The Excitement of Repentance

Context of Repentance

From this passage of Scripture, there is a question that I have for us this evening. The context has to deal with repentance. That's a major theme of this passage of Scripture and it's a major concept of John the Baptist. His baptism is a baptism of repentance. The focus here is upon repentance.

So because of that, the question that I have for you all this evening is how excited are you about repentance? I'm sure many of us get the understanding that within the Christian faith repentance is a big deal. Repentance is a very important concept. As Pastor Sean even brought out, either there was this last Sunday or the Sunday before, that one of the first words of the gospel being preached by Jesus Christ is repent.

That seems like that might be a pretty big deal that if Jesus comes on the scene to preach the gospel that he's about to accomplish, that if the very first word that is recorded of him speaking regarding his gospel ministry is repent, and it seems like that's a pretty important concept. And here it is now within our passage of Scripture that it was something proclaimed and the phrase good news, that is a translation of the Greek word for gospel, John is preaching the gospel, and his specific ministry of the gospel is about repentance.

The Excitement Surrounding Jesus

One of the reasons why I'm asking how excited are you about repentance is because remember our context. We've been kind of out of the gospel of Luke now for a few weeks, but our context has had to deal with the excitement about Jesus Christ. We've seen it with Mary, we've seen it with Elizabeth, we've seen it with unborn John the Baptist, that there was a leaping for joy because of the very presence of unborn Jesus.

There's this huge excitement, even recently in Jesus being presented to the temple, we had looked at two individuals, Simeon and Anna, who also expressed their sincere excitement about Jesus. Even to some degree the teachers in the temple were when Jesus had been left behind, the teachers in the temple expressed somewhat of an excitement as well in the form of their astonishment, at the fact that Jesus was doing such amazing things in terms of his knowledge, of his learning, of his understanding, and then Mary still, even in Luke 2:51, is treasuring up all the things in her heart.

There's a treasuring of Jesus Christ, there's an excitement of Jesus Christ, everything that's going on in our context up to this point has been this absolute utter excitement about Jesus, the shepherds out in the field being excited about Jesus Christ.

So what are the chances then that Luke is recording John the Baptist and is putting it right here within the text chronologically, but also very specifically, and of course it's by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, what are the chances that he is still carrying the same theme of excitement? Well that would be expressed in the very fact that there are people who are coming to him to be baptized, and it even says that they have this expectation in verse 15.

Now one of their reasons for their excitement and their expectation is because they think there's a chance that John might be the Messiah, but there is no doubt that our context is carrying the theme of excitement.

What Repentance Really Is

Another reason for expressing the idea of repentance as something to be excited about is because what John the Baptist, and what Luke has recorded for us is very important to recognize with respect to what repentance actually is. And maybe there's a chance that we're not quite as excited about repentance because we don't quite grasp the significance of what repentance actually is.

Now what we're going to see with repentance is the very fact that repentance is more than just the cessation of sin. When you look at organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous and you see that they actually have success of getting people off of drunkenness and off of liquor, that it's possible for the non-believer for the unregenerate to stop sin. There have been people who are unbelievers and marriages that a spouse has been committing an affair who stops committing the affair, they renew their love for each other in the marriage, they strengthen their marriage, and then they end up enjoying each other for the rest of their lives.

It's possible for the unbeliever to stop a particular kind of sin. Repentance as it pertains to the gospel is not simply the cessation of a specific sin or even sin in and of itself, though it goes along with the idea of repentance. But when Jesus is coming into the world and everything that Luke has been talking about is it's not just the excitement about somebody named Jesus but it's the excitement about the long awaited Messiah who's going to correct things. He's going to fix things. He's going to change lives. He's not just simply going to start a new religion. He's going to start new lives for his people. And repentance is something that is in harmony with that work of changing life.

As you see, the thing is that when the unbeliever stops sin, the difference between the unbeliever who stops sinning and the believer who stops sinning is the fact that the unbeliever has not had a change of life, they've had a change of behavior. You can imagine that somebody who stops sinning could still have an insatiable craving for that sin. And an unbeliever can still have a desire for a sin but that desire is a fleshly desire that wages war with a spiritual desire and the spiritual desire hates the sin that the flesh is desiring.

But when we look at the differences and the concepts of repentance, the excitement about a believer when it comes to repentance is that a believer is excited about repentance because the believer is not excited about the sin that they're repenting from anymore. And what's exciting to the believer is the sin no longer being in their life because repentance is fixing their lives and making them what they should be.

These are the reasons why in this context a question that I have is are we excited about repentance because if we're not excited about repentance, there's a chance that it could specifically reveal something very serious and very problematic within our life. We're not excited about repentance, it could be because we're excited about sin. And there's going to be reasons within our context of even more so why that's going to be a bad thing. And just because we're happy to give spoiler alerts and our sermon that has