5. Growing Downward to Grow Up: The Life of Repentance
Growing Downward
to Grow Up:
The Life of Repentance
Now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret. . . . See what this godly sorrow has produced in you: what earnestness, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation, what alarm, what longing, what concern, what readiness to see justice done.
2 CORINTHIANS 7:9-11
Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent.
REVELATION 3:19
Growing Up and Growing Downward
From time to time during our son’s teen years he would stand with his back to the dining room doorpost, and we would record his height in pencil on the white wood. He was growing up physically, getting taller as each month went by, and he was excited about it. So were we. Watching your children grow up is, after all, an exciting business. Had we not been interested in the way he was gaining height there would have been something wrong with us. But this chapter is not about growing up: it is about growing down; something that every Christian must learn to do.
Growing down, or downward, is doubtless an odd-sounding phrase in a culture like ours. We celebrate the fact of growing up physically and urge those who have slipped into childish petulance to grow up emotionally. It is also our habit to speak of growing up spiritually, and our English Bible does the same. The New International Version (NIV) follows the King James Version (KJV) and all revisions of it in rendering a Greek verb that has nothing of “up” about it as “grow up” in Ephesians 4:15 (“we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ”), and in 1 Peter 2:2 it does the same (“Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation”).
Yes, to speak of growing downward against this background does sound odd, I grant you. But my phrase is there to strike a spark and make a point. What we have to realize is that we grow up into Christ by growing down into lowliness (humility, from the Latin word humilis, meaning low). Christians, we might say, grow greater by getting smaller.
Of his own ministry, in relation to that of the Lord Jesus, John the Baptist declared: “He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:30). Of our lives as believers, something similar has to be said. Pride blows us up like balloons, but grace punctures our conceit and lets the hot, proud air out of our system. The result (a very salutary result) is that we shrink, and end up seeing ourselves as less—less nice, less able, less wise, less good, less strong, less steady, less committed, less of a piece—than ever we thought we were. We stop kidding ourselves that we are persons of great importance to the world and to God. We settle for being insignificant and dispensable.
Off-loading our fantasies of omnicompetence, we start trying to be trustful, obedient, dependent, patient, and willing in our relationship to God. We give up our dreams of being greatly admired for doing wonderfully well. We begin teaching ourselves unemotionally and matter-of-factly to recognize that we are not likely ever to appear, or actually to be, much of a success by the world’s standards. We bow to events that rub our noses in the reality of our own weaknesses, and we look to God for strength quietly to cope. This is part, at least, of what it means to answer our Lord’s call to childlikeness.
The Scottish scholar James Denney once said that it is impossible at the same time to leave the impression both that I am a great preacher and that Jesus Christ is a great Savior. In the same way it is impossible at the same time to give the impression both that I am a great Christian and that Jesus Christ is a great Master. So the Christian will practice curling up small, as it were, so that in and through him or her the Savior may show Himself great. That is what I mean by growing downward.
Downward Growth
The life of holiness is one of downward growth all the time. When Peter writes, “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18), and when Paul speaks of growing into Christ (Eph. 4:15) and rejoices that the Thessalonians’ faith is growing (2 Thess. 1:3), what they have in view is a progress into personal smallness that allows the greatness of Christ’s grace to appear. The sign of this sort of progress is that they increasingly feel and say that in themselves they are nothing and God in Christ has become everything for their ongoing life. It is into this framework, this continual shrinkage of carnal self, as we may call it, that the thesis of the present chapter fits.
What I intend to argue is that Christians are called to a life of habitual repentance, as a discipline integral to healthy holy living. The first of Luther’s ninety-five theses, nailed to the Wittenberg church door in 1517, declared: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ [Matt. 4:17], he willed that the whole life of believers should be one of repentance.” Philip Henry, a Puritan who died in 1696, met the suggestion that he made too much of repentance by affirming that he hoped to carry his own repentance up to the gate of heaven itself. These two quotations indicate the wavelength we are now tuning into.
In my part of British Columbia, where rainfall is heavy, roads on which the drains fail soon get flooded and become unserviceable. Repentance, as we shall see, is the drainage routine on the highway of holiness on which God calls us all to travel. It is the way we get beyond what has proved to be dirt, rubbish, and stagnant floodwater in our lives. This routine is a vital need, for where real repentance fails, real spiritual advance ceases, and real spiritual growth stops short.
In speaking of habitual repentance, I do not mean to imply that repentance can ever become automatic and mechanical, as our table manners and our driving habits are. It cannot. Every act of repentance is a separate act and a distinct moral effort, perhaps a major and costly one. Repenting is never a pleasure. Always, in more senses than one, it is a pain, and will continue so as long as life lasts. No, when I speak of habitual repentance, I have in mind the forming and retaining of a conscious habit of repenting as often as we need to—though that, of course, means (let us face it) every day of our lives. It is the wisdom of churches that use liturgies to provide prayers of penitence for use at all services. Such prayers are always words in season. In our private devotions, daily penitential prayer will always be needed too.
Little is said these days about the discipline of regular repentance. The writers on the spiritual disciplines have noticeably not dealt with it, and the standard Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, now published in the United States as the Westminster Dictionary, has no entry on the subject. Yet it is a basic lesson that has to be learned in Christ’s school of holiness. The theme is a vital one for spiritual health, as has already been said. So let us try to understand it well.
What Is Repentance?
What is repentance? What does it mean to repent?
The term is a personal and relational one. It signifies going back on what one was doing before, and renouncing the misbehavior by which one’s life or one’s relationship was being harmed. In the Bible, repentance is a theological term, pointing to an abandonment of those courses of action in which one defied God by embracing what He dislikes and forbids. The Hebrew word for repenting signifies turning, or returning. The corresponding Greek word carries the sense of changing one’s mind so that one changes one’s ways too. Repentance means altering one’s habits of thought, one’s attitudes, outlook, policy, direction, and behavior, just as fully as is needed to get one’s life out of the wrong shape and into the right one. Repentance is in truth a spiritual revolution. This, now, and nothing less than this, is the human reality that we are to explore.
Repenting in the full sense of the word—actually changing in the way described—is only possible for Christians, believers who have been set free from sin’s dominion and made alive to God. Repenting in this sense is a fruit of faith, and as such a gift of God (cf. Acts 11:18). The process can be alliteratively analyzed under the following headings:
1. Realistic recognition that one has disobeyed and failed God, doing wrong instead of doing right. This sounds easier than it actually is. T. S. Eliot spoke the truth when he observed: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” There is nothing like a shadowy sense of guilt in the heart to make us passionately play the game of pretending something never happened, or rationalizing to ourselves action that was morally flawed. So, after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba and compounded it with murder, he evidently told himself that it was simply a matter of royal prerogative and, therefore, nothing to do with his spiritual life. So he put it out of his mind, until Nathan’s “You are the man!” (2 Sam. 12:7) made him realize, at last, that he had offended God. This awareness was, and is, the seed bed where repentance grows. It does not grow elsewhere. True repentance only begins when one passes out of what the Bible sees as self-deception (see Jas. 1:22,26; 1 John 1:8) and modern counselors call denial; into what the Bible calls conviction of sin (see John 16:8).
