time.

They are the common ways that man responds to conviction. When a person becomes aware that he has sinned, when somebody confronts them, or when the Bible confronts them, or when the Holy Spirit convicts them, or in some other way they become uncomfortably aware that they have not done what God expects, there's a number of things that they resort to. One, the first thing Saul did was minimize it.

As we talked about this last time, I'm reviewing at this point, he minimized his sin. He says, well I did almost everything. The part I didn't do is so small.

I was 99% obedient, but just 1% disobedient, certainly that must count for something. Certainly God isn't so picky that he cares about that 1% of sin and disobedience. And Satan says, well God is very much so.

He is every bit that picky. He expects you to obey 100%. And if you fail to, at least to repent of that failure rather than saying, ah it's no big deal.

God is not hard to live with. God is not an ogre, and he's not unreasonable. He's very reasonable.

He calls upon us to reason with him. In Isaiah chapter 1, verse 18, come let us reason together, he says. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.

Though they be as crimson, they shall be as wool. Obviously God is a reasonable God. He is also aware that even good men sometimes don't obey 100%.

It says in Psalm 103, he remembers our frame. He considers that we're dust, or he considers our frame, he remembers that we're dust. He knows our weakness.

When the disciples fell asleep, when they were commanded to stay awake, that was a disobedient act on their part. But Jesus understood that the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. Now what I'm saying is that God is not so touchy and peevish that he gets bent out of shape when he sees something less than 100% obedience.

But he doesn't like it. He doesn't like less than 100% obedience. And what he really doesn't like is when somebody does less than 100% obedience and acts like it didn't matter whether they were 100% obedient or not.

You see, there's a delicate balance that Christians need to find, and it's not that hard to find, but it's easy to fall on either side of it. One side is to minimize sin altogether and say, well, nobody's perfect. Everyone sins.

There's no hope of being a perfect person, and therefore, why bother trying? Or why even worry about it? Why even think about it? Give it no thought. The other is to be so legalistic and so forth that you don't believe there's any forgiveness for failure, or that if you have a moral failure, it's a guarantee that you never were saved in the first place, is the view. The realistic view that I find throughout Scripture is good men who love God are nonetheless imperfect, not perfected yet.

And though they intend to do well, they still fall short. Abraham intended to do well, but we find sin in his life. David was a man after God's own heart, but he sinned also.

Some of the godliest men in the Bible, virtually everyone, when you read the book of Kings, you see one wicked king after another in Israel and Judah, and only very rarely you hit on one refreshing godly king, a Josiah or a Hezekiah or an Azar, or someone who stands out like a rose among thorns in the history of the kings, and say, well, praise God, finally there's a good man in this history we're reading. But every one of them makes one big blunder at least. Hezekiah makes a blunder, Josiah makes a blunder.

The best kings Judah ever had, they still have one notable blunder on the record against them, if not more. And what the Bible demonstrates is that, and Peter and Paul, we don't see them as men without flaws in the Bible or the other apostles. What we do not see in the Bible is flawless Christians.

What we see is people who have repented of sin, and they do have their foibles, and they do have their warts, morally speaking, spiritually speaking, but they don't make excuses for them. They repent of them. David had a horrible sin in his life, but as soon as he was confronted with it by the prophet, and the conviction came on him, he broke and repented.

He didn't say, well, look at all the good things I've done. Think of how many Philistines I've killed. So what if I killed one good guy? You're either Hittite.

Think of all the bad guys I killed. God should give me some credit for that, shouldn't He? So what if I killed one innocent man? You know? Think of how many women in Jerusalem I haven't slept with. You know? I mean, think about it.

I'm the king. I could have them all. I could seduce everyone's wife if I wanted to.

I'm the king. Why does God get so uptight that I seduce this one man's wife? David didn't respond that way. He didn't say, look, my obedience is, you know, 99%.

The 1% of sin in his life, if there was that much, was something that broke him miserably. And his view of himself, when it came down to him in Psalm 51, and when he was convicted, and he wrote his expression of repentance from it, was that he says, you know, I'm just made of sin, you know? In sin my mother conceived me. I'm a sinner from the womb.

I'm every bit sinful. I'm horrible, you know? There's nothing good about me. And that's the way a person feels when he genuinely repents.

And that's not a bad way to feel. Modern counselors would say, well, you know, don't be so hard on yourself, you know? You do have a lot of good traits, too, you know? Modern counselors are instructed that you're supposed to help people with their self-esteem, and therefore, if they seem to be too broken, or too repentant, or they paint their own sins in very black colors, you somehow are supposed to alleviate that. You're supposed to make them not feel that it's really all that bad.

Wrong. Nothing could be healthier than for a person to see sin to be what it is, ugly, intolerable, and horrendous. And a person who's repented does see it that way.

And although there may be a sin, there may be some area where he falls short of 100% obedience. He doesn't sit around making excuses about it. He repents of it.

See, what Saul did, Saul, when Samuel came and said, well, what about this bleeding of sheep I hear? How come he didn't kill the sheep? Or why'd you keep Agag alive? That's not exactly 100% obedient. Saul should have said, oh man, I really blew it, you know? I kind of made my own decisions in this matter. I thought maybe God would be pleased to have these sheep as a sacrifice.

I really, I have to admit, I didn't do what he said, and that's really wrong of me. I just really foolishly put my own thinking above what God had commanded, and I'm a wretch, you know? I deserve to die. Because the wages of sin is death.

If he had taken that approach, instead of saying, well look, I killed all the Amalekites except for Agag, isn't that enough? Can't God cut a little slack here? You see, it's not that he didn't obey 100% that killed him. That was bad. That was his first mistake.

His second mistake was acting like it was no big deal. Like 100% obedience isn't even the goal to shoot for. It's one thing to not hit the mark because you never shot at it.

It's another thing to shoot at it and miss it. The person who's repentant of sin is always shooting at 100% obedience. And if he doesn't hit it, he realizes there's grace.

He realizes there's grace from God. He misses the mark. But the fact that he missed the mark means that that's what the mark was.

At least he aimed. His aim may be weak or his eyesight imperfect, but he's at least hoping to hit the target. And missing the target is something that he doesn't just say, ah well, no big deal.

It is a big deal. He says, next time I'm going to adjust that a little bit more to the right or whatever I have to do so that I hit it next time. Because I'm not satisfied to be a poor archer.

