Repentance — Part One

I invite you to turn once again to the verses we read in Luke chapter 3, and as you turn there, we’ll bow in prayer and ask for God’s help.

Father, we thank you for the opportunity to declare your glory among the nations, to sing your praise, to talk, as it were, to you in word and in song. Now we come to these precious moments when we anticipate that you will talk to us through your Word, the Bible. And so we pray,

Make the Book live to me, O Lord,
Show me thyself within thy Word,
Show me myself and show me my Savior,
And make the Book live to me.[1]

For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Some six hundred years before the events that are before us here in Luke chapter 3, the prophet Isaiah had spoken, without himself necessarily knowing any sense of the one who was to come—had spoken of one who would emerge in the desert, who would be a voice declaring, “Behold your God!”[2] And what Luke records for us here in these studies that are before us in Luke’s Gospel is that here, all of a sudden, on the stage of human history has emerged the one of whom the prophet spoke—that generations had come and gone, wondering if theirs would be the generation in which the one would arise who would be the forerunner of the Messiah. And to this privileged group at this time in history, they had the opportunity not only of knowing that he was present but also of hearing him preach.

And Jesus, speaking of the arrival of John the Baptist on the stage of history, asks the disciples of John as they are leaving, “What did you go out into the desert to see?”[3] “Why,” he says, “did you go out to the desert? What was it you were expecting to see when you made your journey out there?” “A reed swayed by the wind?”[4] That wouldn’t be particularly unusual.

If not, what did you go out to see? [Did you go to see] a man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings’ palaces. Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.”[5]

And so it is that this waiting and wondering crowd is swelling. It comprises soldiers and Sadducees, it is made up of tax collectors and Pharisees, all of them converging in this remote desert region in order to listen to the sensational message of this quite successful preacher. And one can imagine the gathering crowd waiting for John to begin his message on a particular day.

We’re told later on in Luke 3 here that he used many words, exhorting the people. He “preached the good news to them.” That’s verse 18. So, we don’t have the totality of John’s preaching ministry recorded here in the Gospel records, but we have part of it.

And we might wonder at the wonder that must have attached itself to the group as they suddenly became quiet in anticipation of his commencement to speak. And look at verse 7, as he introduces his sermon. Quite an introduction, I think you would agree. We can imagine his closest associates nudging up to him and saying, “What are you trying to do, John? What are you doing? Just when you’ve got a crowd going, just when the people are coming from everywhere, are you trying to ruin everything? Why, John, would you begin in this way? Couldn’t you have had a nicer introduction to your sermon than this?” After all, no preacher seeking to cultivate popularity or to gain quick results begins his sermons by referring to his listeners as “You brood of vipers!” “Good morning,” he said to them, “you bunch of snakes! Who warned you to come and listen to the teaching today?” That’s what it sounded like. There was nothing particularly polite about it at all. One of John’s gifts was not politeness. Nobody could ever accuse John the Baptist of sugarcoating the message of the gospel. He was a strange man in many ways, in a strange place, declaring a strong message.

I’m tempted to suggest that this is the time in which we do need strange men in strange places with strong messages. He doesn’t rush at the people and appeal to their felt needs. He doesn’t pass out literature to the crowd, perhaps cards, suggesting that they write on there sermon topics that they would like to hear him address or that they would tell him all the things that they felt it was necessary for them to know. He doesn’t touch that at all. Quite the contrary!

Instead of coming, as it were, with a pot of paint to paint over all the cracks of their lives, to paint over their disappointments and their failures and their fears, he comes instead with sandpaper—and not the finest of sandpaper that you use for the finishing work. I mean that hairy stuff that the carpenter uses at the beginning of the work, when the painter comes to your home and says, “Now, it’s going to cost a lot of money here before I even put a lick of paint on it.” And you say, “Well, does it have to?” And he says, “Well, of course, I can paint over it, but it will be a dreadful job. What you need me to do is to work very carefully in preparing the surface if you want the finish to be right, if you want the paint to adhere and to stick.” And that is exactly what we find John the Baptist doing. He is, if you like, coming with sandpaper to prepare the surface of the hearts of his listeners by telling them what they need to hear of the good news so that the good news will stick.

