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In those days John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, repent. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear saints, how can we be ready for Jesus to come? That is, after all, what we talk about in the season of Advent, right? The coming of Jesus, the threefold coming of Jesus, how He came in humility to save us from our sins, how He comes to us now every day in His Word and in His meal to comfort us and to give us all that we need for this life and the life to come, and that Jesus is coming again in glory on the clouds with the angels to judge the living and the dead. How can we be ready for it?
In fact, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago about how the news, Jesus is coming, the news that God is coming is not automatically good news. I mean, just to consider the Scriptures. When God showed up in the Scriptures, sometimes it was to bless, and sometimes it was to wreck house. When Jesus showed up, sometimes it was to raise the dead, and sometimes it was to overthrow the tables with a whip. So how can we be ready? How can we be ready for His coming? How can we be prepared to celebrate Christmas? How can we be prepared to hear His Word and to eat His body and drink His blood? God, how can we be ready on the last day to stand before Him?
Now, the instinct that we all have to prepare ourselves is to do so by our own works and our own efforts. I think I mentioned this to you guys a couple of weeks ago, the bumper sticker that I saw that said, “Jesus is coming soon, look busy.” That’s our instinct is to say, okay, to be ready for Jesus is to have everything cleaned up, to have all my sins straightened out, to have a life so full of, you know, my own life like this bouquet of good works that I would present to the Lord Jesus, that we would get ready by our own works, by our own efforts, by our own preparation, by our own goodness so that the Lord would find us holy when He arrives.
But the Scriptures say something different. John the Baptist came preparing the way of the Lord, casting down the mountains, lifting up the valleys, so that he knows what it means to be ready for Jesus to come, and we have it in his preaching. Repent, he says. Repent. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repentance is readiness, and that’s what we are after.
But what is repentance? I think most of us think that repentance means stopping all the bad stuff and starting all the good stuff. In fact, I think I remember being taught that, that repentance means to do a U-turn with your life. So, you’re doing all this kind of bad stuff and you’ve got to stop doing all that bad stuff and you’ve got to turn around and you’ve got to start doing all the good stuff. But is that what John means by repentance? Is that what the Bible teaches repentance is?
I want to submit to you this idea, and it’s going to sound funny, I think, but repentance is not stopping our sin, but rather repentance is being good at sinning. Now, let me explain that, and I want to explain it with an illustration from Proverbs. A few years back, I realized that one of the troubles that we faced in the church was that we have a lack of wisdom, not in any particular congregation, but just in the church at large. We hardly talk about wisdom. We talk some about faith and some about mercy, but we hardly talk about what it means to be a wise person, and that’s what’s needed in this life to get by: wisdom. So I started studying the book of Proverbs to figure out what wisdom was.
Now I thought that wisdom meant knowing all the right answers, being right all the time. Someone comes with a question and you know how to answer them. But Proverbs gives us an entirely different picture of wisdom. Here’s, for example, Proverbs 9, verses 8 and 9, right before the theme verse where it says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” Solomon writes this: “Don’t reprove a fool or he’ll hate you, but reprove a wise man and he will love you. Give instruction to a wise man and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.”
And verses like this are all over the Proverbs. If you correct a wise man, he’ll thank you for it. If you rebuke a wise man, he’ll be glad about it. If you give instruction to a wise man, he’ll rejoice in that instruction. And what it turns out to be a major part of wisdom, of being a wise person, is not being right all the time, not knowing the right answers, but rather to be good at being wrong. I mean, if a wise person was right all the time, then why would you have to rebuke him? If a wise man knew all the answers, why would you have to instruct him?
This at least gives us a glimmer of hope that if we want to be wise, it doesn’t mean knowing everything; it doesn’t mean being right all the time, but in fact what it means is being good at being wrong. And we’ve all got a shot at that because we’re all wrong all the time. I am anyways, and it’s good fodder for wisdom. But here’s the problem, right? It’s tough to admit that you’re wrong. We want to defend ourselves. We want to make excuses for ourselves. We want to argue our point. It’s difficult to have that humility to admit that we made a mistake.
And, even more difficult, is to be grateful and to be glad to the person who pointed out your mistake. I mean, how hard is that? But that’s exactly what wisdom is. Solomon says, hear it again, he said, “Reprove a wise man and he will love you.” So being wrong is not the problem; it’s what you do with it. Being wrong is not the issue; it’s what you do when you’re called out for being wrong, and repentance is like that. Repentance is being good at being wrong.
