Semper Reformanda: Jon and Justin discuss how none of us can adequately repent, how repentance is not penance, as well the fact that the Christian life is one of ongoing repentance.
Resources:
"The Whole Christ" by Sinclair Ferguson
"Christ the Lord" by Michael Horton
1689 LBC, Chapters 14 and 15
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https://youtu.be/YywV2ZQ_sEs
Podcast Transcript
Justin Perdue: Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are talking about repentance. If you look around in the church and certainly on Christian social media, there seems to be a lot of confusion about repentance and what it is. So we're going to talk about repentance from the Old Testament and repentance from the New Testament. We're going to talk about repentance on the front end in terms of conversion and how one is united to Christ. And we're also going to talk about repentance in an ongoing way in the Christian life and hope to make some sense of this topic. We hope that you're encouraged by the conversation. We hope as always that you find assurance and rest in the Lord Jesus Christ as you listen. Stay tuned.
We're going to have a conversation about an important subject. People have already seen the title of the episode so I don't need to bury the lead. The title of the episode is What is Repentance? That's a topic that gets Christians worked up. If you look on Christian Twitter, or Christian social media in general, and find any kind of dialogue about the topic of repentance, you will notice that people are passionate about this conversation with good reason—because it is an important doctrine, it's an important subject when it comes to our union with the Lord Jesus Christ, our conversion, etc. But then also, it matters in the Christian life as well. So today we want to have a very simple, somewhat introductory conversation on the topic of repentance because our plan over the summer, over the course of several months, is to have other conversations related to this one. We're going to deal with some of the subject matter that is contained in several books.
I'll go ahead and maybe give us a sneak peek on this. In no particular order, we're going to be doing episodes that would be oriented around John MacArthur's book, The Gospel According to Jesus, we're going to do an episode that centers around the book edited by Michael Horton called Christ the Lord, and then we also will do an episode that is centered around the subject matter of The Whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson. You can look for those episodes to be coming out over the course of the summer. Those are not going to be formal book reviews; they're just going to be conversations that will deal with some of the subject matter of those books, but they're going to be an accessible, Theocast-ish kind of conversations that we hope you'll find encouraging. We're going to be dealing with matters like Lordship salvation and all those kinds of things—legalism, antinomianism, and the nature of the gospel, the sufficiency of Christ, the Marrow Controversy, and all of that over the summer.
But what we want to do today is have an initial conversation about repentance and what it is. What we're going to aim to do is talk about it some on the front end, in terms of conversion, and then we're going to talk about what repentance is in the Christian life in an ongoing way. Hopefully, we can point out some of the pitfalls and some of the mistakes, frankly, that people make where categories are collapsed, and things get a little bit confusing and unhelpful to the believer.
Jon, if I were to just ask you straight away what repentance is, how would you answer that question?
Jon Moffitt: Historically, how this has been answered is a change of mind. This is how it's been interpreted through commentators and through the Reformers. A good example of what it is from the Old Testament, in the Decalogue, where it says, "You shall have no other gods before me." This is God telling them to change their mind from a polytheistic understanding to a monotheistic. It is no longer okay to serve multiple gods; you can only serve one God. Not only should they change their way of thinking about something being good or bad, but then it's going to affect their actions, which is that they should only serve one God. That would be a simple example of what repentance would look like in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Justin Perdue: And that change of mind is what produces the change in action.
Just really briefly on this before we get any further down the road: I agree completely with you. The word, for example, in the New Testament for repentance is "metanoia", which is a change of mind, as you said, or a change of understanding. What we're discussing, and you've already hit it, is one of these pillars. We're talking about a change of mind or a change of understanding with respect to a few really important things: one being God, who He is, and the fact that He's the Creator, He's the only God, and thereby we have an obligation to Him. The second thing is it's a change of mind or understanding about ourselves—who we are, and whether we're good or not, all that kind of thing. Lastly, it's a change of mind about how we might be reconciled to God. It's really specifically a change of mind about Christ, who he is, what he did, why we need him, how it is that we're united with him and why we need to be united to him. So it's a change of understanding in all of these ways that then will produce a change in behavior or a change of course of life. We ought not collapse those things, which I think is where we're going to get to in a minute.
Jon, I want to kick it back over to you because I think you were headed somewhere and I jumped in.
