Repentance: The Most Misunderstood Word in the Gospel

Few words in the Bible have been more argued over, and few have been used to load heavier burdens on people God never meant to burden. Some are told they have not repented enough to be saved. Others are told repentance is not needed at all. Both are wrong, and the damage from each is real.

So let us find out what the word actually means, and what it does not.

1. What the word means

Repentance means a change of mind. That is the plain force of it: a mind made up one way, and then made up another.

It is not primarily an emotion, though emotion often attends it. It is not sorrow, though sorrow may lead to it. It is not reformation of life, though a changed life follows it. It is the mind changing its verdict.

You may watch it happen in a story the Lord Jesus Christ told about two sons:

"But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went." (Matthew 21:28-29)

There is the whole thing in one sentence. He said no. Then he repented: he changed his mind — and went. The change of mind came first; the going followed.

That order matters more than almost anything else on this page.

The English word has drifted, and the drift causes trouble. In ordinary speech repent has come to mean feeling wretched about something: a mood, and usually a miserable one. That is not what the Bible means, and a man waiting to feel wretched enough may wait for ever.

The word Scripture uses is a compound: it joins after to the mind. An afterthought, a rethink, a mind arriving at a different verdict than the one it held before.

So the question is never have I felt enough? It is have I come to think differently about God, about myself, and about His Son?

2. A change of mind about what?

Everything turns on the object. A man may change his mind about a great many things and be no nearer to God.

Scripture names the direction:

"Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." (Acts 20:21)

Repentance toward God. The mind turns and faces a Person it had been ignoring, excusing itself before, or arguing with.

And the change is usually threefold.

About God: that He is not the indulgent figure I imagined, nor the hard one I feared; that He is holy, and that I have to do with Him.

About myself: that I am not fundamentally decent with faults, but guilty, and that my case will not stand.

About the Lord Jesus Christ: that He is not merely a teacher or a figure of history, but the Saviour I need, and the only one there is.

When a man’s mind changes on those three, he has repented, whatever the state of his feelings that afternoon.

Notice also what Acts 20:21 does not say. It does not say repentance from every known sin. It says repentance toward God.

The distinction is not a quibble. If repentance were defined as turning from every sin, then no man could ever be certain he had repented, since no man can be certain he has identified every sin he commits. Assurance would be impossible by definition, and the New Testament would be full of anxious people. It is not.

The mind turns toward God. Sins are dealt with afterwards, one by one, for the rest of a life, and the dealing is the fruit, not the root.

3. What repentance is NOT, and this must be said plainly

More people are kept from Christ by false definitions of this word than by open unbelief. Four of them do most of the damage.

It is not penance. There is nothing to work off, no suffering to undergo first, no period of misery to prove you meant it. That idea is a system of men, and Scripture knows nothing of it.

It is not merely feeling sorry. A man may weep buckets and change nothing. Judas felt remorse enough to hang himself and was never saved.

It is not cleaning yourself up first. This one traps the sincere. A man says: I will come to God when I have dealt with this thing. But that is asking a drowning man to swim to shore before he takes the rope. If you could reform yourself first, you would not need a Saviour.

"For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6)

Without strength. That is the condition He came to, and He did not wait for it to improve.

And it is not a work you contribute. If repentance were something you achieve and then present, salvation would be partly earned, and the whole of Ephesians 2 would collapse.

"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Consider what each of these four does to an ordinary person who is genuinely seeking.

Tell him repentance is penance, and he will set about paying a debt that has already been paid, and he will never know when it is enough, because it never is.

Tell him it is deep feeling, and a man of quiet temperament will conclude he cannot be saved because he did not weep, while a man of volatile temperament will mistake an emotional evening for conversion.

Tell him he must clean himself up first, and you have set him a condition God never set, and you have put the cure behind the disease.

And tell him it is a work he contributes, and you have made his salvation part gift and part wage, and the apostle Paul says the two cannot be mixed at all.

"And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace." (Romans 11:6)

Each of these four has kept sincere people away from Christ for decades. That is why the definitions matter, and why this is not a quarrel about words.

4. Then is repentance necessary?

Someone will have grown uneasy by now, and rightly. If repentance is not a work, and not reformation, is it needed at all?

