The Fruits of True Repentance, Part 2

Matthew 3:7-12

     Matthew 3, verses 7 to 12.  This is a sample of the kind of preaching done by the forerunner of Jesus Christ.  Let me read it to you beginning at verse 7, Matthew 3.  "But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come for baptism, he said unto them, 'O generation"...or offspring..."of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bring forth, therefore, fruits befitting repentance, and think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham as our father, for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.  And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees, therefore, every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.  I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance, but He who cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear.  He shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire, whose fan is in His hand and He will thoroughly purge His floor and gather His wheat into the grainery, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.'" 

     Now, in those brief few verses, we find a sample of the preaching of John the Baptist.  And basically, his message is always the same as we see it indicated to us in the gospel record.  It is a message calling for repentance.  It's no different here.  We find that as we note in verse 8 that he calls for the fruits of repentance.  And in verse 2 of the chapter, we see that his message was "Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." 

     Let me back up a little bit before we approach the text.  God promised His people a Savior.  We're all very much aware of that.  God promised them a Messiah, a King.  And even throughout the time of Israel's moral and spiritual decline, even throughout the time of Israel's decadence, even throughout the time of Israel's chastening, the Holy Spirit continued through the mouth of the prophets to speak about the coming of the King, the Messiah, the Christ.  And hope was always kept alive, at least in the hearts of the godly remnant as the Holy Spirit used men like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Joel and Zechariah and Malachi to sing over again and again the songs of the splendor of the King and of His coming kingdom.  Even in times of decadence and even in times of chastening, the message was still there.  And for those that were godly, it was heard and it was believed and the anticipation filled their hearts.  This went on throughout all of Israel's history until the great silent period after Malachi.  The Old Testament ends with the prophecy of Malachi.  And that's the end of the prophetic voice as far as the history of God's people is concerned.  And, in fact, Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, ends this way:  "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord.  And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."  The last statement of the Old Testament is that there was going to come a man who would be really in the spirit and power of Elijah and he would turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God and that was really a prophecy of what man?...John the Baptist.  So that the Old Testament ends with a statement about the coming of John the Baptist, the New Testament then begins with the ministry of this man.  And in between is this 400-year period of silence, four long centuries from Malachi to John the Baptist where no God-inspired voice spoke the message of the Messiah, the coming kingdom of righteousness and of peace.  But just as suddenly as the silence began, just so suddenly was it broken by the powerful and bold preaching of a desert prophet by the name of John the Baptist or John the Baptizer.  Either is correct.  In chapter 3, verse 1, he is introduced, "In those days came John the Baptizer..."  And he hit the silent sky like a comet.  He was the first prophetic voice in 400 years and his message was the most anticipated of any message that could ever be delivered.  His message was the kingdom of Heaven is at hand, the King is coming, the thing for which Israel had hoped, the anticipation of the kingdom, the One which they had longed to see, the King Himself, was nigh, was near.  And we've learned in our study that John the Baptist was the herald of the King.  He was the announcer.  He was the forerunner.  And so we have met him because this fits Matthew's plan.  Matthew wrote his entire gospel to present Christ as King.  And Matthew well knows that all kings have a herald.  All kings have an announcer.  All kings have a forerunner or someone who straightens out the path, who gets things ready for his arrival.  And, consequently, Matthew goes to great lengths to introduce to us this herald in order that he might affirm from another angle, that indeed Jesus Christ was a king.  Like any king, He had a herald, and not just any herald, not just any forerunner, but according to Matthew 11:11, John the Baptist was the greatest man who had ever been born up until his time.  Indeed, a great man.  So Matthew introduces us to John because it fits his theme.  And John's message was the message of repentance, the message that was needed to get Israel ready.  Because the tragedy of the matter, as we have seen, was that even though the King was coming and even though the kingdom was imminent, the people were not ready and the people could not receive the kingdom.  There was sin in Israel.  Israel was lost.  In fact, Israel was no different than Gentiles at this point.  And that's why John preached a baptism, because baptism was actually the rite which a Gentile proselyte went through to become a part of Israel.  And John was, in effect, saying you're on the outside looking in.  The good news, the King is coming; the bad news, you're not ready.  You've got to be converted.  You've got to be changed.  The word repentance, literally, is converted.  You've got to be transformed.  You've got to turn your life around and get ready for the King or you will not be able to receive His kingdom.  And so it was bad news that John preached before it was good news that he announced.  The bad news...look at verse 2...repent.  The good news, the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  That was the twofold message that John preached.  Before the kingdom could be received, repentance had to occur.  Before they could ever enter into the place of blessing and be a part of what God had planned, the kingdom, they had to come to a place of conversion, transformation, 180 degree turning around, away from their sin, a fundamental change in their relationship to God and the way they were living their lives.  And as I said, it was to be symbolized by baptism, the symbol of Gentile proselytes entering Judaism.  And, really, the Jews were outsiders.  This was a shocking message.  So, repentance keynoted John's message.