Jon Moffitt: There's definitely a collapsing of the two understandings of repentance. What I mean by two understandings is that there's a call to the sinner who is not under the grace of God, and who has not received a generation—there's a call to repentance to that individual. And then there is a call to those who are under grace and who are children of God. Then there's another interesting whole dynamic of being the Old Testament prophets and their preaching of repentance to a nation. So you have three different categories of repentance, and often we collapse the three, and many times we collapse the nation repentance with the believer and confuse those two, or even the unbeliever and the nation, assuming that if one repents then God will give them mercy. It's like mercy only comes to the repentant—and that is true to the nation.
Even in Acts, when Peter is speaking about the prophets of old, he's rebuking them. We somehow use it as a means to illustrate that we need to be preaching this type of repentance, but he was saying the prophets of old were telling them that the Messiah was coming and calling them to repent of their ways and obey the law, which will usher in the Messiah—and of course, they missed it completely, not according to God's sovereignty, but this is exactly how it unfolded, which we can get into another time. But then we hear verses where it says, "Repent and your sins will be blotted out." We assume that is the gospel, one, because often you will hear John the Baptist, or even Jesus, mention these types of phrases. And because "it's in the gospels", we assume that that is tied to the gospel.
Justin, let's talk about this for a moment. Just because it's in the gospel, and John the Baptist, or even Jesus, calls people to repentance, we have to be careful to not assume that one cannot receive grace unless they've repented. Because in the Old Testament, to the nation of Israel, they would receive forgiveness, mercy, and grace if they repented. But is that true of the unbeliever now according to the New Testament?
Justin Perdue: The way I'm going to lead off my comments on this is with something that I think I've said before behind the mic here: we would all be helped if the titles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not "The Gospel According to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John", because in the original, the titles are just "according to". I think the insertion of "The Gospel According to" makes us think that everything contained within them is part and parcel of the good news, whereas we have pointed out over time how much of what's contained in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are actually not gospel—it's law. Those statements of law come from any number of people, including John the Baptist and Jesus himself.
With respect to John the Baptist, I think we need to understand who he is. He is effectively the last of the old covenant prophets, and so he should be understood much more akin to Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, etc., than he should be understood as a part of the gospel—like the coming of the Messiah himself. John is the forerunner. He is a transitionary figure from the old covenant into the new. But ultimately the new covenant is ushered in by the Messiah himself, and we understand that even Jesus, as he is doing ministry on earth and as he is teaching, so often speaks words of law to people in order to unsettle them in their self-righteousness, to crush them with the law, and to show them that what they desperately need is the Messiah who comes to fulfill the law for them, to atone for their sins, and to reconcile them to God.
Many times when Jesus speaks, that's his objective. So we need to be careful in how we read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then we also need to be careful on how we read the Book of Acts, which again, I don't want to get us too far down the road here, but the Book of Acts contains a bunch of different things too. Christ has already ascended and the preaching of the gospel is happening, the gospel is going forth and all of those things—that's not debatable at all. But I think what we need to do is be responsible with how we even look at the apostles' language in the Book of Acts and not be biblicists in how we read certain passages.
As a parting shot on this, when you hear language of repentance even from John the Baptist, for example—yes, I know it's in John's gospel; I understand these things—but when he says he's preaching a baptism of repentance, we ought not understand that he is preaching the gospel. He is preaching something else than the good news itself.
Jon Moffitt: Going back to a comment that might be new for a lot of people—when you said Biblicism, this is a very important concept for you to understand as it relates to the confusion on repentance. I think a lot of people are confused on what repentance is because they are biblicists—and it's not a good word, it's a bad word, because what it means is you are not allowing the context of the verse, the surrounding passages, and the Bible at large to influence what you are. What biblicists will do is they will look at a verse or a couple of verses and say, "Well, this is exactly what it says: Matthew 4:17, 'From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."' See? It says in the text that this is what you should be doing." But you're not looking at who Jesus is talking to, what the immediate reason is for Matthew to write that, and at large, what does the entire Bible have to say about repentance and salvation? Is Jesus talking to unbelievers or believers? Those are really important questions. Biblicism doesn't take into account all of Scripture and all of theology.
I would even say that often, Biblicism doesn't allow you to systematize Scripture. You have to systematize Scripture. A good example of this is you will not be Trinitarian if you don't allow scripture to be systematized, because that's how we come up with an understanding that our God is triune.
