Part 2: Do we know what repentance is?

Audio: 1m:12s

That's what repentance is ... It's recognizing [that] my righteousness can't fix this, only the grace of God can.

We too often are like the rich young ruler. I think the way that I'm going to repent to God is that I'm going to make it up to Him. Like the young man I'll get down on my knee. I'll pray more, I'll pray longer. I'll feel badder, longer ... surely God will appreciate it then. That's not repentance.

Repentance is not the substitution of one category of works for another category of works. Repentance is an emptying of self, saying, "Lord, I can't make this right." It is not so much a doing as a depending.

We make a mistake sometimes about talking about repentance as a turning from evil to a turning to good, as though the repentance itself is walking in a different path. Repentance is turning to God, but repentance is not just doing good. God calls to us to recognize the reality of the cross and the goodness of the blood and says, "I have made you well." If God has made me well, then He has made me glad.

-- Bryan Chapell

Do we know what repentance is?

Video ( < 1 minute )

And the result of this is, in fact, the purity of faith ... faith that has nothing to do but believe. Faith that has nothing to do but cling to Jesus. 

I preached this last Sunday about Peter's confession ... "Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." That at the end of the day the christian life is having nothing, sacrificing nothing, and bringing nothing. But falling at Jesus' cross and saying, "Lord I have nothing to give you. You have to do it all."

And somebody asked me after the service ... someone (a dear woman) said, "but we must have repentance, right?"  And didn't know even what to say. How can I fall at the cross and say, "Lord I have nothing to give you", and not have repentance? Who without repentance is going to do that?

I just don't even know that we know what repentance is. The purity of faith is the belief that I have nothing to give ... and that IS repentance. I'm not repentant if I come, saying, "Thank God I'm not like other men." [Rather,] It's the tax collector who sat in the back and beat his breast because he knew he wasn't worthy to stand in the sight of Jesus.

- Pastor Jonathan Fisk

What we need to be convinced of

Audio: < 2 min.

Why do we have this passage? In order to enable us to see that the wounds of Christ reveal the nature of what must fill them ... My sin, and your sin, and every child of God for whom the Son of God died.

We don't like being in this place. Where in humility we have to confess that it was for me my savior died. But this place of humility, where we do not want to be, where we resist being, is the very place where we are most blessed by God. For when we can in our hearts say it was for me my savior died. My sin nailed Him there. It's my sins that filled His wounds. When we can say that, then we recognize this... My sin He took, and I need to know that.

I think sometimes people believe it is the role of a preacher to help people be convinced that their sin needs forgiveness. I actually don't think that's the case. I don't think those in whom the Holy Spirit is working need to be convinced that they are guilty. We know that. We need to be convinced that the wounds of Christ were made for our sin to fit there. So that the guilt we have is not upon us, but as we turn to Christ in faith, our sin is on Him so that we could be free of it now and forever.

--Bryan Chapell
From his sermon on April 13, 2014: "I Am King, You Say" (John 18:37)

The only way to rid yourself of sin

Audio: about 2 min.

'But sin cannot be known in relation only to the law. It must be placed in relation to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.'

What he means by that is ... it's not enough to simply say that the law convicts of sin. You have to move to the next step and say, "Christ has become your sin." It's not that you are going to be working on your sin, to finally rid yourself of your sin. Your sin has been completely accounted for until the day you die.  "Upon Him was heaped the chastisement of us all. Surely He has born our griefs and carried our sorrows." That's what that means. "He became sin who knew no sin."

You have to think of Jesus as a sinner, the biggest sinner of all time, the sinner beyond all sinners ... Not a pretend sinner, not a fake sinner, not a sinner who just kind of went through the motions in order to fulfill some kind of divine formula.  But who became sin, and the wrath of God was poured out on Him on the cross, and He allowed the devil to take Him right down into the grave. That's how serious it is. That's how devastating sin is, how utterly beyond us it is.

But you see, if that picture of urgency is not present ... A world in the control of evil, a creature desperate to flee from God at every possible turn, and then a God who takes this muck of a world and covers Himself with it for our sakes ... If that isn't painted in clear terms, then this is just religion ... we do a little bit, God does a little bit, and everybody comes out good in the end.

(And that's what you want. That's what I want.)

--Pastor Mark Anderson

I have good news for YOU. Period.

Sometimes even our popular christian leaders get it wrong.

It's rare that I post a negative example.  I only do so when the example illuminates, and strikes to the heart of,  "the subtle wonders of the Good News".

"But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
(Romans 5:8)

Luther: "The cross alone is our theology"

The cross is, in the first instance, God's attack on human sin. As an attack, it reveals that the real seat of sin is not in the flesh but in our spiritual aspirations, in our "theology of glory". Thus, the theology of the cross is an offensive theology. Unlike other theologies it attacks what we usually consider the best in our religion.

