True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 2
Luke 3:8-14
We are in a rich and glorious study of Luke's gospel. And we're finding in Luke's gospel the foundations of the Christian faith as well as the bridge from the Old Testament to the New Testament. We're in chapter 3 and I would invite you, if you would, to open your Bible to Luke chapter 3.
Jesus in Matthew chapter 11 and verse 11 said that of those that are born of women, that involves all in the human race, the greatest man who ever lived was named John...the greatest man who ever lived up until his time was John...greater than Abraham and Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel and Ezekiel and anybody and everybody else. There was much about John the Baptist to emulate. He was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb which meant that his life functioned under divine direction and power. He was a man who lived a simple and frugal and almost self-denying life. He spent his entire ministry pointing toward Jesus Christ. All of those are admirable qualities. And if one were to pick a hero, somebody to pattern their life after, John the Baptist would be the best choice of those people who preceded Jesus Christ.
And I think not only in those personal areas, but in the fact that John is a notable model for the preacher. Today in our contemporary church environment there are all kinds of preaching models. I won't bore you with all the options, they're almost endless. Young men are going off to seminary and being trained into all kinds of different styles of preaching...models of preaching.
But I would like to offer to you and to the church in this generation John the Baptist as the model for preaching. I'm not talking about his wardrobe, I don't think God expects us to wear camel skin. I'm not talking about his diet, I don't think we need to eat locusts and wild honey. And I'm not talking about his location, I don't think we have to go out in the desert and expect everybody to come to us. But I am talking about his message because what marked John was that he was a preacher of repentance and he was a preacher of Jesus Christ.
Really, those were the two features in his ministry. He called on people to turn from their sin and embrace the Messiah. And that, of course, is the essence of all true gospel preaching. We live in a time today when there is a minimalistic presentation of Jesus Christ, at best, in many preaching environments. And there's an utter absence of the issue of repentance. In fact, just in the last couple of weeks a newsletter from a prominent ministry defended the fact that the gospel could be preached without any mention of repentance at all.
When I wrote the book a number of years ago, The Gospel According to Jesus and the sequel to that book called Faith Works about to be released in another few weeks called The Gospel According to the Apostles, I wrote those two books to confront the fact that there was a growing movement in the church to deny the role of repentance in salvation. Just an unthinkable thing to occur.
John was a preacher of repentance. Matthew tells us in his third chapter that John came and said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And Jesus came and said, "Repent." Luke records for us in the fifth chapter that Jesus said He didn't come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Repentance is the issue. In the thirteenth chapter of Luke and the third verse and the fifth verse, Jesus said if you don't repent you'll perish.
Repentance so often ignored today, so often overlooked and minimalized is at the very heart of any biblical gospel ministry. And John was a preacher of salvation. He was preaching that people could have the forgiveness of sin and New Covenant salvation, as we've already learned. And the essence of that preaching is two-fold...you preach repentance from sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's precisely what Acts 20 says the Apostles preached. That is gospel preaching.
We could certainly desire to call the preachers of our modern world back to that biblical preaching where they preach true repentance and a true understanding of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well John did. That's what marked his preaching. He becomes for us then a wonderful model for gospel preaching, New Covenant preaching, preaching to sinners telling them they can be forgiven if they repent and if they embrace the true Christ, the true Messiah.
That is God's promise not just for Israel. John was directed to preach to Israel but that is God's promise to all sinners of all times. Salvation, forgiveness of sin, eternal life is given to those who repent of sin and acknowledge Jesus Christ as the only Savior.
Now the prophet John's ministry was not unlike the ministry of prophets before him. All the prophets before him talked about sin and they talked about righteousness and they talked about forgiveness. And they saw God as a Savior and a forgiver and for those who didn't receive His salvation and forgiveness, God then is a judge and an executioner. John just stands at the pinnacle of that with the most concise and defined message and because he was living at the time the Messiah came he can point most directly of all the prophets to the Messiah.
