Repentance

Repentance is the first word out of the gospel's mouth, and one of the most misread. People hear it as groveling, or as merely feeling bad, or as gritting your teeth and turning over a new leaf by willpower. It is none of those. The word the New Testament uses, metanoia, means a change of mind so deep that it turns the whole direction of a life. It is not the misery before the good news; it is the turning that lets the good news in. And it is not advanced spirituality reserved for the serious. It is the doorway everyone walks through to get in at all.

A turning, not just a feeling

Repentance shows itself in motion, not only in emotion. When Paul summed up his preaching he described it as a turn with visible fruit: men should "repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance" (Acts 26:20). John the Baptist demanded the same proof before he would call anyone repentant: "Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance" (Matthew 3:8). You can be sorry and change nothing; that is regret. Repentance is sorrow that gets up and walks in a new direction. The feeling may or may not be intense. The turning is the thing.

Godly sorrow and worldly sorrow

Not all sorrow over sin is the same, and the difference decides everything. Paul draws the line cleanly: "godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death" (2 Corinthians 7:10). Two men in the gospel show the two kinds. Peter denied Christ three times and went out and wept bitterly, and his grief ran toward Jesus and he was restored. Judas betrayed Christ and was filled with remorse, and his grief ran away from Jesus, into despair, and it killed him. The same failure, the same sorrow on the surface; but one sorrow drives you back to God and the other drowns you in yourself. Repentance is the first kind: regret pointed home.

Gregory the Great, Homily 34 on the Gospels · c. AD 591 · via Bellarmine I.13

A depraved mind, unless it be first overturned through fear, is not cleansed from its wonted vices.

The first word of the gospel

It is striking how the New Testament opens its preaching. John the Baptist begins, "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 3:2). Jesus begins His own ministry with the very same words: "Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matthew 4:17). He would not soften it, even warning a crowd, "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" (Luke 13:3). And when Peter's hearers at Pentecost asked what they must do, the answer led with it: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you" (Acts 2:38). Repentance is not a fringe demand for the especially bad. It is the front door of the whole house.

And it is itself a gift

Here is the part that keeps repentance from curdling into a work we perform to earn God's favor: repentance is something God gives, not something we manufacture to twist His arm. When the early church saw outsiders turn, they did not congratulate them; they praised God that He had "granted repentance unto life" (Acts 11:18). Paul tells Timothy to deal gently with opponents in hope that "God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth" (2 Timothy 2:25). And the thing that actually melts a hard heart is not the threat of God but the kindness of God: "the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance" (Romans 2:4). So repentance and grace are not rivals. Grace is what produces the turning in the first place (see grace).

Ambrose of Milan, On Penance I.1 · c. AD 384 · via Bellarmine I.13

No one can do penance well, unless he have hoped for pardon.

What God does, and what is left to you

If repentance is given, a fair question follows: what part of it is actually yours? The answer Scripture keeps showing is that the seeing is His and the accepting is yours, and the two are not the same act.

Christ says what the Spirit does: “when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8). The word behind reprove is elegchō, which the lexicons render as convicting with evidence rather than merely rebuking: exposing a thing, holding it up where it cannot be looked away from. That is not a feeling arriving. It is being shown.

And then the response is left standing open. Luke records the same preaching landing on two crowds, and the difference is not in the sermon.

Acts 2:37

Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?

Acts 7:54

When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth.

Pricked in the heart, and cut to the heart. Both were shown. One crowd asked what to do and three thousand were added; the other picked up stones. The conviction was identical and the answer was not, which is why Hebrews can command the thing that is left to us: “To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15). Nobody is told to manufacture the voice. They are told what to do when they hear it.

Nathan and David is the whole pattern in two sentences. The king had covered it for the better part of a year and was not looking for conviction. God sent a man with a story about a poor man’s lamb, and let David pronounce sentence on himself before turning it: “Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7). That is God’s part, and David did not arrange it. What comes next is David’s: “I have sinned against the LORD” (2 Samuel 12:13).

And it was a real choice. He was the king. He had already arranged one death to keep this covered, and a prophet who says thou art the man to an armed man who has done that is taking his life in his hands. David could have hardened. Others in his position did. Hebrews says a man can be “hardened through the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13), and the deceitfulness is usually the same lie in every century: that the thing is private, and hurts nobody but me.

So the gift and the response are not rivals, and neither swallows the other. He shows a man the truth about himself, which the man could not have produced and did not ask for. Then the man either owns it or works out a reason not to. The showing is grace. The owning is repentance.

Repentance and faith: two sides of one turn

You cannot really separate repentance from faith; they are the two halves of a single motion. To repent is to turn from sin and self; to believe is to turn to Christ. Jesus joined them in one sentence: "repent ye, and believe the gospel" (Mark 1:15). Paul preached them as a pair, "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21). A man turning around turns his back on one thing in the very act of turning his face to another. Repentance without faith is mere remorse; faith without repentance is mere agreement. The real turn does both at once.

Where this lands

Repentance has a bad reputation it does not deserve. It is not God making you crawl before He will have you; it is the turn that finally lets you be had. And heaven does not meet it with a frown. Jesus said the opposite: "joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth" (Luke 15:7). The party in the prodigal's house begins the moment the son turns for home, while he is still a long way off. So repentance is not the price of the welcome. It is just turning around to discover the Father was already running toward you (see the new birth that follows, and the prayer of a turning heart).

A worked example of the two sorrows, in one man’s own case, is at The Idea of It. Related: The Thief Did More Than Believe, The Bored Ear, The Security of Salvation, Grace, Born Again, The Sinner's Prayer, Even From Their Own Confessions, and Sanctification. Greek checked against the BibleHub interlinear and the public-domain lexicons: elegchō at John 16:8. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple.