Tag Archives: Repentance

Leaving It All Behind

10 Monday May 2021

Posted by in Walking in the Way

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Over the last week, I had the opportunity to find and read a book I had never read before; a book by one of my favorite authors.  The book was exceptionally written and yet, when I closed the covers for the last time, I was left wondering if I’d enjoyed it.  There was a tone of misery throughout the entire work and I felt a bit down after I’d finished it.  This got me thinking of a previous post where I mentioned trying a book by my favorite author even though the title and description gave me qualms and where I wondered if what I was about to read meant I would have to stop reading this author. 

“Have to stop reading” sounds a bit legalistic now that I think about it and legalism was not at all what I meant to imply.  Life changes as I move forward in the Spirit. Books I used to read are no longer enjoyable.  Television shows I used to watch are no longer entertaining.  Jokes I used to laugh at are no longer funny.  These things are so not because I’m worried about GOD getting mad at me and judging me.  No, these things are so because I AM a new creation in Christ.  I have been born again by His Spirit.  The same mind that was in Christ Jesus is in me.  I have been and am still being transformed by the renewing of my mind.  This transformation has meant leaving behind many things.

I closed last week with the comment: “If our denominations, doctrines, creeds, and knowledge have become a substitute for this living in vital union with Jesus through his Spirit, let us turn from them.”  I want to take this week to expound on that and, while doing so, write more on the goodness of God.  My main scripture passage for this week is Romans 2 verse 4: “Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?”

What do you think of when you think of repentance?  Whatever the word originally meant, it has come to mean the doing of penance over and over.  If that is the definition we hold in our minds, then this verse also takes on a meaning far different than that intended by the Apostle Paul.  If the end result we Christians are looking for is doing penance over and over, then we need look no further than the religious institutions that define themselves by lists of rules and regulations.  We cannot help but fail if our focus is on not breaking rules and being sure we pray enough and read our bibles enough and attend enough meetings and memorize enough and serve enough.  The guilt that goes along with that sense of failure always ensures there are people flooding the altars on Sunday mornings, repenting, re-dedicating, seeking renewal and hoping enough anointing of the Lord had been received to last through another week.  At least, it always ensured I was doing and hoping so.

What freedom there is in the Spirit!  Some of the truest words ever written are 2 Corinthians 3:17: “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”  Liberty.  Freedom.  He does not call us to a life of doing penance over and over.  His goodness leads us to metanoia (G3341) which means “change of mind”1.  Malcolm Smith calls it a radical change of mind and indeed it is.  It is not a changing of our minds about Jesus, it is exchanging our minds for His.  “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2: 5).  “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (Romans 12:2).  As my mind is transformed, so is my entire inward life, and the outward life cannot help but change as well.

The goodness of God that leads us to this radical change of mind is not the agathosune (G19) I wrote about last week.  The Greek word isn’t chrestotes (G5544) either but a related word chrestos (G5543).  This word means “employed, useful, better, easy, good(-ness), gracious, kind”.  There is no harsh edge or admonishment associated with this word.  It is the word translated “easy” in Matthew 11:30: “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” 

His yoke is easy and His burden is light.  He does not demand.  Rather, He lives in me and wroughts changes I’m not even aware of until the day comes when I realize I’ve lost the enjoyment I used to have in a thing and He bids me come away from it.  I don’t want to give the impression it’s always easy.  Sometimes it is.  Sometimes there is the realization that I don’t enjoy whatever the thing is anymore and it’s done.  Then there are the times when, even though my enjoyment has fled, I do want to keep reading, watching, or doing it.  These are times when there needs to be a subduing of my flesh but He gives the strength for that as well.  I promise this much is true: there is not one thing I have turned away from that I ultimately miss.  There is nothing I leave behind but He does not give me the greater portion of Himself.

I don’t have to work on myself and clean up my behavior before He’ll come live in me.  No, the good news of the gospel is that “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). There is no great work I must do but I confess with my mouth the Lord Jesus, I believe in my heart God has raised Him from the dead, and I am saved (See Romans 10:9-10). Truly, He has put His spirit in me.  He causes me to walk in His statutes.  He enables me to keep His judgments and do them.  (See Ezekiel 36:27) I “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8) and His goodness leads me to metanoia. 

Amen

Unless notes otherwise, scriptures are quoted from the New King James Version of the Holy Bible, Thomas Nelson, Inc. 1982

  1.  Hastings, James, Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., Fifth Printing-March 2001, Page 790

Other References:

Strong, James, LLD., S.T.D., The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 1990

Baptize to Repentance

14 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by in Gospel and Letters of John, Studies

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In this week’s post, I continue looking at John 3:5 and the question; does “born of water” refer to water baptism?  I have yet to be convinced it does because I cannot find anything that suggests water baptism being performed by John would have occurred to Nicodemus in answer to Jesus’ words.  I had hoped I would find an easy answer in the Old Testament thinking that the phrase “born of water” might have been used somewhere and so I looked through my lexicons looking for said phrase.

