Notes on *Repentance*
Repentance: A Daring Call to Surrender, Jack Miller, (CLC Publications, 1975, 2009)
Note-taker’s Preface: The resurgence of gospel-centeredness over the last 20+ years is owed in large part, humanly speaking, to the ministries of men like Tim Keller. But behind his ministry is the influence of Jack Miller and Richard Lovelace, among others, who helped shaped Keller during his days at Westminster Seminary. You can see traces of the influence in the primary sources of Miller and Lovelace. For example, consider these words from Lovelace in Dynamics of Spiritual Life (1979):
The beginning place for personal renewal is a preaching and teaching ministry that emphasizes depth proclamation of the gospel. …We must first make real to them the grace of God in accepting them daily, not because of their spirituality, but because of the perfect righteousness of Christ. (211)
Have you ever heard a sermon from Tim Keller? This is precisely what Keller does, and it’s worth emulating, by God’s grace. As for Jack Miller, his work is as relevant for us now as it was 50 years ago. I think of A Faith Worth Sharing and Outgrowing the Ingrown Church. And, of course, there is his small book Repentance. This book is one that I’ve read and reread for years, together with other men. I will let it speak for itself:
Main Idea/Takeaway
A life of daily repentance is vital for centering the gospel of God's undeserved grace in Christ.
Interaction
"Not to undermine asiety, but to emphasize the humility of covenant." (12)
"Our works- for self-justification- are actually a criticism of God." (21)
"Isaiah saw God!" (22)
"Point to Christ as our only Mediator." (27)
"Priesthood of believers." (27)
"Consider repentance in light of new creation." (33)
"Repentance is hearing again and again, "You're wrong and you're loved." (37)
"Spirit-filled life: Love (affection & obedience); Humility (repentance everyday)." (41)
"When the stress is experienced, the focus becomes more external, not of the heart." (42)
"Spirit-filled life is repentant, not 'perfect'." (43)
"cf. CSL on forgiveness: We are often harsher with other people's sin than we are our own."(43)
"Which can only happen if we care more about what He thinks than we do what others think. If we care about what other's think, we'll only "repent" when our performance suffers, not our heart motives." (43)
"I'm not. I can't. I won't. You are. You can. You will." (47)
"God commands repentance." (61)
"Far worse than we ever imagined, far more loved than we ever dared dream." (66)
"How have we seen the power of guilt play out in people's lives? Our own?" (70)
"Penance, self-reliance, guilt in 'gospel-centered' guise?" (77)
"Counseling as expository in one-on-one...find those places to go." (79)
"Consider the tonic of silence before God." (82)
"So much of prayer is navigating through trifles (which is why it's hard)." (85)
"Devil's tactic in you praying with fluency." (85)
"Why collision matters: 1.) power of testimony; 2.) the tonic of silence before God, not prayerlessness. 3.) Compassion is a fruit of repentance. 4.) Because there is where we remember Jesus is real." (83)
"Wash their feet." (86)
"Beware the self-righteousness of gospel-centeredness. We're addicts at self-congratulations, (i.e., work progress)." (87)
"Epilogue by Jack's widow , 1996." (98)
Table of Contents
Foreword
A Note to the Reader
I. Repentance: The Foundation of Life
II. Repentance and Its Counterfeit
III. What Is True Repentance?
IV. Repentance and the Spirit-filled Life
V. Repentance and the Carnal Christian
VI. Repentance and God's Mercy
VII. Repentance and Counseling
VIII. Repentance and Sharing Christ
Epilogue
Favorite Quotes by Chapter
I. Repentance: The Foundation of Life
"What we all desperately need to see is that the love of a holy God is manifested covenantally at the cross. In the sacrifice of the Lamb of God, the Father promises to receive contrite sinners on a daily-no, hourly-basis." (11)
"The Father, in the gift of His Son, has put Himself under eternal obligation to returning children. Having satisfied the demands of His own holy law, the Father/must open His mighty arms and embrace every returning child." (12)
"To be near God and to have God near us is the whole purpose of human life. But without sincere repentance there can be no face-to-face fellowship with the Father of lights." (12)
"Once tasted, repentance would speak to them of communion with Christ and of self-forgetting fruitfulness and of Kingdom power (Mark 1:15)." (13)
"In our pride we would never think of ourselves in connection with Ananias and Sapphira. But our sin bears a very close resemblance to theirs. They wanted to pretend to be near God when they were not." (14)
"The world of humanity in our generation has been dominated by lies, broken promises, shattered illusions and just general sham. People are sick and tired of role-players and plastic goods, slickly turned out and calculated to deceive. Therefore, if we wish to be effective, we must see that our own pharisaic pretense will eventually be discovered by the people we meet and rebuked by our own consciences." (15)
"Ask the Holy Spirit to make you willing to be searched by God (Ps. 139:23-24). Do not expect the process of searching to be always painless and pleasant. No, hardly. But you will begin to have the joy of a clear conscience and a deepening fellowship with Christ." (16)
II. Repentance and Its Counterfeit
"Penance is not merely a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, it is a religious attitude deeply rooted in the human heart which prompts people to attempt to pay for their own sins by good works and sufferings. Self-justification is the goal of this effort." (17)
"So long as we look within ourselves for the source of our life, we know nothing of Christ." (18)
"What these people seek from God is enough grace to be strong in themselves. They do not need or want a constant flow of water from heaven." (19)
"For truly repentant sinners have discovered, through the renewing work of the Holy Spirit, that all their doing is full of sin. Their doing is the source of their wretched emptiness, their black depression and their self-despising. But now they have come undone. They turn from their sinful doing and trust in what Christ has done." (20)
"Penance is centered in human emotions and perceptions. But repentance to life is God-centered." (20)
"As a natural consequence, those doing penance will God as owing them a debt; living in self-pity, they become almost unshakably convinced that if there is any forgiving to do, they must forgive God for making them such rotten sinners." (21)
"Humanity has an immense pride. This is the basis of the self-pity which leads people to condemn God for what seems to them bad management of human affairs. But one real meeting with the living God puts all this self-righteous junk into its true perspective. You just don't argue with holy fire. You submit to it." (23)
"For the sure mark of authentic repentance is boldness and joyous enthusiasm for the things of God." (23)
"We are not to make men and women our own disciples, but to make them disciples of the Lord. Therefore, repentance means that people must turn from trusting in empty cisterns like ourselves and thirst and drink from Christ alone (John 7:37-38). Pastors and Christian workers are not merely to accept l believers this as an interesting insight which is mildly relevant to their work. It is, in fact, a matter of spiritual life and death." (27)