I'm not satisfied to miss the mark when hitting the mark is what glorifies God and missing it is what grieves God. And since the very thing of my repentance is I don't want to grieve God, I want to hit the mark every time. And Saul didn't show any concern about that.

He didn't show that that was ever in his consciousness, that he really ought to have done what God said. And to be confronted about having not done it 100 percent, he thought Samuel's being kind of unreasonable it sounds like. He's protesting, but I did obey the Lord.

I did kill the Amalekites. I brought Agag back, it's true, and some of the best sheep, but I did kill the Amalekites. What are you trying to find fault for? The person who's repentant is very quick and willing to find fault with himself.

And when accused of sin will want to search his heart to see whether that accusation is true. He will sometimes find that the accusation is false. The devil sometimes tries to condemn you of sins that God doesn't really hold against you.

Things that aren't maybe really sins at all, but the devil makes you try to feel condemned. But I'll tell you what, a person who's really repentant, he doesn't mind thinking the worst of himself at least until he sorts out what's true. If somebody tells me that I did something wrong, my impression is, well, probably I did.

I'm not going to feel all condemned about it. I'm going to take a look at that and see if I did something wrong. And if so, I want to name it.

That's right name. Call it a sin. Don't call it a, you know, a foible or a mistake.

Let's just call it what it is. It's a sin. Repent of it.

But Saul wasn't doing that. And that's what typically is done by people. They know they're not perfect, but they don't think that's all that big a deal.

No one else is either. And so why should they be concerned about it? Well, you don't think that way once you've come to agree with God about sin. If you don't agree with God yet, you still haven't come around to thinking the way he does.

You haven't changed your mind yet. You're still thinking more like the world does. A second mistake Saul made, instead of repenting when he should have, he was confronted.

Samuel said, well, what's this bleeding of sheep I hear in my ears? And then of course he indicated, well, those were brought so that we could sacrifice them to the Lord. And this again was rationalizing his sin. Okay, I admit it.

I didn't do what God said. I admit that. God did technically tell me to kill these sheep, but I thought I had a better idea.

And after all, it was God's interest that I was after. It wasn't a selfish thing on my part. It's not like I was really trying to rebel against God.

I wanted to worship God. I thought, hey, maybe God never thought of this. These sheep could be brought up and sacrificed on an altar instead of just filled with their blood right here on the field.

I just figured it was an oversight on God's part. And really God would really much be happier if these animals were sacrificed on an altar to him. So we saved them to do that.

Now, obviously what he's saying is, admit it, I didn't do what God said, but a good thing is to result from it. That's something that God should approve of. If I understand God correctly, he likes sacrifices.

Therefore, I figured, yeah, obeying him exactly isn't what matters. Getting the results is what matters. If a sacrifice results from disobedience, well, God shouldn't have any complaints about that, because at least things he likes are being accomplished.

And we talked about that last time too, how that's a very common thing to do, to see how some disobedience in some specific thing that God has told us to do, but we haven't done, to see how it's all worked out for the good after all. It's brought about some good results. People got saved.

I've grown. Everyone's learned a good lesson. Things are better.

Therefore, I shouldn't really feel too bad about the sin. I mean, if that were so, Judas ought to say, why should I repent of betraying Jesus? People got saved as a result. How can you argue with souls being saved? You know? What could be wrong about betraying Jesus into the hands of his enemies, since it resulted in his crucifixion? Can you imagine Judas or the members of the Sanhedrin standing before God on a judgment day, and Jesus saying, depart from me, you cursed, in the lake of fire? And they say, wait a minute, wait a minute, hey, wasn't it the will of God for you to die? Now, let's be reasonable, God.

It was necessary for you to die to save all these multitudes that are going into heaven. We were instrumental. True, the thing we did was not well motivated.

We weren't trying to fulfill the will of God. True, we were totally self-centered, and what we did was criminal, but look at what resulted from it. A sacrifice was offered to you.

We disobeyed, but look at, now we can see clearly, this has been something good for the kingdom of God. Why should we repent of what we did? Now, that's a blatant example, an extreme one, but in principle, no different. Saul sinned by not obeying God.

He should have just acknowledged, this was a sin, I did the wrong thing, God forgive me, and he would have been forgiven, and he would have remained king in Israel, I believe, but he was not willing, again, to own his sin for what it was, call it by his right name. He was trying to find some way to make it seem like it was really, you know, almost his religious duty to disobey God in a case like this. Some great thing resulted that God should congratulate him for, and this is what I called rationalizing sin.

Now, a lot of people don't rationalize it quite that religiously or that blatantly, you know, but I mean, if you cheat on your income tax and that leaves you more money to give to the church, you know, that's no justification for cheating on your income tax. No doubt someone might think that way. Someone might think, you know, that any sin that they commit, there's somehow some way that could be exploited to turn around to serve the interests of goodness, but that is not the issue.

The issue is the act itself was an act of disobedience. It stands as a sin to be reckoned with and to be dealt with and to be settled before God, and the only way to settle it is by repenting of it, not making excuses for it. Okay, now let's go on to the third thing.

In verse 21, Saul said, but the people took of the plunder, sheep and oxen, the best of the things. He says, I obeyed, in verse 20, I have obeyed the voice of the Lord. I have gone and wiped out the Amalekites, with the exception I did bring back Agag, but the people, they're the ones who took the sheep and so forth to offer as a sacrifice to the Lord.

It was their idea initially, and it sounded like a good one to me, so I permitted them to do it, but it was their, it was at their instigation, not mine. It wasn't my original idea, and notice he says in verse 24, 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 this idea that Saul kept the sheep alive out of fear of the people, and that they, they made the suggestion he didn't and so forth, I don't think that excuse is fabricated out of cold cloth.

I think that's probably somewhat close to the facts. In all likelihood, Saul and his zeal was out there ready to do the will of God, and the people said, wait a minute, his generals and so forth, do you realize how much livestock is out here? How much food that is? We've been at battle all day against these Amalekites. We're hungry, we didn't bring enough provisions.

There's all these animals, we're going to let this meat just rot and let the vultures eat it. Come on, let's take it home and have a sacrifice and a feast. And very possibly, they were even so hungry that they threatened rebellion against them.

Who knows? He said he feared them. He feared the people. Now again, unless he was just making up that story, which is not impossible, but I think it's more probable that there's some truth in it.

