Getting Saved - What is Repentance?

Repent of your Sins?

I do street preaching, and the approach preachers take to preaching the Gospel to the lost is important. We want to convey God's heart to people. Some people exhort listeners to 'repent of their sins'. 

Listeners don't always know exactly what this means. What does 'repent' mean anyway? 

'Repentance' can sound like a heavy word, full of impending gloom and judgment, with a sense of impossible demands from an angry God. However it is part of the Good News, the light yoke Jesus gives us. What went wrong in our perception of a word intended for our immeasurable blessing?

It's the first word the evangelist uses in his exhortation. Repent, believe, be baptised. That sequence is there in the New Testament many times. The phrase 'repent of your sins' is not.

Why would this matter? A series of conversations with others made me think perhaps it matters quite a bit. Does this phrase scare people away unnecessarily? Are we burdening people in a way God is not? I love to hear people are getting saved, and I love to hear about their individual experiences. But people being convicted about a list of sins to repent of hasn't really come around in the conversations. Instead, when they came into the Kingdom, the people I spoke to called out to Jesus; not always out loud but in their hearts. I've yet to hear an instance where people laboured over individual sins.

Now it is perfectly true that people, in turning to Christ, must turn away from their life without Him. When a man marries, he is very likely to lose certain facets of his previous life. The old life was full of sin, infected with sin beyond self-remedy. But how we phrase this repentance reflects on how people will see Christ. We must endeavour to phrase it in line with the examples we have in Acts. 

Before we get to looking at the examples we have, I want to highlight the fact that Jesus, according to Paul, is not wishing to impute (or account) our sins to us. 

.... in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

2 Corinthians 5:19

What the NKJV calls 'impute', and the ESV here calls 'count against', is a Greek word 'logizomai', which basically means 'to take an inventory of' or 'to reckon'. God is not wishing to take an inventory of people's sins to use against them. (However if they don't come to Christ, their sins will still stand. He is the only effective sacrifice and mediator).

We have Good News. And there is no answer until we have embraced Him. So what we don't need to do is make people think they have to sort their lives out and clean them up themselves. 

When Christ came, His emphasis was on reconciliation.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

John 3:16-17

 

Interestingly the popular NLT (New Living Translation) does use the phrase 'repent of your sins' or something very similar several times in Acts. It is always an addition to the original text. The Good New Bible does the same in places. Other translations, such as the ESV, NIV, KJV, and NKJV, are more literal.

Here's the NLT is Acts 26v20. Paul is speaking.

...all must repent of their sins and turn to God—and prove they have changed by the good things they do

The ESV has

 ......that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance.

If you search an accurate New Testament translation you just won't find 'repent of your/their sins' anywhere.

Acts 2v38 and 3v19 have also been doctored by the NLT. 

At the end of Acts 3 is a verse which sums up the dynamic of salvation as it concerns our sins. The NLT is actually fine here. 

When God raised up his servant, Jesus, he sent him first to you people of Israel, to bless you by turning each of you back from your sinful ways.”

Acts 3:26 NLT

God is active in turning us away from our sins here, not us ourselves. 

In every instance I'm aware of, the New Testament sees the forgiveness of sins as a result of repentance. It's a by-product, an outcome, an inevitability! There's no real sense we need to confront our sins and tackle them in some manner first. Yet a lot of our outreach is inclined to make people think they need to do this. It seems God's preferred emphasis is on the invitation to eternal life, and His desire to have us and include us, love us and know us as family members.

And the word 'Repent' ?

The Greek word metanoeo is translated 'repent' in nearly all English versions in nearly all cases.

Metanoeo means 'think again', 'change your mind', 'reconsider'. It derives from two other Greek words meaning 'again/after' and 'think'. 

You'll find plenty of people out there saying 'repent' means 'turn around', and even that it was a Greek military term. You won't find any actual evidence for that. It appears to be hearsay with no distinct source. My wife heard a sermon saying that Alexander the Great spread the common Greek language and that the term was used routinely by his soldiers to get them to march in the opposite direction. It's a nice story, and variations of it are in widespread circulation, presented as fact. Try Googling what 'repent' means in the Bible; you'll see all sorts of posts from church leaders saying stuff like this. It's just that it's flat out wrong.

This common understanding of 'repent' looks like a case of reverse etymology. There's a word in  common English usage, routinely used to translate a Greek word. But the English word has come to mean something substantially different from the word it is used to represent.

Repent (Cambridge English Dictionary) 'to be very sorry for something bad you have done in the past and wish that you had not done it'

Repent (Greek metanoeo) 'to reconsider (something in the light of new knowledge)'

We must go back to what the writer meant, not what the translation has come to mean.

