Transcript
Thank you, Paul. I think I should say that Pastor Carpenter is certainly telling you the truth when he says that he was in bed at 2:00 a.m., but I think I have a duty to inform you that he was not in bed at 1:00 a.m. And the reason is, neither was I. We were having fellowship over a bowl of yogurt, which had long since been consumed and forgotten, and we had a delightful time.
I woke up in the middle of the night, and that is the quietest I have ever heard the world. I mean, not only the Carpenter house, but Jansen. You can’t wake up in Dallas without hearing something somewhere, and usually several things in several places. And I thought it could be said of Jansen, according to the famous Christmas poem, that not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. And it was an interesting experience to wake up that way.
Paul is right that I have been serving as a pastor for quite a long time. I might add, the group of people that I’m with, I have been with for 35-plus years. I took a Sunday school class at a small mission when I was a first-year man at seminary. The little mission work that was in existence then has grown into a small church, primarily Hispanic people. I would say about 75 percent Hispanic, but English-speaking. Good thing that they’re English-speaking. I do not speak Spanish. And we do now have a Hispanic pastor who also works in the church. But it’s been a very great privilege to minister to the people at what we now call Victor Street Bible Chapel.
And longevity has its rewards. I often tell people that we have a grandmother in the church who was a little girl when I first came. So you will know not only that I’ve been there for a while, but when I look around, I feel very, very old indeed.
Nice to be with you again this morning, and we’re going to resume our discussion of lordship salvation, and we’re going to make use of the handy overhead here to do so. You’ll recall that last evening, those of you who were present, that we decided that we could conveniently divide the discussion of lordship salvation into two basic issues. The first issue was the issue of the nature of saving faith, and we discussed that last night. The second issue is the issue of the nature of discipleship. So our subject this morning is going to be the nature of discipleship.
Just by way of review, and for the benefit of those of you who might not have been here last night, let me also say this, that we have defined lordship salvation as that view which holds that some commitment to obedience is a necessary part of true conversion. That is to say, lordship salvation people believe that you cannot get saved unless you, in some way or other, either implicitly or explicitly, commit yourself to obedience to God. And then they expect you to follow through on that, and if you do not, they will indicate that they do not believe that you are saved.
Over against this is the biblical view that salvation is a free gift, that we are saved by grace through faith, that God offers us the gift, and that we receive it by simple faith in Christ alone. Now, the issue that we discussed last evening is one of the major issues of the controversy, the nature of saving faith. And the bottom line in our discussion last evening is this, that really there should be nothing complicated about our understanding of saving faith.
We have an understanding of faith that is perfectly correct in everyday life, in our usage of that word between ourselves. We know what it means to believe something. We know what it means to trust someone. We have a very valid and correct understanding of what faith is. If we turn to the Bible, we discover that the same concept of faith that we use in everyday life is what applies in the Bible. But if we were seeking a biblically phrased definition, we might say that faith is taking God’s word for it. It’s accepting God’s word as true.
Saving faith is accepting God’s word in the gospel as true. In other words, it is believing the things, or the message, that must be believed in order to be saved. Now, there are many, many things—and this came out in the question-and-answer period—there are many, many things that we do believe and should believe because they’re true: the existence of God, the deity of Christ, the Trinity, creation, the inerrancy of the Bible. And it is by faith that we accept all of these things.
But none of these things, by themselves, are the gospel. And the gospel is the presentation of the offer of eternal life that is given freely to everyone who will trust in Christ. And so, when we believe that message, when we accept that message as true, then we have believed on Christ to eternal life. Lordship salvation, however, abandons both the common-sense and the biblical definition of saving faith and moves into a rearticulated and redefined view of faith which introduces such extraneous ideas as repentance, surrender, commitment, and so on. And this we discussed last night.
So bottom line, one of the major issues is the nature of saving faith, and the simple biblical view is that saving faith is accepting God’s word in the gospel as true. Now, a second issue that arises prominently in this whole discussion is the issue of the nature of discipleship. What exactly is discipleship? Let’s begin with a statement of the lordship view. I will abbreviate lordship salvation as LS. What is the lordship view of discipleship? Basically, the lordship view of discipleship is that discipleship equals being a Christian.
That is to say, all Christians, in the lordship view, are disciples, and that if you are not a disciple, you are not a Christian. And therefore, the call to discipleship is equivalent to the call to salvation. Or we might say that the gospel is wrapped up also in all of the invitations to become disciples of Jesus Christ.
I am a little surprised that in so many quarters in the evangelical church this proposition has gone unchallenged. It seems to me that when we begin to examine the Scriptures, it is confronted with a very difficult—I would say not only difficult, but insuperable—problem. Let me just articulate it this way. We take a passage like Luke 14 and we put it over against a passage like John 4.
Remember Luke 14:
If any man comes to Me, and does not hate his father, mother, brothers, sisters, wife, children, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.
Whosoever he be of you who does not forsake all that he has, he cannot be My disciple.
It is clear from that passage, if nothing else is clear, it is clear from that passage that discipleship is very demanding, that the conditions for effective, long-term discipleship are very tough. They’re very real, and they’re very heavy.
When we move from a passage like that, however, to a passage like John 4, we are struck with the difference. So Jesus says to the woman at the well:
If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that says to you, Give Me a drink, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.
Not a word about forsaking her family. Not a word about giving up everything that she possessed. What He says to her is, if you just knew what I had to offer you, and if you just knew who I was, you’d ask Me for this, and I would give it to you.
Now, if ever an individual was a candidate for reformation, this woman was. She’d had five husbands, and the person she was living with was not even her husband. She was apparently living with a married man, and her life was filled with sin. And nowhere in the exchange between Jesus and the woman at the well is there any call to this woman to give up her lifestyle. That doesn’t mean that Jesus wasn’t interested in her lifestyle. It simply means that when He was discussing the water of life with her, her lifestyle was not the issue.
The issue was the gift that He had to offer, and whether or not she would receive it by faith. Now, when we put these two passages, these two kinds of passages, side by side, I maintain that even the casual reader would say, these passages are different. There’s a contrast between these passages. On the one hand, Jesus is talking to the woman about what is apparently a free and unconditioned gift, if she’s just willing to accept it. On the other hand, in the discipleship passages, He’s talking about something else.
