The Fruits of Repentance

Matthew 3, please, if you haven’t already turned there. I want to read for what will be the final message on the short series on repentance, and give some thought to what is here. Well, let us read from verse 1. Matthew 3, verse 1.

“In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,

“And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

“For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

“And the same John had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

“Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region round about Jordan,

“And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.

“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

“Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance:

“And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.

“And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

“I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire:

“Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Amen. We’ll end the reading of the Word of God at verse 12. What you’ve heard, beloved, is the Word of the eternal God, which you are to receive, believe, and obey, and the people of God said, Amen.

Let’s pray.

Lord, if we have not already surrendered our lives, may we do so even now, and certainly before the conclusion of worship. Grant real, true, genuine consecration. Oh, how we pray. Please help us. Thy grace would keep us from a duplicitous heart. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. So we pray. Make us single. Grant that our whole being would be bent by grace to do Thy will at every turn, every occasion, no matter how challenging. Thou art worthy, O Lord. And in light of Calvary, how can we ever hold back or restrict our devotion?

May the Spirit of God illumine every mind tonight, settle us, cause there to be in this place a real awareness that the Lord has spoken, and extend Thy kingdom. Lord, I pray for fruit that remains. May Thy Spirit be upon me, upon this people. O Spirit of God, work, reveal the Christ, and expose all sin, and give genuine repentance. These things we pray in the name of our Lord Jesus. Amen.

One of the laments that many of us have in these days is the apparent distinction between the power that seemed to attend preaching in the past versus in the present. I cannot speak for the entirety of the world or the kind of unction that may be upon men of whom I have no awareness, but I’m not alone in the feeling, in the sense, that across many places that once knew a distinct blessing of God and the power of the Spirit upon the public ministry of the Word, no longer enjoys such.

There’s a kind of deadness, a lack of fruit, a lack of significant impact, a lack of hearts changed, lives transformed. And in some ways you can almost see why, because a lot of preaching doesn’t even attempt to aim at change. There is almost a fear within the heart, it would appear, of many preachers to be explicit as to the problem of sin, the reality of the wrath of God, the consequences of rebelling against God and ignoring and not believing in the Lord Jesus Christ.

There’s a certain blasé, a professionalism, a certain air of just being precise and accurate, but no urgency, no power, no burden.

None of this was true of John.

John was raised in the traditional arena of religiosity. As a Levite, he was acquainted with all the paraphernalia of the religious activity of his day. The garb, the lingo, the practice, the vying for position, the various undercurrents of what it takes to be successful in religious life in John’s day. He was familiar with it all, and he shunned it all. And instead, he sought to have a ministry that went after the hearts and the consciences of those before him.

He had a burden to actually make a difference, to preach with purpose, to preach with an end in view, that it is not enough for me just to get this message off my chest. I want to see change. I want to see the impact of a right receiving of the truth. I want to see my generation transformed. I want to see lives bow beneath the truth of God’s Word and submit in full to the living God.

He therefore preached to the heart. He went after people, and he was not afraid to make people feel uncomfortable. We need a little discomfort sometimes, don’t we?

John would not let his audience rest in outward associations and profession of words. He calls them, in verse 8, “Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance.” This is uttered to the religious of his day. I explained on Wednesday really the unusual ministry of John, in which he is calling Jews to submit to a ritual that was reserved for Gentiles converting to the Jewish religion. It was a ritual intended to show the humility of heart that acknowledged the deep sinfulness, their lack of spiritual privilege, and the need to be washed before they would ever come in and touch these religious privileges that belonged to the children of the seed of Abraham.

What John is doing is he is applying the same principle to his own countrymen. He’s saying, no, you are just like the Gentiles. You are just as guilty and you need to be cleansed. And more to the point, you need a spirit that is married to the very cleansing itself—repentance, turning from your sin.

If you have ever looked at your generation and been saddened by the lack of spiritual depth, the lack of acknowledgement of sin, John could have felt the same way. But instead of complaining about it, he got about the business of preaching against it and trying to awaken the conscience of his people.

When one preaches about repentance, there are errors that we must caution against. One error is to make less of repentance than we should. It gets turned into something that is precisely the same as belief. And so there’s a sense of it’s so married to belief as to be synonymous. Now, the two go hand in hand, don’t get me wrong, but they are distinct in their expression. And there’s a form of easy believism in which as long as I assent to certain truths and agree with certain doctrine, then I’m okay.