It is noteworthy that there are 30 occurrences of metanoeo, 'repent', as a command, in the New Testament, and of those, only in Revelation 2v21 and 22 are there things to be 'repented of'. The context there is Jesus confronting churches. In all other cases, the 'repent' command stands alone; no object is given.* 

So two things are often misunderstood. The meaning of 'repent' and the fact that 'of your sins' was not present in the Greek texts. Between these two things, we could easily get the thrust of the 'repent' message wrong.

People will not first turn from their sins, and in fact they cannot. They will likely be driven away, unnecessarily. But they can turn to Jesus. The twelve disciples were not told to 'repent of their sins' by Jesus. Neither did He say to the crowds, 'Come to me, you weary and burdened, and I'll also demand you work out where you are sinning and deal with it all'. 

Now it's true, you cannot turn to something or someone, and not turn away from something else. In turning to Christ, it is implicit that you turn away from your life without Him, sin and all. But the focus is not on the sin. The focus is on giving everything to Him, and living with Him, accepting Him as He accepts us. He is after relationship in the first instance. Once we have that connection established, He can work in our lives to clean us up and transform us.

Christianity is first and foremost a release from burdens, an empowerment, a gift, and a change of identity; 2 Corinthians 5v17, 21. There are requirements too, but the requirements follow on, and they flow from the new identity, the new sense of personhood! And they are an outcome of walking in the Spirit! The Holy Spirit graciously provides the power to live differently, and He changes us, mostly, in gentle stages. He is not an impossible taskmaster, as the wicked servant accused in Matthew 25v24. This difference concerning repentance may seem subtle but it is important, and it seems to me many of us may have had this rather wrong!

Don't get me wrong. I'm not trivialising sin. Sin is eternally lethal and needs an answer. The answer is costly, and precious, the Blood of Christ. But the answer is available, and it is free. As far as paying the price, the penalty, is concerned, Christ has done that and we who believe are free from the judgment and penalty otherwise due. That is wonderful. That is grace. A free gift of true life, and a paying-off of what you could never, ever pay yourself.

How many of us, prior to conversion, remember being convicted of particular sins and felt the need to try and change our behaviour? If you did, maybe it showed you were serious, which is not a bad thing. But I know someone well who had no sense of that. She merely cried out involuntarily 'Oh, alright then!' when Jesus was preached. She was prayed with and told to tell someone. Her life was one of much frustration and despair. But her awareness of her sin came later. I was similar. I was not convicted of particular sins before I confessed Christ publicly. I had been feeling a sense of general failure in relationships, and a sense of wanting to hide. Two others I think of were each walking away from God and each nearly died, one from drug use and one following a car crash. They experienced a sense of dread and terror. Both thought they were going to Hell. They cried out to Jesus to save them. Both had some previous knowledge of the Bible. The central decision was to reconsider Jesus and the direction of their lives and to turn to Christ. Acts 3v19 and Acts 26v20 add the extra word 'epistrepho' to denote the 'turn' bit. 

It's easy to see why people who are disappointed with behavioural lapses in new believers want to get them to put away sins, or promise to put them away, before they believe and are baptised. But that doesn't seem to be God's way of doing things. We see who Jesus truly is, we believe, we are baptised. He is the answer to our sinful condition. Our sins are forgiven, and we are given a new life. God has dealt with the root of sin, which is unbelief. He will graciously deal with sin which lingers around, and this may require our co-operation, but He isn't asking for our resolve to sort them out before we receive Him! He came to bring rest for the penitent. Now if we are sincere, we will hand our lives, sins and all, to Him, to make what He will out of them. It's true we can't insist we keep hold of our sins. That is different from thinking we have to acknowledge them and get rid of them before He will receive us.

I encourage you to look at the Acts outreach sermons in a fairly straightforward translation such as the ESV or NKJV and see if they fit with the 'repent of your sins' teaching. I really don't think they do. We repent toward God, away from our life without Him. When we do that, forgiveness of sins is found too. We then believe, and get baptised. We also receive the Holy Spirit. We are thereby born again, saved, children of God. Good News.

Repentance is salvation. It involves believing. Repentance is not something we must do before we can be saved. It is true we are leaving our old life, which was sinful. However, in accepting the Saviour, we repent. He will then, gently and in stages, sort our lives out.

For salvation, repent and believe are inseparable processes. A rethinking of life and believing in Jesus. Baptism is a visible sign and seal, performed very soon afterwards, or immediately, in Acts at least. 

God is emphasising answer, not problem.

*A further 4 verses from later in Revelation report the failure of mankind, under suffering, to repent of things like idolatry and murder, and of not glorifying God. These verses are not recording a command to repent and be saved. 

Certainly, there are other contexts to repentance. Repentance happens for people who are already believers, and it happened in the Old Testament. That's another discussion. Here we are looking at how it works at salvation.