Repentance

Few words in the Christian life carry as much weight, or as much confusion, as repentance. Ask ten people what it means and you may get ten answers: feeling sorry, turning over a new leaf, giving up a sin, confessing at an altar. Some of these have a place in the Christian life. But none of them is what the Bible means when it first calls a sinner to repent. To find that, we have to start with the word itself.

What the Word Means

The New Testament word is metanoeō, built from meta (“change”) and noeō (“to think” or “to perceive”). Its noun form is metanoia. At its root, to repent is to change your mind. It is a change of thinking, and it is not primarily a change of behavior or a feeling of regret.

That simple fact clears away a great deal of fog. The word describes what happens in the mind and heart. What happens afterward in a person’s habits and conduct is the result of that change, but it is not the same thing as the change itself.

A Changed Mind About What?

A changed mind has to be about something. In Scripture, the answer is consistent: the sinner changes his mind about himself and about Christ.

Consider John the Baptist’s message: “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). Those who came to hear him were religious people who felt secure. John confronted that confidence directly: “And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father…” (Matthew 3:9). Their trust was in their heritage and their religion. To repent was to change their minds about that, and to see that they needed a Savior they had not realized they needed.

The same call echoes in Paul’s description of his own ministry: “Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). Repentance and faith are not two separate transactions. They are two sides of one turn of the mind: away from trusting self, and toward trusting Christ.

Jesus gave us a picture of it in two men who went up to the temple to pray. One recited his own goodness. The other would not even lift up his eyes: “…but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13). Jesus said of him, “I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other” (Luke 18:14). He brought nothing but his need, and that was exactly the change of mind God was looking for.

How the Word Gets Misused

Because repentance is so important, it has been loaded with meanings it was never given. A few of the most common:

• Feeling sorry. Sorrow can lead to repentance, but it is not the same thing. Paul distinguishes them: “For godly sorrow worketh repentance…” (2 Corinthians 7:10). The sorrow produces something else. A person can be deeply sorry and still not change his mind about anything.
• Penance or self-punishment. Repentance is not a payment we make for our sins. That payment was made by Christ.
• Turning over a new leaf. Reforming one’s behavior is not the same as changing one’s mind about Christ, and a person can reform and still be lost.
• Turning from every sin in order to be saved. This is the most common and most damaging misuse, and it deserves a closer look.

Putting the Question to the Test

A familiar teaching says that to be saved, a person must turn from his sins. It sounds right. But try to put it into practice, and the questions begin to pile up.

How many sins must a person turn from? All of them? Then no one has ever been saved, because the believer who writes these words, and the best believer he knows, still sins. Only the sins he is aware of? Then what about the ones he doesn’t yet see? Only the sins he practices? Then how many times may a person commit a sin before it counts as a practice: two, ten, one hundred? The Bible gives us no number, because salvation was never meant to depend on one.

Think of a man who struggles with alcohol. He has tried to quit many times, and each failure has left him more ashamed. Then he hears that he must first stop drinking before God will save him. What can he possibly conclude, except that he is beyond hope? He will go on trying to clean himself up, never reaching the finish line, never coming to the One who could actually help.

That is not the gospel. Paul writes, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). And he describes the God who saves as the One “…that justifieth the ungodly…” (Romans 4:5). If a person had to become godly first, God would have no one left to justify. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

What the alcoholic needs to hear is that he doesn’t have to win this battle in order to come. He needs to change his mind about whether he can fix himself, and he needs to trust the One who died for him. The fight with the bottle may be long, but it is fought as a child of God, with the Spirit of God at work in him, and not as a condition for being saved. “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

What About Turning and Fruit?

Some will point out that Scripture does speak of turning. Paul told the Thessalonians that they “…turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9), and he preached that men should “…repent and turn to God, and do works meet for repentance” (Acts 26:20). John the Baptist, too, called for “…fruits meet for repentance” (Matthew 3:8).

These verses are true, and they matter. But look at how they are worded. The fruit is meet for repentance, which means it fits it and shows it. It comes after the change of mind and grows out of it. A person who has truly changed his mind about Christ will find that his life begins to move in a new direction. The turning follows the changed mind, just as fruit follows a healthy tree. It is the evidence, not the price.

Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son shows the order exactly. The young man was in a far country, and the first thing that happened was not a change of habit. “And when he came to himself…” (Luke 15:17). His mind changed first. Then came the turning: “And he arose, and came to his father” (Luke 15:20). And the father, who saw him coming a great way off, ran to meet him before the son had cleaned up a single thing.

“Except Ye Repent”

One more verse deserves attention, because it is often quoted as proof that a person must clean up his life to be saved. Jesus said, “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3), and He repeated the same words in verse 5.

To see what He meant, we have to know what prompted them. Luke tells us that some people came to Jesus with news of “…the Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” (Luke 13:1). Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, had ordered the killing of a group of Galileans who had come to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices, so that their blood was spilled together with the offerings they had brought. It was a shocking act of cruelty, and the people telling Jesus about it seemed to think such a fate must have been a judgment on those who suffered it.

Jesus saw the thought behind the news: “Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things?” (Luke 13:2). He then raised a second tragedy, the eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them, and asked the same question (Luke 13:4). Those listening assumed that those who suffered must have been worse than everyone else, and that they themselves, being better, were safe. Jesus overturned that assumption. They were no better. Unless they changed their minds about their own standing before God, they too would perish. This is the same change of mind we have been describing: giving up confidence in oneself and looking to God. It is not a demand to reform one’s habits before coming.

Repentance in the Believer’s Life

Repentance does not stop at the moment of salvation. Believers who wander also need to change their minds and come back. The Lord Himself said to a lukewarm church, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent” (Revelation 3:19). And John writes that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

This is the changed mind at work throughout the Christian life. We think wrongly, we see it, and we agree with God again. It is part of how a believer grows. And because it happens within a relationship that is already secure, it carries no fear that one more failure will cost him his place in the family. It carries only the joy of coming home.

Repentance, then, is simply this: a changed mind about yourself and about Christ. It is the turning of the heart from trusting in what you can do to trusting in what He has done. And everything else the Bible says about the turning of a life flows from that.