Justin Perdue: Really quick on Biblicism. I think the real pitfalls of it and where it falls short is that it does not take into consideration the canonical context of Scripture; by that, I mean the whole Canon—all 66 books. You don't take the Bible as a cohesive whole and try to hold that together appropriately if you're a biblicist. You tend to pit texts against each other as though they contradict themselves, or there's just some mystery here that you've introduced into the text that actually isn't there, if you understand the Scriptures with an appropriate framework, as you just said.
The second pitfall of Biblicism is that it is inherently opposed to theological frameworks and theological systems that would even arise out of the text, like covenant theology or the distinction between the law and the gospel. What you end up doing is saying things that sound schizophrenic. "Over here it says this, and over here it says this. How do we reconcile the two? We're not sure, but they're both kind of true." It becomes very confusing for people. What ends up happening whenever you collapse categories is that clarity is lost, the saints are harmed because peace and assurance before the Lord are taken away, and the gospel becomes less clear. None of that's ever good.
Jon Moffitt: You'll see pet passages that become the ones that we run to. It's like when you first meet a Calvinist, all they can emphasize are the passages on sovereignty.
I put a tweet out there recently that I was trying to help people understand that repentance is a fruit of regeneration; it's not the cause of regeneration.
Justin Perdue: What is regeneration?
Jon Moffitt: Regeneration—a good example of this is Ephesians, where it talks about us being taken from death to life. It means to regenerate or bring back. It means to give life. We believe that, according to Ephesians, we were dead in our trespasses and sins, and Christ made us alive. So he took us from death to life. That's what regeneration means.
To say that repentance is required of sinners in order to receive regeneration, or another way of saying this is you must first repent before you can receive mercy for sins, or before you can be brought into the family of God—often, you can hear this: repent and believe. But we have to be very careful that we understand the context. It says in John 3:16 that whoever believes in the Lord shall be saved. I believe that for God so loved the world that He gave His Son. I believe all of that, but that's not disconnected from the fact that you are dead. You are in Adam, and because you were in Adam, you were born a sinner.
So we're going to talk about before one is alive in Christ. I absolutely believe in the command that is given to us by Christ that one must repent. I believe that. This is a legitimate command.
Justin Perdue: Even the imperative to believe.
Jon Moffitt: That's right. It is an imperative to believe. You have to believe in order to receive Christ. A dead person, spiritually speaking, cannot repent. Not only that, let's say they can change the direction—they were trapped in sin and now they're no longer trapped in sin. I don't believe Jesus means in general, and I don't believe God means in general. If you're going to turn away from your sin and receive forgiveness of sins, you have to be able to turn away from all of your sin if this is what he's talking about. I don't think it's possible to turn away from not loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, because we don't have the capacity to do that. The thing about this is that if you're saying one must repent in order to be saved, then no one will ever be saved.
Justin Perdue: Let me talk a little bit about the order of salvation as it's been understood, or in theological vernacular, the ordo salutis. All we mean here is trying to break apart how it is that someone comes to faith and is saved. We understand, along with the Reformed through history, that regeneration, or God's sovereign work of giving life to a dead sinner, precedes faith and repentance, and that faith and repentance are both fruits of regeneration—and obviously our conversation today is about repentance. And so life must be given by God in order for a sinner to have this change of mind. It is granted by the Lord, and we are united to Christ by faith given to us by God. Our minds are quite literally changed by God as we hear the message of the law and the gospel, and thereby, we are united to Christ and are saved.
We've got to get this really clear. Because if we say what you just said, that you must repent first in order to receive grace, or you must repent first in order to receive mercy from God, then no one will ever receive mercy or grace. You are making repentance the efficient cause of receiving grace, life, mercy, etc. from the Lord. You really have turned it into a work that a human being must do—and I would argue that you do the same thing with faith if you think in these terms. You're turning faith into something that the person must do that is then the efficient, the effective cause of salvation. Whereas we would understand Jesus is the one who saves, and God, in His sovereign grace and mercy, gives life to dead sinners.
