mind about Jesus Christ so that He is believed and received as personal Saviour from sin." Repentance,
A Look at the Issues
and works, faith must be incompatible with works. They set faith in opposition to submission, yieldedness, or turning from sin, and they categorize all the practical elements of salvation as human works. They stumble over the twin truths that salvation is a gift, yet it costs everything.
Those ideas are paradoxical, but they are not mutually exclusive. The same dissonance is seen in Jesus' own words, "I will give you rest," followed by "take My yoke upon you" (Matt. 11:28 – 29). The rest we enter into by faith is not a rest of inactivity.
Salvation is a gift, but it is appropriated through a faith that goes beyond merely understanding and assenting to the truth. Demons have that kind of "faith" (James 2:19). True believers are characterized by faith that is as repulsed by the life of sin as it is attracted to the mercy of the Savior. Drawn to Christ, they are drawn away from everything else. Jesus described genuine believers as "poor in spirit" (Matt. 5:3). They are like the repentant tax-gatherer, so broken he could not even look heavenward. He could only beat his breast and plead, "God, be merciful to me, the sinner!" (Luke 18:13).
That man's desperate prayer is one of the clearest pictures of genuine, Godwrought repentance in all of Scripture. His plea was not in any sense a human work or an attempt at earning righ teous ness. On the contrary, it represented his total abandonment of confidence in religious works. As if to prove it, he stood "some distance away" from the praying Pharisee. He understood that the only way he could ever be saved was by God's merciful grace. On that basis, having first come to the end of himself, he received salvation as a gift. Jesus said that man "went down to his house justified" (v. 14).
Our Lord's point in relating that account was to demonstrate that repentance is at the core of saving faith. The Greek word for repentance, metanoia, literally means "to think after." It implies a change of mind, and some who oppose lordship salvation have tried to limit its meaning to that.29 But a definition of repentance cannot be drawn solely from the etymology of the Greek word.
Repentance as Jesus characterized it in this incident involves a recognition of one's utter sinfulness and a turning from self and sin to God (cf. 1 Thess. 1:9). Far from being a human work, it is the inevitable result of God's work in a human heart. And it always represents the end of any human attempt to earn God's favor. It is much more than a mere change of mind — it involves a
29. Cocoris, Lordship Salvation — Is It Biblical? 11. Also, Ryrie claims that repentance is "a change of mind about Jesus Christ so that He is believed and received as personal Saviour from sin." Repentance, by this defi nition, has nothing to do with one's attitude toward sin and does not necessarily result in any change in lifestyle. It is merely a christological focus. Ryrie, Balancing the Chris tian Life, 175 – 76.