I have met people like this. There are churches where they almost cultivate it, not intentionally, but certainly in Reformed circles there can be and there exists, I know for a fact, because I’ve spoken to these people, in which they will grow up in the church, have been baptized as an infant, and they come to a certain age in which they are called to agree and make public profession, and the public profession is not their personal saving interest in Christ. It is their personal mental assent to a catechism or a creed. And that person can hold position, as in be a member of the church, and have the consent and blessing of the minister to marry those who are genuinely born again within the congregation.

I don’t mean to say this to discredit all the wealth and riches that some of the heritage there may possess, but in conversation with a gentleman once about these things, and I said to him, had I been your minister, you never would have married your wife, not as you remained in a state of willing unbelief, though you had mental assent. Your refusal to repent and believe the gospel for yourself—there’s no way I would have conducted and officiated the marriage of you and your wife.

His jaw nearly hit the floor, his entire life flashing before his eyes in a way. What would it have been like had I been given that advice?

There is the error, of course, of making things too easy. But there’s also the error in making more of repentance in a certain way in which it becomes a bondage to the soul, that the grief over repentance becomes almost synonymous with the grounds of justification. That I know I’m justified by the measure of grief that I feel. And so the aim and the focus of the heart is to try and grieve more. If only I could grieve more. If I could grieve more, then I might know that I’m saved. If I could grieve more, then I might know that I am elect and then can come to Christ.

And so the bondage of that is substituting the simplicity of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. And it becomes a matter of works.

So we avoid those errors. And yet, what we have here in John’s language of verse 8 of Matthew 3 is the fact that there should be evidence of, or evidence seen in, or there should be proof that someone truly is a child of God, truly possesses saving faith. Works meet for repentance, that align with repentance.

This is a subject that we’ve been looking at over the past number of weeks, and it’s important that we get it right. Our Shorter Catechism tells us, as I mentioned in a previous message, that repentance unto life includes full purpose of and endeavour after new obedience. It’s not just the confession of sin, the acknowledging of sin. There is a purpose. There is a journey that opens up before the penitent of pursuing new obedience.

It is fruit, evidence of change.

So let’s consider then the fruits of repentance. Note in the first place with me, fruit that matches the profession. Fruit that matches the profession.

John says, “Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance.” Meet for repentance. Fruit that is suitable or fitting or corresponding to the thing professed. You profess this turning from your sin, you profess that you truly believe that you have this, you’ve made this decision, you profess through maybe even your willingness to go through the waters of baptism, you profess something, but is there the evidence? Is there that which ought to correspond with repentance?

See, repentance gives evidence. It has a certain character. It shows, as we shall see more as we progress, grief and hatred of sin. It cannot continue in the old life. It cannot be a friend to that which God is the enemy of. Repentance is a turning from sin to God, and if that be true, then it cannot allow us to walk in the same path.

So we might say, the old path must be broken. The old path must be broken. That is, again, part of what John drives at as he preaches and he addresses different individuals. If you go down and you read through Matthew 3, I’ll not do it for the sake of time, but he addresses various individuals who come to him, and he is asking them, break with the old ways. You cannot continue in the old path. There must be a real change, a real break.

Someone may say, I have repented, and by that they mean I have confessed my sin, I have acknowledged it, and yet they’ve never broken with the sin. They’ve never even tried to break with the sin. There’s no intent to break with the sin. There’s a confession of it, but there’s no breaking with it.

What John was looking for is a real evidence of change. He was looking for not just repentance in the general, but repentance in the specifics. So that if you had particular sins, then you should turn from those particular sins and break with them. There has to be a break. A break with the old path.

It has been illustrated at times that repentance is really a 180, a right about turn in which a person is pursuing a particular path. It’s not necessarily a worldly, carnal, godless path. It may be a religious path. It may be a path in which one has been baptized and catechized and gone through Sunday school and sits in church and reads their Bible and even prays. But there’s never been a real break with sin.

Repentance must show evidence of a break with the evil that we profess now to hate because it’s against God. So the thief can’t carry on in his thieving ways, and the adulterer cannot carry on in their adulterous ways. There will be a break, a genuine break.

Also, the false refuge must be removed. The false refuge must be removed.

John identifies that there is a false refuge in the heart of those coming to him. Look at verse 9, as he addresses the Pharisees and Sadducees: “And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father.” We have Abraham to our father. There is a false refuge. We have Abraham to our father.