2. Regretful remorse at the dishonor one has done to the God one is learning to love and wanting to serve. This is the mark of the contrite heart (see Ps. 51:17; Isa. 57:15). The Middle Ages drew a useful distinction between attrition and contrition (regret for sin prompted by fear for oneself and by love for God respectively; the latter leading to true repentance while the former fails to do so). The believer feels, not just attrition, but contrition, as did David (see Ps. 51:1-4,15-17). Contrite remorse, springing from the sense of having outraged God’s goodness and love, is pictured and modeled in Jesus’ story of the prodigal’s return to his father (Luke 15:17-20).
3. Reverent requesting of God’s pardon, cleansing of conscience, and help to not lapse in the same way again. A classic example of such requesting appears in David’s prayer of penitence (see Ps. 51:7-12). The repentance of believers always, and necessarily, includes the exercise of faith in God for these restorative blessings. Jesus Himself teaches God’s children to pray “forgive us our sins . . . and lead us not into temptation” (Luke 11:4).
4. Resolute renunciation of the sins in question, with deliberate thought as to how to keep clear of them and live right for the future. When John the Baptist told Israel’s official religious elite: “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt. 3:8), he was calling on them to change direction in this way.
5. Requisite restitution to any who have suffered material loss through one’s wrongdoing. Restitution in these circumstances was required by the Old Testament law. When Zacchaeus, the renegade Jewish taxman, became Jesus’ disciple, he committed himself to make fourfold retribution for each act of extortion, apparently on the model of Moses’ requirement of four sheep for every one stolen and disposed of (Exod. 22:1; cf. Exod. 22:2-14; Lev. 6:4; Num. 5:7).
An alternative alliteration (as if one were not enough!) would be:
1. discerning the perversity, folly, and guilt of what one has done;
2. desiring to find forgiveness, abandon the sin, and live a God-pleasing life from now on;
3. deciding to ask for forgiveness and power to change;
4. dealing with God accordingly;
5. demonstrating, whether by testimony and confession or by changed behavior or by both together, that one has left one’s sin behind.
Such is the repentance—not just the initial repentance of the adult convert, but the recurring repentance of the adult disciple—that is our present theme.
Repentance and the Reformation
The Reformation era was one time in the Christian past when the life of repentance was well understood. Luther’s rediscovery of present justification by faith, based on Christ’s finished work of substitutionary atonement, led him to challenge the popular idea that there was no more to repentance than the formality of sacramental confession and absolution, with performance of whatever “penance” the priest might impose. Though never officially endorsed, these notions had gained the sanction of custom and consensus; and Luther’s challenge was timely and much needed. As we have already seen, he maintained that repentance was meant to be a constant, lifelong activity, and he argued that, like faith, it has to be an exercise of the heart.
One who picked up this insight and ran with it was John Bradford, who in 1555, at the age of 45, was burned at the stake in London as part of Queen Mary’s campaign to purge England of Protestants. Bradford was a Christian in the full sense for six years only. During that time, however, he gained distinction among the English Reformers both as a preacher and as an outstandingly saintly man, one for whom, quite specifically, repentance was a way of life. Thomas Sampson, the friend who led him to faith, wrote a foreword to the second printing of Bradford’s Sermon of Repentance (in Two Sermons . . . , 1574). Headed “To the Christian Reader, Tho. Sampson wisheth the felicity of speedy and full conversion to the Lord,” this foreword shares something of the reality, and the secret, of Bradford’s holiness. “Such a pattern was Master Bradford,” writes Sampson, “of this . . . repentance which . . . he teacheth, that I which did know him familiarly must needs give God this praise for him, that among men I have scarcely known one like unto him.”1
He goes on to explain this in words that merit extensive quotation.
It pleased God with great speed to make him ready and ripe to martyrdom, in which through Christ he has now gained the crown of life. But . . . he was much helped forward by a continued meditation and practice of repentance and faith in Christ, in which he was kept by God’s grace notably exercised all the days of his life. . . .
Our Bradford had his daily exercises and practices of repentance. His manner was, to make himself a catalogue of all the grossest and most enorme (sic) sins, which in his life of ignorance he had committed; and to lay the same before his eyes when he went to private prayer, that by the sight and remembrance of them he might be stirred up to offer to God the sacrifice of a contrite heart, seek assurance of salvation in Christ by faith, thank God for his calling from the ways of wickedness, and pray for increase of grace to be conducted (i.e., led on) in holy life acceptable and pleasing to God.
Such a continual exercise of conscience he had in private prayer, that he did not count himself to have prayed to his contentation, unless in it he had felt inwardly some smiting of heart for sin, and some healing of that wound by faith, feeling the saving health of Christ, with some change of mind into the detestation of sin, and love of obeying the good will of God. . . .
Let us learn by Bradford’s example to pray better, that is, with the heart, and not with the lips alone . . . as Cyprian saith: “Because God is the hearer of the heart and not of the voice”: that is to say, not of the voice alone without the heart, for that is but lip-labour. . . .
Another of his exercises was this: he used to make unto himself an ephemeris (i.e., diary) or a journal, in which he used to write all such notable things as either he did see or hear each day that passed. But . . . he did so pen it that a man might see in that book the signs of a smitten heart. For if he did see or hear any good in any man, by that sight he found and noted the want thereof in himself, and added a short prayer, craving mercy and grace to amend. If he did hear or see any plague, or misery, he noted it as a thing procured by his own sins, and still (i.e., always) added . . . “Lord, have mercy upon me.”
[This seems to be the origin of the later, unconfirmed story that when Bradford saw criminals being led out to execution he would say, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.”]
He used in the same book to note such evil thoughts as did rise in him; as of envying the good of other men, thoughts of unthankfulness, of not considering God in his works, or harshness and unsensibleness of heart when he did see others moved and affected. And thus he made to himself and of himself a book of daily practices of repentance.2
According to Sampson, repentance was Bradford’s focal theme throughout the six years of his Christian life. He preached it (his last words, Sampson tells us, spoken as “the flames of fire did fly about his ears,” were “Repent, England”3); and he lived it. For his involvement, as a member of Sir John Harrington’s staff, in an act of fraud “to the detriment of the king” in the days before he came alive to God, Bradford insisted on restitution: “He could never be quiet till, by the advice of Master Latimer [Hugh Latimer, once Bishop of Worcester, whose sermon on restitution had first stirred his conscience] a restitution was made. Which thing to bring to pass”—though the fraud had been Harrington’s, not his, and it was eventually Harrington who repaid—“he did willingly forbear and forego all the private and certain patrimony which he had in earth.”4 Thus “his life was a practice and example, a provocation to repentance.”
