Here we are a few days into Lent. Of course the practice of Lent and even the use of the Church Calendar among Protestants is considered verboten in many quarters. Some might even style the habit of paying attention to the Church Calendar as apostasy.
However, a significant reason as to why I’ve become at least tender to the thought of the Church calendar is that by its use of ordering time in a Christian direction it shapes us as Christians. Instead of being shaped by Int’l Women’s Day, or Black History Month, or May Day we are shaped by Advent, Epiphany, Lenten, and Resurrection. If Christians have dominion over their Calendar as a habit, it is much easier to believe that they will practice dominion over other areas of life as a habit.
Another reason to be sympathetic to the Church Calendar is that as a people we are shaped by our customs and rituals. Customs become habit forming and as habits customs and rituals shape us. This is true both positively and negatively.
Negatively the custom of course language makes for a reinforcement of a course people.
Positively the custom of praying before meals works to make us a God-conscious people.
Meaning of Lent
Lent is characterized as a time of especial humility, meekness, and repentance in the Christian’s life. It was to be a time where the Christian identified with the Cross of Christ just as the Easter season was to be a time where the Christian identifies with the Resurrection and triumph of Christ. It became part of the texture of the Church giving a motif to the Christian calendar of humility followed by triumph.
However, over time Lent became burdened with showmanship. People became proud of their performances of humility and repentance.
Another danger in the Lenten season is that there crept into the Church a way of thinking that somehow self-denial and ritual performance was a means of earning favor with God in the sense that man was adding a something needed that wasn’t already present in Christ’s work. This reminds protestants that if we participate in Lent that to enter Lent properly we needs be convinced that there is nothing about Lent that is improving our right standing before God in Christ.
Of course, anything can become abused in the hands of fallen man. And all because a habit is abused doesn’t mean that it is inherently wrong. Scripture clearly calls for repentance and self-denial and inasmuch as lent has typically been a time emphasizing repentance and self-denial we shouldn’t dismiss that aspect of it out of hand.
We want to spend this sermon talking about repentance and then firmly connecting repentance to the Cross of Jesus Christ. We want to suggest that as Protestants we too can celebrate Lent but in a decidedly different way then as part of the Romish sacrament of Penance, which is part of their merit theology.
As we look at Scripture we discover that the beginning of Jesus ministry demands a call of repentance.
Matthew 4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
And then after the resurrection our Lord connects His crucifixion with repentance and forgiveness of sins;
Luke 24:45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. 46 He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
Then on the day of Pentecost Peter calls for people to “repent,” and connects that need in light of the crucified Lord and Messiah.
Acts 2:36 “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” 37 When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.
The Greek word for repent is metanoeō and it means to change one’s mind.
F. F. Bruce puts it simply when he wrote that repentance “involves a turning with contrition from sin to God.”
The great presupposition of repentance is the Cross work of Jesus Christ. There on the Cross, the sinner spies for first time not only the magnitude of His sin but also the cure for His sin.
It is a glimpse of and a beginning understanding of the Cross work of our Lord Christ which drives repentance, both of the initial variety that is connected to faith and conversion but also of the life long variety that is to be characteristic of all Christians. In just a bit we will connect the Cross more tightly to repentance.
We remember, after all, that repentance is not a one off reality but is to be characteristic of the whole Christians life. Luther put it memorably when he said in his 95 thesis;
“When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
So repentance is the way of entering into the redeemed life and repentance is clearly integrally connected with the Cross work of our benevolent master, Jesus.
In light of that let us speak a wee bit about different kinds or repentance;
I.) Natural Repentance
Apart from the Cross work of Jesus Christ repentance is just so many promises to be a better sinner. It is what might be styled as a natural repentance. Fallen man has the capacity to see that something he has done has had consequences that he wished were not present. As such there is a certain repentance — which is really merely regret — that he experiences.
We saw natural repentance recently in the Olympics when the chap who won the Bronze medal in some event publicly apologized on International Television to his girlfriend he had lost due to his recent infidelity. He regretted his actions and so there was a certain horizontal natural repentance.
II.) Legal Repentance
Another wrong kind of repentance is the kind of repentance that thinks that in virtue of the presence of repentance a forgiveness is earned or merited. We see this kind of repentance in history with traveling flagellants. They would go from city to city beating themselves with whips across their backs. In doing so they believed that their self-injury as repentance was please to God.
J. C. Ryle wrote about this repentance;
The tears of repentance do not wash away any sins. It is bad theology to say that they do. That is the work of the blood of Christ alone. Repentance does not make any atonement for sin. It is terrible theology to say that it does. It can do nothing of the kind. Our best repentance is a poor, imperfect thing, and needs repenting over again. Our best repentance has enough defects about it to sink us into hell. “We are counted righteous before God only for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, by faith, and not for our own works or deservings,”1 not for our repentance, holiness, charity, receiving of sacraments, or anything of the kind. All this is perfectly true. However, it is no less true that justified people are always repentant people, and that a forgiven sinner will always be someone who mourns over and hates his sins.
