What Is Repentance—and Why Does Jesus Require It?

Two imperatives of the gospel

In this aspect of the gospel meeting, I want to speak about two imperatives, two imperatives. You’ve heard one already from my brother Michael: that you must be born again. And the second one is there must be repentance, repentance.

You know, we’ve been hearing about the wonderful news of the gospel. But the individual has to be brought to the point where you understand, “Do I need this gospel? Why do I need this gospel? Why are believers, Christians, so anxious to share this message of the gospel and seem to be directing it towards me?”

Well, the two imperatives—and Michael has brought one out very clearly this evening—you must be born again. In fact, in John chapter 3, he speaks about that being born again, that new life, three times over to Nicodemus.

But we find in Luke 13, he also stresses another very important imperative. In Luke chapter 13—and I haven’t put it up there for us to read—I’ll just address to you what I want to point out there.

It was a day when there was news brought to the Lord Jesus Christ about a tragic death. In that tragic death, of course, the Jews believed that, oh yes, people die. But if you die tragically, oh, you must have been involved in deep sin. You must have been a deep sinner.

So they brought before him this news about some men from Galilee who apparently had broken Roman law. Pilate and his soldiers had pursued these men. Maybe they even went to the temple in Jerusalem, thinking they would be safe there. But Pilate had them killed. It says there that their blood was mingled with the blood of the sacrifices, because we know that the temple in Jerusalem was a place of innocent animal sacrifices.

So they bring this news to the Lord Jesus, and he says, “Do you think that they were sinners, those Galilean men, above all other sinners?” He said no, or nay. He said no. But he said, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

There was a tower that fell in Siloam. Eighteen people were killed. Were they sinners above all sinners? He said no. “But I tell you, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

So there’s the imperative of repentance. You must repent or you will perish.

What it means to perish

I was enjoying this. I’m not going to repeat what my brother said, because I was going to bring out John chapter 3, some of that information. But just let me tell you this again. I’ll repeat it again. There’s no hurt in repeating this verse over and over again.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

You see that word *perish*? Unless you repent, unless you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you will perish. Unless you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you will perish.

Oh, do we think that perishing is the same as death? It’s not. We all die, or have an appointment with death, we might say. We’re all going to die a physical death unless the Lord be come and take us home in the rapture. But that’s not what perishing is.

After death, perishing is being cast out, as it were. A place of torment. A place of discomfort. And that for eternity. A place where we’re absolutely separated from God, who has created us and who loves us and sent his Son to die in our place at Calvary’s cross. Perishing is so much more than physical death.

Unless we repent, we’ll also perish. Unless we’re born again, we will perish.

So what is the antidote to it, as we find there? In Mark chapter 1 and verse 15, the Lord Jesus is speaking, and he says, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel.”

I’m so thankful that we read these words in Luke chapter 19 and verse 10: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

I don’t know where every person stands here spiritually, whether you have received that new life that God is offering to you through faith in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, or whether you are without Christ as Saviour and Lord. But the Lord Jesus Christ says, “You must repent and believe the gospel.”

God leads to repentance

I’m so thankful that in his Word, in Romans chapter 2 and verse 4, we read these words: “God leads to repentance.” God leads to repentance.

So this repentance that we’re speaking about is not something that we have to do on our own. God is leading you to repentance.

Do you know that one of the steps, perhaps, in your repentance is the fact that you were sitting tonight in a gospel meeting? You’re not here by chance. There’s no such thing as chance in the life of a believer.

“Oh, the circumstances just lined up favourably, and look at the wonderful benefit that came my way.”

No, the goodness of God leads to repentance.

I was just talking to a dear one recently. They had just come back from a trip, this couple, and they were saying, oh, they had been blessed and things worked out really well. I was careful to point out to them that it’s just the goodness of God leading them to repentance, because this particular couple don’t know Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord.

You know God’s desire. We find in 2 Peter 3 and verse 9 that all should come to repentance. God wants you to come to full repentance tonight, which is necessary, because without repentance, you will all likewise perish.

Seeing our lives from God’s perspective

Now, for a minute or two, let’s just think about this word *repentance*. It’s a Greek word, and it is spelled M-E-T-A-N-E-O, long O, *metaneo*. If we translate that, it is afterthought or thinking at a higher level.