This is related to a number of things in my own mind, but I know we're going to get to the whole Christ later this summer. But just a brief little insertion here. What sparked the Marrow Controversy in the church of Scotland was effectively this question: must a person forsake sin in order to come to Christ? Which is essentially what we're talking about today. Must a person forsake sin and turn from sin in order to come to the Lord Jesus Christ? And the answer to that question that split the church of Scotland apart, on the part of some brothers in Christ, was no. If we need to do anything in order to come to Christ, then no one will come to Christ. Because we can't.
Jon Moffitt: That's right. Because we believe in a very important doctrine that all in Adam died.
Forget Calvinism. True Calvinists cannot believe this. If you're a Calvinist, you cannot believe you have the capacity to repent on your own without Christ or the Holy Spirit's power. You cannot do it because in Adam all die. So this is why we always will say repentance is a fruit of our salvation, and faith and repentance happen simultaneously.
We're going to get into this in a moment: what does repentance look like after salvation? We're going to talk about that in a moment. But I want to belabor this point that if you go to someone and you require them to repent of sin in order to come to Christ, I'm sorry but you are preaching to dead men's bones and telling dead men's bones to do things that cannot be done. If you call yourself a Calvinist, you're confused. Because depravity demands us to preach the gospel and the gospel would leave one to faith and repentance.
Justin Perdue: Really quickly, John, on this, I just wanna jump in. From the 1689 London Baptist Confession. This is chapter 14 on Saving Faith. But I think this needs to be stated, because what you're saying right now is entirely right that on the front end of this thing, when we're talking about somebody being converted and united to the Lord Jesus Christ initially, it really is not a wise thing, in an ultimate sense, to try to pull faith and repentance apart because it becomes very clear that they do go together in this regard.
For example, chapter 14, paragraph two, at the very end of the 1689 confession, it says this: "the principal acts of saving faith focus directly on Christ—accepting, receiving, and resting upon him alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life, by virtue of the covenant of grace. I think when you state things that way, it's very clear that a person only does such a thing like resting, receiving, trusting, and hoping in the Lord Jesus Christ because that individual has been given life from God and has also come to see that God is God, He is holy and we are not, I'm undone and I need a Redeemer and Christ is him. I am casting myself completely upon Jesus and depending on him, not me—on him and nothing else. That is evidence that this change of mind has been wrought in a person, and it's evidence that the Lord has given someone life that they would ever say, "I need Christ and I'm trusting him." When we talk this way, I think it's helpful.
One more comment, if I may, in terms of how a lot of times people say things about repentance and faith that are super confusing. They go to the Book of Acts and they will cite Acts 2 with Peter. What must we do to be saved? Peter says, "Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins." But then later, for example in Acts 13, Paul will say that, for example, "Let it be known to you therefore, brothers, that through this man, forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you," this man being Jesus, "and by him everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses."
Or the Philippian jailer in chapter 16. When he's undone, people remember the story of how there are disciples of Christ in jail, and then miraculously, chains fall off, the gate swings open, and the Philippian jailer is going to kill himself because he's going to be ruined because he's allowed all the prisoners to escape. The disciples look at him and say, "Don't kill yourself." And he basically ends up asking, "What do I need to do to be saved?" And they say, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you'll be saved." I think what we need to see is that in the presentation, even in the Book of Acts, you see that at certain times repentance is stated. Other times, faith is stated. Instead of pitting those against each other and making it sound like schizophrenia, what we're getting today is a better solution to say that all of this is a fruit of regeneration, of the new birth. What's happening here is the change of mind as wrought in a person who believes in Christ. This happens in our experience practically simultaneously on the front end.
Jon Moffitt: Speaking of the front end, when you see Jesus using phrases like, "I've come to seek and to save the lost," "I have come to the sick, the blind, the needy," normally, he is saying this to the Pharisees. He's saying this to the self-righteous because they're standing before him and they don't believe he's the Messiah. They don't believe they need to trust in him. They can't see that they're sick. They can't see that they're sinners. So Jesus is saying that the thing you need to repent of, or the thing you need to see against the law is that you are sinful, you are sick, you were depraved, but they can't do it. This is why even in John 6, it says that the Father has to open their eyes in order for them to see it. And then he says things like, "My sheep will hear my voice and they will come to me. They will know me, they will hear me."
When you hear Jesus speaking of repentance before he goes to the cross, he's talking about the self-righteous. He even uses the illustration of the two men in the temple. Which one walked away justified? The one who was beating his chest.
Justin Perdue: Right. Who understands he needs mercy.