I couldn’t find it.  I do admit I might have missed it: to be thorough I looked up “born” and, since James 1:18 in the King James Version uses “begat” rather than “birthed” or “born”, I looked up “begat” as well.  There was a great deal of begetting in the Old Testament.  Knowing I may not have read the scripture lists with as detailed an eye as I ought, I went to Google.  The search engine was not able to return a single instance of the phrase “born of water” in the Old Testament.  Just for fun, I looked up “water” and encountered many phrases I’d like to take a look at another time (what does it mean to drink the water of iniquity?) but found nothing that suggested someone intimate with the Old Testament scriptures like Nicodemus would associate the water baptism of John with being born anew/born of water and spirit. 

What was the baptism of John?  Mark 1:4 tells me it was a baptism to the repentance of sins.  I want to take a look at the word repentance because it doesn’t mean in this passage what general usage says it means.  My New World Dictionary defines repentance as “a repenting or being penitent; feeling of sorrow, etc., esp. for wrongdoing; compunction; contrition, remorse.”  Repent is further defined as “to feel sorry or self-reproachful for what one has done or failed to do, be conscious-stricken or contrite, to feel such regret…as to change one’s mind about…”  Repentance is made up of the Latin “re-again” and “poenitere-penitent.”1

There is a word for this in the New Testament: metamellomai (G3338).  It is the word used in Matthew 27:3 where Judas “repented” and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders.  It is a word that expresses “a desire that an action might be undone, express regrets, or even remorse, but does not imply an effective change of heart”2.

I am careful whenever I find someone using the word repentance.  It’s critical to understand what is being said.  Is repentance being used to mean “to be afflicted in mind”, “to be troubled for our former folly”…”a being displeased for what we have done”?3  Is repentance being used to mean performing penance over and over again?  If so, then it is not the same repentance used in accordance with the baptism of John.  The Greek word used there is metanoia (G3341) and “where there was a difference made (in meaning), metanoia was the better word, which does not properly signify the sorrow for having done amiss, but something that is nobler than it…metanoia and its verb refer to a true change of heart toward god.”4

I found an article online that said that baptism was used for ritual cleansing of Gentile proselytes and that John applied it to the Jews themselves: all needed to have a true heart change toward God.  No wonder that the Pharisees refused to step into the water! (See Mathew 3:5-9).  And, this is why I am convinced that Jesus never meant baptism when he spoke to Nicodemus about being born of water and spirit.  I doubt that it ever would have occurred to Nicodemus-religious leader and teacher of Israel-that he needed to have a change of heart toward God.  

I must also take into consideration the fact that Jesus could not have meant water baptism because John’s baptism was a forerunner to what did not yet exist.  Christian baptism is the physical demonstration of the identification with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ and has a much deeper significance than the baptism of John (See Acts 18:24-26, 19:1-5).  I cannot agree with Dr. Vincent when he says “Jesus’ words included a prophetic reference to the complete ideal of Christian baptism”5.

Yet I do agree Jesus clearly expected Nicodemus to know what He meant.  Nicodemus’ place among the upper echelons of the Pharisees meant he could not be in ignorance of all that had happened in recent years.  Consider first the coming of the wise men as related in Chapter 2 of Matthew’s gospel.  Their appearance troubled Herod the king and all Jerusalem (verse 3) and Herod had to call the chief priests and scribes to him to inquire where the Christ was to be born (verse 4).  Here’s a thing that blows my mind: the priests and scribes are called into the presence of the king to answer the wise men, they quote the prophet Micah, and then what…go their way?  No one seemed the least bit curious.  Selah!  (pause, and calmly think of that!)  Then comes the devastating slaughter of the children in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16-18, Jeremiah 31: 15).  Then there is John the baptizer.  He quotes Isaiah and declares he is “the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘make straight the way of the Lord’” (John 1:23, Isaiah 40:3). 

I wonder if Jesus expected one so familiar with the prophets and not ignorant of what had been happening in the region, to recognize who he was meeting at night.  I wonder if that is what Jesus meant when he asked, “are you the teacher of Israel and do not know these things?”  I wonder if when Jesus said “you must be born of water” he wasn’t thinking of His own words to Jeremiah when He called Himself the “fountain of living waters (Jeremiah 2:13, 17: 13) and of his words to Ezekiel when He promised a new heart and His own Spirit. 

“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13)

To be continued…

1.  Guralnik, David B. Editor in Chief, Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Cleveland * New York, William Collins + World Publishing Co., Inc., 1976

2. New Koine Greek Textbook Series Supplements, 2nd Edition, Richard Chenevix Trench’s Synonyms, Repent, 2018, 145-146

3. New Koine Greek Textbook Series Supplements, 2nd Edition, Richard Chenevix Trench’s Synonyms, Repent, 2018, 145-146

4. New Koine Greek Textbook Series Supplements, 2nd Edition, Richard Chenevix Trench’s Synonyms, Repent, 2018, 145-146

5.  Vincent, Marvin R., D.D., Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament Volume II, Peabody, Massachusetts, Hendrickson Publishers, Gospel of John Chapter 3:5. Born of Water and the Spirit, Page 92

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