Then, in his ministry Bradford pressed the need for repentance:
Not only in public preaching, but also in private conference and company. For in all companies where he did come, he would freely reprove any sin and misbehaviour which appeared in any person, especially swearers, filthy talkers. . . . And this he did with such grace and Christian majesty, that ever he stopped the mouths of the gainsayers. For he spake with power, and yet so sweetly, that they might see their evil to be evil and hurtful unto them, and understand that it was good indeed to which he laboured to draw them in God.5
Sampson’s profile of Bradford, written nineteen years after the Reformer was burned, is fascinating in more ways than one. In the first place, it narrates what seems to be the first historical appearance of the personal spiritual journal. It shows Bradford as the pioneer of a kind of journaling in which the Puritans later came to specialize—namely, one that in effect turns the journal into a private confessional, designed to keep one honest with oneself and with God. (Honesty about one’s sins and follies is hard to come by, as we have already noted; a journal kept as Bradford kept his can be of great help here. That was true in his day, and is equally true in ours.) Then, in the second place, there is great fascination in the light that Sampson’s words throw on Bradford himself, and his vivid sense of the holiness and graciousness of God.
Bradford’s Sensitivity to Sin
It is clear that Bradford’s grasp of the holiness of God and the hatefulness of sin was very firm indeed. Some moderns dismiss this sharp-edged sensitivity to holiness and sin (rare in itself, yet typical of the sixteenth century’s spiritual leaders), as the spin-off of a neurotic culture. Certainly the fear of God’s wrath was a most potent reality throughout Europe at that time, but to treat Bradford’s sense of divine purity and human impurity as merely weird is perverse prejudice. Bradford was doing no more than facing up to what God tells us over and over again in the pages of Scripture, namely that He hates sin in all its forms, and impenitence on the part of those who have sinned calls forth His “wrath” (judicial hostility, rejection, and retributive judgment).
Let Bradford set this before us in his own way. Here are some excerpts from his “Prayer on the Wrath of God against Sin.”
O Almighty and everlasting Lord God, the dear Father of our Saviour Jesus Christ, “which hast made heaven and earth, the sea and all that therein is”; which art the only Ruler, governor, conserver and keeper of all things. . . . O holy, righteous, and wise; O strong, terrible, mighty, and fearful Lord God, Judge of all men . . . whose eyes are upon the ways of all men, and are so clean that they cannot abide impiety; thou “searchest the hearts” . . . of all men. Thou hatest sin and abhorrest iniquity: for sin’s sake thou hast grievously punished mankind . . . as thou hast declared by the penalty of death laid upon all the children of Adam; by the casting out of Adam and his offspring forth of paradise; by the cursing of the earth; by the drowning of the world; by the burning up of Sodom and Gomor(rah). . . .
[Bradford here adds several more examples of God’s punitive justice in biblically recorded history.]
But, of all spectacles of thine anger against sin, the greatest and most notable is the death and bloody passion of . . . Jesus Christ. Great is thine anger against sin, when in heaven and earth nothing could be found which might appease thy wrath, save the blood-shedding of thy only and most dearly beloved Son, in whom was and is all thy delight . . . If in Christ, in whom was no sin, thy wrath was so fierce for our sin that he was constrained to cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” how great and importable (i.e., unbearable) then is thine anger against us, which are nothing but sinful!6
Bradford’s trembling awe in his address to the mighty Creator who displays this energy of punitive hatred toward all manifestations of the morally disruptive energy of sin, is no doubt out of tune with the gentler ideas of God and cooler attitudes towards Him that are currently common. It was not, however, in any way unique in the Protestant England of his day.
The same attitude finds classic expression in the prayer confessing sin that Thomas Cranmer wrote two or three years earlier for his Order of Communion (1548)—a prayer that has appeared, more or less intact, in all versions of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer from Cranmer’s day to ours. With Bradford-like poignancy, Cranmer’s confession speaks thus:
Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, Have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee in newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy Name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord.7
Otto’s Perceptions on Holiness
In his groundbreaking book, The Idea of the Holy (1923), Rudolf Otto maintained that the religious person’s perception of the “numinous” (his word for the sense of divine holiness) has in it something of fear (the feeling of awe and danger that flows from knowing one is in God’s hands for weal or woe, and that God is neither subservient nor tame), but fear wedded to fascination (the feeling of being allured, even entranced, by God’s beauty, goodness, mercy, and love). Now it must be said at once that most present-day Western religion, particularly of the theosophical, New Age, liberal Protestant and modernistic Catholic stripes, is too culture-bound, immanentistic, sentimental, and bland to yield any form of numinous experience. It casts the Deity in the role of a nice man (or in feminist theology, a nice woman), and has no sense of God uniting in Himself the two aspects of transcendence that Otto picked out. But then the verdict has to be, not that Otto’s analysis is wrong, but that a good deal of modern Western religion is, in certain basic respects, irreligious.
For Otto’s analysis squares with Scripture. Think, for instance, how Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel met God (see Exod. 3; 1 Kings 19; Isa. 6; Ezek. 1), and how Paul met Jesus on the Damascus road (see Acts 9; 22:6-21; 26:12-23). Note how the sense of God’s transcendent sovereignty and glory shone through all their subsequent ministry.
Otto’s analysis is also validated by the sense of God that becomes vivid in revivals and renewal movements, where God is felt to have drawn near once more and no longer to be keeping Himself at a distance. Such movements always depend on, indeed are sparked by, a quickened apprehension of God: one in which awesomeness (God as almighty apportioner of destiny) and attractiveness (God as rich in loving mercy) are always found blended. The Reformation itself was one such renewal movement. The analysis Otto offers is certainly accurate with regard to the magisterial Reformers, Luther and Calvin, and Bradford and Cranmer with them, and the Puritans after them; it is accurate too for great numbers of people who have been caught up in the successive evangelical revivals that have enriched the Protestant world from the eighteenth century to our own present day.
Godly Christians have always been marked by a two-sided perception of the numinous. On the one hand, the transcendent glory of God’s purity and love, as focused in the plan of salvation, fascinates them. On the other hand, the transcendent glory of God’s sovereignty, as focused in the divine threat of judgment for impiety, alarms them. This characteristically Christian sense of the mercy and the terror (fear) of the Lord is the seed-bed in which awareness grows that lifelong repentance is a “must” of holy living. That awareness will not grow under any other conditions. Where it is lacking, any supposed sanctity will prove on inspection to be flawed by complacency about oneself and short-sightedness about sin. Show me, then, a professed Christian who does not see and insist on the need for ongoing repentance, and I will show you a stunted soul for whom God is not as yet the Holy One in the full biblical sense. For such a person, true Christian holiness is at present out of reach.
Bradford’s Other Foundation
But all of this is still only half the story. As Sampson tells us, and as Bradford’s literary legacy of letters, sermons, meditations, and prayers confirms, there was another foundation on which Bradford’s insight into repentance as a life’s work rested. What triggered it not only was his sense of God’s holiness according to Otto’s formula, but also the motives of gratitude for grace received, and love to the God of grace who had redeemed him through the cross and called him to faith in Christ for salvation. On this aspect of holiness, about which Otto had less to say, Bradford was a shining example.