This is like you would do evangelism in Northern Ireland. And to some degree you face it here, but it was more distinct there. And I think it’s because in many, at least in the past, there’s a strong sense of identity to the mainstream denominations. So someone who was raised a Catholic and is still a Catholic, or someone who was raised in the Church of England and is still in the Church of England, or someone who was raised in a liberal Presbyterian denomination and is still there, you would go to them, and this was not an anomaly. This was not some odd every so often you would face it. It was almost predictable.

You would say to them something to the effect of, are you a Christian? Or are you saved? Are you converted? And the response will be, I have my church, or I go to church. It’s not answering the question at all. Are you converted? Are you saved? Are you born again? Oh, I have my church. It’s not what I asked. I’m not interested. That’s not the real question.

This is the way it was for John. The Pharisees and Sadducees, he’s trying to get to the heart of the issue, real personal change, breaking with sin, abandoning all their harbored, the certain things that had become sanctified, like you’re allowed to do these things and no one’s really going to give you much grief about it. Sanitized sins, we might say. And John’s having none of it.

He will not permit them to erect this refuge because the real thing they hide behind is this sense of heritage, lineage, and identity. And because they are of the physical line of Abraham, that ought to give them a sense of confidence in their covenant relationship before God and a sense of confidence in their acceptance. And John knows how they think because he was raised in that environment. And as they come to him, he doesn’t have to wait for them to respond.

“Think not to say within yourselves,” I know exactly how you’re thinking. You’re out here and the card that you present when asked whether or not you’re really a child of God, the card you present is, we be of Abraham’s seed. And for John, he didn’t care. I don’t care.

Again, I say John is treating them all as if they’re Gentiles. He’s calling them to a baptism that aligns with treating them as if they’re Gentiles. So even in his call, their argument, we be Abraham’s seed, it’s almost, we can circumvent this. We’re genuine. We don’t need to go through this. We’re of Abraham’s seed, but this baptism is for you. It doesn’t matter. Your heritage is not saving.

Being raised in a Christian home, being brought to church every day, familiarity with the Bible, being the one who was able to always put their hand up in the questions in Sunday school and give the correct answer, having memorized the catechism, receiving awards for it—none of that matters. It’s not the issue.

False refuge must be removed. So I ask you, do you possess a false refuge? Do you possess a false refuge? Now, you may not be Jewish, so you’re not saying, we have Abraham to our father, but you have something else. You have something else. I’ve been baptized, preacher. So what? There was a man in Acts 8 who was baptized, but his heart was not right before God.

Don’t come to me and, worse, do not go before God and profess loudly some religious identity or some religious garb or some religious, something that you’ve been taught has value and esteem if it is not something that produces real change in your life. You can have all the sound doctrine, you can follow in the religion of your family, you can possess a respectable name, all of that, and there are mercies, no doubt there are mercies. But you’re like the fig tree without fruit, all leafy, no fruit thereon.

The specific sin must be answered. The specific sin also must be answered. Fruits meet for repentance must often then deal with the specific sin of your heart and your life. Let’s not ignore it, because we are very adept at falling back into this posture of, well, we’re all sinners.

That’s true. That’s true. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. None of us escaped this. But when it comes to repentance, it needs to deal with the specific areas in which we have most rebelled against God, as we perceive it. It is not enough to have your pet thing.

Listen, there are all sorts of people, all sorts of people. They’re irreligious. They don’t even believe in God and they have values and certain characteristics that are positive. You can meet men that have not any thought of Christ and yet they’re very honest in their dealings. They would never cheat in their taxes and they have no intent of ever cheating anyone else. They’re upstanding people of integrity, at least in that area.

And what we can tend to do then is that we will acknowledge that there’s a general problem with us, and we may even show forth a certain conformity along many lines that come easily to us. But the thing that repentance, the fruit is the issue, the issue. It’s the sin you treasure. It’s the cherished idol. It’s the habit, the practice, that which you will not break from. That’s the thing that needs to be named and turned away from.

So you can have all this air of religiosity and yet you have a certain bitterness toward a person. You won’t let go of it. You need to deal with it. There’s no real repentance in your life. So there’s fruit that matches the profession.

There’s fruit that searches the soul. Turn over to 2 Corinthians 7. There’s a part of this when we looked at it that I did not really focus on. Turn to 2 Corinthians 7. I want to very quickly show what happened in the Corinthians when they responded positively to Paul’s call to repentance and change.

And instead of showing a shallow sorrow, there was a real godly sorrow that worked repentance to salvation. But in verse 11, he describes the fruit of it, right? He said, I can see this. This is what can be seen. Verse 11: “For behold this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort.”