That the people probably were the first to suggest to him that the, some animals be spared and brought back. I'm willing to give him that. Samuel never says that's a lie.

God has caught you in a lie here. The people didn't suggest that. Let's give it, let's give him that much credit that it wasn't his idea.

It was the people's idea. But you see, even that being so is not a good excuse for what he did. He was the king.

The people had to obey him. And even if they rebelled against him, better for him to be obedient to God and have people rebel against him and him suffer whatever fate there is for being obedient. Then out of the fear of man to do the wrong thing and to disobey God.

Clearly, he still had to bear his own responsibility for his own decision, regardless of how many other people may be equally guilty with him. And this is the important thing that I want to draw out of this. It is what people almost always do when they're not willing to repent.

And that is to find somebody else who ought to do the repenting. To shift the blame to someone else. It's very commonly called blame shifting.

And it's done with great frequency in our culture. In fact, much of modern counseling is designed, basically amounts to nothing more than a search for the right party to blame, other than the counselee. The counselee goes to the counselor because he's sinning.

He's got an addiction. He's got sinful moods, anger, depression, anxiety, all of which are sin because the Bible forbids them. The counselee has an eating disorder or a sex addiction or a gambling addiction.

All this means is they're living in sin. The modern language, such and such addiction, that's just putting clinical and pathological names on stuff that used to just be called living in sin. I like the old name better because living in sin is not something that is a medical problem or that needs a medical cure.

But by giving these things pathological names, basically a person saying it's not my fault. It's not my fault that I'm a womanizer. I've got a sex addiction.

It's no more my fault than if I wet my pants and had a bladder infection. You know what I mean? It's just a medical problem. Wrong.

It's not parallel. The Bible nowhere cuts anybody any slack for their sin. I do believe that some people have brain injuries.

Some people have deficient mental skills. Some people are mentally retarded, for example. Some people might even at certain times of the month or certain times of their life have hormonal imbalances that incline them toward irritability or toward some thing.

But those are simply times when the temptation to do evil is stronger and where they need more grace to counter it. It's not an excuse to say, well, I always get this way at this time of the month. It's hormonal.

Well, maybe it is hormonal. But since you know that, you know that there are certain times when you need more grace. You need to be walking in the spirit more.

You need to be more careful to fight the good warfare. There's no excuse for sinning just because of some physical thing. I'm not denying that physiological factors may come into play in some of our moods and so forth.

I think that's a given. But the point is, who's to blame? Are we going to blame God for giving us this chemical makeup in our body? Where did blame shifting begin anyway? Who did the first blame shifting? Everyone here knows the answer to that. Happened in the Garden of Eden.

Eve sinned, Adam sinned, God confronted them. They should have repented. Instead, they hid, tried to conceal their deed.

When he finally asked them directly, did you eat of the fruit that I told you not to eat of? Adam said, well, the woman that you gave me, she gave it to me, implying, yes, I did, but really someone else bears more blame than this than I do. It's the woman you gave me. So I don't know if it's you or the woman who's more at fault, God.

You two can work it out among yourselves, but I'm fairly clean in this matter. Obviously, the woman's more guilty than I am. And I'm not so sure, God, that you're not the one who really falls, but you're the one who put her in my life.

I mean, she's a temptress. And if you hadn't made her, we'd have a lot happier life around here. I know a lot of men who think that their wife's behavior justifies their misbehavior.

Yeah, my wife drives me to drink. I couldn't help but have an affair or two because my wife is so cold and so frigid. That's no excuse.

But it's, of course, very tempting, once you have sinned, to find some way to blame someone else for your sin. It may well be that your wife is wrong or your husband is a schmuck. And if that's true, he will have to answer to God for that, but you have to answer to God for how you responded to the irritation, how you responded to the temptation, to the pressure that that situation put you under.

The Christians have had to endure greater stresses than you'll ever dream of seeing, and greater irritations than flies buzzing around in your head. You can see I maintain my composure, walking in grace. But it's, you know, the psychologists will, so often the assumption is that if someone comes, he's got any kind of sin problem in his life, it's, first of all, the last thing to suggest is that it's your fault for your sins.

There's always got to be someone you can find. Society is at fault here. You're a victim.

In Freud's view, you're a victim of an oppressive society that had conditioned your superego, which is your conscience, to see certain things as wrong, even though there's no reason you should have seen them as wrong. You were conditioned by your parents, or your Sunday school teacher, society, or the church, or your school teacher, or someone, to see certain things as wrong. And even though there's nothing really wrong with those things, those people have made you have a hang-up about it, and now it's become a problem in your life.

Other, you know, other psychologists have different theories. Not everyone's Freudian these days. In fact, very few are.

But the point is, the psychological counseling basically proceeds on the assumption that you are a victim, and that's why you misbehave. You're a victim of something. And therefore, through therapy, we've got to find out who's to blame for this.

Was it your parents who didn't change your diaper quickly enough when you were an infant, and it's somehow that rejection that you feel is going to repress, or even someone will even take it back into the womb, you know? You sensed when you were in the womb that your parents didn't want you, and you've just lived under this cloud of rejection all your life, and it's led to depression, and anxiety, and hatred, and poor behavior in your own marriage, and so forth. There's actually a Christian book about counseling that teaches that this couple that wrote the book were counseling a lady who was an adulteress. She cheated on her husband.

And in counseling, through a word of knowledge, they found out her problem, the reason she was doomed to be an adulteress, was because when she was in the womb, she judged her parents of fornication, because she was conceived out of wedlock, and her parents had not been married when she was conceived. So, while she was in the womb, she judged her parents of fornication, and therefore they say, Jesus said, the measure you use to judge others will be measured back to you. So, according to their twisted theology, that means that since she judged them, she was destined to do the same thing.

By the way, that's not what the scripture means on that subject. Furthermore, any suggestion that an unborn baby in the womb would have any concept of fornication, or any other moral issue, or any concept of where it came from, or even of its environment, is more than questionable. It's absurd.

And yet, this is a couple of leading Christian counselors writing major books about that thick each, on Christian counseling. And they're just following the world's teaching on the same thing. Basically, you sin because somebody else did something, and you were of course weak enough to judge them for it, or to feel rejection for it, or whatever, but they instigated it.

They were the problem, first of all. Now, this just doesn't wash. It is true that many of the sins you have committed in your life, you were tempted by somebody else, or pressured by somebody else to do.