I’d like to ask you this evening, have you ever thought about your life? Have you ever thought about your life? And how would you rate your life? If you were going to score your life, how would you rate your life?

Maybe you think you have lived and are living a very acceptable life. “You know, I’m not doing a lot of the things that other people are doing. I haven’t murdered anybody. I try to be helpful to people where I can. And I think I’m living a pretty good, acceptable life.”

Well, the only problem with that concept is that you’re comparing yourself to others. *Metaneo* would have us think at a higher level. What’s the highest level that we could think about our lives? God’s view. God’s perspective.

What does God see when he looks upon your life and upon my life? From God’s perspective.

You know, there’s a multitude of verses in the Scripture that God tells us, in his Word, how he sees us. I think about Isaiah. We’ll be talking about Isaiah a little bit. I think about Isaiah in his Old Testament book, book of prophecy of Isaiah. Isaiah says concerning individuals in their sins, he said, “There’s nothing but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores.”

That’s an awful picture. Isaiah is not talking about a person who’s been terribly wounded in a battle or has leprosy or something like that. He’s painting a visual picture, and it’s awful. But that’s what our lives are like when examined by God.

When God looks down at a person who’s never come to the Lord Jesus Christ, whose wounds by sin have never been mollified or bandaged or has never received a new life: nothing but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores.

We read about the leprous people in the Old Testament. What a picture of sinners. Unclean. Unclean. From God’s perspective.

We turn to the New Testament. We can think of very well-known verses in Romans chapter 3 and 23: “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” And we come to Romans chapter 3 and verse 10: “There is none righteous,” not even one righteous person without sin.

Then Romans 6 and 23: “The wages of sin.” What we get as a result of our sin is separation from God. That’s borne out again in Isaiah chapter 59 and verse 2: “Your iniquities have separated you from your God.”

So you see, friend, when it comes to repentance, God wants us to take a fresh look at our lives to see where we are, where we stand before him.

When God looks at your life, does he see you cleansed of your sins? We could put it this way: are you wearing those lovely white garments of salvation? Or does he see you covered in sin and separated from him?

Repentance calls for a careful examination of our lives and a turning away from our old sinful habits, our old sinful attitudes, our own sinful actions that are contrary to the Word of God.

I’ll just make this point here, lest I forget. Repentance doesn’t stop when a person trusts Christ as Saviour. Believers are to repent, because we still have an old sinful nature. While we thank God that we have new life, we still can make errors in our lives. We can still not be the way that God would want us to be.

You see, he loves us so much. He wants to save our souls, but he’s not willing to leave us the way we are. He wants us to abandon that old way of life and to follow him. And he gives us the ability to do it when we trust in Christ as Saviour.

A voice crying in the wilderness

I’m going the wrong way here. I want to take us now to the book of Luke in the Gospel, chapter 3, page 1584. We’re just going to have a quick look at this.

This is a prophecy from Isaiah, and it’s from Isaiah 40. But in this prophecy that’s recorded here in Luke chapter 3, verses 4 to 6, Isaiah was prophesying that before the Lord Jesus Christ, the Saviour of sinners, came into the world and was being sent into the world, that there would be a forerunner that would come to prepare the way of the Lord.

Well, in a way, that’s what’s here. There’s one coming, and John the Baptist was this forerunner for the Lord Jesus Christ. And he’s preaching—guess what?—repentance. People’s hearts to be changed, and people’s hearts to be ready to receive the Lord Jesus Christ, to receive what God was providing for them.

So this is what the prophet says concerning John the Baptist. Here we’re going to look at these things and see what we can glean from it, in Luke chapter 3: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

You know, that’s kind of what Michael and I are doing tonight. We’re voices crying in the wilderness. Everybody who stands and shares the gospel, whether it’s in a gospel hall, whether it’s out on the sidewalk trying to pass out a tract to someone: voices crying in the wilderness.

The wilderness? The wilderness. This world is a wilderness of lost souls, individuals who need God’s salvation. They need that new life, the gift that God wants to give them. And we’re voices crying in the wilderness.

What’s the message? John the Baptist and Isaiah here, they’re not talking about fixing up the road, having dump trucks come in and do this and do that and make everything look lovely and pretty. They’re talking about a work in your own soul, because you’ve examined your life, or you’re examining your life, and you’re finding that your life is not acceptable. You were far from God.

