Repentance Must Go with Forgiveness

Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. ACTS 5:31

A preacher who says as often as Spurgeon did that salvation is simply a look will be asked, sooner or later, what has become of repentance. Spurgeon heard the question all his life, and took it seriously. In the later chapters of All of Grace, having spent chapter after chapter pressing the free offer on the reader, he stops to give two chapters to it, under the plain title Repentance Must Go with Forgiveness. His answer is not a condition added to grace. It is another gift of the same grace, from the same pierced hand.

Riveted together

He begins from his text in Acts. The risen Christ is exalted to give two things, repentance and forgiveness, and Spurgeon will not allow them to be separated. “Repentance and forgiveness are riveted together by the eternal purpose of God.” What God has joined, he says, let no man put asunder.

And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. LUKE 24:47

He gives two reasons why it must be so. The first is the holiness of God. A pardon offered to someone who loves his sin and means to go on in it would be a licence for iniquity. No rebel can expect the King to pardon his treason while he remains in open revolt. The second reason is less obvious and more beautiful: the completeness of mercy. A mercy that forgave the sin and left the sinner in it would be, as he puts it, lame on one foot and withered in one hand. What use is it to bring a man out of the grave if you leave him dead? To be pronounced clean and still have the leprosy on one’s brow would be a mockery of mercy.

Would you, he asks the reader, be content to be forgiven and left as worldly as before? The quickened soul is more afraid of sin itself than of its punishment.

Two handles of one plough

The heart of the chapter is his account of how repentance and faith belong together. They are not stages, one finished before the other begins. “Repentance is the inseparable companion of faith.” All the while we walk by faith, he says, “the tear of repentance glitters in the eye of faith.” Faith that has no sorrow for sin in it is not true faith, and sorrow for sin that does not look to Jesus is not true repentance.

For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. 2 CORINTHIANS 7:10

He has a string of pictures for the bond. They are the Jachin and Boaz of a saving experience, the two pillars at the door of Solomon’s temple, and nobody comes to God aright except between them. “Faith and repentance are but two spokes in the same wheel, two handles of the same plough.” He quotes a description he admired, that repentance is a heart broken for sin, and from sin — grieved over what it has done, and turned away from doing it.

This has a practical edge. Repentance, Spurgeon insists, is not a thing of days and weeks, a penance to be got through as quickly as possible and then left behind. It is “the grace of a lifetime, like faith itself.” The young Christian repents and so does the old one, and the older one often repents more deeply, because he has seen more of the love he has sinned against.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. PSALM 51:17

Pardon melts the heart

Here Spurgeon makes a move that many readers find surprising. We tend to assume that repentance comes first and earns forgiveness: we grieve, and so God pardons. He will not have it. “Do not regard your repentance as the cause of your remission, but as the companion of it.” Indeed, he says, forgiveness leads to repentance as much as the reverse. He quotes a verse of Joseph Hart’s hymn to the effect that law and terrors only harden, while a sense of blood-bought pardon dissolves a heart of stone.

Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? ROMANS 2:4

It follows that the surest way to repent is not to stare into your own heart but to look at the cross. “Do not sit down and try to pump up repentance from the dry well of corrupt nature,” he writes. Nobody can force his soul into a penitent frame. The more you try to produce the right emotions, the more you will be disappointed. But if you think of Jesus dying for you, sorrow for sin will come of itself. He points to Peter in the high priest’s courtyard. The Lord turned and looked on him, and that look did what no argument could.

And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord … And Peter went out, and wept bitterly. LUKE 22:61–62

We repent ourselves; nobody can do it for us. But behind our turning, Spurgeon says, is the Spirit, who shows us what sin is and makes it loathsome. And the exalted Christ uses everything else as well — conscience, Scripture, preaching, the prayers of friends and the hard providences of life. “The Lord’s mercy often rides to the door of our hearts on the black horse of affliction.”

Hope for the hardest

Spurgeon lingers with evident delight on one word of his text: Christ is exalted to give repentance to Israel — to the very people who had cried out for His crucifixion. If He could give repentance to them, there is no heart He cannot soften. The Lord, Spurgeon says, can turn lions into lambs and ravens into doves.

The Lord is … longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. 2 PETER 3:9

That is the note on which he ends, and it is a gospel note. The reader who feels he cannot repent is not told to try harder. He is told to ask. Repentance is as much a gift of grace as the atonement itself, and the risen Christ is ready to give it now.

A word of care

Two cautions are worth adding. The first is that Spurgeon’s insistence that repentance is lifelong can, in a tender conscience, curdle into a habit of endless self-examination that never rests in pardon. The bitterness of repentance and the sweetness of pardon, he says, blend in every gracious life and make up an incomparable happiness. Repentance that never tastes the pardon has gone wrong.

The second is that Christians have long differed over the order of these things, and some traditions speak of repentance as preparing the way for faith. Spurgeon was not greatly interested in drawing a timetable. His point is simpler and almost every believer can own it: repentance is not a price paid to God but a gift received from Christ, and it grows, like faith, by looking at Him.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask whether you have wanted forgiveness without wanting to be free of the sin itself. Tell God honestly which one you have been asking for.

2. If you feel unable to repent, stop trying to manufacture feeling. Read the account of the crucifixion in Luke 23 slowly, and let Christ look at you.

3. Name one sin you have confessed many times but never turned from. Decide on one concrete step away from it this week.

4. Notice whether your repentance ever reaches rest in pardon. If it does not, read 1 John 1:9 aloud and believe it.

5. Think of someone you have written off as too hard to change. Pray for them by name, remembering that Christ gave repentance to those who crucified Him.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, exalted Prince and Saviour, You give repentance and forgiveness, and I need both.

I have wanted to be pardoned more than I have wanted to be made holy. Break my heart for sin, and from sin.

I cannot pump repentance out of a dry well. Look on me as You looked on Peter, and let me weep and be healed.

Keep the tear of repentance and the light of pardon together in my eyes, all my life long. Amen.