It is. The Lord Jesus Christ said so without qualification:

"I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." (Luke 13:3)

And the apostle Paul preached it to philosophers in Athens who had never heard the law of Moses:

"And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent." (Acts 17:30)

So how do both stand? Because repentance and faith are not two steps. They are one turn seen from two sides.

A man walking away from a house turns round and walks towards it. Turning from and turning to are not two journeys; they are one movement described from two ends. You cannot trust Christ without abandoning your former verdict about yourself, and you cannot abandon that verdict and trust nothing.

"For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God." (1 Thessalonians 1:9)

One turn. To God, from idols.

Look at how the two are used almost interchangeably in the same book, because that interchange is the proof.

The apostle Peter tells a crowd to repent. The apostle Paul tells a jailer to believe. The same book records both, and neither writer thought he was preaching a different gospel from the other.

"And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." (Acts 16:31)

The jailer was not told to repent, in that word. Was he then saved without repentance? Of course not: a man who has just fallen down trembling and asked what he must do to be saved has already changed his mind about a great deal. The change had happened; the apostle Paul named the other half of the same turn.

This is why John’s Gospel, written expressly so that men might believe and have life, does not use the word repent even once. Not because repentance is optional, but because believing on Christ is repentance arriving at its object.

"But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." (John 20:31)

And there is a plain reason God attached salvation to a change of mind rather than to a standard of behaviour. A standard would have shut out the dying, the disabled, the imprisoned, the illiterate and the man with an hour left. A change of mind is available to every one of them, on any bed, in any language, at any hour. The thief on the cross could not reform, could not be baptized, could not make restitution, and could not join anything. He could change his mind about who was hanging beside him, and he did, and it was enough.

5. Who gives it

Here is a mercy that men often miss, and it settles the anxious.

Repentance is not something you must manufacture out of your own resources and offer up as your qualification. Scripture speaks of it as something God grants:

"When they heard these things, they held their peace, and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life." (Acts 11:18)

And what leads a man to it is not the fear of hell alone. It is something warmer:

"Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?" (Romans 2:4)

The goodness of God leadeth thee. Not the terror of God. Men are more often broken by kindness than by threats, and God knows it.

Which means a man who finds himself troubled about his soul while reading a page like this is not working something up. He is being led.

And notice where the granting appears in that verse. The Jerusalem believers were not debating whether Gentiles could repent if they tried hard enough. They looked at what had happened and concluded that God had granted it: that the change of mind they were seeing had a source outside the men in whom it appeared.

The same apostle Paul who preached repentance in Athens wrote to a young pastor about the manner of dealing with opponents, and the same assumption is underneath it:

"In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth." (2 Timothy 2:25)

That is worth sitting with if you have been praying for someone for years. You are not waiting for them to generate something. You are asking God to give it, which is exactly what the verse tells you to expect.

6. The two sorrows

"For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death." (2 Corinthians 7:10)

Note what sorrow does and does not do. It worketh repentance: it leads to the change of mind. It is not the change of mind itself.

And there are two kinds, indistinguishable from outside. Both weep.

Worldly sorrow grieves at consequences — at being found out, at what must now be faced. Remove the consequences and it evaporates.

Godly sorrow grieves at the thing itself, before God, and would grieve if nobody ever knew.

Two men in one week showed the difference. Peter denied his Lord with oaths, went out and wept bitterly, and was restored. Judas betrayed Him, felt remorse enough to return the money and end his life, and was not. Same week, same Lord betrayed, two sorrows, two ends.

There is a practical test, and it is worth applying honestly.

Ask what you are actually sorry about. If the sin could be guaranteed never to be discovered, and could be guaranteed to cost you nothing whatever — would you still be grieved that you did it?

That question separates the two sorrows more quickly than any amount of introspection, and most people know the answer immediately.

7. What repentance looks like in an actual person

Enough definition. What does it look like when it happens?

The publican in the temple is the clearest picture Scripture gives, and it is worth noticing how little he does.

"And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other." (Luke 18:13-14)

He makes no promises. He offers no plan of improvement. He does not undertake to be better. He agrees with God about what he is, and he asks for mercy.

And he goes home justified.

Notice also the man standing near him. The Pharisee had the better life by every visible measure, and he went home unchanged, because a man who has nothing to confess has nothing to bring.

Look at what he says, because there is one word in it that is easily lost in translation. He does not say a sinner. He prays as a man who believes there is only one worth mentioning: God be merciful to me the sinner.