And, you know, it is not impossible that a person could argue that because I was raised in this racist home, I inclined toward being a racist myself, or because I was born Irish, I have a tendency to lose my temper, or because I was, whatever, you know, I was raised in a home of a wife-beater, I now am doomed to beat my wife, or have that tendency to beat my wife. Because my father and grandfather for four generations were alcoholics, I'm conditioned to be an alcoholic. Now, I don't deny that a person's environment can predispose them toward certain sins.

Let me tell you something, with or without any given environment, you are born predisposed toward sin. The particular sins that grab you and dominate you may be somewhat affected by the environment you're in. I was not raised in a drinking home.

I've never been tempted to drink. It's not a problem to me. It is to some people.

And it's very possible that a person who grew up in an alcoholic home, and grandfather, and everyone else in the family had always resorted to alcohol as a means of, you know, escaping the walls or something, that child from an early age was conditioned to think, maybe even almost unconsciously, that alcohol is the escape. My dad used it. My grandfather used it.

I think I'll try it when I'm under pressure too, you know. And they might experience more of a temptation that way than I do. I'm not trying to take away from any valid thing that could be said about certain people's circumstances, their parents, the way they were raised, the education they had or didn't have, having some effect on predisposing them toward a weakness, toward some sin or another.

I believe that is possible. It has nothing to do with anything when it comes to repentance though. Because all of us are predisposed toward sin of one kind or another.

And the Pharisees maybe weren't very tempted to become drug addicts, but they were tempted to be self-righteous. And that was their besetting sin. There's a thousand different sins.

The fact of the matter is, once we discover that we've sinned, instead of trying to say, now what was it in my upbringing that inclined me to this, is just call it by its right name. It's a sin. I shouldn't have done it.

Now there may be some guilt that will be shared in this matter with someone else. Maybe the peer group I ran with got me into pornography or got me into stealing or got me into a gang. I was afraid of people and I sought security in a gang because my parents were neglecting me and they weren't there for me or whatever.

I mean there's all kinds of real explanations that involve other people in the guilt of our own sins. Very few sins are committed in a vacuum. Even the sins you commit in total privacy often have been influenced by the fact that someone else out there displayed a pornographic magazine cover in a store where you went in just to buy a quart of milk.

It wasn't your fault. You didn't expect to see that there. But then you walk home with that temptation in your mind and you do something about it.

Now it may seem like a very private thing, but other people are involved. But that has nothing to do with your responsibility in the matter. Because the grace of God has always been available to you and if you had chosen to and determined to and fought the warfare that is available to you to fight and availed yourself of the resources that the Holy Spirit gives to you, you wouldn't have fallen.

You can say no. In fact, you're commanded to. If we were only supposed to feel guilty and repent of the sins where no other human being had any influence on us, I'm not sure I could find any sins like that in my career.

Because we are not, no man is an island. Everything, all the pressure that comes on us in the form of temptation, at least all of it I can think of off the top of my head, I can think of a wide range of temptations that have come to me over the years, almost all of it exists because of someone else. And if no one else, I can always blame Adam, you know.

If he hadn't sinned, there wouldn't be any temptation at all in the world, presumably. But I mean, if you've got a problem with drinking, you could blame the people who manufacture alcoholic beverages. If they didn't do it, I wouldn't fall into my alcoholism.

I would have never touched a drink if no one was manufacturing it. Or cigarettes or whatever. Dope.

I would have never smoked dope if there hadn't been a pusher there. Well, obviously that pusher is going to have to answer to God for pushing. You're going to have to answer to God for buying.

You know, in repentance, what somebody else does is never the issue. In repentance is, where is my guilt in the matter? God doesn't hold me accountable for what someone else did, but he holds me fully accountable for what I did. And that's where my relationship with God is going to be hindered.

If I'm always trying to focus on how someone else is guilty, someone else really should be blamed. Someone else needs to repent, but I never get around to repenting and acknowledging the full weight of my own responsibility and sin and what I'm doing. I can't blame someone else and get away with it with God, because he can't be snowed.

And he knows that if I had looked to him at the moment I was under pressure, I could have said no to that pressure. Fact of the matter is, we live in a world that's full of temptations. Almost all those temptations are put there by other people.

And very possibly, our contribution to human society has been a temptation to others, and has put other people in a position. Jesus said, it's better to have a millstone hung around your neck and be cast in the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. There's no question in my mind that a father who beats his wife and his son then begins to think of that as, that's the way you vent your frustration against your wife, so he becomes a wife beater too.

And you know, statistically it's said that a huge percentage of children who are raised in homes where the father beat the wife end up doing the same thing. I'm sure that that father bears tremendous guilt before God for having caused his little ones to stumble in that way. But the little ones have to answer for their own actions too.

They didn't have to follow their father's bad example, they chose to. And there is no doubt a lot of guilt to be shared with the whole human race, or with all the contributing persons in our society for any given sin. But that's not my problem.

My problem is what I chose to do and what I did. Saul may have been telling the whole truth. These people intimidate me.

They're the ones who made the suggestion. I never crossed my mind until they tempted me. And there are more of them than me.

And gosh, who knows what might have happened to me if I'd resisted them. I feared the people's voice, so I just did what they said. But God told you not to.

You can obey God or man. If you obey man instead of God, you've got that to answer for. And instead of making excuses and saying how much other people are to blame, let God deal with them.

They'll answer to God for that. They will. If they're as guilty as you think they are, God knows it.

And God's not going to let them off easy on it. But the question is not, between you and God, the question is not what did someone else do to you? The question is, what did you do with reference to obeying God? And as long as we shift blame, we never accept blame. And until we accept blame, we haven't repented, as it prevents us from repenting.

Why would we? If I don't feel that I'm really to blame, why would I repent? So, minimizing sin, rationalizing sin, saying, well, really, this really worked out for the good, and blame shifting are all very common things that people do when confronted with their sin, and all of them are short of repentance. Then the next thing, the fourth thing that Saul did is false repentance. He finally got around to doing something that looked like repentance.

He said, okay, I'm sorry. Is that what you want me to say? I'll say it. Saul said the same in verse 24, I have sinned, for I've transgressed the commandment of the Lord in your words, because I feared the people who made their voice.