“What carefulness it wrought in you! Yea, what clearing of yourselves! Yea, what indignation! Yea, what fear! Yea, what vehement desire! Yea, what zeal! Yea, what revenge!” “In all things ye have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter.” You have given fruit. You show fruit.

What does he mean by carefulness? That word is used to describe the earnest concern that they had in their heart when exposed to the fact that they had been careless. They become careful instead of the carelessness that once marked them. This is the spirit that looks and when exposed says, yes, okay, I didn’t realize that. I will immediately deal with that. I confess it before God, turn it out of my life, and put it onto the blood.

Clearing. When he mentions clearing, this is the opposite of self-defense or excuse making. It’s the desire to be clear in God’s sight. When the penitent deals with the matter by right confession, receiving the correction, embracing the necessary restitution and everything that’s necessary, there is this clearing.

Indignation, he uses that word. What’s that? That’s the holy anger that they felt against their sin when it was exposed. When it was put before them, they became—this holy indignation arose within their heart. Now that often happens when sin is exposed. However, sometimes the holy indignation is toward the one exposing it.

That’s how the religious leaders responded to Stephen, wasn’t it? When Stephen was pointing out their sin and dealing with the matter in Acts 7, indignation rose up. They were mad. They gnashed on him with their teeth. This fit of rage rose up within them. They stoned him to death.

But in repentance, the anger is toward the fact that there has been sin in my life and I’ve dishonored my God. It’s an expression of hatred. It’s not just sin’s a bad thing. I hate it. I hate it. I want to be away from it and rid of it.

It mentions fear. What does he mean by fear? It’s again this holy fear or reverence before God, fear of offending God. Knowing that God has been offended, fear grips the heart.

He speaks of vehement desire. This is this yearning, this longing for restored communion. That which has been broken, that which has been lost, there is a cry, oh, let it not continue. Now that I have realized there’s a breach between me and God, let that be restored. Let there be repair. Let there be restoration. “Oh that I knew where I might find him,” says the heart that knows it has lost out with God.

So vehement desire is this longing to heal the breach.

Zeal shows the earnestness of real action. Zeal came upon them. And so, again, repentance isn’t some passive experience. It’s active. It engages with zeal to do the right thing.

And revenge is this set of resolve to deal severely with it. Not trying to find the easy way out. Let’s be severe. Remove it. Get rid of it.

In other words, repentance is not just an inward feeling, it shows itself in real fruit. That’s what the Corinthians proved before Paul, and he says, “In all things ye have approved yourselves to be clear in this matter.” You’ve given evidence of real change, and that’s what John was after. It’s what he’s pressing upon the conscience of the religious elite of his day. Show the evidence of change.

In the third place, there’s fruit that repairs the damage. Fruit that repairs the damage. There’s a willingness to repair. Now, the degree of repairing possible varies. But there are a number of things to keep in mind.

First of all, there is restitution, restitution. At times, the fruit of genuine repentance will be seen in a form of restitution. This is what Zacchaeus was willing to do if indeed he had been guilty of wrongfully taking. He says in Luke 19, verse 8, “if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” That’s restitution.

Now Zacchaeus looking back, maybe there have been claims made against him. Maybe people, they just didn’t like what he was doing for a living. And there may have been this thought in his mind, if it’s true, if it’s true that I have wronged anyone, if it can be proven that I have taken more than I ought to have exacted, then I will not just restore what I took, I will restore fourfold.

Sometimes that’s necessary. You want to show to someone that there’s a real change. I mean, think of it. You’ve taken something from someone and you need to restore it. If you give to the exact penny what you have taken, it may go some way to showing there has been a change. But the other way of them looking at it is, I would appreciate a thanks for the interest-free loan.

Restitution wants to make sure there’s no accusation of any taking advantage. Restitution.

There’s redress as well. Sometimes we cannot engage in restitution. Things can’t be repaired with something material. And so, we do everything we can to restore confidence. We try to redress however we can.

Indeed, we may go to the individual whom we have harmed or who has been on the receiving end of our actions, and we not simply say to them how sorry we are. We will offer to them the power to actually control what repentance and change will look like. You will say to them, how can I make it up to you? And that shows humility, because now they’re in control.

There’s reconciliation. In Matthew 5, in the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord Jesus addresses the fact that if there has been an injury, don’t even try to worship. We are to be reconciled to our brother and then come and offer our gift to God. God sees how there is a breach between us and another. He sees that, and it matters to Him that we do what we can to repair it.