III. What Is True Repentance?
"This motivation for changing one's mind and life-direction is the lordship of the crucified Savior." (31)
"In the presence of this exalted Lord, self-defense is foolishness, but self-examination aided by the Holy Spirit is everything. Stated practically, our self-examination before the Lord must deal with two kinds of sins. For the purpose of easier understanding, we shall call one kind branch-sins and the other root-sins." (33)
"Be encouraged then, fellow believer. In calling you to daily repentance, the Lord Jesus is not simply giving you good advice. He is saying, "If you are mine, you must continue to repent.'" (37)
"Take care not to rob someone of "godly grief" over sin. For if you rob them of the grief, you will also rob them of the joy which comes as a consequence of a hearty repentance." (39)
IV. Repentance and the Spirit-filled Life
"I want to set down two closely related criteria for the Spirit-filled life: The first is sincere love to the Lord Jesus Christ as the gift of the Father's love, and the second is a genuine repentance which causes us to be broken down before God." (43)
"For to have the Holy Spirit in you is to have more of Christ in you, to be more like Christ and to bear the fruit of the Spirit which comes through faith in Christ and His merits (Gal. 5:22-23)." (46)
"There must be a daily conversion of the heart to God (Col. 2:6). And the more you deepen your repentance, the more room you have in your heart for the rivers of living water. The more you know that you are stained to the bone with selfish impulses, the more you see how you hold out against the will of the Lord, then the more you will go to Christ as a thirsty sinner who finds deeper cleansing, more life and greater joy through the Spirit." (47)
"Repentance prepares the way so that the Lord of glory can enter into the spirit and be adored as the new center of heavenly life. Before, such people were consumed by self-love, but once the Spirit convicted them of sin and turned them to the cross, self-love was crowded out by love to the Lord Jesus Christ." (47)
V. Repentance and the Carnal Christian
"Backsliding is not a category or a stage in Christian development, but it is living, unrepentant, in a state of sin on the part of those who know better." (51)
"Definitely, elements of carnality still plague the new Christian. The same can be said of the mature believer. But so long as God's people continue to repent and cling to Christ for growth in grace, they are not carnal in the Pauline sense. They are going forward- sometimes only creeping on hands and knees- but they are not sliding backward like stubborn brute beasts." (52)
"It should, therefore, be fully understood that in the New Testament the lordship of Christ is the basis of evangelism. It underlies the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20), it stands at the center of Paul's great definition of the gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-5), and it is a truth heralded with flaming power at Pentecost (Acts 2:36). With respect to evangelism, G. Campbell Morgan says, "To preach the living lordship of Christ is to create the necessity for His cross.""(53)
"But, as has been stressed in this study, repentance has nothing to do with what we have done. Rather, it is our coming undone in respect to all human righteousness, followed by going outside ourselves in faith to Christ alone for salvation." (53)
"There is no greater stumbling block to the salvation of pseudo-Christians than the insistence of believing relatives and friends that the unsaved loved one is already in Christ." (56)
"I do not mean to imply for a moment that every believer's religious life should be modeled along the same lines. Christian piety can take many different forms. But whenever there is genuine life, this life will produce the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:2)." (56)
"It is the nature of the authentic Christian to respond with repentance and deeds of righteousness when corrected by the Word." (57)
"If people are really carnally minded, they are lost and yet in their sins." (57)
"It is exceedingly important that we do not allow anything to blur the radical difference between the old and the new creation. To do so is to obscure the glory of the Christian hope and the transforming power of grace. We must give all the energy of faith to preaching that Christ of God who gives a totally new life with fullness of spiritual being." (59)
VI. Repentance and God's Mercy
"God has entered into history, and this gives people everywhere a powerful, unprecedented reason for repenting." (61)
"What can be done for sinners like these? They are dominated by an iron self-assertion which prefers their own glory to the glory of God (John 5:39-47, 12:41-43). Even more, what can be done for us, since we all participate in that spirit of unbelief which sent the Lord of glory to the cross? The answer is the cross itself. We have all sinned against the law of God, and now this rebellion has come to climactic expression in our sinning against the ultimate gift of God. But the cross includes in it payment for this worst sin of all--the scorning of it." (64)
"Unbelief is the supreme transgression of the world. and as your sin too, it is most dangerous to your spiritual life. Specifically, unbelief kills our love and feeds our pride." (65)
"Jesus then teaches us that repentance for the worst of sins is freely given to believers on the basis of the greatest of gifts. Thus, it is not just the sight of my unbelief that makes me wish to repent, but my seeing the magnitude of the heavenly love." (66)