When John began his preaching in the wilderness, about six months before Jesus appeared to begin his public ministry, when John began his preaching out in the wilderness of Judea, the hope for the Messiah was very high. The Jews were weary, to put it mildly, of Roman oppression and prior to that Greek oppression. Of course, way back the oppression of the Medo-Persians and even the captivity of the Babylonians. They were ready for their own king and they were ready for the fulfillment of everything that had been promised to Abraham and David and they hadn't seen that fulfillment. They were ready for the Savior to come, the Redeemer, the One who would bring New Covenant salvation, New Covenant forgiveness and usher them in to the fulfillment of all Abrahamic and Davidic promise. They were looking for a monarch who would come and conquer nations, and they got a Lamb who came to conquer sin first. John was a model for this.
He did talk about the Kingdom, but he also talked about repentance. He did talk about the King, but he also talked about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world because before they could ever have the Kingdom and the fulfillment of Abrahamic and Davidic promise, they had to come through New Covenant salvation by way of repentance and faith in the Savior and the Redeemer, the Messiah. Luke wants us to understand John's message because it is a message for all the ages. And so he gives us a sample of John's preaching, starting in verse 7 and down to verse 17. That's the text we're looking at, Luke 3:7 to 17.
And as we go through this passage, we really do see the essence of gospel preaching. This, for me, is the model of how we are to preach. John is a great example. We are greatly indebted to Luke for giving us such a clear sample of John's great preaching, and in so doing providing for us the powerful and clear pattern for everybody who proclaims the good news of forgiveness.
Now as we go through this section, as I mentioned to you last week, we see the nature of true repentance. Because the main note that John sounded was the note of repentance, because he came calling people to repent, he was very clear as to what that involved. And that, as I told you last week, is absolutely critical today because there is such a tendency today to downplay repentance, to shrink repentance down to some minimal level, we face a tremendous amount of false repentance, a tremendous amount of shallow repentance, a tremendous amount of non-saving, superficial repentance.
Now there was nothing superficial about John's message. John preached what you would call hard truth, confrontive truth, even harsh truth because he understood the urgency of repentance and salvation. John was very confrontive. He was very direct. He paid no attention to his culture, in fact he lived his 30 years apart from the culture the whole time in the wilderness. He was not subject to the nuances of the political culture of the Romans, nor was he subject to the nuances of the religious culture of the Jews. He lived apart from all of that. He was culturally ignorant, I guess we could say, and more so, culturally indifferent. He was not interested in what the society thought or what they wanted to hear, he was only interested in the message that came from God to them. And so, John's message is very direct, very straightforward, very unembellished hard truth.
Even so...even so, most of the people apparently who came out and responded to John's preaching and repented and were baptized and there were a lot of them because the Bible says all Judea and Jerusalem were going out to him, most of the people that were coming to him and they involved the multitudes in general. They involved the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious leaders. They involved the tax collectors, the outcasts of society. They involved the soldiers which would be Jewish soldiers most likely, those who were attached to Herod Antipas up at Perea and other Jewish soldiers who functioned as policemen in Jerusalem. All of these various elements of society all going out to be baptized to get ready for Messiah, making some kind of act of repentance, some kind of confession and yet when you get to the end of it all and Jesus has lived and died and gone back to heaven, there are only 120 disciples gathered in an upper room. We can only conclude then that if there were only 120 who were really devoted to Jesus Christ, that most of this was superficial. And amazingly that in the face of hard preaching, that in the face of very direct preaching.
Now if even direct preaching by this man, this great gifted preacher, the greatest of all prophets up to his time, if even that kind of preaching resulted in some large extent of superficiality, what in the world can we expect today with the kind of preaching most people hear? We need to go back and look at John. Matthew says John came preaching repentance, and he did. And Jesus came preaching repentance, and the apostles throughout the book of Acts were preaching repentance. And I need to remind you how serious it is to preach a message without a call to true repentance because apart from true repentance there is no salvation. It's not enough to say to someone...You need to accept Jesus as your personal Savior. I know what people mean when they say that and it's well intentioned, I don't question that. But such words, frankly, are really inadequate to instruct a sinner in the way of salvation. You need to accept Jesus as your personal Savior as if you were sitting in the seat of sovereignty and you were going to give Jesus the privilege of being accepted by you.