He's still not owning all the responsibility for it, but he's at least saying words that sound better now. I did sin. I said I didn't a while ago, but I changed my mind.

I did sin. That sounds like repentance. But the prophet of God, who was very discerning in that situation, who, by the way, loved Saul a great deal, he grieved for days after Saul was rejected as king.

Samuel was not hostile towards Saul in any way, but he had the word of the Lord for him, and Samuel said, no, you've lost it. I'm not going to accept this, what you're saying. You say you're sorry, but isn't it interesting that you didn't say it until I said you've been rejected from being king.

The very words that precede Saul's statement, I've sinned, forgive me. All the right words now, but the timing was off. Why didn't he say that before he had calculated his losses? Why didn't he say that just because he felt conviction and felt sorry for disobeying God? Why was it that it wasn't until he realized his kingdom was being taken from him that he finally got sorry about things? The prisons are full of men who say they're sorry for what they did.

Statistically, though, a huge percentage, well over 50%, once they're released from prison, do it again, which suggests that their sorrow was not really that genuine. They're sorry they got caught, and that's where Saul's at. He's sorry he got caught.

He's sorry he now realizes he's going to lose more if he doesn't say the right words here. If he can't convince Samuel that he really is sorry, then he's going to lose his kingdom. That's a big price to pay for his ego.

So he's willing to sacrifice the ego and say, okay, I admit it, I'm wrong. Can I have my kingdom back now? Sound like anyone else? Famous people? I repented, can I have my kingdom back now? I'm thinking of some well-known evangelists who talked almost exactly that way. Well, when you repent only because it's convenient for you to repent.

This is not repentance. This is making a convenient retraction. This is what I consider the fourth thing that people commonly do.

They have realized that if they don't plead guilty, they're going to get a worse sentence when they're shown to be guilty in court. They plea bargain. I'll plead guilty if you give me a reduced sentence.

You're really repentant? No, but I don't want a bad sentence, so I'll pretend that I've changed my mind. I'll say what you want to say. I'll jump through the hoops because I care about me.

And that's the whole problem. True repentance is not that way, but false repentance is still self-centered, still looking out for yourself. That's the very thing that we need to repent of.

That's what caused you to sin in the first place. You were self-centered, and now you're doing something religious that's self-centered, saying words that resemble the words of a repentant sinner. But in fact, the very selfishness that led to the sin of the first place is also motivating the apparent repentance.

There's been no real change of mind about sin and selfishness in general. You're still operating under it. A lot of people repeat bad behavior after they have apparently repented of it.

Someone did a study a long time ago, and I wish it's been so long ago that I heard the results. I can't remember the statistics, but it was very interesting. Someone had done a study of people who had repented on their deathbed, but then unexpectedly survived.

The doctor had given him over and said, you got, you know, two weeks. Better call on the family and the priest and whoever else you want to talk to. You don't have much time left.

And virtually on their deathbed, they called in the preacher, they repented, they confessed their sins, they jumped through all the hoops. And then all of a sudden, there was a totally unexpected reversal of their medical condition. They recovered, they're back on the street, they're given several more years of life.

And guess what? Very, very tiny percentage of them in any way walked with God after that. Which makes, and that's, and there's where the evidence is of real repentance. It's clear that they did what they thought they had to do to get out of a very frightening situation, namely going to hell.

They were willing to say the right words, but it was no change of heart. As soon as they had the opportunity to demonstrate where their heart was at, it was still at the place it was at before. They hadn't changed their mind about sin.

They hadn't turned to God to serve the living God. And the most frightening thing about it is that no doubt on their deathbed, they were as sincere as they knew how to be. This is the scariest thing.

Because so many people think, well, I can live for myself all through my life, but on my deathbed, I'll repent and get right with God. These people, no doubt, were repenting as sincerely as they knew how at that point in time. They wanted to be ready to meet their maker, but their repentance was phony, as is evidenced by the fact that it didn't make any impact on their life after they unexpectedly recovered.

Which shows that a person might come to a place in his life where he now, he feels it's time to repent, but the appointed time has passed. Call upon him while he is near, it says in Isaiah 35. Seek the Lord while he may be found.

You don't order God around like he's your household servant. Say, okay, God, I'm ready for you now. You strike while the iron is hot.

When conviction is on you, that's when you can repent. When the Holy Spirit is convicting you, it's always because he's seeking to draw you to repentance. And if you respond to him and repent, you'll have genuine repentance.

But if the Holy Spirit convicts you to resist and resist and resist, and then he kind of draws away, and then later you think it'd be convenient to repent, you can't really repent. Not deeply, unless the, because no one, Jesus said, no one can come to me except the Father who sent me, draw him. It's always got to be the Holy Spirit who's initiating repentance.

In fact, the Bible speaks of repentance as a gift from God. Did you know that? Look at, for example, Acts chapter 11, and this is when Peter had to explain himself. He got in trouble because he had, he had gone to the Gentiles' houses.

He gave his story and the church in Jerusalem finally forgave him for that. But in Acts 11, 18, it says, when they had heard these things, they became silent, and they glorified God, saying, then God has also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life. Notice, God has granted them repentance to life.

It was understood. You don't repent on your own. You repent in response to God graciously convicting you and appealing to you and wooing you and seeking to convince you to repent.

And if, if you respond at those times, then you do fully repent and you have to admit that God's the one who granted it, because if he hadn't come and convicted you, you wouldn't have repented at all. In 2 Timothy chapter 2, we have a similar kind of wording. 2 Timothy chapter 2, beginning with verse 24, says, and a servant of the Lord, 2 Timothy 2, 24, a servant of the Lord must not quarrel, but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient in humility, correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance so that they may know the truth and that they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will.

Notice in verse 25, if God perhaps will give them, grant them repentance. Now, repentance is something you do, but it's something you can only do if God grants it to you. Same thing with saving faith.

It's a gift of God, not of works. The same as you both. The fact is that if you don't repent on your, if you don't personally decide to repent, it won't happen.

It's your responsibility. If you fail, you're responsible for that failure. But you can't do it just any time you get a hankering for it.

You can only really repent genuinely when God is granting you that open door. And that may be many times during your life. It may be different seasons in your life.

At different points in your life, God comes again by his written conviction, and you've got another chance to repent at that time. Conviction, by the way, is not repentance. Very important.