"Repentance thus is the more negative side of conversion, the overturning of the idols and the turning to God; saving faith is the more positive side of conversion." (67)
VII. Repentance and Counseling
"But to evade God's condemnation, people erect about themselves a protective wall of self-righteousness." (69)
"No matter how hard people try, they cannot finally escape from this inner torment by moving rapidly through the outer physical spaces though this is a favorite device adopted by those who live in a self-energized speed culture." (70)
"The mystery is that Christ's sacrifice includes in it payment for our despisal and indifference- and you repent of such a sin by trusting in Jesus blood for cleansing." (77)
"It points up the danger which constantly faces both new believers and long-time Christians. It is the temptation to think of the first conversion as everything and to forget that repentance and faith include a continuing, radical reorientation of the life toward God. Hear what John Murray says: "Christ's blood is the laver of initial cleansing but it is also the fountain to which the believer must continuously repair. It is at the cross of Christ that repentance has its beginning; it is at the cross of Christ that it must continue to pour out its heart in the tears of confession and contrition." (77)
"Our work is to teach and preach the gospel in a searching manner, to lay the basis for repentance by showing sinners how much they need the Lord of glory as Savior from their guilt and filth. It is a solemn fact that God has ordained that men and women be saved through preaching." (78)
"Effective counseling is principally a carrying forward in private of specific applications of the preaching ministry in the church! The gospel message is announced boldly in a public context, then given added effectiveness by a one-to- one follow-up in dealing with particular idols which Christ wants removed from each of our lives." (79)
"The gospel message is a mirror in which all repentant sinners behold the image of Christ and are being transformed from glory to glory through the power of the Spirit. Do not underestimate it. For the gospel enables those who are new creations to face their own sins squarely, confess them and forsake them. Do not underestimate it. For the gospel brings forgiveness to us through Christ's death." (82)
VIII. Repentance and Sharing Christ
"Until we have experienced the breaking down of pride by the Holy Spirit, we do not understand what witnessing is all about." (83)
"The awareness of great weakness paves the way for a thoroughgoing repentance that results in a filling with the Holy Spirit's power. Your conviction of sin is used by the Lord to bring you to claim the victory of grace in Him." (84)
"These wiles of Satan are countered by honesty in prayer. Honest prayer unmasks your real need and puts you in the presence of a rich Christ who wants to meet you as you really are-"wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked" (Rev. 3:17). (85)
"So in your confession to God you fight to name your sin-and to give your sin its right name. Then you hand it over to Christ by faith and taste the happiness of guilt forgiven (Ps. 32:1) and find the deliverance from hypocrisy which comes through honest confession (Ps. 32:2-5)."(85)
"God loves you where you are, not where you have been pretending to be. There is a natural transition now to start loving other sinners where they are, not where they pretend to be- or where you think they should be." (86)
"Humility and sincere love appeal in any age. But in ours these qualities become especially magnetic."(87)
"As their repentance deepens they learn to see other people compassionately. They know that God broke through their own thick shell, and that all good in themselves originated with a sovereign invasion from without." (89)
"You find witnessing power only by going to the throne of grace and coming to Christ to get yourself clean and under the blessing of God. From there you go forth to share what you have received firsthand from the Father. This is the beating heart of Christian witness. In evangelism everything depends upon a humble, self-forgetting boldness before God and humanity. Pray boldly and you will witness boldly (Eph. 6:18-20, 1 Thess. 1:5, Acts 4:29-31). Confess your sins freely before God, and you will have freedom to confess Christ before others." (90)
"John Calvin says, "Fear hinders us from preaching Christ openly and fearlessly, while the absence of all restraint and disguise in confessing Christ is demanded from His ministers. The remedy for this timidity is to carry the sin directly to God in prayer until He fills the penitent heart with an ongoing love that refuses to be stopped by the resistance of sinners to the gospel." (91)
Epilogue
"My hope and prayer is that God will continue to use this small book to teach the joy of repentance, humility and a life lived in service to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." (98)
Notable Content
Root-sins: pride, unbelief, lust. (15)
Branch sins and Root sins. (33)
Reasons for praying privately in coming to Christ: (82)
First, prayer in private makes it more difficult for people to use the counselor as a priest and hopefully brings them to rely on Christ on Christ alone for salvation.
Secondly, prayer alone brings the glory of Christ into sharp focus by moving the counselor out of the sinner's line of vision.