You hear people say, "Well, you need to make a decision for Christ," as if the salvation decision was yours and not His. See, those kinds of statements subtly change the focus of the gospel, and they change it subtly away from repentance. What the sinner needs to do is not accept Jesus Christ or make a decision for Christ, but to repent and cry out and ask Jesus Christ to accept him in spite of his sin. He asks Christ if He would make a decision to forgive him. It's not your decision for Christ, it's His decision for you that matters.
I was sitting in my office a few years ago. About five o'clock in the afternoon I received a phone call from the Riverside Hospital down here in North Hollywood. And the person in the hospital said, "Pastor MacArthur, there's a request from a dying patient for you to come down to the hospital." And I said sure, I'll come right away. And I jumped in the car and drove down there. I walked into a room and I looked in the bed and there was a young man, I found out his name was David Chastain(?). He was dying of AIDS. He was in the throes of death and it was not a pretty sight. There also were, I think, three other homosexuals in the room. One was a former lover. Another was a representative of the Gay and Lesbian task force that come to the side of people in that situation. And the other was some male nurse, as best I could assess. But they were all there in the room. I walked in and I knew immediately, of course, the context of all of this.
Well, as soon as I walked in and announced who I was, the three left quickly and I was left standing at the bedside with David. And I said, "I'm John MacArthur."
He said, "Yes I know, thank you so much for coming." He said, "I needed you to come because I'm frightened." He said, "I'm dying and I'm going to be dead very soon and I'm going to go to hell forever. And I don't want to go to hell." And then he began to weep. And he said, "I just want to know if there's any hope for me."
I said, "Well, God is a Savior and He saves all who call upon him if you seek Him with all your heart. And if you repent honestly and genuinely, He'll not turn you away. But," I said, "it's up to you to ask Him." I didn't ask him to accept Christ, I told him to ask Jesus if He would accept him. I said, "Do you know the gospel?"
He said, "Yes, I know it very well. I was raised in it. My parents are Christians. I was raised in a Christian family. I attended Christian school. I went two years to a Bible college. And then I abandoned it all and for the last...I think he said about 20 years, maybe 15 or 20 years...I've been living at the basest level of a homosexual life style, the grossest and basest level." And he said, "I've had endless guilt. I know it's sin. I know it's wrong. I know it offended God. I know I deserve to go to hell, but I want God to forgive me. And I know about the death of Christ and I know about His resurrection." He went over that.
He said, "What do I do?"
I said, "Well, I think what you should do is ask Him to save you." It's like the thief, you know, what did he say? Lord...what? He didn't say, "Lord, I accept you." He said, "Lord...what?...remember me." It's like the publican beating on his chest saying, not Lord I accept you, I make a decision for you, but, "Lord...he says...be merciful to me, a sinner."
So I said...I reminded him of the publican who prayed that in Luke 18. I said, "Why don't you just ask God to be merciful to you?"
So, he grabbed a hold of my hand and held my hand and he began to cry out to the Lord. It was a long...long time. He confessed his sin. He said, "I know it's sin, I've always known it's sin. I know it violates Your law and I know I don't deserve Your forgiveness." And he was kind of weeping and praying and squeezing my hand with the strength that he had. And he just pled with God to save him and forgive him and apply the death of Christ to him. And then when he was done, I prayed the same thing and prayed. And, you know, Jesus said, "Him that comes to Me I'll never...what?...cast away." So there was a real calm after I suppose ten minutes or maybe more, maybe 15 minutes of this intense praying. And there was a real calm. There was just a peace that you could see in his heart. And I assured him that if his repentance was real and his faith was true, God would save him and that God would be glorified in showing His mercy and never would withhold it from true repentance. And just a calm came over him
And just a little interesting thing...he looked at the calendar, there was a calendar on the wall opposite his bed and he just kept looking at it. I said, "What are you looking at?" He said, "I'm looking at the date because I want to remember the day of my new beginning." I remember that line. And he lived about a week and I ran a shuttle down there with some books and he read just intensely as much as he could in those last days. He said, one time, he said, "I...I just really feel like I want to get to know the Lord before I meet Him to make up for lost years." And he was a witness to those people in that environment until his death.