He’s talking about something that is stringently conditioned, whose conditions are enormously difficult for the average person to contemplate. How then can we say that Luke 14 is talking about a free gift? Well, obviously we can’t say it and deal squarely with the text.
This leads lordship theologians to make a very odd statement. And Dr. John MacArthur, in his book The Gospel According to Jesus, does make this statement. He says, basically, salvation is free and costs you everything. And that’s doublespeak. That’s talking out of both sides of the mouth. Something cannot be free and at the same time cost you everything. If something costs you everything, it is not free.
And the lordship theologian is caught in the horrible bind that, on the one hand, he has a class of passages that present salvation as free. On the other hand, he is working with a large group of passages that are related to discipleship, where it is obvious that discipleship is not without enormous costs. Right here, I maintain, those who are in the lordship camp should have said to themselves, something is wrong with the way I’m handling the Scriptures. I cannot put them together in a meaningful or reasonable or rational way.
What is the problem then? The problem is very simple. Lordship theology misdefines discipleship. The most obvious conclusion that we ought to draw if we compare passages like Luke 14 with John 4 is that they’re talking about different subjects. They’re talking about different subjects. And clearly, since John 4 is talking about the subject of eternal life, or eternal salvation, then Luke 14 is not. That ought to be square one in our thinking about these texts.
So the lordship salvation view of discipleship, that it’s a functional equivalent to being a Christian, is fraught with internal contradiction. It is a mishandling of the Scriptures that are involved. What is the biblical view? Let me state it, and then let me try to defend it. The biblical view would be, I suggest, that discipleship is equal to being a spiritual learner, to be a spiritual learner.
And here we need to keep in mind one very simple and basic fact, and that is that the Greek word that is translated disciple really means a student, a pupil. That is what it means. And when you read in your English Bibles about the master-disciple relationship, the simplest English translation of that is to say we’re talking about the teacher-pupil relationship.
Now, in the ancient world, in the world of New Testament times, it was a widely recognized phenomenon that there were traveling teachers. There were many of them, not only in Judaism, but also in the Gentile world. They were what we might call peripatetic teachers. They went from place to place, and they dispensed whatever wisdom or philosophy they claimed to be in possession of. As a rule, if these teachers had anything going for them, they collected a group of younger men who became their pupils, who became their students.
Now, if you were the student of a traveling teacher or philosopher, obviously, to be his student, you had to travel with him. You had to follow him around the countryside. So Jesus was exactly that. He was a traveling rabbi. He was a traveling teacher. He was not stationary in one spot. He didn’t have a school that was located in a building where He went every morning at 9:00 a.m. to teach the truth. No, Jesus taught the truth all over the land of Palestine.
To become a pupil of His, therefore, meant that you followed Him around. That could be very inconvenient, particularly if you had a family at home, right? You had a wife and children, an aging mother and father. You had to make a decision. Am I going to leave my parents or my wife and children in order to get the benefit of the training that this rabbi has to offer? But what I’m suggesting here is that if we can put ourselves into the cultural situation of the first century, we will understand the concept of discipleship.
And it was perfectly, perfectly clear to the average individual in the New Testament world. They knew what it meant to be a disciple. It meant to be a pupil of a teacher. They knew what it meant to follow your teacher around, because so many teachers traveled. And if we will grasp this concept, then we are prepared to confront the New Testament idea of discipleship, which is basically that we take Jesus as our spiritual Teacher. We sit under His instruction through the Scriptures and through the proclamation of the Scriptures, and we are willing to follow Him wherever His teaching leads us.
So we move from the literal movement around the countryside to the spiritual idea of following Him wherever He takes us, wherever He leads us, whatever He wants us to do, we do. But we do this as pupils of a divine Teacher. This leads to this very simple observation, that what has gone wrong in lordship salvation is a confusion between two concepts that ought to be kept separate, a confusion between birth and spiritual education. I can’t emphasize this simple distinction enough.
When lordship people collapse the distinction between conversion and discipleship, they are collapsing the biblical distinction between birth and education. And we all know in natural life that you can’t educate somebody who hasn’t been born. So birth precedes education, even in physical life. We also know that some people who are born don’t wish to go to school, and so education doesn’t automatically follow from the fact that you were born, or full-fledged education doesn’t automatically follow from that.
So a person may, under pressure from his parents, go to the first grade, maybe finish grade school, a little bit of high school, and then drops out. No more education. We all understand that. Well, that’s the simplest of all possible analogies to explain what is going on in Christianity. First, we have to be born into the family of God. First, we have to be saved.
Now, there were people in the biblical accounts who became disciples without being born again. That is, they sat under the teaching of Jesus. Judas was a case in point. They were never born, but they tried to get an education, just as there are people who come into our churches and who come every Sunday and who listen to the Word of God and try to be educated spiritually, and they’ve never been saved. That happens too.
But the biblical order, the only meaningful and significant order, is first to be born into the family of God, secondly to receive the education that God has to offer us through His Word and through His Holy Spirit. So to collapse this distinction is a major mistake, which is one of the mistakes of lordship theology.
Now, this leads us to a final observation about discipleship, and it’s this, that inasmuch as Luke 14 and other passages on discipleship make it clear that education is not easy to come by—that is, that somewhere along the line you’re going to meet difficulties that will tempt you to throw in the sponge—it is obvious that discipleship is something you can opt out of. And there are Christians who do opt out of the educational process.
They run into something in their life, and their Christian experience is too tough to handle. They think, instead of trusting God for it and learning the lessons that God has to teach them in it, they throw up their hands and throw in the sponge and get out of the church and get out of the spiritual education process altogether. Unfortunately, it happens. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be permanent, but it happens.
And no parent sitting in this audience, I presume, is going to assume automatically that just because you have a young child in your home, that your young child is necessarily going to finish his education in the schools. You hope that your child will. You’re going to do everything in your power to encourage them to do so. But it’s not automatic, is it? They have to stick with it. And if they get discouraged, you’re going to have to step in and try to encourage them, and all the rest of it.