As is often true with God’s saints, there was a marked individuality, even eccentricity by ordinary social standards, in the devotional focus of his life. This should be seen as natural rather than strange. Holy people who love God, like couples in love who have eyes and thoughts only for each other, are apt to act oddly in company. Pursuing the one relationship that really matters to them, they will ignore everything and everyone else for long periods, for they are pre-empted by love. Bradford’s heart was altogether for God, and his behavior showed the love that was there. Sampson describes how he would meditate in public:
They which were familiar with him might see how he, being in their company, used to fall often into a sudden and deep meditation, in which he would sit with a fixed countenance and spirit moved, yet speaking nothing a good space. And sometimes in this silent sitting plenty of tears should trickle down his cheeks. Sometimes he would sit in it and come out of it with a smiling countenance. Oftentimes have I sitten [sic] at dinner and supper with him . . . when . . . he hath fallen into these deep cogitations: and he would tell me in the end such discourses of them that I did perceive that sometimes his tears trickled out of his eyes, as well for joy as for sorrow.8
Of his life of prayer, while he was a tutor at Cambridge, Sampson writes:
He used in the morning to go to the common prayer in the college where he was [Pembroke Hall], and after that he used to make some prayer with his pupils in his chamber; but not content with this, he then repaired to his own secret prayer . . . as one that had not yet prayed to his own mind: for he was wont to say to his familiars, “I have prayed with my pupils, but I have not yet prayed with myself.”9
Prayer, for Bradford, was a priority: “faithful prayer is the only mean(s), whereby through Christ we both obtain all things necessary . . . and also retain and keep still the grace of God given unto us.”10 Prayer, as we saw, was always for him a most humbling, searching, and demanding exercise of repentance. As he himself wrote:
In thy prayer away with the purpose of sinning, for he that prayeth with a purpose to continue in any sin cannot be heard. . . . For even as in vain he that hath a wound desireth the healing of the same, so long as in the wound there remaineth the thing that is the cause of the wound, as a knife, a pellet, a dart, or a shaft-head, etc.: even so in vain is the prayer of him that retaineth still the purpose to continue in sin; for by it the soul is no less wounded than the body with a sword. . . . Bid adieu, when thou goest to prayer . . . to thy covetousness, to thy uncleanness, swearing, lying, malice, drunkenness, gluttony, idleness, pride, envy, garrulity [idle gossip], slothfulness, negligence, etc. If thou feelest thy willful and perverse will unwilling thereto, out of hand complain it [sic] to the Lord, and for his Christ’s sake pray him to reform thy wicked will. . . .11
Why Continual Repentance?
We can now clearly see why for Bradford, and for all other Christians with him, the Christian life has to be (as Luther said) an exercise of continual repentance before it is anything else. Fleshed out, the reasoning that explains this is as follows.
God is the Creator, who brought everything into being for His own pleasure, and on whom everything depends for its existence every moment. He has a right to prescribe how His rational creatures should behave. He has done this in His moral law, which requires us to be holy as He is holy—like Him on our own human level in our character and our conduct, in our desires, our decisions, and our delights. We are to invest all our powers in living a life of grateful worship and loyal service—a life of fidelity, uprightness, integrity and love toward both Himself and our fellow-humans—a life shaped by the purpose of glorifying Him through wise and skillful obedience to His revealed will. Putting it in new covenant terms, we are to recognize that we are required in all circumstances to be honest, godly, single-minded, energetic, passionate persons who behave at all times in a Jesus-like way, with hearts aflame, heads cool, and all our wits about us. Total righteousness is called for, expressing total devotion and commitment. We are assured that nothing less will do.
The purity and uprightness of God’s own character, and His judgments of value (what is good and worthwhile, and what is neither) are fixed and immutable. He cannot be other than hostile to individuals and communities that flout His law. He cannot do other than visit them sooner or later in displays of retributive judgment, so that all His rational creatures may see the glory of His moral inflexibility.
Because of God’s majesty as sovereign ruler of the universe, sin (lawlessness, missing the moral mark, failing to practice righteousness with all one’s heart and soul) is a major matter. Secular Western culture, which has deliberately atrophied the sense of God’s majesty, finds this hard to believe, but it is so. Some sins are intrinsically greater and intrinsically worse than others—but there can be no small sins against a great God.
God’s purpose in our creation, as in our new creation, is that we should be holy. Therefore, moral casualness and unconcern as to whether or not we please God is in itself supremely evil. No expressions of creativity, heroism, or nice-guy behavior can cancel God’s displeasure at being disregarded in this way.
God searches our hearts as well as weighing our actions. For this reason, guilt for sin extends to deficiencies in our motives and our purposes, as well as in our performance. T.S. Eliot wrote of “. . . the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason,” and God observes and assesses our reasons for action as thoroughly as He does the actions themselves. In one sense, indeed, it is true to say that God focuses more attention on the heart—the thinking, reacting, desiring, decision-making core and center of our being—than He does on the deeds done, for it is by what goes on in our hearts that we are most truly known to Him.
God is good and gracious to all His creatures, and has so loved the world as to give His only Son to suffer on the cross for our salvation. Active thanksgiving that expresses thankfulness of heart is the only proper response, and is in fact one of God’s permanent requirements. Unthankfulness and unlove toward Himself are as culpable in His sight as are any forms of untruthfulness and unrighteousness in dealing with our fellow-humans. Transgressing the first and greatest commandment has to be the first and greatest sin (see Matt. 22:34-40).
God promises to pardon and restore all who repent of their sin. Because sin, both of omission and of commission, in motive, aim, thought, desire, wish, and fantasy even if not in outward action, is a daily event in Christians’ lives (you know this about yourself, don’t you?), regular repentance is an abiding necessity. Repentance must be thorough, coming from the heart just as did the sin. Repentance, whereby sin is confessed and forsaken in the confidence that—as the Anglican Prayer Book has been saying since Cranmer drafted it—God “pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy Gospel,” expresses in a direct way the regenerate heart’s desire to cleave to God, and to love and please Him constantly. It is this desire that begets the purpose of forsaking the sin and returning contritely to the Lord.
Cherished Sin Is an Obstacle
Regenerate persons know that sin when cherished becomes an obstacle to their enjoyment of fellowship with God. It prompts God to withdraw their assurance and make them feel His displeasure through inward as well as outward chastening. Therefore, their instinct is constantly to pray with the psalmist: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:23-24). This has been poignantly put into verse in a hymn that starts like this:
Search me, O God, my actions try,
And let my life appear
As seen by thine all-searching eye;
To mine my ways make clear.
Search all my sense and know my heart,
Who only canst make known,
And let the deep, the hidden part
To me be fully shown.
Throw light into the darkened cells
Where passion reigns within;
Quicken my conscience till it feels
The loathsomeness of sin.
Search all my thoughts, the secret springs,
The motives that control,
The chambers where polluted things
Hold empire o’er the soul.
No regenerate person in his or her right mind wants to be found cherishing sin! As the great fish got Jonah out of its physical system by vomiting him onto dry land, so the born-again will labor to get sin out of their spiritual system by recognizing and renouncing it in repentance. Sometimes this involves dramatic public gestures, like:
• Zacchaeus announcing that half his property would go to the poor and all extorted monies would be restored fourfold (Luke 19:8); or
• the converted Ephesian wizards burning their occult library (Acts 19:19); or
• the Corinthians scurrying around to impose by congregational fiat the church discipline that they had neglected before (2 Cor. 7:9-11); or
• the public confessions of sin that occur again and again in revival times (see Matt. 3:6; Acts 19:18).
Always, however, there will be self-search in God’s presence, as a discipline of discipleship to Jesus Christ, with dependence on the help of the Holy Spirit to detect what needs to be put right. All Christians, deep down, want to repent of all that stains their lives, and to put it behind them.