The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story: We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem somehow to have gotten derailed, but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious effort. What we need is to get back on "the glory road". The story is told in countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is "the soul." The basic scheme is what Paul Ricoeur has called "the myth of the exiled soul." The soul is exiled from its home, and its true destiny is to return.

Indeed, so seductive has the exiled soul myth been throughout history that the biblical story itself has been taken into captivity by it. The biblical story of the fall has tended to become a variation on the theme of the exiled soul. Adam, originally pure in soul, either by nature or by the added gift of grace, was tempted by baser lusts and "fell", losing grace and drawing all his progeny with him into a "mass of perdition." Reparation must be made, grace restored, and purging carried out so that a return to glory is possible. The cross, of course, can be quite neatly assimilated into the story as the reparation that makes the return possible. And there we have a tightly woven theology of glory!

One of the difficulties in the attempt to set the theology of the cross apart from the theology of glory is that the differences between the two are often very subtle. The theology of the cross arises out of the realization that it is simply disastrous to dissolve the cross in the story of glory. Jesus was crucified "outside the camp," not in the temple. The cross insists on being its own story. It does not allow us to stand by and watch. It does not ask us to probe endlessly for a meaning behind or above everything that would finally awaken, enlighten, and attract the exiled, slumbering soul. The cross draws us into itself so that we become participants in the story. Just as Jesus was crucified, so we also are crucified with him. The cross makes us part of its story. The cross becomes our story. That is what it means to say, as Luther did, "The cross alone is our theology."

-- Gerhard Forde
selected from his book:
On Being a Theologian of the Cross,  (Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518)

Jesus didn't purchase a "possibility" for you

When Jesus went to the Cross,
He didn't purchase the "possibility of salvation".

(As if He opened a door for people to walk through, if they so chose).

No, Jesus took names to the Cross.

--Paul David Tripp

What have you got?

I often hear people say, “I wish I could get hold of Divine Healing, but I cannot.” Sometimes they say, “I have got it.” 

If I ask them, “What have you got?” the answer is sometimes, “I have got the blessing”, sometimes it is, “I have got the theory”; sometimes it is, “I have got the healing”; sometimes, “I have got the sanctification.” 

But I thank God we have been taught that it is not the blessing, it is not the healing, it is not the sanctification, it is not the thing, it is not the 'IT' that you want, but it is something better. It is “the Christ”; it is Himself. 

How often that comes out in His Word – “Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses”, Himself “bare our sins in his own body on the tree”! It is the person of Jesus Christ we want. 

I prayed a long time to get sanctified, and sometimes I thought I had it. 

Of course, I lost it because I did not hold on to Him. I had been taking a little water from the reservoir, when I might have all the time received from Him fullness through the open channels. 

And when at last I got my eyes off my sanctification, and my experience of it, and just placed them on the Christ in me, I found, instead of an experience, the Christ larger than the moment’s need, the Christ that had all that I should ever need who was given to me at once, and for ever! And when I thus saw Him, it was such rest. For I had not only what I could hold that little hour, but also in Him, all that I should need the next and the next and so on. 

I had to learn to take from Him my spiritual life every second, to breathe Himself in, and breathe myself out. So, moment by moment for the spirit, and moment by moment for the body, we must receive. 

There came a time when there was a little thing between me and Christ. I express it by a little conversation with a friend who said, “You were healed by faith.” “Oh, no,” I said, “I was healed by Christ.” 

What is the difference? There is a great difference. There came a time when even faith seemed to come between me and Jesus. I thought I should have to work up the faith, so I labored to get the faith. At last I thought I had it; that if I put my whole weight upon it, it would hold. I was trusting in myself, in my own heart, in my own faith. I was asking the Lord to do something for me because of something in me, not because of something in Him. 

That is it. It is not your faith. You have no faith in you, any more than you have life or anything else in you. You have nothing but emptiness and vacuity, and you must be just openness and readiness to take Him to do all. You have to take His faith as well as His life and healing, and have simply to say, “I live by the faith of the Son of God.”  

The Apostle Paul tells us that there is a secret, a great secret which was hidden from ages and from generations (Col. 1: 26), which the world was seeking after in vain, and God says it “is now made manifest to his saints”; and Paul went through the world just to tell it to those that were able to receive it; and that simple secret is just this: “Christ in you the hope of glory.”

Albert Benjamin Simpson (1843-1919)
the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance

A death He can use instead of a life He cannot

Life is a web of trials and temptations, but only one of them can ever be fatal, and that is the temptation to think it is by further, better, and more aggressive living that we can have life. But that will never work. If the world could have lived its way to salvation, it would have, long ago. The fact is that it can only die its way there, lose its ways there. 

For Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the correctable; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot.

-Robert Capon

Only in dumb love

Too many preachers are trying to make themselves lovers, when the thrill of any romance is the blinding realization that someone else loves you ... your identity is your Lover ... only in dumb love will you ever be able to speak.

-Robert Capon