We can admit our sin trusting that Christ Jesus came into this world for the explicit purpose of saving sinners (1 Tim. 1:15). The worst sinners receive more grace. Only fools live as if they have no need to repent. God’s children know they are sick. But they also know that God has sent Christ to be their great physician. So tell God how your sin has made you sick, commit to pursuing spiritual health, and expect Jesus to make you well.

At the start of his ministry the Lord Jesus used just two verbs to summarize the good news of his kingdom: “Repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Paul condensed his ministry in a similar way: I testified “both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). Only by this kind of preaching was Paul “innocent of the blood of all” (Acts 20:26). He had delivered the essential message that had been committed to him.
Repentance, along with faith, belongs to the “elementary doctrine of Christ”—it is foundational for the Christian (Heb. 6:1). By faith we accept, receive, and rest upon Christ alone for salvation. By repentance we turn from sin to God with a commitment to new obedience.
We must repent. So we need to know how to do it. But lest we try to do something we don’t understand we need to first know what repentance is.
What Is Repentance?
Repentance is “an evangelical grace.” Like faith repentance is a gift from God. Only God can “grant … repentance” to those who err (2 Tim. 2:25). Church leaders summarized Peter’s evangelistic crusade like this: “God has granted repentance that leads to life” (Acts 11:18). Jeremiah understood this same truth. He prayed, “Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old” (Lam. 5:21 KJV). We are naturally enslaved to sin (Rom. 6:17). No one turns from sin apart from God’s energizing work.
Still, you and I must repent—“none may expect pardon without it.” “If a man does not repent God will whet his bow” (Ps. 7:12). Repentance isn’t meritorious. We don’t repent in order to gain God’s kindness. Penance isn’t how we pay for our sins. It isn’t the depth of our sorrow for sin, or the strictness of our turning from it that makes God favor us. Only the sacrifice of God’s sinless Lamb can do that. But to be pardoned you must repent.
To truly repent you must know sin’s misery. Penitent people see and sense sin’s danger. Some sins are patently dangerous—a life of violence is likely to end violently (Matt. 26:52). But a life of any iniquity will ruin you; it will kill you spiritually and eternally (Ezek. 18:30­–31). Sin is dangerous because it violates God’s rules for your happiness. No sin can provide lasting joy—only ruin and destruction (1 Tim. 6:9). The wicked will “fall into their own nets, while” the godly “pass by safely” (Ps. 141:10).
Penitent people also see and sense sin’s filthiness. Sin is repulsive to the believer. It is contrary to God’s holy nature and violates his holy law. This is why every sin, even the smallest sin “deserves damnation.”
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From the Christian standpoint, there is no absolute power or authority for Parliament congress, civil governments, or monarchs. All authority is delegated, limited, and under God in the various God-ordained spheres of life. In light of this, and because of the legitimate sword power given to the state, Kuyper rightly warns, “we must ever watch against the danger which lurks, for our personal liberty, in the power of the state.”[7] Professing Christians today have largely lost that vigilance which Kuyper enjoins. 