And so we at least attempt a reconciliation. Now, not every attempt of reconciliation will produce reconciliation. Not all whom we have wronged will be willing to actually reconcile, but let it be that within our power and to the degree that may be reasonable, we have sought to reconcile. We go to that person not making demands, not controlling their behavior, but simply endeavoring, however you may, to get the cogs of reconciliation turning. It may take a while, but we begin.

And then there’s revelation. Sometimes our sins are public. Sometimes our sins are of such a nature that it would be in our interest to actually stand before people and say, I’m guilty in this regard, and I repent of my sin. There are times when the church may call upon a member to do that because, again, the public nature of what has been done. And should it be ignored, people are left to wonder whether the matter has ever been addressed at all. And the crime, the sin, the guilt, what has been done is of such a public nature there ought to be a public confession.

That is not the case for every sin. Not every repentance requires this. We do not need to do it for every penitent in every circumstance, but I mention it. Sometimes it may be the right course.

In the fourth place, fruit that walks in obedience. Fruit that walks in obedience.

If I can just go back to something I mentioned about the change that takes place and just summarize it for you in this way. There needs to be a forsaking of the old path. I cannot emphasize that enough. There needs to be a forsaking of the old path. The old path is the one in which we pursued life without Christ, where we pursued our own desires. And perhaps we, even as professing believers, pursued a path that we were not aware was against the living God.

We will forsake the old path. We will then embrace the new path. Embrace the new path. Repentance will not just leave us in the neutral. It is the abandoning of the old to embrace the new.

When you read, and I will not turn there, but if you read Colossians 3, I think it is, and there’s a similar passage in Ephesians, where it addresses the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new. And it shows this renovation that takes place, that Christianity is more than just a message we agree to. It actually produces a reformation, a renovation of the life.

The putting off of the old man with his deeds, the old life, we abandon it. We seek to distance ourselves from it. Its behavior, its language, its crowd, everything it perceives to be popular, acceptable, relevant, but we know it is not conducive to a life of godliness, it is not in accordance with the revealed will of God. And there is an abandoning of the old life, a putting off of the old man with his deeds, and in its place, putting on of a new man. And that new man comes with his own deeds, his own activity. And we fill then our lives with that which is new and honoring to God.

“Cease to do evil; Learn to do well,” Isaiah 1. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. This is evidence of repentance, the changed life.

Yes, the thief who stops stealing and starts then to actually add blessing. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians 4: “Let him that stole steal no more,” he calls him “to work with his hands” that he may have to give to them that are in need. So it’s not just, he’s gone from taking what didn’t belong to him to giving away what does belong to him. Transformation.

We come before God and we say, I can’t do better than the summation of our new vision of life, than the language that the Apostle Paul used in his conversion, Acts 9:6, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” It doesn’t matter what I did in the past. If that’s not Your will, I’m done with it. And that goes right across the board. It’s entire, it’s complete, it is full. Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?

And then there’s a focusing on the great objective. What’s the great objective? To glorify God. “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God,” 1 Corinthians 10:31. And so then the whole life, abandoning the old, embracing the new, and this ongoing focus that never departs the vision, does this glorify God? Does this glorify God?

We try to escape difficulty, but we’re just trying to make our life easier rather than asking, maybe staying in the difficult place is what glorifies God. We try to justify a relationship, telling ourselves that person’s not a Christian and I’m trying to help them. But ultimately it is pulling you away. You’re getting sidetracked. You’re becoming more like them rather than them being influenced by you. And the real call of the Spirit to the heart is give it up. Sever that relationship. Don’t get entangled romantically with someone who’s going to draw you away from Christ.

Glorify God.

Finally, fruit that rests in Christ. Fruit that rests in Christ.

It’s not just this relationship with sin, turning from it and turning unto this new life and this new obedience. Nor is it something, as I said in past weeks, that happens once. It never really occurs again in our experience. Repentance is ongoing. That’s the first thing.

The fruit that rests in Christ, it’s the fruit of repentance that rests in Christ is continuous, is continuous. It’s always, it’s always ongoing. There’s this ongoing willingness of discovery concerning the depravity of our heart. It’s a willingness for the Spirit to actually, as David said, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.” “See if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

It invites the illuminating power of the Spirit by the Word. It invites that spotlight that may expose yet new areas that have yet to be conquered by grace. The Christian is always on this exploration of discovery of remaining corruption, abandoning it with the same vigor as first attended their saving relationship with Christ, and walking after new obedience.