You see, that's what...that's what presenting the gospel is all about and it's not about you accepting Christ, it's about you asking Christ to accept you, right? That's the issue. It's at His discretion. We don't call sinners to repent enough today. We're not asking Him to take moral action. We have this superficial thing about accepting Jesus. There's...there's moral action here. There's a real moral issue. There's a grappling with a condition that is endemic, systemic, profound called sin. It isn't that Jesus is standing hat in hand waiting for sinners to render a verdict on Him. That isn't it. It's that He is ready to render a verdict on sinners. They are at the disposal of His sovereignty. But He promises for those who truly repent that He will provide forgiveness. So the gospel is a call to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, and that is the essence of what John preached. And that is the essence of what all true preachers preach. And those who don't preach that don't preach truly. We preach repentance. That's what I said. In Luke 13:3 and 5 Jesus said, "If you don't repent, you'll perish." We preach repentance. That is our message.
At the very end of Luke's gospel in the great commission, Jesus says, "Repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations." That's what we do. We preach that God forgives sinners who repent and believe in the name of Jesus Christ. That's the gospel...that's the gospel.
Here we are again in our day today fighting...fighting for the preservation of the doctrine of repentance in the gospel. I'm glad that book is coming out again on The Gospel According to the Apostles cause it has a whole section demanding the preaching of repentance.
John was aware of shallow conversion. He was aware of that. He was aware that the Jewish people were very good at superficial religion and so the tone of his preaching was urgent and the tone of his preaching was even harsh as he spoke hard truth calling sinners to true penitence.
Now with that as a background, let's look at the text now and we're going to see that there are six elements in John's preaching...six elements that define for us true repentance. This is important cause people will say, "Well I believe in repentance," and then redefine it in some way that it's not consistent with true repentance.
So what is repentance? Well John gives us six characteristics of a true repenter so we can see it in the demonstration that is given here as Luke records the preaching of John. And by the way, from verse 7 to 17, actually including verse 18, you have a sample of John's preaching. But now remember, he preached for months and he preached every day all day as the crowds kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. And the verbs in this passage, a number of the verbs are imperfect which is continuous action and present tense which also is continuous action so that this is kind of the cycle of John's preaching and the cycle of his interaction with the cycle of people who kept coming day after day. So this is really a sampler of the consistent kind of preaching John did day after day and gives us a great model for preaching for true repentance and salvation.
Now a true repenter is to be known by six characteristics. Number one, I already covered the first four, we're just going to review...number one, true repenters reflect on personal sin...they reflect on personal sin. Remember, we looked back at verse 5 at that wonderful passage from Isaiah 40, part of which says, "Every ravine shall be filled up, every mountain and hill shall be brought low, the crooked shall become straight, the rough road smooth." And we said if you're going to make a highway to the heart, a highway on which God can come into the heart, you have to do some preparation, heart preparation. And the ravine is the low and the base and the hidden of the secret shameful things of the heart that have to be brought up to the light. And we talk about the mountains and the hills being the lofty things, the things of pride and self-righteousness and they have to be brought low. And then we talked about the skolios, the crooked, the bent things that need to be straightened out, the things of deception and dishonesty. And then the rough roads have to be made smooth. All the other bumps, all the...all the other iniquities that litter our lives, they all have to be dealt with, they have to be examined. There's a real honest internal introspective reflection on personal sin. That's true of a true repenter. They do an inventory on their sin and they are overwhelmed by it and they want forgiveness.
