Monday, January 5, 2009

"Repent and Be Saved" (pt. 3)

(See previous posts -- pt. 1 and pt. 2)

The Bible teaches that we must repent and believe in order to be saved. But what does it mean to repent? In the previous posts, I've given two descriptions of repentance. Now, here is a third, this time from Charles Spurgeon...

“Another proof of the conquest of a soul for Christ will be found in a real change of life.

“If the man does not live differently from what he did before, both in private and in public, then his repentance needs to be repented of, and his conversion is a fiction.

“Not only action and language, but spirit and temper [attitude] must be changed….

“…Remaining under the power of any known sin is a mark of our being the servants of sin, for ‘you are servants of the one you obey’ [Rom.6].

“Idle are the boasts of a man who harbors within himself the love of any transgression. He may feel what he likes, and believe what he likes, but he is still in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity while a single sin rules his heart and life.

“True regeneration implants a hatred of all evil; and where one sin is delighted in, the evidence is fatal to a sound hope…..[that is, the hope that such a person is genuinely saved”].

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