Daily Devotionals

Devotional: June 21st

REPENTANCE AND FAITH

Repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ. - Acts 20:21

Very near the close of his missionary career the Apostle Paul summed up his preaching as being all directed to two points, " Repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." These two, repentance and faith, ought never to be separated in thought, as they are inseparable in fact. Genuine repentance is impossible without faith; true faith cannot exist without repentance.

And yet the two are separated very often, in this day especially, even by earnest Christian teachers who have a great deal to say about faith, and not nearly enough in proportion about repentance; and the effect is to obscure the very idea of faith, and not seldom to preach, " Peace! peace! where there is no peace." A Gospel which is always talking about faith, and scarcely ever talking about repentance, is denuded indeed of some of its most unwelcome characteristics, but is also deprived of most of its power, and it may very easily become an ally of all righteousness and an indulgence to sin.

Some of the most formidable objections to the Christian doctrine of forgiveness - viz., that it is immoral in its substance - arise chiefly from forgetting that "repentance" towards "God" is as real a condition of salvation as is "faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." We have here the Apostle’s deliverance about one of these twin thoughts. We have three stages - the root, the stem, the fruit; sorrow, repentance, salvation. But there is a right and a wrong kind of sorrow for sin. The right kind breeds repentance, and thence reaches salvation; the wrong kind breeds nothing, and so ends in death. Look at this ladder, which the Apostle sets up "from the horrible pit and the miry clay" of evil, up to the sunny heights of salvation, and trace its stages; not forgetting that it is not a complete statement of the case, and needs to be supplemented, in the spirit of the words already quoted, by the other part of the inseparable whole, "faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ."

It would be an interesting study to examine the two letters of the Apostle Peter, in order to construct from them a picture of what he became, and to contrast it with his own earlier self, when full of self-confidence, rashness, and instability. It took a lifetime for Simon, the son of Jonas, to grow into Peter; but it was done. And the very faults of the character became strength. What he had proved possible in his own case he commands and commends to us; and from the height to which he has reached he looks upwards to the infinite ascent which he knows he will attain when he puts off this tabernacle, and then downwards to his brethren, bidding them, too, climb and aspire. His last word is like that of the great Roman Catholic apostle to the East Indies: "Forward!" He is like some trumpeter on the battlefield who spends his last breath in sounding an advance. Immortal hope animates his dying injunction: " Grow! grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour."

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