One of the questions you might have in the back of your mind as I address you this morning is this: “Why is it that the good news, while welcomed by some and even by me in the past, does not stick? Why is it that we see hundreds of people respond to appeals to follow Christ, and within a matter of weeks or months, the hundreds have dwindled down to half a dozen or to ten or a dozen?” Now, you can keep that in your mind as I proceed and see whether our study this morning at least goes part of the way to answering that question.

As we saw last time, John the Baptist was on the stage of history, speaking in this dramatic fashion, because, as we saw in the second verse, the word of God had come to John.[6] He was not up there with a bright idea or two. He was not up there trying to start a John the Baptist club. He was not up there using his voice simply to manipulate the minds of people. He recognized that God had given to him a voice and given to him a place, but he had given to him a message. And the thing that gave the place and the voice significance, and always does, is the fact of the message being declared.

And the word of God had come to John as the last, if you like, of the Old Testament prophets. As it had come to Jeremiah and to Joel and to Ezekiel and to the rest, so it had come to John, so that he was out, now, on the banks of the waterbeds, in all of this desert region, declaring the word that had come to him.

And it was clearly the staggering nature of his message which caused him to address his listeners in such fearless and pointed terms. For he does speak fearlessly, and he does speak pointedly. His message is deliberately harsh so as to awaken his listeners to the reality of their circumstances. He strikes their conscience, as you will see, with such a directness that it almost takes our breath away, separated from the event by time and by geography. We can only imagine what it felt like to be in the congregation when he begins to speak by saying, “You bunch of snakes!” There’s even a slight ripple that comes from me suggesting it to you now—but it would have been a corporate intake of breath followed by an outrush of breath. “Whoa! ‘You brood of vipers’? Quite an introduction, that!” Describes them as the offspring of poisonous snakes.

Now, we shouldn’t miss the obvious link between the snake and the devil. That’s the point that he’s making. The serpent came, the devil came, in Genesis 3, and brought man into all this chaos. The serpent is described in Revelation 12 as being cast down into the pit.[7] And it is imperative for men and women to hear about their lineage. It’s not uncommon for people to come to me and tell me that their roots go back here, and they go back there, and their great-grandfather came from Wales, and on their mother’s side he came from Germany, and the two got together in Poland, and then… And it’s a long and elaborate story, and I try and listen with great care every time that I hear it. But people are interested in their lineage. And in fact, I haven’t found many people in all of the world that speak more about their lineage than Americans—perhaps because you have such little lineage! I don’t mean that as a judgment; I mean that as an observation. The country is so young. And so there is a search for identity. There is a search for roots. There is a desire to attach myself to something beyond the ephemeral nature of my life. That’s understandable—and especially if we think that along with that comes privilege.

And so John preempts the people who are about to play the nationalist card. He says, “I know that many of you like to say, ‘We belong to Abraham,’” he says, “but I suggest that you don’t do that. Because I’ve just referred to you in relationship to, really, where you belong.” They need to be confronted with the fact of their poisonous, evil, and destructive lineage.

Now, I can imagine the people muttering in the crowd. I don’t think there is any question about it. You don’t have to be too outrageous to assume that people by this point were immediately nudging one another and saying, “I think I’m going to leave. I never heard anything quite as rude as this in all my life. I don’t like him. I don’t like the way he looks, I don’t like the way he sounds, and I don’t like his obvious dogmatism.”

And some of you are already in that predicament this morning, and the problem for you is that you’re right in the middle of a row. And were you not where you are, you would’ve already made a run for it. Because this is Palm Sunday! And you were hoping that you might come, and somebody would wave a little palm branch, and you would have a happy time and go out for lunch, and all of a sudden you find yourself in this catastrophic situation, where there’s some erstwhile crazy Scotsman beginning to introduce you as akin to the group here in the desert wilderness, as a brood of vipers!

You say, “That’s thoroughly rude. That’s not the kind of thing we expect! After all, we’re Americans! We don’t need to hear this stuff from him. We have our background. We have our relationships. There are certain things that accrue to us because of where we were born and what we’ve known. This is our land. This is our place. I mean, don’t be too unkind to us. After all, we know God. If anybody knows God, we know God. It came with our birthright.” And so people like to say, “Well, I’m really not interested in hearing from John the Baptist. I’d like to hear from Jesus. Jesus was a nice person. John was an ugly person. So let us hear from Jesus.”