The same thing is true in the spiritual life. Once we become Christians, we can get immediately into the educational process, and we do so by coming to hear the Word of God. And our fellow Christians presumably will encourage us, our pastor will encourage us, to stick at the process of spiritual education no matter how tough the going gets. But it’s not automatic. And if I get sufficiently discouraged, or sufficiently away from God, I may throw in the towel.
So we have to be realistic. And one of the things that I think is wrong with lordship salvation is that it’s a theology in the ivory tower. It doesn’t recognize the way people are, the way they operate, what can happen in the Christian life. Christianity is a wonderful experience. It begins with the reception of an absolutely free gift. But after that, it is necessary to persevere to get the full benefits of our spiritual experience, to get the full spiritual education that God designs for us.
And if we think that because we’re Christians we will never drop out, let us think again. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. It’s necessary for us to face the potential dangers of Christian experience in order to become victorious over those dangers.
So much for the nature of discipleship. But my third point, which at first blush will not appear to be related to discipleship, is in my mind, at least, firmly related to it. And it is a point that we cannot avoid discussing when we are discussing lordship theology, and that is the subject of repentance. It is a watchword with lordship theologians that repentance is absolutely necessary to salvation, and they pillory those who do not share that conviction. And they say, how can a man get to heaven if he doesn’t repent?
Let’s talk about this for a moment. There are, I think, at least three basic views that exist in the evangelical church on the subject of repentance. And the first of these is that repentance means turning from sin, and it is a condition of salvation. If I do not repent, if I do not decide to turn from sin, I cannot be saved. This is the view of lordship theology.
Now, there are many ways of addressing this issue, but the simplest way to address it, I think, is this. There is one book in the New Testament that professes to have been written for the purpose of bringing men to the experience of salvation. What book is that? Come on, folks. Not James, not Jane, not even Romans, even though Romans discusses the gospel. John. Notice the key word to that question. All of us professors try tricky questions. I said the only book that professes to be written for the purpose of bringing men into salvation.
You can come to salvation through Romans. I even think you can do it through James. But neither of these two books claims to have been written for this purpose. But the Gospel of John does. John 20:30 and 31:
Many other signs Jesus did which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing you may have life through His name.
The only book in the New Testament that claims directly to have been written for the purpose of bringing men to saving faith is the Gospel of John. Now, my second question—you knew you were going to have to have a quiz somewhere along the line with an ex-professor, 27 years at the seminary, 27 years of giving tests, and my greatest frustration as a non-professor is I can’t give tests anymore, so here I am to give you a test. All right, the answer to question one was the Gospel of John is the only New Testament book that claims directly to have been written for the purpose of bringing men to salvation. Question number two: How many times does the Gospel of John refer to repentance? How many times mention it? How many times does it mention it?
Write an A-plus to that. Who answered that question? Very good. Zero. An absolute zero. The one book that claims to have been written for the purpose of bringing men to eternal salvation mentions repentance not at all. That ought to tell us something. In Dr. MacArthur’s book, he has a statement to this effect. He says, “No message that omits the call to repentance can be regarded as the biblical gospel.” And my reply to that is, in that case, the Gospel of John does not present the biblical gospel, because it omits the message of repentance.
I think we must draw the conclusion that repentance is not a condition for eternal life. If it had been a condition for eternal life, John would have said so, not once, but many times. How many times does—well, I don’t know the answer to this one myself, so you can give me a generalized answer. How many times does John link eternal life with faith? The answer that I’ll accept is many, okay? Many, many. Can you read the Gospel of John without discovering you have to believe in Christ? You can’t even get through a chapter without it. But you can read the whole Gospel of John and never get the idea that you have to repent. How did he manage that? On purpose, folks, on purpose.
I always like to refer to the little incident in the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Most scholars think that John the son of Zebedee was originally a disciple of John the Baptist. There’s reason for thinking so. It’s a good guess that before he became a disciple of Jesus, he was a disciple of John the Baptist, that in fact he is one of the two unnamed disciples in John chapter 1 who leave the Baptist and join themselves to Jesus.
But in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John, you remember that a Jewish delegation calls on John the Baptist to find out for the officialdom at Jerusalem just exactly who he is. And John denies that he’s the Christ. He denies that he’s Elijah. He denies that he’s that Prophet who should come. So then the delegation from Jerusalem says, why do you baptize then if you are not the Christ, nor Elijah, nor that Prophet? What’s this baptism all about?
Yes, what did I say? Jesus? Let me backtrack and correct that. The delegation is addressing John the Baptist, and John the Baptist has denied that he’s the Christ, he’s denied that he’s Elijah, he’s denied that he’s the Prophet. So the delegation says to John the Baptist, why do you baptize then if you’re not the Messiah, if you’re not Elijah, if you’re not the Prophet?
Now John the evangelist is writing about this, and if he was a former disciple of John the Baptist, this is his golden opportunity to give the response that we would expect from the Synoptic Gospels, right? “I baptize with the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.” Golden opportunity for John the evangelist to put the subject of repentance into his book in the mouth of John the Baptist. What do we get? According to John the evangelist, John the Baptist replies, “I baptize with water, but there’s One standing among you whose sandal strap I am not even worthy to loose.” Not a word, not a syllable about repentance.
Golden opportunity. How did John the evangelist manage to miss the subject of repentance for 21 chapters? I say again, on purpose, because he’s writing a book to tell us how to get eternal life, and with that repentance has nothing to do. Okay, so the lordship salvation people have no answer to that, and their efforts to read repentance into the Gospel of John are counsels of desperation. And I’ve cited a couple of their efforts in the footnotes of Absolutely Free.
So that’s one view, that repentance is turning from sin, and it is a condition of salvation. A second view is that repentance is changing the mind, and that in salvation it is changing the mind about Christ. Now let me say here that some very, very fine people hold this view. Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, the founder of Dallas Seminary, held it. Dr. Walvoord held it. Dr. Ryrie holds it. Many, many of the graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary hold it. Some of my best friends hold it. I respect it.