     Now, repentance is an important thing.  It's a great, great, biblical truth.  And I want you to understand it before we look again at his message.  The great theologian Eric Sauer said this, and I think it's a good summation of the thought of repentance.  He said this, quote, "Repentance is a threefold action.  In the understanding, it means knowledge of sin.  In the feelings, it means pain and grief.  And in the will, it means a change of mind," end quote.  And all three have to be there.  In general, then...and stay with me on this, cause I want to explore these three for just a moment...in general, then, repentance involves first of all, insight in the mind, understanding, secondly, despair in the emotions or the feelings and thirdly, a change of life, changing the pattern, turning around, coming to the place where you see the truth in your mind.  And then you cry out with the apostle Paul, "O wretched man that I am..." and you have despair.  And then you remove all self-redemption possibility and you turn around and become totally dependant upon the grace of God.  We know in the New Testament that redemption is presented as a gift.  God has granted redemption it says in Acts, chapter 5 and chapter 11.  Redemption is a gift according to II Timothy, chapter 2 and verse 25 where the Bible says, "In meekness, instructing those that oppose them, if God perhaps will give them repentance."  It's a gift from God.  God grants this gift in a threefold measure.  Let's look at them.  We've already mentioned them.  Let's look at them specifically.

     First of all is that intellectual part.  And by the way, each of these, the intellectual, the emotional and what we'll call the volitional element of repentance has a different word for it in the New Testament.  Most interesting.  Each of them has a different word so that they are delineated by the Holy Spirit as well.  First of all is the intellectual.  Repentance begins when there is a knowledge of sin, when there is a recognition of sin.  So John, like any good preacher of repentance, confronted people with sinfulness.  There had to be an understanding of sin involving a sense of personal guilt, a sense of personal defilement, a sense of personal helplessness.  Now, all three of these are illustrated very aptly in Psalm 51.  Take your Bible and turn to it with me for a minute and I'll point this out to you.  We see the intellectual element of repentance in Psalm 51 in verse 3.  This, by the way, is David's repentant heart crying out to God after his terrible sin with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah.  He committed adultery with Bathsheba and then in order to eliminate her husband he got him out in a battle and instructed his soldiers to get him in the heat of the battle and then leave him there until he was killed.  And in response to that, his heart is broken and he repents.  But first of all is the intellectual part in verse 3.  "For I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me."  Verse 7, "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.  Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow."  Verse 11, "Cast me not away from thy presence.  Take not thy Holy Spirit from me."  Now, in all three of those verses is a recognition of sin.  Verse 3, explicitly, "For I acknowledge my transgressions, my sin is ever before me."  Verse 7 and 11, implicit, the sense that he needs to be cleansed, the sense that he needs to be purged, that there is something wrong, that God may leave him, verse 11, the Holy Spirit may be removed from him.  And so there is an acknowledging, an acknowledging of sin, a recognition of what we are before God.  That is the beginning of repentance.  The story goes that Lady Huntington was invited...or rather invited, I should say, the Duchess of Birmingham to come to hear George Whitfield preach.  The Duchess responded in this manner, quote, "It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth.  It is highly offensive and insulting," end quote.  Well, Lady Huntington was insulted when George Whitfield attempted to call her to the recognition of sin and consequently she never entered into the act of repentance.  Mr. Moody, after preaching to the prisoners in a Chicago jail, visited them cell by cell.  In the first cell he found two men playing cards and they said, We're here because false witnesses have testified wrongly against us.  In the second cell the man said that the guilty man had escaped and I was only an accomplice and I am here.  And in the last cell, only, Mr. Moody found a man crying over his sins and there it was that Mr. Moody stopped.  You see, the recognition of sin intellectually is where repentance begins.  Henry Drummond, who wrote the wonderful little book on The Greatest Thing in the World on I Corinthians 13...some of you may have read it...after hearing the confession of sinners on one occasion said this, "I am sick of the sins of these men.  How can God bear it?"  Recognition of sin is the beginning, but it is not the end.  It's just the beginning.  True repentance involves more than that. 

