Repentance is simply giving up to stop fighting against God and to stop attempting to gain your own salvation through your own works; to literally give up and fall upon Christ. That is salvation.
Interpretation
Repentance involves surrendering to God's will rather than trying to achieve salvation through personal efforts.
In this quote, Paul Washer emphasizes the concept of repentance as a deep acknowledgment of one's inability to achieve salvation through personal works. Instead, true salvation is found in the act of surrendering oneself to Christ, highlighting the contrast between human effort and divine grace. This perspective encourages believers to cease their struggles against God and accept the salvation that comes freely through faith in Christ.
In practice
In a sermon about grace, a pastor might say this quote to illustrate the importance of relying on God's mercy.
We deal five minutes with a person and their conversion and then we spend the next fifty years trying to disciple a goat into a sheep. I'm not saying this because I'm angry. I'm saying this because countless people are being deceived.
Pray for the field. If God calls, then prepare for the field. When it is time, go to the field. A life lost for Christ is a life well spent.
There is no such thing as a great man of God, only weak, pitiful, faithless men of a great and merciful God.
Those who would send out thousands of questionnaires asking the unconverted what they would desire most in a worship service should realize that ten thousand unanimous opinions of carnal men do not carry the authority of one jot or tittle of God's Word.
The evidence of conversion is not a decision card filled out, it's a life being lived out.
When we realize what we were before Christ and what we deserved in that state, it further magnifies the enormity of the gospel for us.
Anyone in a free society where the laws are unjust has an obligation to break the law.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flush of truth.
The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.
Present-moment living, getting in touch with your now, is at the heart of effective living. When you think about it, there really is no other moment you can live. Now is all there is, and the future is just another present moment to live when it arrives.
A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.
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