And the reason I respect it is that it does not interfere with the freeness of the gospel. Those who hold this view say, in essence, that when you trust Christ, it is impossible to do so without changing your mind. That is, you move from a condition of unbelief to a condition of belief. Before, you thought maybe you were saved by your own works, or that you couldn’t be saved, or that something else was true. And now, when you trust Christ, you’ve changed your mind about that, because now you understand that salvation comes only through faith in Christ.
So under this view, repentance is really only the flip side of the coin of faith. That is, it is something that inevitably occurs whenever faith occurs. And I agree that nearly everybody who trusts Christ has some change of mind in the process. My problem with this view for a long time has been that I do not think that the evidence that the word means simply a change of mind is adequate or compelling.
I think everybody agrees that originally the word repent—I’m talking about the Greek word here, which is metanoeo, or the noun is metanoia—everyone agrees that originally the word did mean to change one’s mind. But as everyone who studies language knows, words tend to change their meaning according to the way that they are used. And in my judgment, the usage of the word repent in the New Testament and in the New Testament period does not support the idea that the word means simply a change of mind, and that repent in Greek in the first century, at the time the New Testament books were written, meant approximately what the English word repent means.
So what I am then basically saying is that the English word repent, which we read in our Bibles, is an adequate translation of the Greek word for repent, and that the connotations we generally associate with the English word are more or less present in the Greek word. Now, that’s my view of things, and therefore I am uncomfortable with position two. But let me underline the fact that I’m not uncomfortable with people who hold this position, because I believe that many people do hold it, and they are fully and deeply committed to the total freeness of the grace of God.
What then is my view of repentance, rejecting number one and two? May I suggest this? Let me offer you a definition. I want to suggest, and do suggest in Absolutely Free, that repentance is a decision to turn from sin to God for harmonious relations. Let me repeat that. I think we can sustain from the New Testament the view that repentance means that the repenting person decides he’s going to turn away from sin, whatever his sin may be, and he’s going to turn back to God. And the purpose of this is to restore harmony between himself and God.
Let me elaborate this a little bit, because this is a little new in some of our circles and needs a little bit of clarification. The first thing I would like to say is that we need to observe that in the New Testament the word repent is frequently addressed to Christians. It is frequently addressed to Christians. Revelation 2:5 is a case in point, and the one that I want to discuss is Revelation 3:19. In fact, if you have your New Testaments, you might turn to Revelation. I think it’s helpful to look at these texts.
We’re writing to the seven churches of Asia, and John is recording the message of the risen Savior to each of these churches. Let’s just read 2:5. This is the church that had left its first love, the church of Ephesus, and in verse 5 Jesus says to this church:
Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.
Get back to where you were. Get back to your previous relationship with God, is what He is saying to this audience.
Now let’s flip over to 3:19. Now this is the letter addressed to the Laodicean church, the famous lukewarm church, which was neither cold nor hot. And verse 19:
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten.
The word chasten here is the familiar word for child-train, the Greek word paideuo, which means the discipline and education that you administer to the child. And Jesus is saying to the Laodiceans, you are among those that I love, and I treat you as children who need discipline.
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent.
And then notice the next verse, a famous verse, oftentimes misused as though it were a gospel text, but it is actually a text for Christians. And Jesus says:
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.
Notice that the call to repent is followed immediately by an invitation to fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
What is lost when a Christian sins is not his salvation, but his fellowship, his harmony with God, if you want to put it that way. And therefore, when we repent, we turn away from the thing that has interfered with our relationship to God. We turn back to Him for harmonious relations. We turn back to Him for fellowship. First John 1:9:
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
In the context, we’re talking obviously about fellowship.
If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ is cleansing us from all sin.
But if we sin, then we are to confess it, and we are to experience forgiveness. What is this? Well, the word repent is not used there, but obviously we are repenting. We’re turning away from the sin. We’re turning back to God. We’re renewing our fellowship with Him by confession.
So the first thing that we want to observe is that in the New Testament repentance is very frequently a Christian experience. This leads me to make this observation, that if you will look carefully at the writings of John Calvin and Martin Luther, I think you will discover that essentially they held the view that repentance is something that Christians do. They were very much opposed to the Roman Catholic doctrine that penance or repentance was a condition for eternal salvation. And Luther and Calvin both firmly held to sola fide, faith alone. And they regarded repentance, or penance, as a product of saving faith, not a precondition to it, not a part of it, but a result of saving faith.
And there’s a great passage in Calvin, part of which I have quoted in Absolutely Free, in which he says, “By repentance I mean regeneration.” And he goes on to say that the whole process that is involved in repentance is the process by which God remakes us and transforms us so that more and more we become like God, like Jesus Christ. And he goes on to say that we are engaged all of our life in this, and that there is no end to this warfare before death. That was Calvin’s view of repentance.
Martin Luther says in one of his statements that God has ordained that the entire life of the believer should be repentance. There is a sense in which they have struck a real biblical truth, that the entirety of Christian experience is, in fact, repentance. So that whether or not I talk about being out of fellowship or in fellowship, increasingly I discover what God disapproves of in my life. I turn from it for His transforming power. I sustain or restore my harmonious relationships with Him. And this process goes on and on and on.
Remember the passage where Jesus is talking to His disciples and He says to them:
If your brother sins against you and he turns and says to you, I repent, you shall forgive him. And if he sins against you seven times a day, and seven times a day he turns and says, I repent, you shall forgive him.
Now why did Jesus say that to His disciples? Why is that their standard? Because that’s the way God deals with us.
I sin—I don’t know about you folks, but I’m sure I sin more than seven times a day—but the wonderful thing about the grace of God is that every time I turn back to God in repentance, He’s there with forgiveness, so that fellowship can either be restored or continued, and so that His transforming and remaking process can go on and on in my life through the years. I think Calvin and Luther are onto something, that repentance at its most fundamental level is what the Christian life is about. And therefore, in one sense of the word, it is what discipleship is about, because as I follow the Lord Jesus Christ, I learn more of what is pleasing to Him. I repent of the things in my life that I increasingly discover are not pleasing to Him. I allow Him to remake me and to deepen my fellowship with Him.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” If you repent, we have fellowship. If you don’t, you haven’t opened the door to Me. That’s the fundamental principle that is involved. Now there’s a second thing under this discussion of repentance. I have said, first of all, that Christians do it repeatedly. A second thing that we may say is that unsaved people do it before salvation.