Here again, there is a lesson of profound importance to be learned from Bradford. When he signed letters, as he did, as “a very [i.e., real] painted hypocrite, John Bradford,” “a very hypocrite,” “the most miserable, half-hearted, unthankful sinner,” “the sinful John Bradford,”12 it was not pious play-acting. He was, in fact, testifying to the intensity of his sense of present imperfection. He longed to advance further along the path of whole-hearted repentance than he had yet succeeded in doing. It is, in fact, a law of the spiritual life that the further you go, the more you are aware of the distance still to be covered. Your growing desire for God makes you increasingly conscious, not so much of where you are in your relationship with Him as of where as yet you are not. What might seem exaggerated in Bradford’s language is no more, just as it is no less, than an index of the ardor with which Bradford longed to become a better man in Christ than he felt he was. If only we had even half that ardor, how different we should be!
Weeding Out Sin
Gardeners are constantly at war with weeds. The worst kind of weeds are those that spread below the ground by developing a cat’s cradle of interlocking roots, from which shoots rise and break surface all over the place. The root system of sin produces particular sins as its shoots in similar fashion. One sin will reinforce another, being connected with it under the surface. Thus, envy and ambition will reinforce each other; so will lust, pride, and anger; greed and sloth will reinforce inclinations to cut moral corners, as they in turn will reinforce greed and sloth; and so on.
The self-knowledge that enlarges and extends as we walk with God, sit under the preaching and teaching of His Word, and live in honest fellowship with His saints, will often confront us with connections of this kind within ourselves. This forces each of us to realize again and again that, as a veteran believer once said in my hearing, “I see I have some repenting to do.” (He then went off for an hour, and did it.) Unraveling the tangled roots and identifying the murky elements of our motivations proves in practice to be an endless task.
As those learning the piano must keep practicing, with a wide range of exercises designed to overcome particular weaknesses and impart new facility to the fingers, so we who are pupils in Christ’s school of holiness have to keep repenting, as shortcoming after shortcoming and fault after fault in our moral and spiritual system become known to us. What the Anglican Prayer Book calls “hearty [meaning, heartfelt] repentance” is, as we saw, the downward dimension of growth in holiness. Growth in holiness cannot continue where repenting from the heart has stopped.
This is a way of saying that conversion must be continuous. For over three centuries, Protestants have equated conversion with what the Westminster Shorter Catechism calls “repentance unto life”—“a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavour after, new obedience.”13 For many Christians there is such a moment of conscious conversion, and this experience of “sudden” conversion is a great blessing. There has to be for all of us some form of entry into the converted state, in which none of us is found by nature. It is a happy thing to be able to recall how one’s own entry into that state took place.
But there is more: following on from “the hour I first believed,” conversion must now become a lifelong process. Conversion has been defined from this standpoint as a matter of giving as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of God. This means that as our knowledge of God and ourselves grows (and the two grow together), so our conversion needs to be repeated and extended constantly.
To think in these terms is to catch up with John Calvin, who both referred explicitly to the “sudden conversion” (subita conversio) by which God “subdued and made teachable” his hard heart and gave him “some foretaste and knowledge of true godliness,”14 and also in his Institutes of the Christian Religion set forth a concept of conversion as the practice of lifelong active repentance, the fruit of faith, springing from a renewed heart:
The whole of conversion to God is understood under the term “repentance.” . . . The Hebrew word for “repentance” is derived from conversion or return, the Greek word from mind and purpose: and the thing itself fits each derivation, for the essence of it is that departing from ourselves we turn to God, and putting off our former mind we put on a new one. So I think repentance may well be defined as a true conversion of our life to God, issuing from pure and heartfelt fear of him, and consisting in the mortification of our flesh and old man and the vivification of the Spirit.15
Exactly!
Model of Repentance
So far, we have discussed repentance in very general terms. Now, however, we should take note that repentance, by its very nature, is specific. Knowing just what one needs to turn from is part of its reality. Vague repentance is nothing, or at least next to nothing. “It is every man’s duty to endeavour to repent of his particular sins, particularly.”16
So we find that, alongside the general calls to repentance that are recorded in the Bible (see Matt. 3:2; 4:17; Mark 6:12; Luke 5:32; 13:3,5; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 17:30), there are passages naming specific lapses for which the offenders must repent. Now we look briefly at one of the most striking of these, namely the letters of the Lord Jesus Christ from His throne to five of the seven churches whom He addresses in Revelation 2–3. We should note these points:
1. Following the vision of Christ in His glory to the correspondent (1:12), the letters are the real core of the book. The visions of coming conflict and triumph for the Lord and His people (chapters 4–22) are a kind of appendix, or schedule, attached to the letters to give substance to the repeated promise that Christ will share unimaginable bliss with every believer who overcomes (see 2:7,11,17,26; 3:5,12,21).
2. The letters address the churches, but they are actually meant for each of the individuals making up those churches. “He who has an ear” (singular) is to listen; “he who overcomes” (singular) will be rewarded. As always, the Word of God individualizes its recipients. Each hearer or reader must realize that the Word is addressed to his or her heart, for personal response.
3. The sins of the churches corporately, and of their membership individually, are specified. Ephesus has forsaken its first love (2:4); Pergamum has tolerated anti-holiness teaching (2:14); Thyatira has encouraged an immoral woman instructor (2:20); Sardis has lapsed into spiritual deadness and sub-Christian casualness of behavior (3:1); Laodicea is lukewarm, self-satisfied, and complacently half-hearted in spiritual things (3:15,17). Putting it the other way around, these churches have failed to maintain a spirit of love for their Lord, righteousness without compromise, intolerance of the intolerable, zeal for God’s glory, and willingness to exert effort for Christ. Of these specific failings—all of which have to do with the quality of their discipleship and loyalty to their King—Jesus Himself now requires them to repent.
4. As it expresses Jesus’ love, and His purpose of blessing, when from His glory He tells His people to face and repent of their sins, so it expresses His love when He sets Himself before them for a renewal of their fellowship with Him (3:20). It is to Him as Lord that Christian repentance should be directed, just as it is to Him as Savior that the penitent should look for their initial pardon and restoration.
Here, then, is a model for Christian repentance today.
“Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed,” writes James (Jas. 5:16). He is talking not of the formalities of institutionalized absolution, but of the intimacies of Christian friendship in what are nowadays called “accountability relationships.” In accountability relationships, one cares for another in a context of open sharing of lives: sad things like failures and falls, as well as glad things like deliverances and successes. Confession of sins within pastoral friendships of this kind is an important expression of repentance. Embarrassment should not be allowed to hold us back.
To confess one’s sins to another who knows you as a peer and a friend is to commit oneself to redoubled effort not to lapse that way again. To ask one’s friend to pray that one may be healed (it is moral and spiritual healing that James has in view—in other words personal healing of the most significant sort) is to make oneself accountable for maintaining that commitment on a permanent basis. Few of us, I think, really know the value of accountability relationships in the battle for honest repentance and for whole-heartedness in fighting temptations to sin.
Frank admission of one’s sins to friends in Christ is part of the biblical pattern of Christian repentance.