That is what the change of mind produces. Not a man comparing himself favourably with others in the room, but a man who has stopped comparing altogether because he has seen Someone else.

And the word he uses for merciful is not the ordinary one. It is the word for the mercy seat: the place where blood was applied. He is asking, without knowing all he is asking, for what the cross would provide.

He went home justified while the religious man went home as he came. That story was told by the Lord Jesus Christ to people "which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others" (Luke 18:9), and it has lost none of its aim.

8. What follows it

If repentance is a change of mind and not a reformed life, does the life matter?

It matters enormously — as consequence, never as condition.

"Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance." (Matthew 3:8)

Read that carefully, because whole systems have been built on misreading it. It does not say bring forth fruits in order to repent. It says fruits meet for repentance — fruits appropriate to it, fruits that match it, fruits that show it happened.

An apple tree does not grow apples in order to become an apple tree. It grows them because it is one.

So a man who has genuinely changed his mind about God, himself and Christ will not stay where he was. Zacchaeus came down from the tree and made restitution nobody demanded of him. But he was not saved by the restitution; he made restitution because salvation had come to his house that day, and he said so.

And notice who assesses the fruit. Not the believer, anxiously auditing himself; not other believers, appointed as inspectors. The fruit is evidence, and evidence is for the observer.

Scripture never tells a man to examine his fruit in order to discover whether he is saved. It tells him to look at Christ, and it tells him what is written:

"These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life." (1 John 5:13)

A man who is looking at his fruit to find assurance is looking in the wrong direction, and he will find both more and less than he hoped.

9. "I have repented before and gone back"

This is the honest difficulty of a great many people, and it deserves better than encouragement.

First, distinguish two things that share a name. There is repentance unto salvation, which happens once, when a man first changes his mind about Christ and trusts Him. And there is the daily repentance of a believer, who sins, agrees with God about it, and goes on.

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)

The second is not a repeat of the first. A son who has grieved his father does not become a stranger and reapply for the family; he comes as a son who has done wrong.

Second, if you are troubled about having gone back, consider what that trouble indicates. A man with no life in him does not grieve over being cold. The very distress is evidence of something alive.

Third, be careful of a trap that catches sincere people. A man begins to wonder whether he ever really repented, and so he repents again to be sure, and then wonders whether that was real, and so on, and he ends up trusting his repentance instead of trusting Christ.

That is a subtle exchange, and it is deadly. Repentance was never the thing that saved you. It was the turn that brought you to the One who did.

Nobody is saved by the quality of his repentance any more than a drowning man is saved by the elegance of his grip on the rope.

10. The one thing that would settle it today

Suppose you are not sure. Suppose you have read this far and cannot tell whether the change described has ever happened in you.

Then do not spend another year examining the question. Settle it now, deliberately, and know the day.

You are not asked to feel a certain amount, or to promise reform, or to arrive worthy. You are asked to agree with God about what you are, and to trust the One who died for exactly that.

"Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." (John 6:37)

In no wise — under no circumstance, for no reason, on no account. There is no exception written into that promise, and yours would have been the one to need it.

"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." (Acts 16:31)

And do not wait for a better moment. There is a warning in Scripture about the striving of God with a man, and it is not endless:

"And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man." (Genesis 6:3)

That is not said to frighten anyone into a decision. It is said because it is true, and because a man who intends to attend to this eventually should know that eventually is not a date he controls.

The publican did not schedule his prayer. He was in the temple, he saw himself, and he spoke. It took him one sentence.

11. "Repent and be baptized": the verse that troubles people

One verse is quoted more than any other against everything written above, and it should be faced rather than avoided.

"Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." (Acts 2:38)

Read who is being addressed. This is Jerusalem, seven weeks after the crucifixion, and the men listening are the men who had cried crucify him. The apostle Peter has just told them so to their faces. Their specific national guilt is in view, and baptism was the public act by which a Jew broke with that verdict and identified himself with the One his nation had rejected.

And whatever the verse means, it cannot mean that baptism obtains forgiveness, because the same apostle Peter, in the same book, watched forgiveness arrive before any water was involved:

"While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word... Then answered Peter, Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?" (Acts 10:44,46-47)

They received the Holy Ghost first. The water came afterwards, and it came as acknowledgment of what had already happened. If baptism were the means of forgiveness, that account could not stand.