     Let me show you why I say that.  A hardened Pharaoh in Exodus, chapter 9 and verse 27 says, "I have sinned."  A double-minded Balaam in Numbers 23:34 said, "I have sinned."  A remorseful Achan in Joshua 7:20 said, "I have sinned."  An insincere Saul in I Samuel 15:24 said, "I have sinned."  And a desperate, despairing Judas said, "I have sinned."  But in none of those cases does the Bible ever record that true repentance took place because the intellectual element is only the beginning of it, not the end of it.  There must be secondly, the emotional, and as Eric Sauer says, this what we have in the feelings.  We go from the mind to the feelings and it becomes a recognition not only of sin, but that sin is hateful to a holy God and then there is an overwhelming sense of guilt in the emotions.  Psalm 51 again...in this Psalm where David is facing his sin, we find this element in verse 1.  "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.  Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin."  You see, here is a man crying for mercy and the only man who needs mercy is a man who is what?...guilty.  You see, innocent men don't need mercy.  Justice will do fine for them.  It's guilty men that need mercy and David recognizes here that he is guilty and his emotions are stirred.  In verse 10, "Create in me a clean heart"...he sees the evil in his heart..."O God, renew a right spirit in me."  Verse 14, "Deliver me from blood guiltiness..."  And David even felt the anxiety and the pain in his physical body.  He cries out to God in the midst of this sin in terrible anguish in his heart.  In fact, back in Psalm 32 he says, "When I kept silent about my sin, my bones became old through my roaring all the day long...day and night thy hand was heavy on me.  My moisture is turned into the drought of summer."  Like your tongue dries up when you know you've done something wrong and you're facing the test, David just dried up.  His bones hurt.  He had physiological responses to the emotion of guilt.  And we see that repentance involves not only an intellectual element but an emotional sense of guilt, a deep recognition that sin is against the holy God and an overwhelming sense of sorrow.  And, beloved, I would just hasten to add that all true elements of repentance, all true acts of repentance must include this feature.  It's gotta be there.  You have in Luke, chapter 18, this interesting statement about the rich young ruler, "And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful for he was very rich."  You say, oh, boy, that's good, he was sorrowful.  Yes, but there's something wrong with that kind of sorrow.  When I talk about...now watch this...when I talk about emotional pain over sin, I mean that the pain is over the violation of a holy God, not over the consequences.  It's got to be lupe kata theon.  It's got to be a sorrow directed toward God.  Sorrow that is merely a sense of shame because everybody found out or sorrow that is really fear of the consequences is selfishness.  And that is selfward.  True emotional guilt, true sorrow in the heart is because God has been violated and that's the stuff of which real repentance is made.  There are a lot who are sorry they got caught, right?  Lot of people who are sorry they lost their reputation, lot of people who are sorry they got some consequences; that's different.  Listen to this.  True repentance doesn't think of consequences, it doesn't think of other people's opinion and it doesn't think of excuses; it does think of transgressing God, it does think of being personally guilty.  So it is lupe kata theon, sorrow toward God.  That's the issue.  And when there is genuine repentance, there will be this deep sense of sorrow directed toward a holy God who has been offended.  Judas, when he betrayed Christ and he was condemned it says in Matthew 27:3, repented, but it wasn't the right kind.  It wasn't the right kind.  It wasn't the repentance that is God-ward, it was the repentance that says I don't like the consequences.  That's different. 