Prepare the way of the Lord

So let’s look at these things. He says, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

I think we need to be brought, if we take an examination of our lives from a higher view, from God’s view, we come to the realization that there are some changes that need to be made. There’s some things that aren’t right. There’s a need that I have. “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

He says, “Make his paths straight.”

I was finding that interesting. We sang that hymn that Michael gave out: “The way to heaven is straight and plain.” Straight and plain. “Make his paths straight.”

Are you willing tonight to take the message of God, that God sees you as a guilty sinner needing salvation, are you willing to take that message straight from God? Or are you trying to rationalize around it?

“What is it? Not really. I mean, I’m not all that bad.”

No, friend. There’s no rationalizing around it.

“Well, I’m not all those choices that I made. You don’t know how difficult my life was.”

We’re not trying to say that there aren’t difficulties in life and difficult circumstances. But our paths are not straight, and we need to be straight. We need to take the message straight from God, and we need to make the path straight.

The Lord Jesus Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

Every valley shall be filled

Then we read that “every valley shall be filled.”

This past summer, Margie and I made a little trip out west in Alberta. In the Rockies, it’s very beautiful there. Mountains here, mountains here, valleys here. You know, sometimes a valley doesn’t get too much light, does it, because of the high mountains?

But “every valley shall be filled.” What does that suggest to me? There’s exposure. There’s no darkness when God casts his searchlight on the life of an individual.

God knows every detail of your life. He knows what you’ve thought. He knows what you’ve said. He knows your actions. He knows your motives. He knows the intents of your heart. And as a sinner, they have been against God.

So “every valley shall be filled.” Their exposure to the light. God says, “Come to the light. It’s shining for you.” God says, “Come to the light.”

Humility, honesty, and obstacles

“Every mountain and hill brought low.”

You know, I’m so thankful for humility. Humility. Because the Word of God brings us down. It humbles us when we see what we are in the sight of a holy God, when we understand the things that we’ve done, the way that we live, the thoughts that we’ve had have all been an offence to God. We’ve had a stench before him, and they’ve separated us from him.

“The crooked places shall be made right,” made straight. Honesty.

Would you be willing to be honest with God tonight and say—this is the conclusion that you have to come to, because the God who cannot lie, as we’ve been hearing in the book of Titus, the God who promises, he cannot lie—he’s giving it to us straight.

We have to be honest with ourselves. “Yes, I’m prepared to be honest. I am the sinner.” Did you say, “I am”?

And then what it says: “The rough ways smooth.”

Perhaps there’s some obstacle in your life. You know, you can remove those rocks in the road that are keeping you from coming to the Lord Jesus Christ. You can do it.

Sometimes it might be sins that you really enjoy doing, and you don’t really want to give them up. That’s your old sinful nature. But when you stop and think that these sins, this sin in particular, the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross and he endured the punishment of God for those sins.

So the rough ways can be made smooth.

Then look at the promise of verse 6: “And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” I think that’s the promise of a person who repents. “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

So my question to you tonight: are you willing to repent? To take the place that God gives you—a sinner—in his Word?

Come to the Lord Jesus Christ

But perhaps you are repentant and honestly can say, “I do see myself as God sees me, but I don’t know where to go from here.”

Well, you could come to the Son of Man, which is the Lord Jesus Christ, because he has power on earth to forgive sins. He has told us that in the Scriptures.

The Lord Jesus Christ says in Matthew chapter 11 and verse 28, he says, “Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy burdened, I will give you rest.”

Your great burden is that you, as an unforgiven sinner, if you go out to meet God, you’ll be judged for your sins.

So Isaiah 53, we’re just going to turn there for a minute, and in closing, Isaiah 53, verses 4 and 5.

Michael has told us the Lord Jesus Christ suffering on the cross of Calvary. I’ve always found that interesting in reading the events there at Calvary, that the Lord Jesus Christ never cried out in pain for all the torment that he received from the hands of sinful men: nails through his hands and feet, the lashing of the back down right into the bone, wearing a crown of thorns, a visage marred more than any man.

He never cried. He never spoke ill words to those who inflicted such pain on him.

But in Isaiah 53, 4 and 5, we read these words: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” That’s what the Lord Jesus Christ was doing at Calvary. He was carrying our griefs, bearing our griefs, carried our sorrows.