We’re all sinners. You should know that. I’m a sinner. You’re a sinner. And every day we break God’s law in the things that we think, and the things that we say, and the things that we do, and the things that we fail to do. But the question is for us, what are we going to do with our sin? How are we going to treat it? How are we going to think about it? Remember that sin assaults us in phases. If you think of a sin and a timeline for sin, you have the thing leaning up to the sin, which is temptation, and then you have the sin itself, and then you have the outgrowth of sin, and that outgrowth is the major…
I mean, sin is important, but that outgrowth is so important. What are you going to do with your sin? How are you going to think about your sin? How are you going to treat your sin? Now, this should be very practical because all of us have sinned, and we all have wounded and bent-up consciences, and there’s a little battle that’s happening in our conscience all the time. I mean, even right now there’s these battles that are happening in our conscience about our sins, those sins that we remember, those sins that trouble us, and some of them could be from long ago. I mean, it could be from a lifetime ago, and some of them could be from yesterday, but there’s this battle going on about, how do I treat that sin? How do I think about that sin?
And there are a lot of bad options. The devil has a lot of tricks to play on us here. For example, I’ve got three examples; you could think of more. But the devil, for example, wants us to hide our sin. He wants us to cover it up. He wants us to keep it in the dark. He doesn’t want anyone to know about it, to pretend like it never happened, and so the devil wants us to let that sin just fester down in the conscience where it can rot away and callous our own conscience and eat away at our faith and press us to despair. So he can use it against us and say, look, you call yourself a Christian, but look at what you’ve done. You’re unclean. You’re unholy, the devil lies because of that festering sin.
Or another option, the devil wants you to be proud of your sin and to flaunt it. Who cares about God and His rules? Do whatever you want. I suspect for most people who claim to be Christian, that is not really one of the options, but the devil will go for that one just as well as another. Or here’s another option that the devil will come and set you to work making excuses for your sin. It wasn’t that bad. They deserved it. I was tired. Nobody got hurt. I work hard. It’s okay to blow off some steam. Nobody’s perfect. You know this, right?
So, the devil wants you to hide your sin, to excuse your sin, to flaunt your sin, to do everything bad with your sin, and I suppose you can see something of yourself in these options, and this is the battle that’s being fought. How do you consider your sins? But against the multitude of all of these options that the devil gives us, the Lord has given us only one option, and it is this: repent, repent.
Now what does this mean? What’s repentance? I’m going to read you the definition from the Augsburg Confession. This is really good, actually. And in fact, if you haven’t read the Augsburg Confession, remember the Augsburg Confession was what the Lutherans wrote in 1530 when they said, what do you guys believe anyways? And so they wrote up the Augsburg Confession. I made a bunch of copies of it for people to read, but I think maybe the First Service gobbled them all up, but I’ll make some more for next week. If you haven’t read it in a while, it’s really quite great.
And this should whet your appetite because this is the Augsburg Confession’s definition of repentance. They said, now repentance consists properly of these two parts. One is contrition, that is, terrors smiting the conscience through the knowledge of sin, and the other is faith, which is born of the gospel, or of the absolution, and believes that for Christ’s sake sins are forgiven, comforts the conscience, and delivers it from terrors; then good works are bound to follow, which are the fruits of repentance.
So there are two parts to repentance: contrition and faith. And both of these parts are the work of the Holy Spirit. Contrition is the work of the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the law, and faith is the work of the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the gospel. And here we note, because there’s not going to be a chance to note it again, that there is fruit of repentance, things that grow out of repentance: good works, suffering and quietness, good works of love towards God and the neighbor; that comes after repentance. But our focus, I want you to focus this morning on these two things, on contrition and faith.
And first is contrition. Contrition is to know and to feel your sin in your conscience. Contrition is what happens when God the Holy Spirit presses His law on us, into our ears and into our hearts. Contrition is what we’re talking about when we say that the law of God is like a mirror which shows us our own sin and puts our own sinfulness in contradiction to God’s holiness. Contrition is the fruit or the result or the goal of the preaching of God’s law.
And I’d like to suggest even a clarifying point here because contrition is more than simply the admission that I’ve done something wrong, that I’ve made a mistake, that I haven’t been perfect. I mean, even the unbeliever knows that they’re not perfect, right? I mean, you go out on the street and you ask someone who doesn’t even know the name of Jesus if they are a perfect person, and I imagine that would be hard to find. But what’s the result? They say, well, I’m not perfect. I haven’t done everything right. I’ve made mistakes. Sure, I’ve made mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes. To err is human. Nobody’s perfect, right?
But the Christian knows something more. You, dear saints, know something more about your sin. You know something more than that you’ve made mistakes. You know that your mistakes, that your sins, that your failures are offensive to God. In fact, more than that, you know that your sins have earned you God’s wrath. You know that your sins have earned you hell. You know that because of the things that you’ve done wrong, knowingly done wrong, that God should cast you off forever. You remember King David in Psalm 51, he says, and this seems like a wild thing to say, King David says, “Against you and you only have I sinned, O Lord, and done what’s wrong in your sight.” And we think, David, what are you talking about? You sinned against everybody.