This kind of repentance, is a repentance that the Puritans styled a “legal repentance.” Legal Repentance viewed repentance as a work that could be traded up for grace so that what needed to be said is that we are saved by our repentance. Instead of understanding that it is God’s grace, as found in the Cross of Christ, that gives repentance the thought is that it is repentance that energizes the Cross work of Christ. It is the mistake of thinking that our repentance doesn’t need to be imputed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ in order to be accepted. It fails to realize that even our best repentance needs to be repented over. It includes the note of regret – perhaps even the remorse that personal sin exposes one to eternal punishment but there is no change that repentance always bespeaks. This legal repentance believes that this regret or remorse alone will in some measure by itself atone for disobedience against God’s Holy standard.
This legal repentance is exemplified in the person caught in their crime/sin. Sorry that they were caught but seeking to escape consequences via remorse.
This legal repentance is a theme that we find in Western Literature, whether in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” or Dostovesky’s “Crime and Punishment,” or more recently in the “Catcher in the Rye.”
Dostoevsky, for example, has his character Raskolnikov confessing his crime to Sonia, the merciful, suffering prostitute whose life became intertwined with his own, yet Raskolnikov continues to struggle with genuine repentance often rationalizing his actions.
In Scripture we find this kind of false repentance in the remorse of Esau. Scripture teaches;
Hebrews 12:17 For you know that afterward, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears.
We see this “Legal Repentance” in the suicide of Judas.
Mt. 27:3 Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, 4 saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
III.) Biblical (Evangelical) Repentance
Biblical (or Evangelical) Repentance is anchored in the Cross. The Spirit opens the eyes of the awakened sinner to see the truth about God’s character and His holy, just, and good Law that he has repeatedly violated. In the Cross the sinner sees the Holiness of God against his own depravity and sin and seeing God’s holiness the awakened sinner begins to see His danger since he is convinced that “the soul that sins shall surely die.” The awakened sinner begins to sees how filled with the rot of love of self he is filled with and seeing that he cries out to God that God may deliver Him from his body of death.
At the same time the Holy Spirit awakened sinner sees the mercy of God inasmuch as he sees that God is pouring out His just wrath against his own sin upon the second person of the Trinity on the Cross, who added to Himself a human nature, so that the Spirit awakened sinner was not required to pay for His own sins. In seeing the mercy of God he discovers the deep love of the Son for His people. The Spirit awakened sinner, in looking at the cross receives repentance as a consequence of that repentance and faith being graciously won for him by Christ on the cross in his place. The Spirit awakened sinner repents but he understands that his repentance, like his faith, are gifts of God won for Him by the finished work of our magnificent savior on the cross. The Spirit awakened sinner understands that his faith and repentance are further expression of God’s great grace and favor towards him and are not mechanisms that earn God’s favor.
We see this kind of Repentance was at the heart of Paul’s preaching in the book of Acts. In his farewell to the Ephesian Elders Paul can say;
“I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus” (Acts 20:21).
This is in harmony with the Scripture we looked at earlier;
Luke 24:45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. 46 He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
Here we see the intimate connection between repentance and the Cross work of Jesus the Christ. Because the Messiah has suffered and risen from the dead there can be proclaimed the command to repent.
Now, just a few words on the consequences of repentance and trusting the finished work of Jesus Christ.
1.) Biblical Repentance delivers us from seeking to find another means by which our guilt can be taken away. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating that those outside of Christ who know not the forgiveness that faith and repentance bring as looking to Jesus Christ for relief, are forever seeking to fob off their sin, guilt, and misery someplace else. They have no Messiah to take away their sin and so they either carry that sin themselves and so become self destructive or else they seek to cast their sin, guilt, and misery on others around them — often on those who love them the most. They do not own their sin and so they seek to place it on everyone else. Only by doing so can they live with the sin, guilt and misery they can’t escape.
2.) Connected with this is the idea that Biblical repentance provides sanity for the Biblical Christian. Sin that isn’t forgiven because of the Cross work of Jesus Christ that issues forth in faith and repentance leads to mentally unstable people. Sin drives people insane. We tend not to see this insanity because we become accustomed to it, but those who refuse to roll their sin upon Christ are people who are or will become mentally unstable. Those outside of Christ who refuse to repent will eventually, by the weight of all that sin, guilt, and misery they are carrying become tetched. The Cross of Christ takes away sin, guilt, and misery as well as how all that sin, guilt, and misery expresses itself.
Now, the potential consequence of a sermon like this is that people will be frightened that they have the wrong kind of repentance. I have found that folks who have that instinct to be fearful that they have the wrong kind of repentance … a non God pleasing repentance — are the people who have been graciously given Biblical repentance. The hardened sinner does not examine himself on this matter. They who are wheat as among the tares is satisfied with just looking like the wheat.
But if it is the case that we find ourselves convinced that we are too often a practitioner of natural or legal repentance and not evangelical repentance the answer is to look to Christ who receives all sinners. The answer to a lack of Biblical repentance is to look outside of ourselves to Christ who is our repentance before the Father. The prayer is that we would always be impressed with Christ for us and not with our own repentance that needs repenting over.
During this lenten season may we be a repentant people because of how the Lord Christ has, in His cross work set us free.