I think that’s easy to demonstrate from the New Testament. The story of the prodigal son, if you will read it carefully in context, is really a story about repentance. If I ask you the question, when did the prodigal son repent? I think your answer ought to be, when he was out there in the far country and he said to himself:
How many servants of my father have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger. I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no more worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.
That was repentance. That was not the salvation, because at this point in time he is thinking, I will have to work for my dad in order for him to receive me back. I will probably have to strike a bargain with Dad, and I’ll have to say to him, don’t treat me anymore as your son, just treat me as a servant, and I’ll work for you, and you can let me live on the farm. And as you know, if you read—this is a passage I center on in Absolutely Free—when he makes his journey and gets back to his dad, his dad runs and meets him. Before the kid can get anything out of his mouth, his dad has embraced him and kissed him. His dad has given him his total acceptance without so much as a single word from his son.
And then, and only then, does the son say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight.” Only after his father has already received him. But he does not say, “Make me as one of your hired servants.” He now realizes that that was perfectly inappropriate, that his father receives him back unconditionally, extends his forgiveness to him, and that it’s not a matter of striking a bargain with his dad. And so all he says is, “I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no more worthy to be called your son.”
What does the father do? That’s right, kid, you’re not worthy to be called my son? No. “Bring out the best robe, put the ring on his finger and the sandals on his feet, and kill the fatted calf, and we’re going to sit down and we’re going to have fellowship, he and I, and everybody who wants to come into the party,” which the older brother did not want to do.
Okay, so what we have here is something that is very realistic. The individual repents. He needs to get back into harmony with his father. He does not yet understand the terms on which his father will receive him, but he has repented, and that starts him on his way back to God.
The book of Acts contains a story that is in many respects similar. This is the story of Cornelius. Cornelius was a Gentile pagan, and while he was still unsaved, he turns from his paganism, and he begins to pray to the God of Israel, and he begins to give alms. And then the message of salvation comes to him: “To Him give all the prophets witness that whosoever believes in Him shall receive remission of sins.” Cornelius had already repented, but he was not saved by his repentance. He is saved by the grace of God.
Now this has many analogies in ordinary life and experience today. Many, many times unsaved people do, in a very significant sense, repent. They say to themselves, I’m getting nowhere with this lifestyle. Everything is coming to pieces. The number of particulars here is almost endless. My marriage is breaking up. I’m losing my job. I’ve got this habit that I can’t break. I need God. I need to get back into right relations with God.
So what does he do? He starts coming to church. He’s not a Christian. He starts coming to church. He starts reading his Bible. He starts saying his prayers. He’s repented. He’s not saved by any of those things. What does his repentance really do for him? It gets him moving in the right direction. It gets him back under the ministry of the Word. Hopefully he finds a church like the one here, where he can find out that he isn’t saved by repentance. He’s saved by the grace of God through faith alone.
In other words, he has started the journey of the prodigal son. He’s gotten down the road, and eventually he meets a loving heavenly Father who says, I receive you unconditionally. I accept you on the basis of your faith in My Son. All of your pledges to Me about service, surrender, commitment, etc., are no part of this transaction. I receive you on the basis of what Christ has done for you on the cross. So that often happens. That often happens.
But my third point is, not always. Not always. While it is true that many, many unsaved people experience a real form of repentance before they are saved, it is equally true that many do not. Nor is it necessary. An example is obviously the woman at the well. Jesus does not talk to her about repenting of her lifestyle. He does not call upon her to disengage from the married man with whom she is now living. He starts right up front with her and He says, I’ve got a gift for you, and all you need to do is to know that the gift is here and who I am, and you’ll get this gift.
And anyone who thinks they see any repentance in this story is looking at a mirage. It isn’t there. Here is a woman who is thirsty for something she doesn’t have. She hardly knows what. But she meets it in the Person of Jesus Christ, and she gets it in the form of eternal life, and there’s no repentance there. Now, after she got eternal life, there was time enough to repent, and Jesus stayed a day or two. I don’t know what He said to her, and it’s not the purpose of the Gospel of John to tell us what He said to her. But it wouldn’t be surprising, would it, that she came to Him and said, you know, I got the impression You maybe didn’t approve of my lifestyle. What do You think I ought to do about it? And He probably said to her, leave that man.
But that was no part of the transaction of salvation, no part of the gift of eternal life. It was a logical outflow, but not a condition for that. Another example is the blind man in John chapter 9. You can read through this chapter in its entirety, and you will not find even a reference to sin, except for our Lord’s statement to the disciples that the man is not blind because of his own sin or anybody else’s. “Who sinned,” said the disciples, “this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus said, nobody did. He’s not blind because of somebody’s sin, either his own or his parents, “but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”
Not a word about the guilt of this man. But when we get to the end of the story, we have Jesus saying to this blind man, “Do you believe in the Son of God?” And the blind man says, “Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?” You know, just tell me, I’m ready. And Jesus says, “You have both seen Him, and it is He who is talking with you.” And the next words are that he falls down before Jesus and he says, “Lord, I believe.” No repentance. If anybody thinks they see repentance in there, they are looking at a mirage.
The point is that when a person is ready for faith, he’s ready for faith, and we don’t need to introduce repentance at all. We don’t need to introduce conditions at all. But sometimes God uses repentance to get people ready for faith. Let’s not put God in a box. Let’s not say that because He dealt with Cornelius in the way that He did, and brought a repentance to Cornelius before He brought him salvation, He has to always do that. He can also reach people as He reached them in John 4 and John 9.
And my principle is this, that if I am talking to a person who says to me, Sir, what must I do to be saved? my answer to him is not repent and believe. My answer to him is, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”
So by and large we may say that repentance is the experience that goes along with discipleship. It may indeed occur prior to salvation, and in fact often does occur, but it does not always occur. And because it is not always there, it is not a condition for eternal life. The only condition for eternal life remains faith. But after we are Christians, we have lots to repent of, and we have lots to repent of every day of our lives until the Lord takes us home to be with Himself.