Some people feel good just because they got convicted, they feel kind of purged by feeling guilty. I had a friend of mine who was a Christian guy, lived in a house I was with, and he would, from time to time he'd go out in heaven, he'd commit fornication. And he'd come back and he'd be all grieved and so forth, and he'd talk very freely about it and so forth, but he did it again and again and again.

And we began to think, you know, he seemed to think that by talking about it and admitting it and being so open and feeling so guilty about it, that that somehow atoned for it and took the place of repentance. I've many times preached in churches, usually as a guest preacher, because I've never been a pastor of a church, but I've preached in churches where people came up afterwards and said, well, I really got convicted by what you said. As if my preaching had done its work, you know.

Well, wonderful, you got convicted, but I don't care. Did you repent? That's what I want to know. If you got convicted, that's an opportunity to repent.

Did you repent is more to the point. If I pointed out to you some sin by my preaching and the Holy Spirit convicted you of it, and you walk away under conviction, am I supposed to rejoice in that? Am I supposed to say, well, that was an effective sermon, that person's now living under condemnation and conviction? No, the idea is that conviction is there to lead you to repentance. And you can't repent, no one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws him.

It's by the Holy Spirit convicting the world of sin and righteousness and judgment that God draws men to himself. But if he stops drawing, as is the case of many of those people that were set on their deathbed, they had no doubt rejected previous opportunities to turn to God when they could have at earlier times, but now it was merely convenient to get right with God. They weren't acting under conviction of sin, they were acting under fear of loss, loss of their souls.

But while that might be a present element in everybody's repentance, it cannot be the leading element in genuine repentance. And so a convenient retraction, and say, okay, I sinned, is that what I'm supposed to say? I'm supposed to say something here to get right with God, to make sure I don't suffer any loss, don't want to go to hell, don't want to lose my kingdom, don't want to go to jail for very long. I'll say I did the wrong thing, will that help? Sometimes it will help in terms of deceiving man, but it won't help in deceiving God, because God is not mocked.

And therefore, repentance must be genuine. What is genuine repentance? What characterizes genuine repentance in contrast to what we've been talking about? Since repentance is a foundational necessity in a Christian life, we certainly ought to have some assurance that what we have done, which we call repenting, is the real thing. Repentance, by the way, turn to, if you would, Luke 15.

But repentance is, as we said in a previous lecture, the first word of the gospel. Peter, on the day of Pentecost, said, repent and be baptized, every one of you. Jesus said, repent and believe the gospel.

Paul said that he went around preaching to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ. Repent, repent, repent. Jesus said in Luke 13 twice, if you do not repent, you will all likewise perish.

Luke 13, verses 3 and 5. So repentance is a mandatory thing. It's not optional. It doesn't come at a later, it's not a second work of grace or anything like that.

Repentance is where you start your Christian life. It's the first one. Now, at Luke chapter 15, we have a very well-known story.

There's actually three stories here. All of them have something in common. They all have something to do with the appropriateness of rejoicing over that which is lost now being found.

There's a story of a lost sheep, a story of a lost coin, and a story of a lost son. And the story of the lost son we usually call the story of the prodigal son. All of these stories end exactly alike, or almost exactly.

Whatever gets lost eventually gets found. And when it is found, there's great rejoicing and appropriately so. Now, the reason for Jesus telling this parable was essentially to show the Pharisees that they were not anywhere near God's heart.

Because Jesus was fellowshipping with tax collectors and sinners who had recently come back to God, and the Pharisees were bummed out because these people were having such a good time in God, and they were prostitutes and sinners only so recently. And Jesus wanted to point out, well, these people are found now. They were lost when they were prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners.

They were truly lost, but now they're found. Shouldn't we rejoice? Shouldn't they be partying? I mean, shouldn't we be feasting and so forth? And he describes the sheep that's been lost and found, the coin that was lost and now found. He says, the woman who finds the coin, she calls all her neighbors in, and they rejoice with her.

Why aren't you rejoicing? And in the story of the prodigal son, it's really a story about two sons. The man had two sons. One of them was the prodigal.

And when the prodigal returned home, the servants and the father were rejoicing, but the other son wasn't rejoicing. He had a grudge against this younger son. He said, how come he went out and got to enjoy all that sin? And then when he comes back, it's like he's lost nothing.

I've been here faithful and loyal to my dad all this time, and I never have had a party yet. And he's basically jealous that so much ado is being made over this returning son. And he points it out to his father.

He says, this son wasted your goods with prostitutes and so forth, and you throw a party for him when he comes back. What about me? I've always been a faithful son. I've always been right here.

And his father says, that's right. You've always been right here, and that's been your reward. Being with me is reward enough.

But our son, your brother, has been lost, and now he's found, and you should rejoice. Come on in and dance with us. It says there was dancing and music going on.

It was a rejoicing time. Now, the thing about that story is it's much longer than the other two in the same chapter. All three want to get the point across that there should be rejoicing when lost people are found.

In fact, he says repeatedly, even so, there is rejoicing in heaven when one sinner comes to repentance. In one place it says all the angels rejoice when one sinner comes to repentance. That's the point of these stories.

But the third one's the longest, more detailed. And as part of the detail of the prodigal son, we have the detail of his repentance. Now realize that this was a parable.

Jesus was not talking about an actual case. He was making up a story to illustrate his point. Therefore, the father and the son and so forth represent things, but they weren't real individuals that this historically happened to.

There may be many cases in real life that are very similar to this. The story may resemble many real cases in history, but the point of the parable is to make up a fictitious story and use it to make some true spiritual lesson. And since Jesus essentially was at liberty to make up the story, when he describes the boy repenting, the repentance that he describes is very clearly what Jesus regarded to be true repentance.

You can tell a lot about Jesus' opinion about true repentance by the way he formulated the thoughts in this boy's heart when he tells about how he repented. And so we have in this story what I see as a picture of true repentance described by Jesus himself in the form of this son who comes back. And in Luke chapter 15, just part of the story, we know the story.

Let's read a few verses only. Verses 17 through 19. But when he came to himself, he said, How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and despair, and I perish with hunger? I will arise and go to my father, I will say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.

I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. Now these are the thoughts of repentance that Jesus put into the mouth of this boy as to show us what true repentance looks like.

Two things very important about it that are seen here. One is, although he had fallen into miserable conditions, eating with the pigs and so forth, lost all his money, and he did look forward to having a more comfortable situation in his father's house, he nonetheless was more concerned about what he had done to God than anything else. His first statement is, I have sinned against heaven and, Father, in your sight as well.