It continues. This is how we honor the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s how we show our appreciation. We don’t want to be entangled with all the things that caused Him suffering on Calvary. We’re ashamed. And we seek not to multiply then those things that brought Him such grief and sorrow.

It continues.

It also comforts. This ongoing repentance, this genuine repentance and turning from sin and on to the Lord and endeavoring to obey the Lord brings a certain comfort. What it begins to show to your heart is when the question is asked within our own soul, am I really a Christian? We begin to actually give evidence of change to our own conscience.

Now I’m not saying we rest there, nor am I saying that it will be as strong in all as it may be in some, nor am I saying that our assessment may always be accurate, but there is an element in which genuinely perceived the humble heart, when the question is asked, am I really the Lord’s? There can be a reflection of this turning from sin and turning to new obedience, and seeing that played out in an ongoing way in the life.

When you’re able to see that God is definitely at work in my life, it’s not everything I would want it to be, but it is certainly more than I would be capable of without His grace. It brings comfort. There’s a God who’s working in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure. There is a fruit of righteousness. There is an evidence of Christ’s likeness. There is a frame of humility that embraces all that He loves and shuns all that He hates.

It continues, it comforts, and it cherishes. You see, repentance gets rid of, it turns away from everything that gets in the way of our relationship with Christ.

Heaven is going to be the undiluted, unveiled glory of the risen Redeemer before us. And fellowship and communion of the believer on that day will be deeper, more profound and meaningful than anything ever experienced this side of eternity. We are going to be overwhelmed with a sense of His love. And we are going to be helped in being overwhelmed by our love toward Him. We are going to experience a deep, a depth of fellowship unlike anything we can begin to fathom.

But it begins here. It begins here.

Every sin cherished, every idol harbored, everything that’s against His will that we make room for, severs, hinders, builds a wall, causes a difficulty in actually enjoying the sweet fellowship of our Lord. Repentance brings about, if the grace of the Lord is truly in it, it brings about a sense of the bitterness of sin, which makes way then for the sweetness that there is in Christ.

That’s what Thomas Watson said. Till sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet. Till sin be bitter. So repentance is that recognition, that illumination, that acceptance of the awful bitterness of sin, and it cannot compare to the sweet taste of fellowship with Christ.

Yes, we continue to repent because sin continues to rise up and get in the way of our fellowship.

And beloved, I urge you, do not fear repentance. Oh, fear making it the ground of your acceptance. Fear making it the very foundation of your justification. It is not. Your justification is the person and work of Christ. Your turning from sin is not the grounds of justification. But it is a fruit, a fruit of real spiritual life.

And though the world, indeed even in the church, shun any willingness to really engage in a life of repentance, doing battle with sin, turning away from everything that grieves the Holy Spirit, being sensitive to the voice of the Lord, while they may not think much of it, let it not be true of you. Embrace the grace that is repentance.

Invite the Spirit to aid you in deepening that work. And read the Word of God to the end of your own sanctification. Jesus prays for you: “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” What’s He saying? Change them, Lord. Change them. Out with the old, in with the new. Out with the unrighteousness, in with the righteousness. Out with the disobedience, in with the obedience. And use Your Word, Lord.

And we read the Word in order to be changed. If you have never repented, it’s time you did. If you have never turned from your sin, then you must or you will never see the kingdom of heaven. May the Lord open your eyes.

Let’s bow together in prayer.

Time to seek the Lord. In just a moment, everyone will get up. Some will leave. Some will discuss and talk. So there’s a little moment, a little window right now.

If the Lord is working, if a sense of conviction is going on in your mind and in your heart, if you say, preacher, I’m not quite sure what I need to do, just cry to the Lord. Make confession of your sinfulness. Name the most grievous sins you can think of briefly before the Lord and believe that in Jesus Christ and through His cross work and resurrection, He will give you life.

Only believe.

Lord of mercy, awaken, convict, draw, save. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on this people. Fall upon that individual that is wrestling and fighting. Give deciding grace and show mercy that there might be here this very night new life enjoyed.

We thank Thee for Thy love. We acknowledge, Lord, that even in our best frame we fall very far short. Deepen Thy gracious work in every heart. Let Thy people enjoy the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the nearness of the Lord Jesus Christ, the sunshine of His sweet countenance, the blessing of His amen.

O God, grant Thy benediction may be upon all Thy people. We would walk in newness of life to the praise of Thy glorious grace. Bless our fellowship. Let our conversation honor Thee. May the Holy Spirit be upon us for the week that has opened up before us. Hear us now, Lord.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Spirit be the portion of the people of God now and evermore. Amen.