So repentance—I agree with Luther and Calvin—that repentance is largely a Christian operation and is part and parcel of the process of learning to know God, to live with God, and to be the disciple of Jesus Christ. Selah.
Now we’re ready for your questions.
Yes, sir. I think he was speaking to the nation as a whole, and that fundamentally he was warning the nation that without repentance they were facing national calamities. And I don’t think any of his words imply, although they are sometimes taken as implying, that he was warning of eternal damnation.
When he talks about the trees that are cut down and cast into the fire, many people in reading the Bible have what I call a kind of a knee-jerk reaction to fire, and it’s always hell. And it’s not always hell. And as the Old Testament makes very clear, fire is an apt symbol of God’s temporal judgment against His disobedient people. So what the nation was facing was the awesome and awful calamities that did in fact come upon it in A.D. 70. And those of you who know some history on this will know that according to Josephus, the Jewish historian, in the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, he estimated that a million Jews were killed. And that’s a lot of people back in those days, when the population wasn’t nearly what it is today in so many of the great cities of our country.
And so John is calling upon the nation to repent, to change their ways. Now we need to remember that the Gospels which present the message of John do not go into all the ramifications of what he said. We have only snatches of what John said. We do, however, know from other passages that he called men to faith in the coming Messiah. In fact, in Acts 19 Paul said that John indeed preached a baptism of repentance, saying that they should believe on Him who should come after him.
So one of the roles of the baptizing work that John did, and his call to repentance, was to get the nation ready for faith in the Messiah who was to come after him. Not that the repentance helped save them, but the repentance helped prepare them. He was preparing the way of the Lord, just as we were saying very often people are prepared for salvation by some form of repentance that God brings into their life prior to their conversion. So it had also that role. And of course, if there was to be real reformation in Israel, there would need to be real regeneration in a very large number of Jewish people.
But the bottom line is, the nation did not as a whole repent and did not as a whole believe. And therefore, as a nation, they went through the fires that John had warned them about and suffered the consequences of their unrepentant life. Now, if a person got saved in Israel and did not change their lifestyle, then they could be caught up in the same calamities just as surely as their unsaved Jewish brethren around them.
And you remember the Gospel of John talks about believers who were secret believers. They were genuinely saved, but they didn’t have the courage of their convictions, and they did not confess Christ. And as long as they went along with the crowd, which was headed toward judgment—temporal judgment I’m talking about here—they could find themselves experiencing that very thing.
So in the life of the Christian, we would say a refusal to repent will expose us to the temporal judgments of God, and the very thing that happens to the unrepentant sinner next to us may happen to us too. So if the unrepentant sinner who lives next door to me, as a Christian, has a drug habit, it’s very likely that his habit will produce broken health and a broken home, if not jail. And if I’m a Christian living next door to him and I develop a drug habit, it’s very likely that my drug habit, unless I repent of it and get God’s deliverance, will produce broken health, a broken home, and jail. So repentance applies across the board, and repentance is the avenue by which we reestablish harmonious relationships with God.
If we refuse to repent, then we’re asking for the difficulties that come to the unrepentant. I might just add, because your question is good, that some have quoted the passage that occurs in Luke, you remember: “Do you think that the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices were greater sinners than all those who live in Galilee? I say no, but unless you repent you shall all likewise perish.” Well, many have drawn the conclusion that He was telling them, if you don’t repent you will go to hell. But a simple reading of the passage shows that’s not the meaning of the passage.
The passage talks about the people who were killed, physically killed, by the tower of Siloam that fell on them, and the people who were killed, physically killed, by Pilate in his rash slaughter of apparently innocent people. So the obvious meaning of this is that unless you folks out there, the Jewish people who are listening to Jesus, unless you repent, you’ll likewise suffer physical death. And the Greek word perish is a word that is easily used, and frequently was used, of dying.
So many people have read into some of the passages related to repentance a nuance of eternal damnation which is not really there. Repentance basically warns people against the consequences of staying out of harmony with God. And of course, if a person is unsaved and has an unrepentant frame of mind, so that he never turns to God for salvation, he’s not only going to suffer the temporal consequences, but the eternal consequences. He goes to hell in his unrepentant state.
Yes, ma’am. The question is, is a knowledge of sin necessary for a person to be saved? Paul, please note that without prompting, you repeated the question. I think definitely so. How can we understand that we need to be saved if we don’t understand that in some sense we’re sinners who are threatened by eternal damnation? And I think with most people that doesn’t need to be labored too far, until you get to people who have already made up their mind that they’re more good than bad, and that therefore they may be entitled to salvation on the basis of their works.
But the average man on the street knows, first of all, that he’s not entirely good, that he has guilty things in his life, and secondly, he’s worried about what God will do about that. And even the woman at the well—you see what Jesus does is to surface for her the reality of her sin. He doesn’t call upon her to abandon it. Up until the point that He begins to probe her life, she is thinking in terms of physical water. And so she says, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst and don’t have to come back here to draw.” So she’s on the wrong track with Him.
He’s talking about spiritual water that meets her spiritual need, and she can’t get off that track until she becomes aware that He’s addressing her spiritual need. And so that’s what He does with an abrupt change of subject matter, apparently to her: “Go, call your husband, and come here.” And that leads to the whole unfolding of His awareness of her sinfulness. And she’s impressed that He sees her spiritual need. And now she begins to think in terms not of somebody who can give you physical water, but of Messiah. “I know that Messiah is coming. When He comes, He will tell us all things.”
And the interview ends when Jesus presents to her the truth that He is Messiah, He is the Christ, and it is believing that, of course, that brings men eternal life. So yes, I agree with you that an awareness of my sinfulness is a presupposition that goes along with trusting Christ to save me. I will misconceive what His Saviorhood is until I’ve understood that I’m in some danger of the judgment of God.
John 5:24:
He that hears My word, and believes on Him that sent Me, has everlasting life, and does not come into judgment.