Verse 5 says, “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement,” or the punishment so that we could have peace, “was upon him. And by his stripes, we are healed.”

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The iniquity of us all

Then we find in verse 6 of Isaiah 53. Perhaps you don’t see how to believe in Jesus, the Lord Jesus Christ. Look at this lovely verse, and we’ll just examine it for a minute. Isaiah 53 and verse 6: “All we, like sheep, have gone astray.”

We’re all sinners. God has declared that. “We’ve turned everyone to his own way.” We’ve all done that. Turned to our own way, our own selfish pursuits. Left God out of the picture.

Perhaps, as a young person, we didn’t even know about God. We might have grown up in those kinds of circumstances. Nevertheless, we were living our own way, independent of God. We’ve turned to his own way.

“And the Lord has laid on him,” on the Lord Jesus Christ, “the iniquity of us all.”

You see, when he died on the cross, while he didn’t cry out because of the injuries that men put upon him, he cried out in the darkness. He said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Psalm 22. Same words. It was prophesied he would say that, and he did.

In the darkness, God the Father, in a very concentrated way, poured out all the righteous judgment against the sins of humanity. Past, present, future. Sins that are imaginable, sins that aren’t even imaginable, things we couldn’t even imagine someone doing, and yet will be done or have been done. All poured out upon the Lord Jesus Christ as he paid the penalty for sin.

The first and last doors

I just want you to think for a minute about a young man who was attending gospel meetings. I think it had been several weeks that he’d been going. It was in England, and the preacher was a man named Dwight L. Moody.

The young man, he listened to the gospel, and the more he listened to it, the more he became convicted that he was a sinner. Finally, he was at the point where he was repenting of his sins. He was agreeing with God he was a sinner, but he just couldn’t see. “How can I be saved? How does this happen? How do I believe?”

Well, we know, friend, it’s not like a cloud that comes over you, and all of a sudden, when the cloud lifts, “Oh, I’m saved.” It’s not like that, is it? It was not my experience, and I’m sure those of you who are saved, that wasn’t your experience either.

There was some agony involved on the part of trying to understand. But this is what Mr. Moody told this man.

In fact, it was unique circumstances, because Dwight L. Moody was just leaving, and this young man went to the station and said, “Mr. Moody, please don’t leave. Tell me. Please help me. I want to be saved.”

Dwight L. Moody said as he was boarding the train, he said, “Isaiah chapter 53, verse 6. Go in at the first door and come out at the last door.”

“Go in at the first door and come out at the last door. Go in at the first door and come out at the last door. Go in at the first door and come out at the last door.”

So let’s do this. You put your name in at the first door, and you take your name out at the last door. And I’ll gladly put my name in there.

“Glenn Todd, like a sheep, has gone astray.”

Are you willing to do that? Admit before God. Honesty required. Honesty required.

“Glenn Todd, like a sheep, has gone astray. We have turned,” all of humanity, “to his or her own way. And the Lord has laid on him,” Jesus Christ, “the iniquity of Glenn Todd.”

When I look at Calvary’s cross in my mind’s eye and I see the bleeding, dying form of a Saviour, I see a Saviour there who’s rested his head on his chest after saying, “It is finished.” I see Jesus Christ dying for Glenn Todd.

That’s what God wants me to see. And that’s what he wants you to see.

If that isn’t enough—that was certainly enough for me to say these words—“Jesus died for me.” There’s no mystery about it. Jesus died for me. Understanding, there’s no mystery about that, is there?

God is satisfied with Christ’s work

But if that wasn’t enough, we can look further in Isaiah 53 and verse 11. Here’s what it says, the testimony God gives: “He,” God, “shall see the labour of his soul,” of the soul of the Lord Jesus Christ, “and be satisfied.”

God is satisfied with the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

“By his knowledge”—and that’s what we’re trying to do tonight, to share this wonderful knowledge from God with you—“by his knowledge, my righteous servant,” the Lord Jesus Christ, “shall justify many.”

Remember, this is prophetic. Isaiah wrote this before it occurred. He said, “For he shall bear their iniquities.”

And the Scripture tells us, the New Testament, “He bore our sins in his own body on the tree.”

I don’t know if God can make it any plainer than that, dear friend. “The Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Take him as your own Saviour, and you will be saved.