Now of course in the parable the father represents God, but that's beside the point. He's talking about it like it's a real family situation with a real son and a real father on earth. And the boy, when he really gets right, he realizes first of all what he's done to God and secondly what he's done to his father in the parable, the earthly father, who he had basically brought reproach on him through his behavior and wasted his father's goods and so forth.

But the important thing to note is that genuine repentance is God-centered, not self-centered. When Saul said, I'm sorry, I sinned, is that good enough? He was still self-centered. He was motivated by a desire not to lose his privilege.

This son is fully expected to lose his privilege. I'm not worthy to be your son, just let me be a servant. That's good enough.

My concern is I've sinned against heaven and against you, and I want a restoration of this relationship. Sure it's good for me, no question about it. If I was only allowed to repent when I was convinced it would be bad for me to repent and that I wouldn't benefit by a relationship with God, I'm not sure what motivation there would be.

But the fact is, it is good for you to repent and get your relationship right with God. But somehow true repentance involves a shift of me-centeredness to God-centeredness. When David repented of his sin with Bathsheba, he was not told that he was going to lose his kingdom, but he was rebuked for sinning against God.

And when he wrote Psalm 51 as an act of repentance or an expression of his repentance, in Psalm 51 verse 4 he said, Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this great evil in your sight. Interesting that he'd say, against thee, thee only, have I sinned. Only God? Is God the only injured party in David's sin? How about the woman who was defiled and who was impregnated with a child that was later to die? And so he subjected this woman to the grief of illegitimate pregnancy and loss of a child, as well as loss of a husband by killing her husband.

And by the way, that was a sin against the husband too. And against Israel as a whole, since David was their king, he was a pretty bad example to them. But most of all, Nathan the prophet confronted David and said, You have given the enemies of the Lord an opportunity to reproach and blaspheme him.

Somehow that fact weighed upon David far more than the fact that he defiled a married woman or murdered an innocent man. Those crimes were horrendous in themselves. He was not denying that he'd done those horrible things, but what weighed upon him was what it did to God.

You know, this is very important. I remember hearing a crisp background. I lived in California.

Someone came to me one morning and said, I was up all night counseling an alcoholic, a drunkard. And he said he was just blubbering about how much he'd ruined his family and disappointed his wife and his children by being such a drunkard. And this person said to me, and I told him, Don't be thinking about that.

Think about how much you've ruined yourself. And I said to this person, That wasn't the right counsel either. The person should be repentant, first of all, not because of what he's done to his wife and family, not because of what he's done to himself, but what he's done to God.

If your repentance is going to be focused on what's happened to you as a result of your sin or what's happened to others as a result of your sin, how many humans have been injured, there's always the fact that no matter who was relatively innocent and injured in the situation, all men are sinners. All men deserve worse than what they get from God anyway. And if my sin inconvenienced somebody or hurt their life, they can't claim that they deserve something better.

They can't claim to be lily white themselves. They are sinners too. They may be innocent in this particular matter, but the guilt can, the sense of guilt can be mitigated and watered down a little bit by saying, Well, yeah, I did wrong that person, but he wasn't altogether clean in this matter himself.

He made some bad judgments in the deal too. Hopefully he'll learn a few lessons from this. And somehow it won't really seem quite as bad.

When you realize that God has never done any wrong thing to anyone. He's done nothing but lavish his gifts on an undeserving humanity. He's been faithful to promises which he made uncoerced.

No one coerced him to make any promises to us. From the moment we sinned, we deserve to go to hell. And if God had the moment we sinned, our first sin, sent us directly to hell, he would have been fully within his rights.

And every breath you've taken, and every opportunity to be saved, or to enjoy life even for one minute, is all just the bounty and the abundance of the mercy and the grace of God. He's done nothing wrong. He's wronged no person.

And yet every man on earth, including you, have wronged him. And when you receive mercies like this, like a dog biting the hand that feeds it. When you receive mercies continually, daily from the hand of God, and then rub manure in his face, as it were, by going out and sinning.

This is a reproach. This is a guilt that cannot be mitigated. This is a guilt that cannot be in any sense diminished.

And the thing that motivates true repentance is finally getting the revelation of how much you have brought grief to God. Now, secondarily, you may well grieve how many other people were hurt in this situation. Your wife, your children, your friends, your parents, whoever.

Whoever else you grieve is secondary. Still important, but nowhere near as important as the fact that you have become aware of how greatly God has been hurt and offended by your sin. And that is the first consideration.

It was David's first consideration, although many others were hurt by what he did, and so was he, eventually. The sword never departed from his house. He lost several children as a judgment because of this.

He actually had his own son rebelled against him, and he was in exile for a while. All these things happened, the Bible indicates, because of his sin. There were things that Nathan said would happen because of his sin.

Now, that wasn't what was primary in his concern, however. Primary in his concern was that against thee, thee only have I sinned, and none this evil in your sight. So with the prodigal son, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and also in your sight.

But firstly, against heaven, which is a Jewish way of saying against God, because the Jews avoided saying God unnecessarily for fear that they'd take the name in vain, so they often would substitute the word heaven, where God would otherwise be what they meant. So here we see that true repentance, as Jesus depicts it in the mouth of this prodigal returning and repenting, is God-centered, God-focused, not self-centered. The other thing about it that's very obvious to me is how much humility is there.

I'm not worthy to be called your son. I won't even ask you for that mercy of restoring me. I have truly forfeited all my rights.

My sin weighs so heavily upon me, I could never dream of expecting any favors. I could never dream of demanding any rights. I don't even have the right to be forgiven.

I'm not worthy to be called your son. Don't think for a moment that I expect you to restore me completely. But could I maybe just be a slave in your household? This is so obviously a part of true repentance, but so obviously absent from what many people regard as their own repentance.

I mentioned earlier the television evangelists. They go out, they commit adultery, they mishandle funds, they live in luxury on the pensions of widows and so forth that have been given to them. They do these horrendous, horrendous things, drag the name of God through the mud, bring reproach on the church for maybe, what, two, three more decades before this reproach is wiped away from the church? Maybe never in this generation.

Maybe it'll be a generation or two before it's forgotten. Maybe it won't even be forgotten then. Who knows how much damage these people have done? But they weep a little bit.

