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Repentence is recognizing your sin as sin, realizing its seriousness, being disgusted by it, and resoving to forsake it completely.
Faith is confident belief in God’s character and actions, trusting that He will redeem, justify, sanctify, and glorify through Christ those who believe Him; this faith results in a changed life in service to God.
Repentance comes at the very beginning of a person’s road to salvation, for no one can be saved until he recognizes his need to be saved, and no one can recognize this unless he sees his own sinfulness.
Faith is the instrument of our salvation, not the ground of our salvation. We are saved through our faith, not because of our faith. Both faith and repentance are the gift of God.
(Douglas Wilson, Omnibus III)
Taken from Great Texts of the Bible:
The formula of the Old Covenant is, “Thou shalt not.” These great words, like a flash of lightning, discovered to man what lies in the depths of his own being–moral obligation along with a sense of utter impotence to meet it, darkness and despair as of chaos returning.
The formula of the New Covenant is “I will”; still greater words, which discover the heights above, as it were the body of heaven in its clearness, unruffled serenity and easy self-achievement of the grace of God. It would not be possible to represent what is characteristic in each dispensation more vividly than by these contrasted formulas.
On the one side is a vain effort to attain, a strife between the law of the mind and the law of the members, a sense of hopeless duality that the centre of a man’s being. On the other side is the rest of faith, a great reserve of spiritual power, the reconciliation of divine ideals with the practice of human lives achieved by grace.
Moral obligation persists under the gospel, but only as it is resolved into the higher freedom of the new life. As Pascal says,” The law demands what it cannot give; grace gives all it demands.
This is another article written by A.W. Tozer. Its words are bold but truth. They may be sharp and piercing, but this issue is so significant that toning the article down would lose its impact. The truth is often painful to hear, but it is only the truth that is worth our hearing:
Boredom is, of course, a state of mind resulting from trying to maintain an interest in something that holds no trace of interest for us. No one is bored by what he can in good conscience walk away from. Boredom comes when a man must try to hear with relish what for want of relish he hardly hears at all.
By this definition, there is certainly much boredom in religion these days. The businessman on a Sunday morning whose mind is on golf can scarcely disguise his lack of interest in the sermon he is compelled to hear. The house wife who is unacquainted with the learned theological or philosophical jargon of the speaker; the young teenager who is anxiously thinking about what to do after church service-these cannot escape the low-grade mental pain we call boredom while they struggle to keep their attention focused upon the service. All these are too courteous to admit to others that they are bored and possibly too timid to admit it even to themselves, but I believe that a bit of candid confession would do us all good.
When Moses tarried in the mount, Israel became bored with the faith that sees the invisible and clamored for a god they could see and touch. And they displayed a great deal more enthusiasm for the golden calf than they did over the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Later they became tired of manna and complained against the monotony of their diet. On the petulant insistence they finally got flesh to eat, and that to their own undoing.
Those Christians who belong to the evangelical wing of the church (which I firmly believe is the only one that even approximates New Testament Christianity) have over the last half-century shown an increasing impatience with the things invisible and eternal and have demanded and got a host of things visible and temporal to satisfy their fleshly appetites. Without Biblical authority, or any other right under the sun, carnal religious leaders have introduced a host of attractions that serve no purpose except to provide entertainment for the retarded saints.
It is now common practice in most evangelical churches to offer the people, especially the young people, a maximum of entertainment and a minimum of serious instruction. It is scarcely possible in most places to get anyone to attend a meeting where the only attraction is GOD. One can only conclude that God’s professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games, concerts and refreshments.
This has influenced the whole pattern of church life, and even brought into being a new type of church architecture, designed to house the golden calf.
So we have the strange anomaly of orthodoxy in creed and heterodoxy in practice. The striped-candy technique has been so fully integrated into our present religious thinking that it is simply taken for granted. Its victims never dream that it is not a part of the teachings of Christ and His apostles.
Any objection to the carrying on of our present golden-calf Christianity is met with the triumphant reply, “But we are winning them!” And winning them to what? To true discipleship? To cross-carrying? To self-denial? To separation from the world? To crucifixion of the flesh? To holy living? To nobility of character? To a despising of the world’s treasures? To hard self-discipline? To love for God? To total committal to Christ? Of course the answer to all these questions is no.
We are paying a frightful price for our religious boredom. And that at the moment of the world’s mortal peril.
This article by A.W. Tozer first appeared in The Aliiance Witness in 1946. It has been printed in virtually every English-speaking country in the world and has been put into tract form by various publishers, including Christian Publications, Inc. It still appears now and then in the religious press.