Practical Guidance About Repenting
You have heard, no doubt, of the Irishman who, when asked the way to Dublin, scratched his head and said, “Sure, if I was going to Dublin, I wouldn’t start from here.” In the same way, I must confess that when the agenda is to try to help Christians form the habit of continual repentance, I would not choose to start from here—not, that is, from the cultural milieu of the modern West at the start of the twenty-first century. Everything, humanly speaking, is set against this agenda, in a way that has never, perhaps, been true before.
Culture, we know, oscillates between prideful optimism that encourages people to take themselves too seriously and trust themselves too much, and frivolous pessimism that leads them not to take themselves and their lives as seriously as they should. Buoyed up by technological triumphs, the West was in the first mood when this century opened. Deflated by wars, crises, and all sorts of public reversions to barbarism, we find ourselves in the second mood as the century draws to its close. Our sense of the dignity and glory of being human has been eroded, and nowadays life is felt to be merely trivial—which is one reason why our culture so readily smiles on abortion and euthanasia.
Christianity has totally lost its cultural leadership:
• secular relativism controls the world of education;
• consumerist materialism rules in the marketplace;
• the idea that we can know what is finally true about life is ridiculed;
• tolerance for all departures from yesterday’s wisdom is demanded; and
• any appeal to absolute standards of right and wrong is viewed as bigotry.
In practice, Christianity has ceased to be the accepted basis of personal and community life in the West. It has been downgraded to a mere hobby for the minority whom it still interests.
The churches of the West, meantime, present a spectacle of confused disorder in both faith and morals. In view of the way that pluralism of belief and behavior is currently generated and applauded in centers of theological study, the confusion seems certain to continue. It is a fact, unhappy but undeniable, that repentance nowadays rarely gets mentioned in evangelism, nurture, and pastoral care, even among evangelicals and Christian traditionalists. The preoccupations of stirring congregational excitement, sustaining believers through crises, finding and honing gifts and skills, providing interest-based programs, and counseling people with relational problems, have displaced it. As a result, the churches, themselves, orthodox and heterodox together, lack spiritual reality, and their members are all too often superficial people with no hunger for the deep things of God.
No, ours is not a good time for trying to promote the discipline of constant repentance. However, this emphasis is always needed, doubly so when repenting has gone out of fashion. So I proceed.
My task now is to pull the threads together, and to sum up what we have seen about repentance in a form that yields practical guidance. As must by this time be obvious, I believe that even as we who are Christians ought to praise God, give Him thanks, and make requests to Him daily, so we ought to repent daily. This discipline is as basic to holiness as any. Whatever else was wrong with the old practice of penance, its requirement of regular reporting in the confessional at least kept believers aware that facing, forsaking, and fighting sins is a constant task. The further one goes in holy living, the more sin one will find in the attitudes of one’s own heart, needing to be dealt with in this way. As the single-mindedness of our inward devotion is the real index of the quality of our discipleship, so the thoroughness of our daily repentance is the real index of the quality of our devotion. There is no way around that. What we need to learn, or re-learn, at this point may be summed up as follows.
Purity of God
First, only through constant and deepening repentance can we sinners honor the purity of God.
The God whom we claim to love and serve delights in righteousness and hates sin. Scripture is very clear about that.
You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell (Ps. 5:4).
Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong (Hab. 1:13).
The LORD detests men of perverse heart but he delights in those whose ways are blameless. . . . The LORD detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful (Prov. 11:20; 12:22).
. . . the LORD hates . . . haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers (Prov. 6:16-19).
God’s purity is just another name for this hatred. We must understand that in calling us to purity as He does (see Ps. 24:4; Matt. 5:8; 1 Tim. 1:5; 5:22; 1 John 3:3), God is requiring us to cultivate the same hatred in our own hearts.
Accordingly God’s Word to all His people is: “hate evil, love good” (Amos 5:15). “Hate what is evil; cling to what is good” (Rom. 12:9). And our appropriate response is: “Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees! . . . I hate every wrong path. . . . I have taken an oath . . . that I will follow your righteous laws. . . . Away from me, you evildoers, that I may keep the commands of my God!” (Ps. 119:5, 104, cf. 106,115).
But how should we deal with the fact that our obedience always proves to be less than perfect?
Those who neglect the discipline of thorough repentance for their shortcomings, along with regular self-examination so as to discern those shortcomings, are behaving as if God just turns a blind eye to our moral flaws—which is actually to insult Him, since such indifference would be a moral flaw in itself. But God is not morally indifferent, and we must not act toward Him as if He were. The truth is that the only way to show real respect for God’s real purity is by realistically setting oneself against sin. That means not only a wholehearted purpose of pleasing God by consecrated zeal in keeping His law, it also means repentance. And repentance means not mere routine words of regret as one asks for pardon without one’s heart being involved, but a deliberate confessing, an explicit self-humbling, and a sensing of shame in the presence of God as one contemplates one’s failures. For God’s purity, as we saw, leads Him to hate evil. His demand that we be like Him requires us to become haters of it too, starting with the evil that we find inside ourselves.
It will help us here to look at a classic Bible passage that profiles repentance from the inside. In Psalm 51, according to tradition, David goes public by poeticizing the penitence he expressed to God after being convicted of his sin in the matter of Bathsheba and Uriah. He broke the tenth commandment by coveting his neighbor’s wife, the eighth by stealing her, the seventh by committing adultery with her, the ninth indirectly, by trying to fool Uriah so that he would treat the coming child as his own, and the sixth directly, by liquidating Uriah at long range. Then, as we noted earlier, David spent a year shrugging off what he had done until Nathan, acting as God’s spokesman, showed him God’s displeasure at it (see 2 Sam. 11–12). But in Psalm 51 we meet a David who has come to his senses, and is now expressing repentance very fully, in six distinct stages, thus:
1. Verses 1-2 are a plea for mercy and forgiveness. They show a true understanding of God’s covenant. David appeals to God’s “unfailing love” (“lovingkindness” and “steadfast love” in other versions), that is to God’s covenant faithfulness to those to whom He has pledged Himself. The covenant whereby God and human beings commit themselves to belong to each other forever is the basis of all biblical religion. When God’s servants stumble and fall, God’s faithfulness to the covenant to which they have been unfaithful is their only hope. This covenant relationship is emphatically a gift of grace on God’s part. It is He who initiates and sustains it, enduring all the follies and vices of His covenant partners. For God’s holy ones were, are, and remain silly, sinful creatures, who can live before Him only through being constantly forgiven for their constant shortcomings. To this forgiveness, however, repentance is the only road.
2. Verses 3-6 are an acknowledgment of guilt and the punishment we deserve for our sins. They show understanding of sin, as our inbred perversity of heart that finds its expression in sins, specific acts of evil and wrongdoing in God’s sight. The deep truths here are: first, we are not sinners because we sin, but rather we sin because we are sinners (vv. 5-6); second, all our sins, our inhumanities no less than our idolatries, are sins against God (v. 4).
