While reading Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Soul Winner: How to Lead Sinners to the Saviour the other day I came across the following quotations...
"Repentance is to leave
The sins we loved before
And show that we in earnest grieve,
By doing so no more."
Repentance is a change of mind. What one used to adore, one now abhors. That in which one used to delight, now one detests. Love and loyalties have shifted. What one once loved, one now grieves. One actively recoils from that which previously was regarded. One grieves that they once held sin so dearly and cleave to God's promises in rejecting them now completely.
"True belief and true repentance are twins."
Belief and repentance are born of the same mother at the same time. They are not siblings born years apart with distance in between. They are born as twins. They are born together or not born. There are no miscarriages when they come. There is no still born faith. It is belief and repentance, born as twins, grasping the heels of each other as gifts from God who planted and fertilized the seed to begin with. Although it may involve much travail and pains in labor to bring about, it produces the two-fold fruit of faith and faithfulness, belief and repentance every time.
"If a man doesn’t live differently than how he did before, both at home and beyond the walls of his house, his repentance needs to be repented of, because his conversion is a fabrication."
There is a repentance of which itself requires repenting. It is a repentance in theory that fails to find reality. It is a stated change of mind without an observed change of behavior. This "repentance" requires a repentance. This "change of mind" needs to be rethought. It needs to be reborn, anew, in belief and repentance. It is a commitment to say absent of a commitment to do. This brand of repentance is merely unbelief masquerading as renewal. It is all chirp and no flight. It is tuppence, worth less than the effort it took to produce it.
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