REPENTANCE The Missing Note âAnd that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.â Luke 24:47
You wonder why a commission as vital as the one above is so neglected. We can well expect it to be so among those who have missed the mark altogether: but among those who basically preach the true God and His Gospel it is very difficult to understand how a doctrine of the Gospel, and so imperative to it, can be neglected. We see the prominence that the preaching of repentance had from the Old Testament prophets to John the Baptist and from John as the forerunner of Christ to Christ Himself. As John came preaching repentance, so Christ continued the same. The message of Peter as he preached on the day of Pentecost was the message of repentance. Paul in Athens laid the claims of Jehovah, the true God, upon the Greek philosophers and demanded that they repent. Preaching repentance is not something apart from the Gospel. The cry of repentance is in the gospel message. It is that cry in the Gospel that makes the Gospel become good news. The grace of repentance brings men to agree with a Holy God concerning sin. Sin is infinitely offensive to God and worthy of eternal banishment. The grace of repentance as it effectually works in the heart causes a man to take sides with God against himself and confess that he and his sin are obnoxious to a thrice Holy God. He is made to see that in his nature and practice he is abhorrent and must repent or perish, turn or burn. I am sincerely afraid that great multitudes of professing Christians are no more than that, âprofessing Christians.â I am fearful that they have done no more than accepted someoneâs proposition and merely agreed with a âsimple plan of salvation,â that at best can only produce a false hope. In such cases the heart hasnât been smitten with conviction of sin, neither has there been a development of âgodly sorrow,â creating remorse and confession of the heinousness of sin before a Holy God. The modern concept of âsoul winningâ has produced an easy-believe type of religion that has only populated the churches with a mass number of poor misguided souls that are âtwofold more the child of hellâ than before. The earnest prayer of this pastor is that God will be pleased to pour out upon this religious, but lost world the spirit of grace and supplication. And that those who parade themselves on the âbroadway to destruction,â blindly convinced that they are in the straight and narrow may be brought into the dust of repentance. As an old minister of long ago said, âThere is no going to the fair haven of glory without sailing through the narrow strait of repentance.â ~~WTW