     So you begin with the intellect and then it moves to the feelings.  But no matter how convinced the mind is about sin and no matter how pained the emotions become even in the right way, true repentance will never happen without the third area and that's volitional...intellectual, emotional and volitional.  There's got to be an act of the will.  There's got to be a turning around.  With David he recognized it and he felt guilty for it and his guilt was directed toward God, but the thing that really made the repentance happen was the fact that he had an act of will in which he said I will not do this anymore.  I turn from this.  He changed his life pattern.  Look at Psalm 51, verse 5.  "Behold, I was shaped in iniquity and in sin did my mother conceive me."  He recognizes that this is the past, this is the way it was.  But in 7 he says, "Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean.  Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow."  Turn it around.  Turn this depravity around.  Turn this sinfulness around.  "Create"...verse 10..."in me a clean heart, O God.  Renew a right spirit within me."  You see, his will wanted a dramatic change.  That's vital.  That's vital.  That's illustrated, I think, in the New Testament in many cases, one that's especially meaningful, the prodigal son.  First of all, the prodigal son intellectually knew he'd done wrong.  Right?  And then he got very emotional about it and he began to look at the pig slop that he was eating.  He began to realize what a terrible mess he was in.  But finally he was volitional in Luke 15:18, "I will...I will" he says.  I will what?..."arise, go to my father and I'll say to him, Father, I've sinned against Heaven and before thee.  I am no more worthy to be called thy son.  Make me as one of thy hired servants.  And he arose and came to his father."  There was the act of true repentance consummated.  He moved in the direction of God.  In Luke 23:42 you have true repentance where the thief says in verse 41, "We indeed suffer justly...we receive the due reward of our deeds..."  He says, I acknowledge I'm a sinner.  "This man has done nothing amiss.  And he said to Jesus, Lord"...and right there, that man changed his allegiance, didn't he.  For a long time either himself or Satan or whatever had been lord, but now it was Jesus.  "...Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom."  From now on, I want to be identified with You.  There was a change.  His will was activated.  And the other thief, it wasn't so with him, it wasn't so.  Now, you see, once repentance occurs, there will be an immediate response.  And this is what we find, looking again in Matthew, chapter 3, now.  This is what we find in Matthew, chapter 3 and verse 8 called the fruits of repentance.  When this really, honest, legitimate, intellectual, emotional, volitional turnaround and transformation occurs under the power of God as a gift from God, when God does this miracle in a life, there will be fruit, there will be results.  All true repentance will bear fruit.  John's message then is true repentance.  And John is very concerned with validating anybody's supposed repentance on the basis of whether or not they manifest what?...fruit.  If it isn't there, then the repentance isn't valid because where there is real repentance, there will be real results.  Where there is a transformed life, where there is conversion and transformation, there's got to be a by-product.  And so that's the main message that John uses to confront the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

     Now, let's go back to Matthew 3 and again look at this confrontation.  John's message:  repentance.  You've got to repent and it's gotta be real and honest and legitimate and manifested by the fruits of repentance.  And do you know what those fruits of repentance are?  We'll remind you in case you've forgotten in just a moment.

     Now, as we look at this sample sermon...and we've already begun to look at it and gotten down to verse 10 and we'll pick it up there after a brief review...we have noted that in John's message we find five elements:  the congregation, the confrontation, the condemnation, the conflagration and the consolation.  John's out in the wilderness.  Okay?  Incredible man, wearing a garment made out of camel skin, eating bugs and honey, lived not only there when he was ministering but had lived there throughout his life waiting for this moment.  He was God's man.  He was set apart.  He was uncorrupted by the system.  Just by the way he appeared and by his very dress and diet, he was a rebuke to the materialistic minded people of his age.  He was the prophet of God, anointed by God to announce the coming of the King and the people began to flock out to him from inside the city.  They began to come in droves.  And with all of the people that were coming, one day there appeared a special group and this is point one in our message and this is the congregation.  And we saw who they were.  Look at verse 7.  "But when he saw many of the Pharisees and the Sadducees come for baptism..."  John looks up one day and here come the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious leaders, the two leading factions of Judaism, the legalists and the liberals, the Pharisees being the legalists, the Sadducees being the liberals.  And they were coming for baptism.  In other words, they were gonna do whatever needed to be done to get in on this deal.  They wanted to be included.  They were afraid that this new movement would exclude them.  If the people were in it, they were gonna be it, because they wanted to hold their control over the people.  And it may be, too, that they felt in their hearts that maybe this guy was a prophet of God and maybe there was some magic in this deal and let's get in on it if there is.  Or whatever their motive was, it wasn't the right one and John knew it right off the bat.  They wanted to be a part.  They were the ritualists and the rationalists, not the realists.  They weren't legitimate repentant men; they were phonies.  And by the way, it's most fascinating for us to remember from last time that they were archenemies.  The only thing they'd ever agreed on was whatever they needed to save their political skins and they also agreed on the death of Jesus Christ.  But apart from that, they despised and hated each other and were in absolute disagreement.  But when they found a common enemy to their power and their authority and their prestige, they really got together.  And so they came as hypocrites.  And we move from the congregation to the confrontation.  John confronted them as such in verse 7.

     He said to them, "O offspring of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"  You snakes, what made you run before the bush fire?  What chased you out here?  What cleared you snakes out of your holes?  What fire made you run?  Are you legitimately running from the wrath of God?  And I told you last time that that viper he's talking about there is that little snake that looks like a stick.  And it's on the desert out there and whenever there was a fire in that dry grass or whenever a farmer would burn his field, those little snakes would come scurrying ahead of the flames.  And John the Baptist is saying, what chased you here?  Is it really the wrath of God?  What's your real motive?  What brought you phonies out here pretending to be running from the wrath of God?  And John really unmasks the masquerade.  What's your real motive?  Well, he knew it wasn't genuine repentance. 

