Repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ-Acts 20:21.
Very near the close of his missionary career the Apostle Paul summed up his
preaching as being all directed to two points, “Repentance towards God, and
faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” [Acts 20:21]. These two, repentance and
faith, ought never to be separated in thought, as they are inseparable in
fact. Genuine repentance is impossible without faith; true faith cannot
exist without repentance. And yet the two are separated very often, in this
day especially, even by earnest Christian teachers who have a great deal to
say about faith, and not nearly enough in proportion about repentance; and
the effect is to obscure the very idea of faith, and not seldom to preach,
“Peace! peace! when there is no peace” [Jer. 8:11]. A Gospel which is always
talking about faith, and scarcely ever talking about repentance, is
dispossessed indeed of some of its most unwelcome characteristics, but is
also deprived of most of its power, and it may very easily become an ally of
all righteousness and an indulgence to sin. Some of the most formidable
objections to the Christian doctrine of forgiveness-namely, that it is
immoral in its substance-arise chiefly from forgetting that repentance
towards God is as real a condition of salvation as is faith in our Lord
Jesus Christ. We have here the Apostle’s deliverance about one of these twin
thoughts. We have three stages-the root, the stem, the fruit; sorrow,
repentance, salvation. But there is a right and a wrong kind of sorrow for
sin. The right kind breeds repentance, and thence reaches salvation; the
wrong kind breeds nothing, and so ends in death. Look at this ladder, which
the Apostle sets up “from a horrible pit and the miry clay” [Ps. 40:2] of
evil, up to the sunny heights of salvation, and trace its stages; not
forgetting that it is not a complete statement of the case, and needs to be
supplemented, in the spirit of the words already quoted, by the other part
of the inseparable whole, “faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.” It would be
an interesting study to examine the two letters of the Apostle Peter, in
order to construct from them a picture of what he became, and to contrast it
with his own earlier self, when full of self-confidence, rashness, and
instability. It took a lifetime for Simon, the son of Jonas to grow into
Peter; but it was done. And the very faults of the character became
strength. What he had proved possible in his own case he commands and
commends to us; and from the height to which he has reached he looks upwards
to the infinite ascent which he knows he will attain when he puts off this
tabernacle, and then downwards to his brethren, bidding them, too, climb and
aspire. He is like some trumpeter on the battlefield who spends his last
breath in sounding an advance. Immortal hope animates his dying injunction:
“Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior” [2 Pet. 3:18].
In Celebration of Life in Him,
Dr. Jim DeBruhl, gembeaux@bellsouth.net
" Everything is wrong until God makes it right,"