3. Verses 7-9 are a heart-cry for cleansing from sin and cancellation of guilt. They show understanding of salvation as a work of God restoring joy in fellowship with Himself through the assurance of sins forgiven. David’s “bones” (his conscious self, the person he knows himself to be) are “crushed” (rendered unable to function properly) as a result of his condemning conscience. He asks that his “bones” may be made literally to “dance” (as all the translations say, “rejoice”) by the bestowing of this assurance (v. 8)—a vivid metaphor for the revitalizing of one’s inner life that knowledge of one’s forgiveness brings.
4. Verses 10-12 are a petition for quickening and renewing in God. They show an understanding of spiritual life as essentially the steady, positive response of the human spirit to God—a response that is called forth and kept in being by the regenerative ministry of the indwelling Spirit of God Himself. It is God’s way to remove our demerit, our defilement, and our deviancy together. He does not save us in our sins, but from our sins. Whom He justifies He also sanctifies. Where there is no sign of a pure heart (a sin-hating heart that reflects the purity of God) or of a “steadfast . . . willing” spirit (a disposition to honor and obey God and resist temptations to sin), we may well doubt whether the person is in a state of grace in any sense at all. Certainly, seeking to be renewed in righteousness and kept from sin henceforth is of the essence of repentance. Without this, one lacks contrition, and is not in fact penitent at all.
5. Verses 13-17 are a promise to proclaim God’s pardoning mercy in witness and in worship. The verses show an understanding of ministry to both God and our fellow-beings: to the holy God, by thankful praise; and to sinful humans, by proclaiming to them the grace that saves. Saints, let us note, are saved to serve—to celebrate and share what God has given them. Fresh dedication to doing this, in addition to all other good works, is one token of reality in repentance.
6. Verses 18-19 are a prayer for the blessing of the Church, God’s Jerusalem, the people on earth who bear His name. The verses show an understanding of what most delights God—saved sinners, penitents who are now pardoned and prospering spiritually, being moved by gratitude and joy to offer “righteous sacrifices” (v. 19). (The thought here is of love-gifts to God, though the slaughtered bullocks of which David speaks might not immediately suggest that to the modern mind.) David’s intercession for all God’s people is not really a change of theme from the penitence that he was expressing before. Intercession springs naturally from the experiences of God’s pardoning love that repentance triggers. Knowledge that one is loved will call forth love for others, and love for others will lead us to pray for them.
David honored the purity of God by the way he repented of his shameful misdeeds. Humbling himself, he acknowledged the provocation he had given, sought deliverance from the power as well as the guilt of his sins, and pledged himself afresh to do God’s work and advance His praise. This was true repentance, and as such is a model for us.
In their dreams and desires, even if not in their outward behavior, Christians too have their lapses into coveting, lusting, greed, malice, and deceitfulness. Christians, like others, are tempted to be self-indulgent, to abuse and exploit their fellow human beings, to treat might as right in the realm of relationships, and on occasion to wish others dead. Whether or not God in His providence keeps us from acting these things out is not the issue. The point is that the disordered desires were there, and when our hearts embraced them, our hearts were wrong. That is what we need to repent of.
Some forms of so-called holiness teaching encourage us to be insensitive to, or unconcerned about, the ungodly thoughts and motives that lurk within us, but one index of true holiness is an increasing awareness of them, a growing hatred toward them, and a deepening repentance for them, when we find ourselves harboring them in our-hearts. We saw this holy hatred in John Bradford, and God wants to see it in us all, for His purity can be honored no other way.
Healthy Souls
Second, only through constant and deepening repentance can we sinners maintain our souls in health.
Spiritual health, like bodily health, is God’s gift. But, like bodily health, it is a gift that must be carefully cherished, for careless habits can squander it. By the time we wake up to the fact that we have lost it, it may be too late to do much about it. The focus of health in the soul is humility, while the root of inward corruption is pride. In the spiritual life, nothing stands still. If we are not constantly growing downward into humility, we shall be steadily swelling up and running to seed under the influence of pride. Humility rests on self-knowledge; pride reflects self-ignorance. Humility expresses itself in self-distrust and conscious dependence on God; pride is self-confident and, though it may go through the motions of humility with some skill (for pride is a great actor), it is self-important, opinionated, tyrannical, pushy, and self-willed. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Prov. 16:18).
As quinine is the antidote to malaria, so humility is the antidote to pride. In the sense in which Shakespeare’s Orsino in Twelfth Night sees music as the food of love, repentance should be seen as the food of humility. Or changing the picture, repentance should be thought as the exercise routine that maintains humility, and through humility, health in the soul. “No cross, no crown,” said William Penn. “No humility, no health, and no repentance, no humility,” is what I am saying now.
The self-knowledge in which a Christian’s repentance is rooted comes from the law. It is a result of being made to face God’s prescribed moral standards for us, His creatures. In Romans 7:7-25 Paul tells us first, how in his youth the law taught him to recognize sin in himself, by stirring into action the very motives and desires that it forbade. “I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire” (Rom. 7:7-8). Then he tells us how, in his present Christian life, though “in my inner being I delight in God’s law . . . I see another law at work in the members of my body [he means, in all that he actually does], waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (Rom. 7:22-23).
The “law of sin” means sin operating as a driving force, irrationally anti-God in its thrust. The words “I see” tell us how Paul perceives himself when, by the light of the law that he longs to keep, he looks at himself and measures his actual achievement—in other words, when he practices the discipline of self-examination. Each time he does so, he sees that his reach has exceeded his grasp, that nothing he said or did was as good and right as it should have been, and that his noblest, wisest, most selfless, pure-minded, God-honoring, generous acts were all flawed in some discernible way. In retrospect he always finds that his conduct could and should have been more Christlike, and his motives less mixed. Always he finds that he could have done better than he did.
This discovery, calling as it does for the constantly renewed repentance that I advocate, is unquestionably depressing. Hence Paul’s agonized cry in Romans 7:24, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Yet this, we should note, is followed by the triumphant shout of Romans 7:25, as Paul looks ahead to “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23) in the life beyond: “Thanks be to God—[that one day He will thus rescue me] through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Partial present deliverance from the power of sin, which is the other side of his experience (see Rom. 7:5-6; 8:4-5), makes him long all the more for the total future deliverance that God has promised. Meanwhile, however, he grows downward in deepening humility as he becomes more and more aware of how sin in him still thwarts his aim of perfectly pleasing God. In this he is a model for us all.17
A Battle in the Church Today
A battle is being fought in the modern Christian world. It is, from one standpoint, a battle for law, and from another standpoint a battle for conscience. An educated, sensitive conscience is God’s monitor. It alerts us to the moral quality of what we do or plan to do, forbids lawlessness and irresponsibility, and makes us feel guilt, shame, and fear of the future retribution that it tells us we deserve, when we have allowed ourselves to defy its restraints. Satan’s strategy is to corrupt, desensitize, and if possible kill our consciences. The relativism, materialism, narcissism, secularism, and hedonism of today’s Western world help him mightily toward his goal. His task is made yet simpler by the way in which the world’s moral weaknesses have been taken into the contemporary church.
