Living A Life of Genuine Repentance
How do we know when we’ve actually repented? We want to be people who leave their sin behind and live holy lives, but how do we do that? Is it even possible? Here are a few thoughts on the topic.
Lately I’ve been considering the topic of genuine repentance. A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on the responses of the sailors & the Ninevites in the book of Jonah. Both of them encountered God - the sailors saw his power through a great storm and the Ninevites heard of His coming judgment through the Prophet Jonah.
There is much to debate on whether either one of those parties gave us a full picture of repentance. One offers sacrifices and makes vows while the other declares a fast and stops doing their evil deeds. The reality is, it’s impossible to know their hearts and the story leaves out a lot of details.
Nevertheless, the scenario got me thinking… what is genuine repentance? And how can we tell when we have actually repented.
In 2 Corinthians Paul writes about “worldly grief” and says this:
“For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.”
—2 Corinthians 7:10
Isn’t that all too common? We apologize quickly because we feel bad for a few reasons.
We feel bad for getting caught.
We feel bad for hurting the other person
We feel bad about how our actions make us look
None of those actually lead to repentance though. All grief goes away when either enough time has passed, the person we hurt says they’re not hurt anymore, or people forget about what we’ve done and we’re left worse than we were before.
So how do we know when we’ve actually repented versus felt “worldly grief?” I’m going to venture to share 5 indications that we, or someone else, has actually repented.
There’s a renewed passion for holiness
Let’s face it. You and I care very little for holiness on our own. We need God’s help in caring whether we live like Jesus or not. So when we’re drifting and perhaps spending less time with God, we’re not going to drift into holiness.
When we’re living in sin our passion for holiness greatly decreases - in every area of life. The scripture very rarely talks about sin and ungodliness in an isolated manner. Oftentimes when Paul or other New Testament writers are offering up encouragement to live godly lives, they are contrasting a life of holiness with several different areas of sin that a person could be living in. Galatians 5 is one example of that.
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
—Galatians 5:19-24
When we repent in one area of life, it will inevitably have an impact on the other areas of our life as well. On the contrary, if we’re simply trying to improve ourselves morally & stop doing the sin, then none of our life will have an impact. We’ll spend all our time thinking about this one area while falling into sin in other areas.
So much of repentance is falling out of love with sin & in love with Jesus - which we’ll talk about is the next point.
There’s been a change of heart about the sin
You and I sin because we love sin. It’s what we’re best at and what we’ve been trained to do throughout our lives. Since day one we have been experts in “just doing what feels best.” If we were to get to the core of any sin issue in our lives and ask the question, “Why do I keep sinning in this way?” The answer would be clear: because we love that sin or what that sin can provide us.
So the problem we need to fix is not just a moral or external problem that people can see, but an internal and heart level problem that no one can see. We need a shift of love. We need to go from loving our sin to loving Jesus.
Jesus clearly says, “If you love me you will keep my commands.” (John 14:15) Which means that when we’re not keeping His commands the root of our problem is love for Him.
We must see sin for what it is - gross, full of corruption, & offensive to God. We must see Jesus for who He is - just, full of compassion, & worth every bit of our obedience.
Only God can create this kind of disdain for sin in us. We need to ask the Spirit of God inside of us (the one who convicts us of our sin) to help us feel what God feels when we sin. My bet is that if we felt the grief that the Holy Spirit felt when we sin, we would change quickly.
God hates sin and hates what it does to us. We will never experience Him the way we were created to when walking in sin. Asking Him to change our deepest core love - away from our sin and onto Him - will result in long-lasting repentance.
There’s a reliance on Spirit-power as opposed to will-power
In some ways I think Christians are the most optimistic people in the world. How often have you and said, “This is the last time! I won’t do this again!”
I know I have. And the truth of the matter is, almost 99% of the time I did the thing again that I didn’t want to do. And I would assume that you have a similar story. You sin and then you look at the result of that sin and you hate it. Then you commit yourself to never doing it again. Only to realize the next day that you have, in fact, done the same thing again.
I don’t think this is where God intends us to be. I think he’s created a way for us to actually experience freedom from all of the sin that we are tangled up in. After all, Galatians 5:1 says, “It is for freedom that Christ set us free.”
If that’s true, which I certainly believe it is, then there’s a whole lot of freedom that you and I might be missing out on.
I think when we are consistently relying on our own willpower to defeat the sin in our lives, we are remaining in bondage. We are a slave to our own ability to live holy. And, as you can imagine, that is pretty intense slavery. You and I don’t have the capabilities of actually living holy lives. We don’t need more willpower we need Spirit power.
Matthew chapter 6 is a really important chapter. In it, Jesus talks about praying, fasting, and seeking after the Kingdom of God. This will need to be another blog post, but I believe that three pronged approach to living is the formula for actually living a Spirit empowered life. We don’t need more of ourselves to defeat sin, we need less of ourselves. We are the problem. So when we pray, when we fast, and when we seek the kingdom, we are calling out to God and asking for more of him and less of us.
In order to get Spirit power we need less of us. Christ is made strong in our weakness - not in our attempts to be strong. When we spend time praying and fasting we are acknowledging our weakness and, therefore, calling out for Christ’s strength to work in us. This is the only way to actually live the repentance we want to live.
The change has been long lasting
This may take a few weeks to see, but has the change been long lasting? When we only feel bad for getting caught we’re likely to go back to the sin when time has passed. Once we perceive that our sin is “out of the news cycle” then we’re prone to pick it back up again.
True and genuine repentance leaves long-lasting change. True and genuine repentance always leaves us looking more like Jesus in the long term, not just a short term.
Part of what enables us to walk in repentance in a specific area for a long time is a repentance plan.
Think about this for a second… In the area of your life where you are stuck in sin, what does it look like to live 100% like Jesus in this area? And how do we get there? Look at what Philippians 2 says,
…though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
—Philippians 2:6-8
Jesus was fully God and fully man but according to Philippians 2, he didn’t flex his God muscles but rather He obeyed just as any other man would.
This means, as a man, Jesus was 100% obedient at all times. As a man, Jesus had to practice following his Father. Which means that we can learn from Jesus about how to actually follow the father and become obedient. It will take practice, and we will fail - unlike Jesus - but it is possible to walk and obedience in the same power that Jesus walked in which is our only shot at long-term change.
There’s been godly fruit in the opposite direction
Finally, for us to know there has been genuine repentance, we need to see godly fruit in the opposite direction. One thing I know to be true is that we’ll never become something we don’t have a vision for. How will we be able to take practical
steps of change in a direction if we don’t know the end goal of that direction?
For example. If I’m a perpetual gossiper then I don’t need to simply stop gossiping. What I need to do is to become a perpetual encourager. I need to become someone who honors people and shows dignity to them.
If I’m a thief, I don’t need to simply stop stealing things. I need to become generous and begin giving things away. (Ephesians 4:28)
This is the radical nature of the Kingdom of God. We don’t just stop doing bad things, we start doing things that seem radically different than who we were prior to Christ changing us. This is what it means to be a new creation. The old us is dead and gone and the new us is alive and here. That new us can do things a new way in light of a new Kingdom in accordance with a new King.
Thanks for reading and, if you have any thoughts you want to share, feel free to email me. Be sure to subscribe for access to the next blog.
—Brandon