Well, I’ll be glad to let you hear from Jesus if you turn for a moment to John chapter 8. And I want to show you that while it is customary to contrast John and Jesus in relationship to this, in actual fact, there is nothing John said that Jesus didn’t also say. Clearly, Jesus said more, but in his teaching, he echoed and underlined the preaching of John the Baptist.

For example, John chapter 8—and the Jews are present; they’re playing the nationalist card again. Verse 39: “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said, “If you were Abraham’s children, … then you would do the things Abraham did.” Now, that wasn’t very nice. You don’t want to be calling in question whether their lineage is their lineage. So he says, “As it is, you … determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did[n’t] do such things.” “You claim to be tied up with Abraham? Well, I’m going to tell you: Abraham didn’t do that. You’re actually doing the things your own father does.”[8] They must have said to one another, “Who does he think our father is, then?” “‘[But] we[’re] not illegitimate children,’ they protested. ‘The only father we have is God himself.’”[9]

There is nothing John said that Jesus didn’t also say. Clearly, Jesus said more, but in his teaching, he echoed and underlined the preaching of John the Baptist.

Now, who can argue with that? “God is my Father,” they said. Jesus said, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now [I’m] here. I have[n’t] come on my own; … he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you[’re] unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil.”[10]

“Excuse me? Excuse me, Jesus, just for one moment, if we may. You’re starting to sound a lot like John the Baptist here. Now, you know what happened to him!”

“You belong to your father, the devil, … you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me!”[11]

That’s where we are today, men and women. Jesus comes and tells the truth, and men, because he tells the truth, do not believe him. If he would tell a lie, they would believe him. If he would say, “I am merely another religious leader,” they would accept him. If he would say, “I am akin to a Hindu avatar, pointing some measure of way to God,” they would have said, “Fine, take your place here.” But because he comes and tells the truth, they do not believe in him.

Now, what Jesus says in John 8, I suggest to you, is therefore akin to what John the Baptist is saying in chapter 3.

Now, the fact is that many of us have never heard a sermon with this text, if we’re honest. Have any of you in the last year heard someone stand and announce their sermon title as being “Flee from the Coming Wrath”? Well, if not in the last year, how about the last five years? Or—let’s make it as wide as we possibly can—let’s say a decade. Have you in a decade attended the preaching of the Bible and had someone introduce their sermon as follows: “I’d like to address you this morning on the imperative nature of fleeing from the coming wrath”? And the answer’s probably no.

Why? Well, because it is regarded as being the language of the tub-thumper. This is the kind of phraseology that had been captured by the extremist, by the oddity. This is the kind of language that we expect from the lips of people who fiddle around with snakes in the remote mountain areas of West Virginia. But it’s not the kind of thing that we expect in the well-heeled suburban environments of a prestigious city like Cleveland, Ohio—“and we’ll thank you very much, sir, whoever you are, to remember that when you’re preparing your sermons in future. Just remember who we are.”

I know who you are. There is little doubt that some, with misguided zeal, take phraseology like this and abuse it. But the fact of their abuse does not provide for us the excuse to fail to face up to what the Bible is saying. Therefore, we cannot be selective in our apportioning of the Bible. If we’re going to study the Gospel of Luke, then study the Gospel of Luke we must. And when we come to this kind of phraseology, we must face it head-on.

After all, at the end of this millennium, in the great concerns for the language of political correctness, we are not unique. Bishop Ryle in 1856, then the bishop of Liverpool in the heart of the North of England, exclaimed in similar terminology, “[There is] a morbid dislike of strong language [today],—an excessive fear of giving [any] offence,—a constant flinching from directness and plain speaking.”[12] Now, he was addressing the heart of the nineteenth century. He says, “In the nineteenth century, people don’t like to hear it straight.” Can you imagine, if he were present now at the end of the twentieth century, what he would envisage or what he would encounter? We’d say to him, “Hey, you ain’t seen nothing yet, in the middle of the nineteenth century!”