Church people who call themselves liberal, radical, modern or modernist, and progressive, labor on principle to baptize into Christ the thoughts and ways of each unbelieving society in which the church finds itself anchored. In the West, this means situation ethics (nothing is prescribed save the motive and mood of love), and arising out of this, safe casual sex, serial marriage through repeated divorces, abortion on demand, and legitimizing the homosexual lifestyle (because sexual self-fulfillment through whatever genital activity one favors is nowadays rated among life’s highest values). Evangelicals, charismatics, and orthodox believers generally would not endorse this sexual looseness theoretically, yet they tend to fall into it practically, and in moral matters across the board they rarely do much better than their heretical opposite numbers.
Fearing heresy, misbelief, legalism, coldness, and deadness, we spend all our time teaching true doctrine, praising the Lord, defending the faith, and evangelizing the lost, and rarely get around to educating our consciences on matters of basic morality. A hundred years ago Western culture taught Christian morals through schools, the press, and the weight of public opinion, but that is no longer so. If the Christian community does not teach righteousness today, nobody will. But Western Christians today are scarcely able to teach righteousness, because they themselves have scarcely learned it. With our overall neglect of ethical education for believers, plus our constant exposure to brainwashing by expositors of positive thinking and high self-esteem who cry down all guilt feelings as unspiritual and against the mind of Jesus, it is not perhaps surprising that when it comes to uprightness, integrity, and compassion, conservative Christians are not seen to excel.
Indeed, it is worse than that. A steady flow of conservative leaders in recent years have disgraced themselves publicly by their mishandlings of sex, money, and power. No doubt conservatives themselves are partly to blame for having lionized their leaders, treating them as superstars, feeding their egos with money and applause, and thus eroding their sense of their own vulnerability. No doubt the fallen leaders are themselves directly to blame for self-deception. Someone once said, “Woe to the man (or woman) who believes all the wonderful things people say about him (or her)!” Flattery feeds pride. A flattered leader can easily come to believe not only that his experience, knowledge, and skills make him very important, not only that being the man he is, he cannot be seriously wrong about anything, but also that he is in fact above the law and can freely break the rules.
More fundamentally to blame, however, is the corporate decadence that now marks the conservative church—the decadence that concentrates exclusively on upholding the faith and ignores the biblical insistence that those who maintain the doctrines of grace must manifest in their lives the grace of those doctrines. In other words, orthodoxy (right belief) must lead on to orthopraxy (right behavior). In this era of decadent Christianity, in which niceness has replaced righteousness as the moral goal and success is valued over sanctity, the call to orthopraxy is rarely heard and rarely heeded. So we all suffer loss at this point.
The fact is that Christians today are all victims of our decadent late twentieth century ethos that wrenches public orthodoxy and personal morality apart, implying that the latter does not matter so long as one is valiant for the truth. So when leaders fall we may well reflect (Bradford-like) that there but for the grace of God go we. Were our consciences educated any better than those of the saints who sinned? Do ours work any better than theirs? Probably not. If with our own inadequate moral equipment, in a world that mocks morality anyway, we had been exposed to such temptations (first to pride and then to folly), we might well have fallen as they did. We need honestly to acknowledge that Satan has made great headway in the battle for our consciences. Unless and until it is re-established that the Christian life for everyone is a life of self-scrutiny, self-humbling, and daily repentance for daily sins, Satan will continue to score.
If it is true, as we have been saying, that holiness is an honoring of God that is health-giving to the soul, and that humility is at the heart of holiness (humility, not as a game of groveling before God, but as a frank facing of one’s limitations, frailties, and failures, with dependence on God for all that is good)—if it is also true that humility is rooted in, and reinforced by, realism in repenting of our failures, and if finally it is true that realism in repentance flows from knowledge of God and of ourselves—then our first need, as disciples in Christ’s school of holiness, must be to exorcise complacency from our souls.
We should not take it for granted that, because we are holding on to the faith that others have given up, God has to be pleased with us, and therefore we should be pleased with ourselves. Rather we should suspect ourselves of being like the Laodiceans, with consciences atrophied by worldliness and prosperity, and no ears for the words of the one whom we call our Savior and our Lord.
What, then, should we do? Action is required along two lines. Within the church, preaching, study, and fellowship need to be directed to raising each other’s consciousness about God’s hatred of sin, His requirement of righteousness, and the way we offend Him by not taking His demand seriously. And in our daily pilgrimage, we must learn to listen to God for ourselves. If we dare to ask God to let us hear His word to us personally about our lives, He will.
God’s word to us is normally heard out of Scripture as it is read, preached, and applied. Soaking our souls in Scripture is our wisdom, therefore, if we are seeking holiness seriously. A helpful scheme of applicatory meditation on each passage is to ask ourselves:
• What does this passage tell me about God? How does it describe God’s nature and power; His plan and purpose; His likes and dislikes; His works, ways, and will for His human creatures?18
• What does this passage tell me about living? What does it say about right conduct, wrong conduct, wise conduct, foolish conduct; different situations and relationships in which people find themselves; the way of faith with all its difficulties and delights; various emotional states and temperamental traumas; virtues to cultivate, vices to avoid, and values to hold on to; pressures from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and what to do about them? In short, what does it tell me about all the realities of belonging to a lost humanity in a spoiled world now touched by the powers of redemption, and involved in the ongoing conflict between Christ the conqueror and the defeated powers of darkness that are so desperately fighting back?
• What does all this say to me about my own life today? What does it tell me about the tasks, problems, opportunities, pitfalls, and temptations to sin that confront me day by day? What warnings and encouragements does it give me, and what wisdom and resources does it show me?
Meditating on these things means thinking them through in the presence of God. Meditation should lead into prayer, in which we talk to God about them directly. This is always the proper conclusion of personal Bible reading.
If you practice meditating on Scripture in the manner described, with initial prayer for the Holy Spirit’s light and subsequent prayer that God will write in your heart what you have seen and learned, you will certainly hear the divine voice. You will certainly encounter the enthroned Savior. Amid the assurances of grace and help with which He will delight your heart, He will again and again verify to you the truth of His word: “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent” (Rev. 3:19). Do not say that you were not warned about this! But do not fancy, either, that you are walking the path of holiness, growing downward as Christians are called to do, if rebuke and repentance have no place in your life.
The late Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill said many things better than anyone else. I round off this chapter by quoting some sentences from the profile of sanctity that he draws. Here Neill deftly focuses the thrust of what this chapter has tried to say:
With monotonous regularity the saints all tell us that they are the chief of sinners. To non-Christians this is sometimes extremely irritating; it seems like an affectation, a mere manner of speaking, that those who are obviously so good should condemn themselves in such extravagant fashion. But there is no doubt that, when the saints from St. Paul on have used such expressions, they did so because they could not speak in any other way. . . . It is paradoxical, but true, that progress in saintliness always means at the same time progress in penitence.
It is not hard to see why this is so. We have spoken of the enlightenment of the conscience by the Holy Spirit. It is only the enlightened conscience that can take sin as seriously as it needs to be taken . . . with increasing knowledge, there is an ever deeper sensitiveness to our failure to make the best of the opportunities that God has given. Perhaps the actual and identifiable sins are few; but, given such opportunities as have been given us, what would Jesus have made of them? For here is the heart of it all. To move forward on the road of holiness means to know Jesus better. To him we always return. The better we come to know Him, the more plainly we shall see how little like him we are. . . .19
Yes, that is precisely how it is.