Although, this article was written a long time ago, its message remains applicable and relevant, perhaps even more, to today’s christian world:All unannounced and mostly undetected there has come in modern times a new cross into popular evangelical circles. It is like the old cross, but different: the likenesses are superficial; the differences, fundamental.
From the new cross has sprung a new philosophy of the christian life, and from that new philosophy has come a new evanglical technique-a new type of meeting and a new kind of preaching. This new evangelism employs the same language as the old, but its content is not the same and its emphasis not as before.
The old cross would have no truck with the world. For Adam’s proud flesh it meant the end of the journey. It carried into effect the sentence imposed by the law of Sinai. The new cross is not opposed to the human race; rather, it is a friendly pal and if understood aright, it is the source of oceans of good clean fun and innocent enjoyment. It lets Adam live without interference. His life motivation is unchanged; he still lives for his own pleasure, only now he takes delight in singing choruses and watching religious movies instead of singing bawdy songs and drinking hard liquor. The accent is still on enjoyment, though the fun is now on a higher plane morally if not intellectually.
The new cross encourages a new and entirely different evangelistic approach. The evangelist does not demand abnegation of the old life before a new life can be received. He preaches not contrasts but similarities. He seeks to key into public interest by showing that Christianity makes no unpleasant demands; rather, it offers the same thing the world does, only on a higher level. Whatever the sin-mad world happens to be clamoring after a the moment is cleverly shown to be the very thing the gospel offers, only that the religious product is better.
The new cross does not slay the sinner, it redirects him. It gears him into a cleaner and jollier way of living and saves his self-respect. To the self-assertive it says, “Come and assert yourself to Christ.” To the egoist it says, “Come and do your boasting in the Lord.” To the thrillseeker it says, “Come and enjoy the thrill of Christian fellowship.” The Christian message is slanted in the direction of the current vogue in order to make it acceptable to the public.
The philosophy back of the kind of thing may be sincere but its sincerity does not save it from being false. It is false because it is blind. It misses completely the whole meaning of the cross.
The old cross is a symbol of death. It stands for the abrupt, violent end of a human being. The man in Roman times who took up his cross and started down the road had already said goodbye to his friends. He was not coming back. He was going out to have ir ended. The cross made no compromise, modified nothing, spared nothing; it slew all of the man, completely and for good. It did not try to keep on good terms with its victim. It struck cruel and hard, and when it had finished its work, that man was no more.
The race of Adam is under death sentence. There is no commutation and no escape. God cannot approve any of the fruits of sin, however innocent they may appear or beautiful to the eyes of men. God salvages the individual by liquidating him and then raising him again to newness of life.
That evangelism which draws friendly parallels between the ways of God and the ways of men is false to the Bible and cruel to the souls of its hearers. The faith of Christ does not parallel the world, it intersects it. In the coming to Christ we do not bring our old life up onto a higher plane; we leave it at the cross. Our old life must die.
We who share the gospel must not think of ourselves as public relation agents sent to establish good will between Christ and the world. We must not imagine ourselves commissioned to make Christ acceptable to big business, the press, the world of sports or modern education. We are not diplomats but prophets, and our message is not a compromise but an ultimatum.
God offers life, but not an improvised old life. The life He offers is life out of death. It stands always on the far side of the cross. Whoever would possess it must pass under the rod. He must repudiate himself and concur in God’s just sentence against him.
What does this mean to the individual, the condemned man who would find life in Jesus Christ? How can this theology be translated into life? Simply, he must repent and believe. He must forsake his sins and then go on to forsake himself. Let him cover nothing, defend nothing, excuse nothing. Let him not seek to make terms with God, but let him bow his head before the stroke of God’s stern displeasure and acknowledge himself worthy to die.
Having done this, let him gaze with simple trust upon the risen Saviour, and from Him will come life and rebirth and cleansing and power. The cross that ended the earthly life of Jesus now puts an end to the sinner; and the power that raised Christ from the death now raises him to a new life along with Christ.
To any who may object to this or count it merely a narrow and private view of the truth, let me say God has set His hallmark of approval upon this message from Paul’s day to the present. Whether stated in these exact words or not, this has been the content of all preaching that has brought life and power to the world through the centuries. The mystics, the reformers, the revivalists have put their emphasis here, and signs and wonders and mighty operations of the Holy Spirit gave witness to God’s approval.
Dare we, the heirs of such a legacy of power, tamper with the truth? Dare we with our stubby pencils erase the lines of the blueprint or alter the pattern shown us in the Mount? May God forbid. Let us preach the old cross and we will know the old power.
Not I But Christ 