Now, why is this so important? Why am I taking so much time on this? Well, I want to tell you why, and please listen carefully. There will be in every group, and therefore in this one, some who, in an earlier day, have decided that they would take up the offer of a religious coat of paint. They went to some event, or someone introduced them to Christian or spiritual things and said to them, “You know, what you need is some broad brushstrokes on your life. You need a veneer of Christianity. You really look a bit of a mess, and if you will simply slip up your hand, then we will be able to offer you a fresh coat of paint, and you will go on your way, and it will be remarkable how well you do.”

And so they made a superficial response to a fairly superficial call and received a coat of paint. And then, within a few days, looking in the mirror, spiritually speaking, they discovered that the paint had begun to peel. And within a matter of weeks or months, they were a sorry mess, and paint was all over the floor. It was not that these individuals had been unmoved. They had actually encountered something of the truth of God’s Word and had been stirred by it. (This may be a description of you. Listen carefully.) They had known a moment of passing regret. Something that was said struck a chord about something in their life, and they said, “You know, that is true of me.” So, stirred and facing regret, sighing with emotion, they resolved to be different. And since this individual seemed to have the paint necessary to do the clean-up job from the outside, they decided that they would offer themselves up for it and see if they couldn’t assimilate some of these Christian principles into their experience.

And that’s exactly what happened. They were stirred, but in the cold light of dawn, as they analyzed themselves against the clear standards of the Word of God, as against the indications of what it means to be a child of God, as against the pattern of the Bible in terms of a description of what it means to have been made new by God, we are forced to conclude, “That is not me.” And the paint never stuck.

At the same time, we may well have been relying on something that had been done to us by a religious professional—not least of all the idea of baptism. And we thought that the best thing that could happen to us was to have some kind of external rite or ceremony to which we might introduce ourselves, and in that we would find the answer to our great concerns; or that we could claim lineage to some historical figures who themselves were very religious, either in our immediate family—“My dad was a deacon, my uncle was a pastor, my grandfather was Dr. So-and-So from the Theological Divinity School of Blah Blah Blah. And so,” we said, “somehow or another, I can’t but believe that it has all bled down to me, and I think, frankly, that I’m fine.”

But in the cold light of dawn, we know we’re not fine. We are constantly in search, then, of those who will tell us we are fine. And you’ve come to Parkside in the hope that you might find out that you’re fine; that you’re okay; that there’s nothing at all to worry about; that the paint is supposed to peel like this; that you are supposed only to be stirred, you’re not supposed to be changed; that you can go to heaven without knowing holiness; that you can have your life changed without any direct encounter with the power of Jesus.

You will not hear that message here. You mustn’t! You dare not! It is a lie! And so you must face, as I must face, both in hearing what I say and in seeing what you hear, that what—as in the crowd addressed by John—what the people wanted was different from what they needed, and what they needed they did not want. And so, instead of giving them what they want, he takes the sandpaper out, and he rubs them. He doesn’t tickle them under the chin. He doesn’t scratch them where they itch. He doesn’t put his finger up and find out what the drift of the group is and what it is they’re particularly concerned to hear. No, he stands up, and he says, “Here’s the deal, you brood of vipers: I’m really wondering who it is got to you and suggested that you should run away and try and find escape from the wrath of God.”

Now, some of you are saying, “Well, I’m a little bit confused, because I thought we would hear something nicer here. After all, I was brought up with a very stern religion.” And this is something people tell me all the time: “If you had seen where I was brought up, Alistair, you wouldn’t have believed it. Every Sunday, I would go into this dark and gloomy cavern of a place, and I would be told again and again that I was a sinner, that I was in the wrong, and that I was really a dreadful soul. And when I got to an age of accountability, I decided that I would listen to no more of that and I would get out and on my way. After all, any kind of religion like that was absolutely useless to me. All that it did,” the people tell me, “is instill fear in me. I feared God. And that was bad.”

Not necessarily. Let me speak a word in favor for your religious heritage. Let me suggest to you that it was a wonderful thing that you were brought up as you were—that you confronted the fact, regularly, that you were in the wrong. The dilemma was not to be found in the discovery that you were in the wrong. The dilemma came that although religion was able to offer an accurate diagnosis, that same religion did not offer an adequate cure.