So the idea of judgment is right there with the promise of eternal life, and that implies something’s wrong with me, because God’s going to have to judge me unless I believe in Christ and get eternal life. Good question. Other questions? Surely I’ve not exhausted your curiosity here. I might have exhausted you, but hopefully not your curiosity.
Yes. “Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before.” Okay, what you have here is obviously another call to the nation to repent, to get back into harmonious relationships with God. The result of this will be, surprisingly, the return of Christ, the advent of the millennial kingdom. That’s what he says. Many people have thought not, but I think the text is plain.
Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that He may send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before.
Now, in this context, of course, what I’d like to do—let me put up another overhead here to try to clarify this—we’re saying that repentance is the decision to get back into harmonious relationships with God. So repentance is a broader issue than salvation. It’s a broad basket here.
But if, when a person is unsaved and they repent, what they’re going to have to discover in the process of their repentance is that they need to be saved in order to have the kind of harmony with God that repentance is designed to give them. So that what we have is the prodigal son, for example, deciding he needs to get back into harmony with his father. He doesn’t know how yet, but when he meets his father he discovers it’s by the unconditional grace of his father that he does.
In the context of Acts 2 and 3, the presupposition here is that the repentance that is enjoined upon Israel is inseparable from the message that Jesus is the Christ. That’s even plain here, right? And that nobody would be responding to this message without recognizing that the name in which this message was preached was Jesus Messiah. And therefore, at some point or other in the process of repentance, they would have to have accepted this truth. But accepting that truth is converting, it is regenerating.
Remember again the key passage from John 20:
These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, and believing you may have life in His name.
At whatever point a person believes that Jesus is the Christ in the New Testament sense of that word, then at that point they are regenerate.
Now repentance, therefore, is the broad effort to get back into harmony with God. But in the process of repentance, the unsaved man finds that he must have faith in Christ. Remember the statement that is made later in Acts, that Paul says, “I preached everywhere repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, Paul is saying, when I told people to repent and get back into harmony with God, I also told them to put their faith in Christ.
So what is being called for here is a national repentance, a national return to harmony with God, with all of the implications that that would have for the lifestyle of the people involved. That would have sweeping implications for their lifestyle. But part and parcel of getting back into harmony with God would be the act of personal faith in Jesus the Messiah, and that act, and that alone, would be saving.
So we must remember that sometimes the more narrow concept—we would say, okay, let’s put it this way—faith in Christ is the more narrow concept. Repentance is the larger concept. For the unsaved person, the whole process of repentance will be incomplete until they come to faith in Christ. So the prodigal son doesn’t finish his restoration of harmony with his father till he meets his father. Cornelius, even though he is praying to God and giving alms and all of this, is not yet right with God until the message comes to him from Peter that he must believe in order to be saved.
So if we can think of it that way, this is the larger concept for the unsaved person. The larger concept includes the smaller concept of faith in Christ for eternal life. And in that way we should have no problem with a passage like this that is addressing the larger issue, and the smaller issue is clearly implicit here because he says that He may send Jesus Christ to you. How is a person going to repent toward a message like that unless he accepts the premise of the messenger, that the Jesus he’s talking about is in fact Jesus Messiah? But to accept that fact would be to believe in Him for eternal life.
Acts 2:38 fits in here exactly. The call is broader than just a call to eternal salvation, but eternal salvation is involved in this because the totality of the repentance is not finished until there has been personal faith in Christ. Now, probably some of the people to whom Peter was addressing himself in Acts 2 were already saved. You remember that Peter says, “Be it known to the whole house of Israel that God has made this same Jesus, whom you crucified, Lord and Christ.” Now if he had not said one further word, he had said enough to bring them to faith in Christ.
And you remember the simple statement of First John 5:1:
Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.
So at whatever point the hearers of Peter’s message in Acts 2 understand that the Jesus whom he proclaims is indeed the Christ, at that point they’re saved. And I think that there were undoubtedly people already saved in the audience before Peter got the question from them, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” Notice the question implies their acceptance of his premise. Men and brethren, what are we going to do in the light of the fact that you have told us that the Person we crucified was the Christ? What are we going to do about that?
And his answer is, repent and be baptized, not to be saved, but to become part and parcel of the Christian church in which fellowship with God alone was available. So he did not preach that to the Gentiles.
Yeah, and this is very interesting. Let me get this off so I can look Paul in the eye there. Paul has raised the question, to whom was the message of Acts 2 addressed? Was it not addressed to the Jews, and did he preach this to the Gentiles? The answer is yes, he did address the Jews in Acts 2, and no, he did not preach this message to the Gentiles.
Those who have studied the book of Acts carefully have made the observation that Acts looks, on the surface, like it is inconsistent in the way it relates baptism, forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Spirit. In Acts 2:38, apparently baptism precedes the remission of sins and precedes the gift of the Spirit. But in Acts 10, in the household of Cornelius, it’s the other way around. “To Him give all the prophets witness that whoever believes in Him shall receive remission of sins.” And what happens here? Well, immediately the Holy Spirit falls on Cornelius. He gets the Holy Spirit, and then Peter says, well, can anybody prevent them from being baptized, since they’ve already received the Holy Spirit? Entirely different, entirely different.
What we discover by careful examination of the book of Acts, I think—and I don’t want to get too deeply into this—but I think what we discover by a careful examination of the book of Acts is that to Jews of the land of Palestine, who had been exposed to the public ministry of Jesus and the public ministry of John the Baptist, both of whom baptized in Israel, before the believer in Christ could get back into harmony with God, he had to accept baptism. But outside of the Palestinian context, even among Jews, for example in Antioch of Pisidia, there is no such condition, and the moment a person believes he not only gets eternal life, but he also gets the forgiveness of sins and the Holy Spirit, and so on.
So we would say that in both Acts 2 and Acts 3 the repentance was a very crucial issue. It was not the condition of salvation, but it was the condition of restored harmony with God, which included the gift of the Spirit and which included admission to the church. Now let’s admit that that’s a little complicated, but I think that if you study it through, you will find that that makes sense out of all the data that is presented to us in the book of Acts.