One of the most remarkable features of the late-modern era has been the strange coalescence of an incessant call for ‘total emancipation’ from the shackles of alleged oppression with an explicit totalitarian drift in political life. This perplexing and apparently contradictory element of life in the West manifests itself in a constant clamouring amongst the citizenry for complete self-determination, equality and self-expression in the name of ‘justice,’ whilst looking to the state as the appropriate organ to legislate into existence the rights, entitlements and freedoms being demanded. The reformed philosopher Jan Dengerink is to the point:
To [central government] is ascribed a clear supremacy over all other basically non-political groups. . . . This clearly shows its out-workings in the socio-political activities of various Western democracies, with all of the structural and spiritual leveling that follows from it . . . the result is always a heavy-handed bureaucracy, which in practice reduces the individual citizen to a nullity, one in which the technocrats and social planners get the final say . . .[1]
Statism Everywhere
In short, the majority of people have become statist in their thinking, implicitly or explicitly. The central meaning of statism is important to note. The presence of an ‘-ism’ should immediately alert the careful thinker to the possibility that there has been an exaggeration of a created and God-ordained structure (in this case the state) into something well beyond its intended function. Fundamentally, statism is a political system in which the sphere of civil government exerts substantial, centralized control over much of society, including the economy and various other spheres.
The dominance of statism today means that few people question anymore progressive, redistributive taxation (including inheritance taxes), national minimum wage laws, market interventionism, the suspension of civil liberties by unelected bureaucrats in the name of public health, state control and funding of medicine, education, charity and welfare, as well as a large share of the media such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), The United States’ National Public Radio (NPR), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In Britain, the National Health Service alone is one of the world’s largest employers.[2] The public sector has become so vast that most people have grown accustomed to the state’s omnipresence.
The Church Swallowed up by the State
In this brave new world, the church herself is increasingly treated as little more than another social club with no more significance in culture than a cinema or sports team. Yet in the West we seem increasingly ready to allow the state to license, control, and regulate the churches. We seem ready to allow our churches to be locked them down indefinitely and at will if ‘public health’ functionaries of the state require it, and we cease pastoral counseling in biblical truth for those struggling with their sexuality.
This ‘omni-competent’ vision of the state has become so ubiquitous that many evangelical Christians have lost their cultural memory of God-given, pre-political institutions, rights, and responsibilities that are to be protected but are not created, controlled, or governed by the state. As a consequence, believers have floundered in their response to unprecedented and illegal lockdowns of the church, the growing collapse of civil liberties, the total control of education, expanded abortion, euthanasia, no-fault divorce law, the redefinition of marriage and family, homosexuality and transgender issues, largely because a scriptural world and life view norming our understanding of these questions and the role of the state with respect to them has collapsed. Instead, we have a liberal democratic and statist worldview drilled into us by the various organs of cultural life, where Jesus and a hope of heaven is spread on top as a sort of spiritual condiment giving religious flavor to secularism via the ministry of the churches.
What has become increasingly clear in recent decades is that we are entering an era of (a likely protracted) struggle for the freedom of the church in the West, not just with the state and its bureaucracy, but with various church movements themselves, some of whose leaders are emerging as committed apologists for statism! There has never been a shortage of cultural leaders ready to support and advise falling down before the image of the absolutist state when the music plays (see Daniel 3).
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
The Bible distinguishes between the law and the gospel. The law demands perfect, exact, personal, and perpetual righteousness from us but the gospel gives to us salvation and life freely for the sake of Christ, who is our righteousness and freely through faith, which itself is a gift. 

And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor your father and mother.’ ” And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” And Peter said, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life” (Luke 18:18–30; ESV).
On Twitter, on February 18, 2022, a person hitherto unknown to me proposed, “I will never get over Jesus being asked how to get into heaven and basically says, ‘Don’t be rich.’” On what principle was our interlocutor operating? He announced, “Sorry, but the bible says, I believe it, that settles it” (sic). This is exactly the wrong interpretation of the story of the rich young ruler (hereafter RYR) because it follows a poor method of interpreting texts.
For orthodox Christians there is no question that whatever the Bible means to say is binding. That the Bible says something in Luke 18:18–30 is not question. What is question, however, is just what the Bible means to say and how do we know? These questions are relevant and pressing for those outside and inside the Reformed churches. I recall hearing this passage explained by a Reformed minister, who announced to his congregation, in effect, that our Lord really was calling the RYR to sell all he had. The implication seemed to be that, had the RYR done so, he would have received the benefit in question, i.e., eternal life.
Is this what Jesus says?
The RYR asks, “What must I do…”? As he asks that question he assumes that he can do something to inherit eternal life. It is the very assumption, our interlocutor also accepts, that Jesus is going to challenge. Jesus begins to question his premise when he says, “Why do you call me good?” The RYR assumes that he has goodness and that his good ness and Jesus’ goodness are on a continuum. They are not.
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