So you discovered that you were in the wrong, and in asking “What am I supposed to do?” you were then told, “You’re supposed to do these external things. You’re supposed to obey this. You’re supposed to confess, and you’re supposed to confess, and you’re supposed to confess. And you go on doing this, and as much as you can, eventually, it may put a smile on your face.” But what it did was it made you gloomier and gloomier and gloomier. Because the more you realized your accountability before God, which you couldn’t deny, and the more you then ran to the solution that was offered and you found that it didn’t answer your questions, you discovered that you were in a hopeless predicament. And so you said, “Forget it.” In your hundreds and your thousands, you said, “Forget it!”

So you walk off to university, and you say, “I’ll have none of that. I will embrace the good life. I will find the answer in intellectualism.” And you discovered that no matter how smart you became, it didn’t hold the answer to life.” You said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get a job. And when I get a job, I’ll make a buck, and when I make a buck, I’ll buy some stuff. I’ll buy a lot of stuff! And I’ll find the answer in materialism.” And you got a job, and you got a car, and you got a house, and you got a wife, and you got a golden retriever, and you got two garage door openers, and you got a mortgage, and you got a pain in your neck. And you woke up one morning, and you said, “This doesn’t answer it either.”

And then you said, “You know what? I don’t really like my wife, and I’m fed up with my children. They’re driving me nuts. The reason I’m messed up is because I’m in a cage. So I’ll get out from here, and I’ll get a Harley-Davidson. I’ll go ride across the country. I’ll find the answer to life. It’s somewhere other than this. But I know for sure, I’m not going back to that dead religion thing!”

And then, suddenly, one day, somebody brought you around Parkside Church. And that’s why you’re here this morning. You baby-boomed your way, rebounded, right off a dead religion into an embracing of essentially self-absorbed hedonism. You wakened up. You said, “I’d better go back around again and see if there is anything in this at all.” And you were hoping dreadfully, having come this morning, that there might be something said to you that would make you feel good and okay and fine, and the guy says, “You’re a brood of vipers! Why did you show up at Parkside Church?”

Now, hold that thought for just a minute. I’m going to come back to it.

For those of you who were brought up on the other side of the spectrum, you find yourselves equally lost. I’m referring now to the people who were brought up in an environment where Sunday after Sunday after Sunday they were subjected to altar call after altar call after altar call. They were always “letting go and letting God.” They’re letting go of this, letting go of that, letting go of the next thing. They didn’t know whether they had a hold of anything left or not. And the reason they were in the predicament they were in is presumably because they still had a hold of something. And they were tyrannized by it. So they would confess, and they would decide, and they would commit, and they would invite Christ into their lives, and then two weeks later they would do it again, and so on. And the paint has all peeled off their lives! They’re not holy. They don’t read their Bibles. They don’t enjoy worship. They don’t share their faith. They’re lost!

Now, on this side, what’s missing? This side is easy-believism. They never heard the message “Flee from the coming wrath!” They just said, “Yeah, I’d like Jesus. Yeah, I’m lonely. I don’t like being lonely. Yeah, I’m unhappy. I don’t like being unhappy. Yeah, I want purpose in my life.” So they signed up for the antidote to loneliness, unhappiness, and purpose. But they were never converted! ’Cause that’s not how you get converted! Jesus didn’t come to answer the problem of loneliness! He came to deal with my sin. He came to deal with the fact that all the paint is peeling off my life—that I am bereft of hope, that there is no way I can do a self-improvement job, and the answer does not lie in my doing something and thereby, as a result of some external motion, making myself a Christian, nor does the answer lie in having something done to me by means of a dead orthodoxy in some other expression of religion.

Jesus didn’t come to answer the problem of loneliness! He came to deal with my sin.

So what’s the missing link in both cases? Well, the answer is repentance. Repentance.

Now, that brings me to me to my sermon for this morning. See, just as vipers flee from the approach of a brush fire, so these individuals were trying to escape from God’s judgment, either by outward ceremony or by an appeal to their heritage—the very thing that people are doing in Cleveland this morning.