And the apostle Paul settles it for anyone still uncertain:

"For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." (1 Corinthians 1:17)

A man sent to preach the means of salvation, and not to administer it, has told you which is which.

12. "How can I know whether I have really repented?"

This question is asked by two very different people, and they need opposite answers.

The first has never changed his mind at all. He is comfortable, he intends to sort the matter out eventually, and he asks the question the way a man asks about the weather in a country he does not plan to visit. To him the answer is: the question is not academic, and you already know you have not.

The second is troubled. He has been over it many times, he cannot find the certainty he wants, and he is afraid the change was never real. To him the answer is quite different, and the first thing to say is that his anxiety is itself evidence. A man who has never repented is not kept awake by the fear that he has not.

But do not rest there. Assurance built on the quality of an experience will fail, because experiences fade and memory is unreliable. Assurance is meant to rest somewhere else entirely.

"He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life." (John 5:24)

Read what that verse rests on. Not the vividness of a moment. Not the depth of a sorrow. Heareth and believeth, and then four statements in the present tense about the man who does.

So the honest way through is not to search your memory for a sufficient experience. It is to settle the matter now, plainly, on the word of God, and if it was already settled years ago, you have lost nothing by settling it again today.

A man who does that will find the anxiety loosens, not because he has finally felt enough, but because he has stopped looking at himself.

One more word to the troubled reader, because this article would be incomplete without it.

You may have noticed that everything difficult about this subject arises when a man looks inward for a qualification. Every anxiety on this page — have I felt enough, was it real, did I mean it, have I gone back — is the same anxiety wearing different clothes, and it comes from the same place: looking at yourself for evidence that only Christ can supply.

The cure is not more introspection. It is a different direction of gaze.

"Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith." (Hebrews 12:2)

Author and finisher. He began it and He will complete it, and neither end of it was ever resting on the strength of your grip.

The word that opens the door

Repentance has been made a barrier by men who load it with conditions God never attached. It was never a barrier. It is the door opening.

It costs a man his own opinion of himself, and that is the only price, and it is a price the proud will not pay and the broken pay gladly.

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." (Psalm 51:17)

And heaven is not indifferent when it happens:

"Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." (Luke 15:10)

One sinner. Changing his mind. And a sound in heaven that has nothing to do with how the day felt to him.

Let us Pray:

Our Father, we come before Your throne of grace through the precious name and perfect merit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who alone has opened the way into Your presence.

We thank You for Your beloved Son, and for the unspeakable gift, given to those who had nothing to bring. We praise You for Your preserved Word, which declares "The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance" (Romans 2:4), and which cannot be broken.

We confess before You that we have often been sorry for the consequences of our sin and not for the sin itself. Forgive us, we pray, and cleanse us, for You are faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

We beseech You for every soul reading these words who is yet without Christ. Send forth Your Holy Ghost to convince them of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; open their understanding; and draw them to Your Son before this day is done.

Strengthen Your people who read it. Comfort the discouraged, establish the wavering, and let none go away empty. And use this message to grant repentance unto life to every reader who does not yet know Your Son, for Your glory and not for ours.

We pray all of this to You, O God, our Holy and Heavenly Father, in the precious name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by the power and anointing of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The Most Important Prayer You Will Ever Pray

Before you close this page, one question matters more than everything you have just read: if you died tonight, do you know where you would be?

You cannot be saved by joining a church, by being baptized, by giving money, or by living a decent life. Salvation is not a wage that is earned; it is a gift that is received. Every one of us has sinned, the wages of sin is death, and there is a real hell prepared for sin, but the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross in the sinner's place, was buried, and rose again the third day.

If you know yourself to be a sinner, and you are willing to turn from your sin and trust Him alone, then speak to God now. There are no magic words, but if these words are the cry of your heart, pray them and mean them:

After You Have Prayed

1. Tell somebody today. "That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:9).

2. Begin reading the Bible. Start with the Gospel of John, then Acts, then Romans. Read a little every day. "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2).

3. Talk to your Father every day. You may now come boldly, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. No appointment is needed and no man's permission.

4. Find a Bible-believing church and be baptized. Not to be saved: you already are, but in obedience, and as the public confession of what has happened to you.

5. Rest in this, and do not be shaken by your feelings. "He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). You will still sin; when you do, confess it and go on — "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9).