     And so in verses 8 to 10 we came thirdly to the condemnation and he says in verse 8, "Bring forth, therefore, fruits befitting repentance."  This is really a condemnation.  He's really saying you phonies.  You come running out here like everybody else pretending to repent and wanting to get this baptism and identify with the Messiah and be a part of this whole thing.  You're chasing, you're running out here supposedly fleeing from the fire of the wrath to come.  What's your real motive?  I know it isn't genuine repentance because if it was, there would be the fruits of is and I don't see that.  You better bring forth legitimate fruit of repentance before you can legitimatize your supposed act of repentance.  So John challenges them to true repentance in verse 8.  And then he reads their minds in verse 9 and says, "And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham as our father..."  Don't be saying to yourself, well, have you forgotten, we're real Jews.  We're the children of Abraham.  What do you mean, turn around, get converted, be repentant.  Why, we're the sons of Abraham.  We have a guarantee in the kingdom.  And we went into that last time, didn't we, how they felt about that?  John says, listen, you better not count on that.  I say unto you, God is able to make children of Abraham out of rocks if He wants to.  That's no big deal.  And, I think, implied in the stones here is the Gentiles.  If you Jews want to turn your hearts to stone, then God will take the lifeless stones, the Gentiles, and turn them into the children of Abraham.  So he says, you better not depend upon your descent from Abraham.  You better not depend upon your self-righteous hypocrisy.  If this is real and you really want to be baptized and you're really fleeing from the wrath to come, the only way you'll escape the wrath to come is to have genuine repentance and to bring forth the genuine fruit of repentance and not to depend upon your ancestry to redeem you.  And then the condemnation really focuses on them in verse 10 and let's pick it up right there.

     Verse 10, "And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.  Therefore, every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire."  Now, this is really a strong, strong statement.  In those days, men kept vineyards and orchards.  And at the end of the harvest season, the keeper of the vineyard, the keeper of the orchard would go through and check out all of his vines and all of his fig trees.  And the fruitless vines and the fruitless fig trees that were dead and produced no life he would cut down lest he waste his time on them.  And so again in an agricultural illustration, John pictures God, as it were, coming to find the fruitful tree, the tree where the fruit of repentance is visible.  And where he doesn't find it, He lays the axe, as it were, at the root, indicating the axe is resting there waiting to do its work of judgment.  The tree without the fruits of repentance is cut down and burned.  Look at it in verse 10.  "...every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit"...the fruits of repentance..."is hewn down and cast into the fire."  That's precisely the illustration used by our Lord, Himself in the 15^th chapter of John the 6^th verse.  "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, is withered, and men gather them and cast them into the fire and they are burned."  Now, John is saying this:  Look, you can pretend to be running from the wrath to come.  You can pretend to be fleeing from the judgment of God, but if there's not any fruit there and if you're depending upon your self-righteous smugness and your descent from Abraham to save you.  You're in a lot of trouble because the axe is already laid at the root of your tree because there's no fruit.  There's an imminency here.  He says...look at it..."the axe is laid unto the root of the trees" already.  Now, he says; it's there.  It's there now.  Judgment is now.  It's imminent.  Notice a most interesting thing that judgment in John's preaching and in all of the prophetic preaching of the Old Testament was connected with the coming of the Messiah just as much as salvation was.  And they didn't see any great gap like we see salvation now and the great judgment at the end of the millennial kingdom.  They didn't see all of that gap in there.  They just were told as the prophets always had been told that when the Messiah comes, the Messiah will come for salvation and He will come for judgment and they saw it as one.  They saw it in unison.  Listen, in the temple when Jesus was taken there as an infant in Luke, chapter 2, verse 34, Simeon said about that child, "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel."  From the very beginning when the baby came, it was judgment and salvation and they knew it.  That was always the word of the Old Testament prophets.  The Old Testament prophets looked to the time of Messiah as a time of great wondrous blessing and salvation and equally as a time of great and wondrous judgment and didn't necessarily see that there would be a great change or a great gap in between.  I think about Isaiah 11, "There shall come...a rod out of the stem of Jesse, a Branch"...and that's Christ.  It talks about in verse 3, immediately, that He is going to judge.  "With righteousness shall he judge the poor, reprove with equity for the meek of the earth...he will smite the earth with the rod of his mouth and the breath of his lips shall" be used to "slay the wicked."  Boy, that's a little different than the Bethlehem baby story, isn't it?  The prophets saw Him coming in great judgment.  Isaiah 61:1 talks about this Spirit of the Lord...listen to this..."The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me"...this is Christ, a great prophecy of Christ.  And He even quoted this Himself being the fulfillment of it.  "...bec