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.
...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.
Today the logic goes something like this: 'Calling a ruler Son of God is out of style. No one really does that nowadays. We can support a president while also worshiping Jesus as the Son of God.' But how is this possible? For one says that we must love our enemies, and the other says we must kill them; one promotes the economics of competition, while the other admonishes the forgiveness of debts. To which do we pledge allegiance?
I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.
And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.
Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?
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