Must I Repent to Be Saved?

Must you repent of your sins in order to be saved? Do you have to turn away from your sin before you can turn to Christ? That is an important question because it seems like that's what the Bible says. Repent and believe for the forgiveness of your sins. This is an ongoing debate. It's been happening for a long time. And we need to look to the text of scripture to find out what does that actually mean. And I'm going to tell you ahead of time, no, you'll never be able to repent of your sins.

No one ever has. Not in the history of humanity has anyone ever repented of their sins and then was saved. I'll explain what I mean. Stay tuned.

Thanks for joining us for another episode of Theocast. I'm your host, Jon Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

That's just south of Nashville. And if this is your first time listening, we're so thankful that you're here. theocast.org, where we've got free articles and books and a community available. We'd love for you to come and join. Anything you can't afford, we'll get to you for free. Just let us know. Those of you that support us monthly allow us to give away our resources, and we're thankful to do so. We're here to pull the clutter off the gospel today. We want to make sure that Christ is supreme and that we find nothing that blocks our view of him.

Looking under the author and finisher of our faith, making sure that we distinguish what Christ has done for us in the gospel and what we're supposed to do in the law. And never to combine those two, but make sure that they are distinct. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more today. I put out a small article this week on my social media about repentance and is it required for salvation. And after about 900 comments, I saw on Facebook, I realized it was time for me to do an episode on this.

It's one that I haven't done in a while. So the question is, does the Bible require you to repent of your sin, to seek repentance, to repent, to obey repentance before you come to faith, or before you were allowed to be saved or before you were saved? Like is this what the And there's so many different ways you can say it. Most people will just quote scripture, repent and believe for the forgiveness of your sins. The requirement to come to Christ is that one repents.

This is the call. Like you must repent. You have to you can't just say you believe in Jesus and not turn from your sin. You have to turn from your sin and then you can believe. So this is a very important conversation because there are people on either side of the fence on this and there are you they're using scripture to make their argument of do you repent and then believe or what is what is actually happening here? Well, what we're about to talk about is an old argument.

And if you want more historical data to read about, I would go get the whole Christ by S. Clair Sinclair Ferguson. This is a debate during the 17th century. It's called the Marrow controversy by the Marrowmen. And just to give you a quick update historically about what it was, what it was about is that within the Scottish Presbyterian churches, they were pressing that men in the pulpit in these churches should be preaching that those who are hearing the gospel and are not believers, they need to repent fully of their sins. They need to turn away from their disobedience and before they are to turn to Christ and believe in him.

And that is the requirement and that is the preaching that they should repent of their sin. Whatever they're doing, whatever is contrary to God and then put their faith in Christ. And if they are unwilling to repent of their sin, if they're unwilling to turn from their sin, fully turn from their sin, they cannot be saved. They have to turn from their sin because this is what it's required of the text. And this created a massive debate and you can read about the debate and the arguments there actually came a creed because from the town that this came from was Arctur.

And so the Arcturer creed which is kind of hard to say. But this was a creed developed saying we will not teach this. We do not think this is biblical that there is requirements and obligations on the believer before one can be saved. If you put obligations on the believer, that means they are now involved in their salvation and one is not saved by faith alone, but one is saved by faith and repentance. And one could argue before you even finish and please try to hear the whole video before you comment.

I think sometimes I could see at what point you comment and I was so chuckled because there are people who don't even watch the video at all. They comment on like 5 seconds. Just from the title or seeing my face. As ugly as it might be, they've already made their decision of what it is that they are going to say. So don't do that. Let's look at the text. That's what we're going to do today. If you want the historical debate, you can go back and read that. The reason why I mentioned the whole Christ the marrow controversy is I wanted people to understand this is not new.

Lordship salvation is one that falls into this camp. I think lordship salvation as I have mentioned in the past you could go into Theocast and type in lordship salvation and you will find a plethora of videos I have done there explaining the debate and how this is related often you must make Jesus Lord of your life in order for you to be a believer if you're unwilling to make him Lord which is again repenting of living for yourself and then making Jesus Lord you're putting obligations on a believer sorry you're putting obligations on a sinner in order for them to be saved. And I'm going to make the argument that scripture does not do that.

Now, before I continue, I want to make it abundantly clear that I think that there is repentance involved. Now, we have to define what we mean by repentance and we then need to define where repentance goes and we can then talk about it. Sometimes we forget that God will demand things from us. And simply because he demands it does not mean that we have the capacity to do it.

It's important that we understand this definition because it will play into how we will then involve ourselves in scripture. But for instance, God demands that we live perfect lives. He actually does demand this. Like this is a part of we are commanded. The greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, our soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves. These are the two greatest commandments that Jesus has given us.

And those aren't suggestions. They're not the two great suggestions. They are commandments that this is you are to do. And he expects them to be done perfectly. And the reason why I know that is because James tells us that if you fail in one area of the law, you fail in all area of the law. And therefore, you are to be condemned. So, it's not obedience is not accomplished once. I got married one time and therefore I am married.

I don't have to go and do the ceremony over and over and over again. That was a one-time deal and I'm now married. That's not how obedience works. You see, I may have done the ceremony, but I need to continue and perpetually love my wife as Christ has loved the church. There's ongoing obedience. So it's not that you just obey once but it is perfect perpetually without fail and that is how the law is to be understood. If one is to repent they are going to repent from not doing that to doing that which I think is quite fascinating to me when we start thinking about repentance.

We we always think about repentance being the stopping of sin but sin is not necessarily the act of doing something like murdering, cheating, lying. Sin is also not loving God and not loving neighbor. So if I if I simply don't do that, I am actively sinning even though I'm not in the act of doing something. The sin is not doing something.

Right? So the question is if I'm repenting of my sin, we just got to work through this logically here. We got to look take the emphasis from scripture and look at all of it and then we'll dive into the text. But I just want to start here so we all agree that the requirement of the law is that one not disobey it and one obey it. So if I'm repenting of not loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, that means I have actively started to love God with all my heart, mind, and strength. That is what it means to repent.

I'm going this direction, not loving God. Now I'm going this direction. I am loving God. And to fully repent would mean I fully do that without fail. And I am now fully loving my neighbor as myself without fail. That is what it means to repent. So we have to look at each particular context and ask ourselves what is the repentance from? Is it sinning?

Is that what the repentance is from? And what is it unto? Is it perpetual obedience or something else? And there are times there is a repentance from sin towards obedience. We can look at those passages. But when we're talking about salvation, the repentance is not if it is required that you stop sinning and start obeying, that means salvation is based upon your repentance. And we're going to have some problems with that.