By Justin Jordan
In Romans 2:4, we are told that it is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. Does that mean that God is not being kind to those who don’t repent? Absolutely not!
“But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath…” [Romans 2:5]
From this verse, you can see that it is our stubbornness and our own unrepentant heart that keeps us from repenting. A friend of a friend was recently struggling with smoking. He would cry out before God to remove his habit, and each time he’d end up smoking. Finally, God revealed his attitude about it. He realized that whenever he cried out to God and “thought” he was being repentant, he was really thinking in his mind, “I’m gonna smoke next time.” That day he made a strong decision not to smoke, and he hasn’t smoked ever since. Stubbornness is a lack of yielding to God, and it comes from a heart that doesn’t want to change. It is true that God leads us to repentance, but we have to decide whether or not we are actually going to change.
If we go on to Romans 2:8, Paul says,“but for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger.” Basically, when you are chasing your own will, instead of God’s, your heart will begin to harden. When one is focused on their own agenda, and they are following evil, it is unlikely that they are going to repent any time soon. Like I said, it’s a choice that you have to make. Are you doing something wrong? Have you been convicted? Then it is up to you to stop doing it!
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” [Hosea 4:6]
Another obstacle that keeps people from repenting is not knowing what repentance is or isn’t. As I’ve discussed in the article prior to this one, repentance isn’t feeling bad about what you’ve done. Unfortunately, there are many in the Body of Christ that don’t understand this. They think repentance is something else when it is really just a decision that we can make because of the Lord’s kindness. If there isn’t a foundation of repentance in the church, then we basically have a church full of people doing whatever they want, and constantly feeling guilty about their wickedness. Sadly, this is actually the way a lot of churches are behaving in these last days.
Repentance is the first step that we take before we are saved, but it doesn’t end with our salvation. We all have areas where we have not yielded to the Lord. This may be one reason why we are told in 2 Corinthians 13:5 to “examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith.”
In the next post, Sidharth will be writing about living a lifestyle of repentance.
Well said. I agree that the true meaning of repentance is a major problem in many churches (in America, at least). I’ve seen so many people who think apologizing and feeling sorry is repentance. But God is good and just. I heard a good illustration of this recently.
Look at it this way… if you committed a murder, and you went before a judge, and you told the judge that you were sorry for what you did and you feel bad about it, should he still send you to prison? If he’s a good judge, he will, because justice should be done. He wouldn’t be a good judge if he let murderers walk away free just because they apologized! Likewise, God does not overlook sin just because we feel bad about it.
We never deserve to be forgiven, no matter how bad we feel nor how much we apologize. We broke the Law, and thus the punishment must be handed out. Fortunately, our punishment for sin has been paid by Jesus, so we can be forgiven!
I don’t remember having read this post earlier, rather not that carefully. Anyways, this time, I could with the comment. This is a truth, which most of us, come across, sometime or the other. We need to constantly examine ourselves, to see if we are truly repentant or just somehow pushing on, with our lame excuses. We often fail to realize the complete sense of the word ‘Repentance’, if we fail to remember that Jesus had to pay a price to forgive us our sins.