Secondly, true repenters reflect on personal sin, secondly, reviewing, true repenters recognize divine wrath...they recognize divine wrath. It's absolutely critical to preach the doctrine of hell. It's critical to preach the doctrine of eternal judgment as John did because why else would someone want their sins forgiven if there was no hell? If there was no judgment? And so, John, end of verse 7, preached about the wrath to come...he preached about the wrath to come. That is an expression well known to the Jews, it refers to God's final wrath, God's final vengeance, the judgment that Messiah would bring on the ungodly.
And it's in light of the wrath to come, it's in light of eternal hell, eternal judgment, eternal punishment that forgiveness becomes urgent. And that's what calls for the harsh words, or the hard truth, the straightforward truth to shake people out of shallow attitudes and shallow repentance.
In fact, to show you how hard John was on his audience, he says in verse 7, "When the multitudes were coming," the multitudes, and, of course, Matthew tells us in front there were the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and Jesus says right to the Pharisees and Sadducees, as well as the multitude around them, "You brood of vipers." In other words, you're coming but there isn't any change in your nature, you're still the sons of Satan, you're still of your father, the devil, the original serpent. You're still sons of snakes. You haven't had any change in your wicked nature..."Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Remember I told you what he means by that is you're like snakes scrambling in front of a brush fire, scrambling toward the water. Here you come scrambling down the back hills of Jerusalem, back side of Judea, you're scrambling as if you were snakes trying to escape from the wrath and you're scrambling down there to get in the water of this baptism thinking that by that you can escape the wrath to come...who told you that? There's no change in your nature, you're just crazed like snakes scrambling toward water chased by a brush fire. You recognize the fire of judgment but you haven't recognized that you are snakes. And so he unveils that fact to them.
Yes, they did recognize the wrath to come, that's necessary. Yes, there had to be an honest reflection on personal sin. Some of them were apparently doing that or they wouldn't have submitted to John's baptism because John's baptism was the baptism that was usually reserved for Gentiles who were proselyting into Israel, becoming Jews by...by a baptismal ceremony, that is they were proselytes to Judaism. And what Jew would want to admit that he was no better than a Gentile? So some of them were doing some reflection on personal sin, saying...Okay, I'm not in the covenant, okay I'm not in the family of God, okay I'm no better than a Gentile, I'll go ahead with that baptism...and yes, I see the wrath to come. So they had come this far.
There's a third characteristic that John points out to them. True repenters reject religious ritual. "Who warned you to flee?" Remember, I told you what he's saying there is...Did you think that by this rite of baptism you would escape the wrath to come? You're like snakes who think if they can get to the water they'll escape the fire...but there's still no change in your nature. It doesn't do you any good to come down here and go through the water, that is not enough. You have to reject religious ritual. Baptism doesn't save. We went into that last time. You cannot avoid God's wrath by any religious ceremony, including baptism.
So true repentance is a matter of recognizing your personal sin, recognizing divine wrath, rejecting ritual as a means of salvation, any ritual. And then fourthly, John also says you have to renounce family ancestry. You cannot trust in your ancestry. In verse 8, in the middle of the verse, they would say...and he knew it so he says..."Don't start saying to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father.'" Don't say...we're going to get out of this wrath, we're going to escape because after all, Abraham is our father and God gave the covenant to Abraham back in Genesis 12 and 15 and 18 and reiterated it to Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and we are in that line and we are born out of the loins of Abraham, we are the people of the covenant. And because we're Abraham's children we're going to be God's people and we're going to receive all the Abrahamic promises of blessing and the land and prosperity and all of that.
He says you can't count on that, you can't count on your family, you can't count on your ancestry. You can't count on your heritage. And in a very sarcastic way he says...God can make children of Abraham out of these rocks, that's nothing special. And that's a statement to demean their Abrahamic ancestry. It isn't that it didn't mean anything, but they really inherited from Abraham was sin. It's really what he passed on to them. They did inherit covenant promise which means opportunity for spiritual blessing, it doesn't mean spiritual blessing, it means opportunity for spiritual blessing if they believed and obeyed God. So they did inheri