Now, listen carefully: neither they nor we will be saved from the coming wrath by carnal descent or external ceremony. If we are relying on who our parents were, or their faith, or their commitment, or old Grandpa So-and-So, or whatever it is, cut it out! And if we have the notion that as a result of our external conforming of ourselves to a pattern of religiosity, that somehow or another this will be the answer, I’m sorry, no can do.

Now, John doesn’t only address the futility of religious formalism; he also reaffirms the opportunity of escape if they will turn to God in wholehearted repentance. Now, this is his message, and it is to this that we will come—seriously. This has been a very long introduction. But let me then put a conclusion on the introduction, and then this evening we’ll put the middle in for those who are concerned to hear.

Look at what he says: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” “With repentance.” The English prayer book says God “pardon[s] and absolve[s] all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy gospel.”[13] “God pardons … all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy gospel.”

What is repentance? Repentance is an about-turn. In our lives, we are walking in the direction of our own self-centered concerns. Oh, we may have a religious component to that, we may attend church with frequency, we may be involved in all kinds of religious activities, but at the core of our lives, we’re going our own way. In an encounter with Christ, the call comes to turn and to walk in the totally opposite direction. Or, if you like, in the way we’ve described it before, our lives—the biography of our lives—are in two volumes: volume one, where we live for ourselves and serve ourselves; volume two, where, having discovered the wonder of the gospel, Christ writes a whole new chapter and chapters in our lives.

Can I ask you this morning: Do you have a volume two? Did you ever repent?

To repent means not only to turn from but it means to turn to. The Thessalonians are described as those who “turned to God from idols to serve the living … God.”[14] It involved a change of mind, a change of heart, and a change of direction. Repentance doesn’t only begin the Christian life, incidentally. We might equally ask of one another, “When did you last repent?” for those who profess faith. But while it doesn’t only begin the Christian life, there is no Christian beginning without repentance.

Now, let me draw it to a close by making this as clear as I possibly can, before I have no voice left at all. When we read the Bible—and you are sensible people, and you must check—when you read the Bible, you discover that God’s holiness is revealed. It is revealed in his law; it is revealed in his commandments. So, I read my Bible, and it says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[15] And I say to myself, “In all honesty, I have not done that, and I do not do that.” And what does that produce? Produces a sense of guilt.

Now, at the end of the twentieth century, we have been fed for the last thirty-five years the notion that all guilt is wrong. So now we come to church, and we feel guilty. Everything that has been said to us—everything that we have read in magazines in the last week or two weeks—has said to us, “You’re not supposed to feel guilty.” So there is a mechanism at work immediately in our minds to say, “This is totally bogus. Because if this were right, I wouldn’t be feeling guilty. Because the one thing God wants me to feel is not guilty. Therefore, something’s up here. Therefore, let me out; I must make a run for it.”

What if that is absolutely wrong? What if, as the Bible says… Surely, there is a wrong kind of guilt that we need to be freed from, a kind of pathological sense of guilt, which is a psychological condition, from which we need liberated. But there is a real sense of guilt. Every child knows there is a real sense of guilt. “Come home at eleven.” You come home at twelve thirty. “Don’t take the car.” You do take the car. “Did you tell the truth?” “No, I didn’t tell the truth.” Do you feel guilty? Of course you do. And should you? Of course you should. Why? Because it opens the door for the possibility of forgiveness and for liberation.

And you see, this is where those of you who’ve been brought up with a stern religion have hit the wall with consistency. ’Cause you went to church, and you did feel guilty. The diagnosis was accurate. The cure was horrible and couldn’t work, so it drove you again and again to an external form of religion, which could not answer the cries of your heart. It’s not supposed to. It’s wrong.

The revelation of God’s holiness produces within us a sense of guilt, and then the discovery of the gospel—that the Lord Jesus died to be the Savior of these people who know themselves to be guilty—is actually the good news: that what the law could not accomplish, what commandments could not accomplish, what external religion could not do, by the incarnation and the death and the resurrection and the coronation of the Lord Jesus Christ, God has done.

And what you discover is that grace enables the guilt-burdened and the heartbroken to repent. It is grace that enables the guilt-burdened and the heartbroken to repent. And the very repentance to which a man or a woman comes is a result of God granting to you repentance! And if you sit this morning burdened by guilt and broken in your heart, a travesty of attempts at religious painting, and you say to yourself, “God, I don’t know what I am supposed to do, and I don’t know where I’m supposed to go; I think I’ll just run away and hide!”—let me tell you: the power of repentance does not lie simply in its ability to evoke guilt, but the power of repentance lies in the grace that is proclaimed to us in the gospel. Romans 2:4: it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.