You sinned against Bathsheba, you sinned against Uriah, you sinned against your family, you sinned against the whole people of Israel. What do you mean that you’ve sinned against the Lord and the Lord only? But David has this insight, this Christian insight, that all of our sin stands offensive before the Lord and deserves His eternal wrath and punishment. In fact, we confessed it earlier. We said, “I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto you all my sins and iniquities by which I have ever offended you and justly deserved,” you said it with me, “by which I have justly deserved your temporal and eternal punishment.”
So that we know not only that we’ve done something wrong, but that we’ve done something wrong to God. We know not only that we’ve failed, but we know that we have failed the God who made us and who gives us our life. We know not only that we have sinned, but we know that we have sinned against God, whose holiness rises up to the heavens, and that holiness calls out for our destruction. And this knowledge, worked by the Holy Spirit, who convicts the world of sin, is a conviction of the particularly devastating wretchedness that is what it means to be a sinner. It’s the confidence that the conviction that your sin, the sin that’s scratching around in your conscience right now, and all the other sins that you’ve added to it, that all of these make God mad, really, that they’re offensive to Him, that they rise up to Him like a stench, and this crushes us.
I mean, you see this. What contrition is? Contrition is not only the sense that I’ve done something wrong, but it is the sense that I have disappointed God. It’s not only the sense that I have made a mistake, but it is the sense that God is angry with me. It is the sense of a child who is crushed because what he did wrong was not only something wrong, but because it made him a disappointment to his father. And so the Christian is disgusted with their sin because we know not only that it’s a sin, but it deserves truly God’s wrath.
And this is a terrified conscience, and this is contrition, and this is the first part of repentance. But there’s a second part, and that’s the good part. Repentance consists of contrition and faith. You see, repentance is not only the knowledge of our sin; repentance is most especially the knowledge of our Savior, Jesus Christ. If our repentance has only contrition and not faith, then we are left like Judas or King Saul in despair. But the Holy Spirit, who works contrition in our hearts through the law, comes along with the gospel also to create faith.
And faith, dear saints, is a sure and certain confidence in the promises of God that our sins, that your sins, that the sin that is bothering you, that that is forgiven through the death of Jesus on the cross. And here we have the promises of God. The promise that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That’s your sin, too. Here we have the words of Jesus who says this: listen, Jesus says, “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, and I came to give my life as a ransom for many.” Here is the preaching of Saint Paul who says that in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their transgressions against them, that for our sake He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
This is the work of the Holy Spirit to show you Jesus, who was stricken by God and who was afflicted and upon whom all of the iniquity that we have managed was laid upon. So that when we see the cross, when we see the suffering and the death of Jesus, we are seeing what we deserve, but what we are not given. We behold what God gave to Christ in our place. We behold God’s wrath spent not on us sinners, but on our perfect Savior.
I’ve always wanted to commission – if any of you know an artist, I’ve always wanted to commission a particular piece of art. This is what I’d like to have. I’d like to have the back of Jesus, there’s His back, and across His back are tattooed the Ten Commandments. You see them there? And then through each one of them is the lash of the whip, so that for you who have committed idolatry, it’s marked off. For you who have failed to pray and honor God’s Word, it’s been marked off. For you who are rebellious and angry and lustful and greedy, the sin has been taken away by His suffering. Can you imagine?
Or if you want, here’s another picture. Imagine taking all of your sin and writing it on a piece of paper. You’d need a pretty big piece of paper, and you hand it to Jesus, and He takes it, and He folds it up, and He holds it in His hand as it’s nailed to the cross. We’ve had this picture before, right? The blood of Jesus simply washes it all away. It covers your sin. Dear saints, His blood covers your sin. It takes away your guilt. It atones for your shame. Everything, all that you’ve deserved, all of God’s wrath and anger is spent on Jesus, the Savior of sinners, your Savior. His work on the cross was for you. His blood and His death, they’re for you, so that nothing can separate you from the love of God, not death, not trouble, not shame, and certainly not your sin. And He has taken care of it. He has cast it away as far as the east is from the west. He has buried it in the depths of the sea.
And dear saints, that joy and that confidence and that certainty, that is faith. The second part of repentance, the flowering of repentance, and that is what Jesus wants us to do with our sin. He wants us to know it, and He wants us to know that it’s forgiven. He wants us to feel it, and He wants us to rejoice that it’s been taken away from us by His death on the cross. He wants us to repent. That means to let Him be our Savior.
And this is what it means to be ready. It’s what it means to be ready for His coming. It doesn’t mean to clean yourself up and to make yourself holy and righteous. It means simply to repent of your sins and to rejoice in His kindness, rejoice in His love, and rejoice in His blood. And by this, dear saints, you are ready. You are repentant. You are died for by Jesus. Your sins are forgiven. God be praised. Amen.
In those days, John the Baptist came preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, repent. The kingdom of God is at hand. Amen.