Jon Moffitt: Who was saying, "Be merciful to me." And then who's the self-righteous man? "Lord, I am so thankful I'm not like this man. Jesus gives the exact illustration of what these people need to repent of.
My conviction is that Jesus came preaching repentance of self-righteousness. Stop trying to save yourself by yourself. That's what he came preaching. I would say that when we're preaching repentance, we would do well to do the same to tell people. As you preach the law, the law crushes people. You have them look at the law and say, "See? You can't save yourself. So repent of that and turn to Christ." We know that if they do this, you can see them turn away from self-salvation and they turn to Christ, immediately we can say that is a fruit of the Spirit. To be able to do that, you have to have the Spirit of regeneration in you.
Justin Perdue: To turn from self-salvation to God's salvation is, without doubt, a change of mind that is brought by the Holy Spirit. I'm going to read from the 1689 again briefly, just to keep referring back to Reformed confession. Chapter 15 on Repentance to Life and Salvation, paragraph one, reads this way: "Some of the elect are converted after their early years having lived in the natural state," that is, without the Spirit, "for a time and served various evil desires and pleasures." Then this: "God gives these repentance to life as part of their effectual calling." And so it's very clear that—and Acts 11 is like this, the words of Titus 3 are like this—that God grants repentance to people as a part of His effectual calling on their lives. Meaning God has said to a dead person, "Live." Like when Jesus says to Lazarus, "Come out of the tomb," the one who gave the command gives life so that the command can be heeded. It's the same with us. God effectively looks at us and says, "Live." And what happens? Again, simultaneously in our experiences, the law and the gospel is preached and Christ is heralded. Scales are knocked off our eyes and we immediately see that we are ruined before a holy God and that Christ is our Savior, that he has atoned for my sin, he has accomplished my righteousness, he has secured my sanctification, he has secured my resurrection. I need him and I'm trusting him.
Jon Moffitt: This does not contradict passages like Acts 17:30 where he says in the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent. We would say amen. Repent under Christ. Fall upon Christ. Amen to that.
Justin, for just a couple of minutes here, let's talk about in the Christian life. Then we're gonna have to really take this into the Semper Reformanda. But we'll tee it up for a little bit. Often when people hear me say this, what they're saying then is, "Jon, if you preach that, then people will live however they want." No. You have to understand the difference between preaching the gospel to the unbeliever and preaching the gospel to the believer. It's the same gospel, but the application does have its differences. You're calling someone unto faith and then you're calling someone to live out their faith. As James says, faith without works is a dead faith. Justin and I believe that. Repentance is a fruit; it's a real fruit and it should be happening. I think it is a wonderful fruit that God repents us. We often look at repentance as something that we can do on our own, and it's not. It's a Spirit-wrought work. It's something that happens to us. We will repent. But I will tell you that there's nowhere in Scripture that indicates that you have the capacity to repent of all your sins all of the time. That would mean you don't walk by faith, you walk by repentance. That's not the command that we've been given.
I just want to read you a couple of passages that I think are helpful. We need to be living in a life of repentance. What that means is we're constantly changing our mind from trusting in the lie of Satan to believing in the sufficiency of something outside of Jesus Christ. All sin can be summarized basically of trusting in something else that is "more sufficient" than Jesus. And then we end up with fear, anxiety, lust, anger, all of that comes out of us. Where we must find our rest is we do not have the capacity to repent of all sin. Justin and I would both agree that we need to repent of known sin, and if we're actively in sin, we need to change our mind about that and walk away from it and change the direction.
But where we also rest is in the reality of, for instance, Hebrews 4:16, "Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace." Why should we have confidence? Well, the whole book of Hebrews is about the sufficiency of Jesus being our mediator. It says, "that we might receive mercy and find grace in a time of need." When do you need grace and mercy for sinners when you're sinning?
I must continue here in Hebrews. It says in chapter 10, "Therefore, brothers, since we have the confidence to enter it in the holy places by the blood of Jesus." We don't have confidence to walk into the presence of God because we've done righteous things; it's because we don't do righteous things. "By the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened up for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with a heart sprinkled clean from the evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful." He's faithful, not us. That's where our confidence lies.
So yes, we repent. But Justin, you and I both know we are not good with God because of our repentance; we feel we are good with God because of Christ's blood being sprinkled upon us, and God is faithful. That's where we rest.