The apostle—where would you say, one more question folks—this was what is number four on the quiz this morning. You’re doing great. How about this. Where would you say that the apostle Paul got saved? I didn’t hear an answer. On the road to Damascus, and I’d say so too, because that’s the point at which he recognized that Jesus, whom he was persecuting, was the Christ.
Exactly. Three days later—notice, by the way, let me emphasize this because it’s related to the whole subject of repentance—Paul recognizes on the road to Damascus that Jesus is the Christ. First John 5:1, “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” Paul gets up from the road to Damascus, and he’s born again. Is he in fellowship with God? No. He goes back to Damascus, and for three days he doesn’t eat anything, he can’t see anything, and after three days Ananias comes in.
And Ananias says, “Arise and be baptized, washing away your sins and calling on the name of the Lord.” Paul does it, and immediately he becomes a vibrant witness for Jesus Christ. He’s now in harmony with God. But Paul was a Palestinian, and his return to harmony with God is conditioned in the same way it was for all Palestinians. Of course, like everybody in the history of man, salvation was by faith and faith alone. But harmony with God for the Palestinian was now to be achieved through baptism. And then, on the practical experiential level, that we experience forgiveness of sins every day of our life, Paul sins, we’re forgiven, and he becomes a man in harmony with God and a vital and effective preacher of the message of Jesus Christ.
So this perfectly illustrates what’s happening here. Now people have, in my opinion, tried desperately to evade these conclusions by saying, well, Paul wasn’t really saved on the Damascus road. He was only saved after Ananias came to him. Nonsense. If we didn’t have Acts 22:16 in there, we would never for one moment suspect that he was not saved on the Damascus road. There’s no way he could not have been saved on the Damascus road. But fellowship is something that comes subsequent, and we must meet the conditions of fellowship. Even we who are saved by grace must meet the conditions of fellowship. What are they? Repentance, if you want to put it that way, confession of sins.
I don’t care how long you’ve been a Christian. If you get away from God, you will not get back into fellowship with God without confessing your sins. You will not. That’s a condition. It’s not a condition for eternal life. And you die with unconfessed sins, you go straight to heaven, unlike what the Catholics tell us. Okay? You go straight to heaven because you are saved, and saved eternally. But you cannot get back into fellowship with God without meeting the conditions. But for us the conditions are simple. For the Palestinians they weren’t that hard, but baptism was one of the conditions. That’s what we have to recognize. God insisted that those who had rejected the baptizing ministry of John the Baptist and the baptizing ministry of Jesus should get back into harmony with Him by accepting baptism in the name of Jesus Christ. And then and only then were they in harmony with God, even though they were saved beforehand when they believed in Christ as the Giver of eternal life.
That’s exactly 11:30? I agree. But do clocks lie? Yes, frequently they do. Well, let’s see what my watch says. Do we have another question that we could handle? Yes, go ahead. I knew we shouldn’t have gone past 11:30. That’s the hardest question of the morning. Yeah, okay. Hopefully I won’t need that much.
But that’s a very good question, because on the one hand we will say that if a person has any real measure of true repentance, even before they are saved, that obviously God has worked that repentance in their heart. The other side of it is then, do we get hung up on the fact that this is God’s doing and we can’t do anything about it? What you’ve actually touched is the age-old question of the interfacing of divine sovereignty with human responsibility, about which the theologians have tussled down through the centuries without resolving it to everybody’s satisfaction.
Now let me just say that my conviction here, for whatever it’s worth, is that divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not mutually incompatible. I was fortunate enough when I was going through college to have Dr. Kenneth Kantzer as a teacher in philosophical apologetics. And basically he taught, and I think that this agrees with Scripture—I don’t think Scripture attempts to reconcile this for us explicitly—the Scriptures present the sovereignty of God, and the Scriptures present the responsibility of man, and the Scriptures do not go out of their way to tell us how they relate to each other.
But it is Dr. Kantzer’s conviction, and mine, that this can be reconciled within the framework of omniscience, that God is an omnipotent God who can create people with genuine free will, but He is an omniscient God who knows exactly what people will choose, or what they would choose if their situation were slightly altered. In other words, He knows all possible and actual choices.
By the time you’re talking about that, you’re talking about something so immensely complex that the largest computer in the world could never handle it. What would this person choose if somebody on their way out of church had given them the gospel? What would they choose in the light of that slight change, as over against what they would choose if nobody did it? Well, but that has to be answered in the context of who else might have given them the gospel in the past, and who else might give them the gospel in the future, et cetera, et cetera.
It becomes so complex that it defies the human mind to try to grapple with it. But the point is that God is able to prevent choices that He does not desire to be made, and He is able to direct people to choices that He desires to be made, so that at one and the same time we may say God ordained that choice, and we may say the choice was freely made, because God’s method of operation did not violate the free will of man, but encouraged man toward the goal that God wanted.
All of us who have been saved have probably many examples of this in our own experience. I was born into a Christian family. I had no control over that. I grew up in churches where the gospel was clearly preached. X number of people talked to me about the gospel. When I finally chose to trust Christ, I was not conscious of the slightest coercion to do so, but I wanted to do so because the convergence of all the factors in my life brought me to the place where I both understood it as something that God had showed me in the Scriptures, and I wanted it.
So I think that probably it is just as well for us that the Scriptures don’t try to go into all the techniques involved. And I think we can say without real contradiction, on the one hand, that if there is repentance, it is God-granted. “No man can come unto Me except the Father who has sent Me draw him.” That’s different than coercing him. But without divine intervention, nobody comes to God. And if they do come to God, it’s because God has drawn them to Him.
But at the same time, there is a real decision of the human heart which is, in terms of our consciousness, free. And we do not feel coerced, and we are not coerced. So that if I, in fact, draw back from the wooings of God, then I draw back from His benevolent efforts toward me by my own choice.
The best thing I ever heard about sovereignty and free will was a statement made by C. H. Mackintosh, an old Plymouth Brethren writer. And I tell you the truth, no matter how often you discuss this, you will never get a better statement than this. C. H. M. said, if anybody ever goes to heaven, they will have only God to thank, and if anybody ever goes to hell, they will have only themselves to blame.
I don’t think anybody will improve on that resolution ever. All right, we’ll close with that.