'Godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not
to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world
worketh death.'--2 COR. vii. 10.
Very near the close of his missionary career the Apostle Paul summed up
his preaching as being all directed to enforcing two points, 'Repentance
towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.' These two, repentance
and faith, ought never to be separated in thought, as they are
inseparable in fact. True repentance is impossible without faith, true
faith cannot exist without repentance.
Yet the two are separated very often, even by earnest Christian
teachers. The tendency of this day is to say a great deal about faith,
and not nearly enough in proportion about repentance; and the effect is
to obscure the very idea of faith, and not seldom to preach 'Peace!
peace! when there is no peace.' A gospel which is always talking about
faith, and scarcely ever talking about sin and repentance, is denuded,
indeed, of some of its most unwelcome characteristics, but is also
deprived of most of its power, and it may very easily become an ally of
unrighteousness, and an indulgence to sin. The reproach that the
Christian doctrine of salvation through faith is immoral in its
substance derives most of its force from forgetting that 'repentance
towards God' is as real a condition of salvation as is 'faith in our
Lord Jesus Christ.' We have here the Apostle's deliverance about one of
these twin thoughts. We have three stages--the root, the stem, the
fruit; sorrow, repentance, salvation. But there is a right and a wrong
kind of sorrow for sin. The right kind breeds repentance, and thence
reaches salvation; the wrong kind breeds nothing, and so ends in death.
Let us then trace these stages, not forgetting that this is not a
complete statement of the case, and needs to be supplemented in the
spirit of the words which I have already quoted, by the other part of
the inseparable whole, 'faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ.'