Justin Perdue: Amen. Hebrews 12:24, the blood of Christ speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. That word effectively is, "It is finished." That's where our confidence is found.
There are so many other passages that are popcorning around in my brain right now that I think are helpful in this conversation. 1 John 1:8 through 2:2 is really good because we're told that if we say that we have no sin, then we make God out to be a liar and the truth isn't in us. But what we're encouraged to do is to confess our sins because God is faithful and just, in the Lord Jesus Christ, to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And John then says, "Little children, beloved, I'm writing this so that you might not sin. But if anybody does, know that we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ, the righteous. He's the propitiation and the satisfaction for our sins." And so we're encouraged to confess sin, to acknowledge sin, and to trust the Lord in Christ that we are absolved and that we're forgiven and that we're righteous. We're not saved by our confession, we're not saved by our repentance, but God will continually grant these things to His saints. And we live a life, as has been said so many times, of continual repentance because we understand that when it comes to us, we are always failing. And then we are casting ourselves anew upon the One who has paid for every failure.
As I say things like this, I'm saying this to myself as much as I am to the listener because I need to be reminded of these things. I tend to be very bothered and grieved by my sin. I'm not saying that I'm grieved as much as I should be because that's a whole hyper-introspective Pandora's box of things. But when we encounter sin in our lives, our tendency is to be bothered by that, to be concerned by it, we question whether we're legitimate, we doubt whether we're God's, and all these things. I think my word there is that instead of having that mindset, we should be reminded that the fact that we're even grieved by our sin in the first place is evidence that we now belong to Christ. What we are encouraged to do is to continue to take our sin to the Lord, to confess it to him, to confess it to our brothers and sisters, and then to be absolved in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are various other texts in the Scriptures for sure where you see the apostles exhorting churches to repentance. Many times that's because they're turning to a different way of salvation. I'm thinking of Galatians, I'm thinking of Hebrews—not neglecting such a great salvation means don't go back to the law.
Then you have passages like the letter to the Corinthians where Paul will, in various places, do a law-gospel thing. He's rebuking them for how they understand Christian freedom effectively. You think that sexual promiscuity and gross sexual immorality are expressions of Christian freedom. Don't you know that people who do these things won't inherit the Kingdom of God. Why would you engage in things that the judgment of God is coming for? You used to be this, now you've been cleansed. This isn't who you are now. Those are the words of Paul in Ephesians, it's the word of Paul in Corinthians. Remember who you are. You're not this anymore.
Jon Moffitt: That's 2 Peter 1.
Justin Perdue: Totally. It's a really consistent message: don't go toward another gospel, don't revert back to self-salvation, don't go back to the law, and then remember who you are now in the Lord Jesus Christ and live that way. And we always are having to be reminded of these things because we go astray.
Jon Moffitt: For those of you that are new, we do a podcast, and I'll let Justin explain that. But I think in Semper Reformanda, what I would like to now take us into is the confusion that repentance is a fruit. But just like other fruits like joy, meekness patients, longsuffering, they aren't full and complete. Repentance isn't full and complete. In other words—I'll say this now and explain it later—just because you're now a believer doesn't mean all sin will always be repented of fully and completely forever. Otherwise, that means we could be perfect. I'll leave that here and we'll explain later.
Justin Perdue: Oh, dear listeners. Notice what Jon Moffitt just did and how he set it up and he just took it right away. He kind of dangled in front of you and he's like, "Oh, but not for now. We're going to talk about it later."
If you want to be a part of the conversation that Jon has just teed up for us, we're going to have that in the other podcast that we offer weekly called Semper Reformanda. That podcast is for people who have partnered with our ministry and have locked arms with us to see this message of the sufficiency of Christ, and the rest that is ours in him, spread far and wide as possible. So if you want more information about Semper Reformanda, how you can become a part of this great thing that the Lord is doing, and how you can get more involved with Theocast and meet other people that think like you and are wrestling through the same things you are, then go over to our website, wordpress-1294806-4720887.cloudwaysapps.com. You can learn everything about Semper Reformanda over there.
For many of you, we'll talk with you again next week on the regular edition of the podcast. And for others of you, we're going to talk with you in just a few minutes. I trust that you go over to your Semper Reformanda feed and listen in on the conversation there. Talk soon.