It is grace that enables the guilt-burdened and the heartbroken to repent.

So let me finish with God’s kindness. John the Baptist was a very kind man! He would have been a bum if he had offered to them some lousy patch-up paint job—get a few quick results, sign a few people up, get the houses of their lives painted, and hit the next town, all the time knowing that the dust will hardly have settled behind you as you make your exit from the village before the paint has begun to peel off the external walls of their life. What good is a Christian proclamation like that? Who needs that nonsense? Nobody at all.

So he was kind to bring the sandpaper and to rub and rub and rub so that when the people said, “Oh, I understand now!” then he said, “And let me bring to you the paint, the broad brushstrokes of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn [by] Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.[16]

You see, the message of the gospel doesn’t really make sense until I recognize that I am the son of a viper. Because if I am, then I deserve judgment. And here’s the wonder: that I, who deserve judgment, should on account of God’s grace be granted forgiveness.

I love the children’s song—it gets it good—and with this I close:

Wide, wide as the ocean,
[And] high as the heaven[s] above,
[And] deep, deep as the deepest sea
Is my Savior’s love.
[’Cause] I, though so unworthy,
Still am a child of his care,
For his Word teaches me
That his love reaches me
Everywhere.[17]

I do not offer to you some slick, external, religious paint job. I challenge you to bring the house of your life to Christ and have him come and dwell within it and, by the power of his Spirit, to transform you in such a way that you will bear fruit that befits repentance.

Can I ask you: Did you honestly ever repent?

Father, it is to you alone that we must come in answering that question. Who would take such a message on their lips, apart from the passionate conviction that gripped the heart and mind of John the Baptist that all he said was true?

Lord, we’re living at the end of a century where, in this country, men and women’s lives have been buffeted by easy-believism on the one hand, and they wonder why it is that having done what they were told to do, they are so unchanged; and on the other hand, a form of stern religious formalism that has driven them to despair. And here in the words of this ancient prophet, this strange man in a strange place, this strong message, we begin to get an insight to the wonder of the gospel. First the sandpaper, then the ointment. First the bended knee, first the cry of the guilt-ridden heart, and then the cry of the redeemed.

I pray that you will bring men and women in this day—this very day, from this very congregation—from the emptiness and futility of an easy-believism and the sad, sorry, dreadfulness of stern religious orthodoxy devoid of the gospel; and that where they sit they might simply cry out, “Lord, ‘nothing in my hand I bring,’ but ‘simply to [your] cross I cling.’[18] I turn from my sin, as best I know what that means. And I turn to you, Lord Jesus Christ, as best as I know what that means. And I trust that since I believe you’re the one at work within my heart and mind to make me even feel as I feel, that you’ll take care of the details from this point on.”

May the grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest and remain with each one, today and forevermore. Amen.

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[1] R. Hudson Pope, “Make the Book Live to Me.”

[2] Isaiah 40:9 (KJV).

[3] Matthew 11:7; Luke 7:24 (NIV 1984).

[4] Matthew 11:7; Luke 7:24 (NIV 1984).

[5] Matthew 11:8–10 (NIV 1984). See also Luke 7:25–27.

[6] See Luke 3:2.

[7] See Revelation 12:9. See also Revelation 20:3.

[8] John 8:40–41 (paraphrased).

[9] John 8:41 (NIV 1984).

[10] John 8:42–44 (NIV 1984).

[11] John 8:44–45 (NIV 1984).

[12] J. C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: St. Luke (Ipswich: William Hunt, 1856), 1:89.

[13] The Book of Common Prayer.

[14] 1 Thessalonians 1:9 (NIV 1984).

[15] Matthew 22:37–39; Mark 12:30–31; Luke 10:27 (paraphrased).

[16] William Cowper, “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood” (1772).

[17] Charles Austin Miles, “Wide, Wide as the Ocean” (1914).

[18] Augustus Toplady, “Rock of Ages” (1776).