They say, I'm sorry, it was really wrong of me. And then instead of saying, I'm no longer worthy to be a minister of the gospel, I have truly forfeited anyone's trust. I have truly done things that should make you never trust me again and God doesn't owe it to me at all to restore me to ministry.

Instead they go out and say, now I've done what I should do, haven't I? Shouldn't I have my TV empire back? Shouldn't I have my theme park back? Shouldn't I be giving back everything I had before I sinned? This is not repentance. This is convenient retraction. This is saying, okay, I'll jump through this hoop if it'll get me what I want.

That's not repentance. Repentances are no longer worthy to be your son. Now the amazing thing is, the father wouldn't hear anything of it.

He said, get that ring on his finger, get that robe on him. My son is back, he's my son again. And he gave him what he did not expect or demand for himself.

But I think he would not have given it had the son come back demanding it because it would be an evidence the son had never really assessed the weight of his own sin if he still thought that, well, my sin was, yeah, it was bad, but it wasn't so bad. Let's just pretend like it never happened and let's get back to business as usual. Now, in fact, once you do repent, to a very great degree, it does become business as usual again in the positive sense.

You can get back right on the track and God accepts you and it's just as if you never sinned. If we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and so often to restore us to honors and privileges and favors that we know darn well that we have forfeited. But the grace of God is just that great.

But that only happens when we are genuinely repentant, and genuine repentance means God doesn't owe it to me to forgive me. God doesn't owe it to me to restore me. God doesn't owe it to me to do anything.

If he decides I should be tortured in prison all the remaining days of my life, I'll still consider it an abundance of mercy that he lets me be saved at all because that's truth. Repentance is just agreeing with God about things, and that's the truth. I had a friend who had a ministry to homosexuals.

There was a homosexual man who had become a Christian and then he backslid back into a homosexual lifestyle. He contracted AIDS and then he came back to the Lord seemingly and he was dying of AIDS and my friend visited him in the hospital. And I didn't go so I didn't see the man myself, but my friend told me, he says, the guy's real bitter.

He says that ever since he's come back to the Lord and his AIDS has been in advanced stages, and the guy of course died of AIDS, but he was quite amazed. He says he's very upset with Christians. He says Christians act like he's a leopard.

They don't want to come anywhere near him. And he says, where's the love that Christians are supposed to have? Where's the forgiveness I should be getting? Why aren't these Christians reaching out to me in my time of need and so forth? And when I heard this report back, I thought, yeah, that is kind of a reproach that Christians are so standoffish. They should be more gracious.

Wait a minute, wait a minute here. What's wrong with this picture? The guy is dying because of his own sin. Now maybe it's true that Christians should be more forgiving and more loving and more willing to risk their lives or whatever they should be doing more, but what does that have to do with his attitude about it? If I were in his shoes, I know what I'd be thinking.

I'd be thinking I'm dying as a just recompense for my sins. I don't deserve to get exempt from the consequences of my sin. If I've truly repented, I say I'm getting exactly what I deserve.

And if part of what I'm getting is people are afraid to come near me, people are suspicious of me, people are afraid to get infected or whatever, I grieve about that, but I just have to admit that I deserve it. I brought this on myself. I'm not worthy to make any claim to any rights for myself.

Now those were all forfeited by the sin for which I now repent. And part of my repentance is I don't expect that anyone owes me anything. If anyone reaches out to me at all, I should consider it magnanimous on their part.

If God receives me into his kingdom, that's magnanimous on his part. He doesn't owe it to me. It's just, to me, on one hand I could see fault on both sides.

I could see that Christians probably should be more willing to lay their lives down and more compassionate and so forth than they were apparently being to him. Although who knows, maybe a lot of Christians were reaching out to him and he was so hungry for attention that he didn't count it as enough. I don't know.

I know my friend has reached out to him, so I don't know how many others may have been too. But the real sin I saw here was this guy's attitude. He hadn't repented, and that's the scariest part of it.

He was dying, and therefore he had to renounce in order to get right with God, because he knew he was dying. He had to renounce his sin and say it was wrong and stop doing it. But it never came crushing down on him how terrible and sinful his sin was and how much he had forfeited of any right to any favors or any blessing from man or from God because of his sin.

And until one is willing to take full account of how much you have rightly forfeited by your sin, you haven't repented. And the amazing thing is that once you do repent and you do fully assess how much you have forfeited rightly by your sin, in more cases than not, God gives it back to you. But if you get it back on your own by making people feel guilty or by some other manipulation, that's kind of going behind God's back, as it were.

You know, I mean, it's like I have sinned. I leave my case in the hands of God. If he slays me, I deserve it.

If he lets me live and I'm miserable the rest of my life, I deserve that, too. If I go to hell, I deserve that, too. If anything better than any of those three things happened, I should be manifestly overwhelmed with gratitude because I have forfeited any right even to be called a son, to be included in the family of God, to have Christians treat me as a brother.

If every Christian rejects me after I've repented, I'd have to say, well, I guess they wouldn't have if I hadn't sinned. It's my fault. What can I say? The fact of the matter is I have sinned in ways that I very often thought that I should be put out of the ministry for.

In fact, I took myself out of the ministry a couple of times for that very reason. But God, and I told God, you know, not only if you never give me ministry back again, but if you never even reinstate me into eternal life, I don't deserve any better. And I was sincere.

That's what I knew to be the case. But in every case, God did more than I felt like he was required to do, and he's put me back in ministry a couple of times. I'm pretty sensitive, though, about sin.

I mean, some of the things that I think would disqualify me from ministry that an ordinary pastor might do without feeling any problem about it. But to me, I think a minister should be an exemplar of the character of Christ and of holiness and so forth. And I have not always been that, and I'm not saying I am now.

But God has always been gracious, but only because he's granted genuine repentance to me in those times. And at those times, I know the feeling that the prodigal son has. I'm not worthy to be reinstated, and I will not make any demands.

If God chooses graciously to reinstate me, that is icing on the cake. It's certainly not required. Well, actually, there's some more things in my notes about repentance, but we don't have time for them, and we don't have time to take a third lecture on it.

We have to move along to other things. But that might not be entirely true. Maybe I'll decide between now and next time whether we continue on repentance and finish that up or whether we move on to talk about faith for God.

Eventually, though, we'll get through it all. Okay, let's stop there.