Repentance is simply giving up to stop fighting against God and to stop attempting to gain your own salvation through your own works; to literally give up and fall upon Christ. That is salvation.
Interpretation
Repentance involves surrendering to God's will rather than trying to achieve salvation through personal efforts.
In this quote, Paul Washer emphasizes the concept of repentance as a deep acknowledgment of one's inability to achieve salvation through personal works. Instead, true salvation is found in the act of surrendering oneself to Christ, highlighting the contrast between human effort and divine grace. This perspective encourages believers to cease their struggles against God and accept the salvation that comes freely through faith in Christ.
In practice
In a sermon about grace, a pastor might say this quote to illustrate the importance of relying on God's mercy.
We deal five minutes with a person and their conversion and then we spend the next fifty years trying to disciple a goat into a sheep. I'm not saying this because I'm angry. I'm saying this because countless people are being deceived.
Pray for the field. If God calls, then prepare for the field. When it is time, go to the field. A life lost for Christ is a life well spent.
There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.
Those who would send out thousands of questionnaires asking the unconverted what they would desire most in a worship service should realize that ten thousand unanimous opinions of carnal men do not carry the authority of one jot or tittle of God's Word.
The evidence of conversion is not a decision card filled out, it's a life being lived out.
When we realize what we were before Christ and what we deserved in that state, it further magnifies the enormity of the gospel for us.
It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign — a kind of death-rattle — when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them.
Be neat, Philothea; let nothing be negligent about you. It is a kind of contempt of those with whom we converse, to frequent their company in uncomely apparel; but, at the same time, avoid all affectation, vanity, curiosity, or levity in your dress. Keep yourself always, as much as possible, on the side of plainness and modesty, which, without doubt, is the greatest ornament of beauty, and the best excuse for the want of it.
There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there.
That part of Christ's nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.
The smallest things become great when God requires them of us; they are small only in themselves; they are always great when they are done for God.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.